words to live by

Moe Tkacik hasn’t, so reading her work makes me nostalgic for when I wanted to be a better writer. On Fair Game:

The Valerie Plame story is the improbable tale that manages to reach the elite “apotheosis” level of Bush Administration corruption without making a central plot point out of the indiscriminate killing and/or sexual humiliation of innocents perpetuated by some legally-immune triple-billing defense contractor or some other similarly depressing scheme by which the rich concocted innovative new ways to profit off human misery, etc. etc. etc. Now, as we learn in Fair Game, it is very possible—in fact, the movie implies that you might as well upgrade that to “almost certain”—that some poor Iraqi scientists and their families gave their lives as a very direct result of Karl Rove‘s decision to teach a lesson to all the would-be Plame-Wilson duos in Langley, but the movie doesn’t really follow this thread very far and let’s be honest you are not here to learn more about the slaughter of innocents. You are here because Valerie Plame was a glamorous spy who also happened to be on the side of “good” and what with all the mind-alteringly weird polling data and surreal Bush Administration revisionism going on these days you need to be reminded, as painlessly as possible, what it was like when the “bad” guys were in charge.

This, as the hashtag would have it, is real-keeping. Cheap nostalgia for the bad old days — the tonic of liberals who’d rather not admit that the past two years haven’t gone as they’d hoped.