Mark Halperin has an ever interesting substack and in the latest he pretends to overhear a conversation between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at a posh restaurant. I decided to try my hand at this Halperinian genre.
WJC: The larger context is all over the world the natives are restless. The root problem is they know too much in too timely a way. Hell it took years after his death for JFK’s indiscretions to become public knowledge. The basic problem is the information speed is too fast for a democracy to function. Contra the WaPo, democracy thrives in darkness. Especially with election integrity where ignorance is bliss.
GWB: Yeah the problem with elections is you can't prove it's legit since it's un-auditable. On the other hand, people trust computers with their banking so it's reasonably easy to trust them with voting. The answer is just to use the tools we have to tamp down dissent. Love our FBI but I wonder if they can scale up to the level necessary to keep the MAGAs down. We took a big hit with Twitter but hopefully they’ll be able to derail Musk, maybe on foreign policy risk grounds. It’s a cliche, but in an age of information we need to own the narrative. Put me down for “order over truth”. Or, failing that, if we're going to be judged in realtime then maybe our guys should go the other route and be more ethical given the transparency?
WJC: Hogwash. What the folks don’t realize is how good they got it compared to Europe let alone to the rest of the world. It would be worthwhile to explain that the price of the comforts they have - the 2-car garage, the easy access to fuel and food - is a political order that prioritizes order over the timely truth. Let them find out what's really going on after we’re dead and gone. Is it a conspiracy theory if we call everything a conspiracy theory?
GWB: Ha. Don’t know if you saw the latest Peggy Noonan column, but she reinforces this. She has that perfectly patronizing touch in saying “ahh.. the conspiracy theorists we shall always have with us, it’s in our DNA”. She's got that patrician streak, careful to be considered lace curtain and not shanty Irish. More importantly she implicitly attacked alternative media, which I sheepishly admit has been more right than wrong on many things, including on Covid, than the dominant media.
WJC: Yep the media has had its pants pulled down more often than me on Epstein’s plane!
GWB: Ouch.
WJC: Too soon?
GWB: Too gross and too soon.
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