Hack of Hacks

This guy single-handedly diminishes my diploma.

Alex Pareene at Salon is listing the 30 Biggest Hacks in political media.

http://www.salon.com/news/war_room_hack_thirty/index.html

Marc Thiessen comes in at #6.  First, I was surprised he warrants that much attention.  Second, well no shit he's a hack.

My friend Laura once wrote in our high school paper that Juniors signing up for classes should consider AP European History.  Sure, it's hard, but it's intimate.  "There are only 5 of us (Thiessen never shows)."

"Thiessen never shows" became a sort of catch phrase.  I wouldn't say I had a great deal of animus against Marc, for the same reason I don't sit around obsessing about Bristol Palin's improbable run on DWTS.  I have other things to shorten my life over.

But Marc was a loser.  Not a brilliant, flame out of a loser, like say MC Hammer.  There was nothing exceptional about Marc at all.  He was not at the very bottom of the class.  I would guess he was decidedly average academically.  He was not an athlete.  He was not a student leader.  He was just a nondescript dork. He was the sort of guy that when he wandered into your dorm room, you began to wonder how long it would be before he left.

Put another way, Marc was like lingering flatus.  Not pungent enough to comment on, but foul enough to make you shift in your seat.

He went on to work as a foreign policy advisor for Jesse Helms.  He then went on to be the speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush.

Look at THAT resume!  He was the foreign policy advisor for a guy who's ideas on foreign policy consisted of little more than grunting angrily and pounding on the desk whenever someone mentioned Fidel Castro. He was speechwriter for two men, who famously tortured the English language like it was Khalid Sheik Mohammad himself.  Rumsfeld's utterances were so bizarre, he inspired a book of avant garde poetry based on his extemporaneous musings.

Example:

Glass Box You know, it's the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

Bushisms are of course legendary.

Again, you can't blame Marc for being the wordsmith for people who can't actually speak English.  But when Rumsfeld and Bush look at you and say, "Hey, I want that guy to type my wordy-speech things."  You have to wonder.  It's like being hired by Snooki to be her spiritual advisor.  

Sure enough, Marc's writing is as bland and predictable as if it had been written by some artificial word processing program.  It's grammatically accurate, I suppose, but really says nothing that isn't being said with more panache by some mouth breather like Tom Tancredo or Sean Hannity on Fox.

So, he can't write.  Big deal.  It's the 21st century.  Print, I've heard, is dead.

What makes me ill that I know Marc is that he's perhaps the foremost torture apologist working in the news media today.  He has published the predictable Regnery book about how Obama's making us less safe by actually trying terrorists in court rather than looking them in a box in Cuba and waterboarding them.  Because the difference between being in a Supermax jail cell and being in Gitmo is the difference between the life and death of the American Way of Life.

Journalists like Jane Mayer have derided his book as being factually inaccurate and a gross distortion of what happened.  Thiessen defended his book by saying, "I know you but what am I!"  and "I'm rubber, you're glue."

Marc Thiessen has become the Pravda spokesman for the torture set.  He's the quintessential example of the "imperial" mindset of the Bush years.  He's the guy who helped "make our own reality" rather than observe the world as it existed.

Torture?  No, because America doesn't torture.  Sure, waterboarding is torture, and we waterboarded a bunch of guys, but because America doesn't torture, then our waterboarding wasn't torture it was SHUT THE FUCK UP MARC THIESSEN!

In the end (because everything is Obama's fault), it will clearly be seen as a mistake that we didn't lance this boil on the face of Lady Liberty.  We should have had a truth and reconciliation committee look at the torture that was committed as a matter of American policy.  Pardon those who come forward and tell the truth.  Arrest and prosecute those that don't.

By NOT prosecuting the likes of Addington, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Yoo, we've allowed this crime to go unpunished.  We've allowed torture to be up for debate.  There is now a "pro-waterboarding" position in our political debate.  You can't go back to normal from there.

Thanks, Marc.  Heckuva job!