posted November 12, 2004 07:57 AM              

Planet Full of Doofuses
by Bob Wallace

If I had the power, I might rename the earth, "Doofus." Actually, I do have the power, but it's only in my imagination, which means the name change will stay in there and no place else.

I wonder if the plural of "doofus" is "doofuses" or "doofi"? I like "doofuses" myself; it sounds more accurate. And what exactly is the correct definition of "doofus"? To me it means "lovable moron." It's what you call someone who is an amiable klutz. You just look at them and shake your head.

I'd like to rename the earth "Doofus" because the whole world is full of lovable morons. Mostly. Unfortunately I'm included, although I like to think I'm a lovable semi-moron. It could be worse. I could be one of those retarded monkey-people running the elevators in Brave New World. Although if I had to be a monkey, I'd rather be one of the flying ones in The Wizard of Oz, even if I had to dress like a bellhop.

If the world wasn't full of imperfect lovable morons, it wouldn't be in the shape it's in, with one step back for every two steps forward. It wouldn't be in the shape it's always been in. Religion is right: people are imperfect. Fallen.

One of the reason people are doofuses is because they follow the wrong people. I could quote Dostoevsky or Shakespeare to buttress my argument, but I won't. As is my wont, I'll use cartoons as an example, since I spend more time watching them than reading Richard III.

There is an archetype in cartoons I call the "would-be world conqueror." Examples? Marvin the Martian. Brain, of Pinky fame. Simon bar Sinister from the Underdog show.

Here's where things get scary. All of them have what I call an "amiable but stupid sidekick." Marvin has his robot dog. Brain has Pinky. And Simon has Cad, who can do little more than say, "Duh...okay, boss!"

On the other hand, heroes almost never have sidekicks, and when they do, they're not stupid. Did Underdog have a sidekick? Superman? Batman had Robin, but Robin never said, "Duh...okay, boss!"

The problem with the would-be world conquerors is grandiosity and hubris, which are the same thing and, in my opinion, the worst of the inborn imperfections in humanity. These conquerors always want to be God, like Satan did. And they always want to be worshipped, like Satan did. All you have to do is look at real-life nutcases like Herod or Nero or Caligula. Caligula went so far in his nuthood as to declare himself a god.

These days we have a president who claims God has chosen him, and that He talks to him. The difference between his imperfections and those rulers who were much worse is not one of kind, but only of degree. Grandiosity and hubris are a slippery slope, and those afflicted with them almost never know it.

What do these cartoon characters tell us? Something really very disturbing. Anyone who wants to conquer the world is never going to have a shortage of misguided – indeed self-deluded – people to follow them. It's not a case of one Brain and one Pinky; it's one Brain and several hundred thousand, if not millions, of Pinkys.

Or, as Robert Higgs so eloquently put it: "An adequate answer might fill a volume, but some elements of that answer can be sketched briefly. The essential components are autocratic government, favorably disposed mass culture, public ignorance and misplaced trust, compliant mass media and political exploitation for personal and institutional advantage."

Many people may not take cartoons seriously, but I do. Cartoons are just modern-day myths; good ones are just as accurate as any ancient myth, because they tell the same stories and same truths, just dressed in modern clothes. Marvin the Martian is just an animated version of Ares, the Greek God of War. Brain, in his own way, is just as loony as Satan.

If you think it isn't true that wackos who wants to conquer the world will never have a shortage of goofballs to follow them, ask yourself how many people said "no thanks" to Hitler and Stalin? More German and Russian soldiers died at the Battle of Stalingrad than all of America's wars combined. Had I been there, I would have snuck away. If I could. I wouldn't die for Brain or Marvin the Martian, or any demented human acting like them.

The real heroes never have doofus sidekicks because they don't want anyone slavishly obeying them. Only people who desire to conquer want slaves. The real heroes, whether in cartoons, or old myths, or in real life, want people to be free, and to be responsible for themselves. Even it if means not wearing a seatbelt.

When Superman said he was defending, "Truth, justice and the American way," he wasn't asking for anyone to say, "Duh...okay, boss!" to him or anyone else.

Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his book, Leftism Revisited, understood what knuckleheads many people are. He also understood why an earth full of doofuses follow the people who lead them to their deaths. The reason, he wrote, because the "Children of Darkness are more clever than the Children of Light."

What Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote is true. Many people are more liable to follow someone evil than someone good, as long as those who are evil "hide from the light" and pretend to be good. That's why the Children of Darkness are more clever than the Children of Light. Because evil always disguises itself as good.

Marvin's dog, and Pinky, and Cad, are a bunch of sleepwalking dimbulbs who can't tell the difference between good and evil. All three are just symbols of the human race in general. Amiable but stupid. Lovable morons. Doofuses.

The heroes, the Children of Light, always demand that people take responsibility for themselves. The Children of Darkness always tell people it's not their fault; it's someone else's. And when those supposedly at fault are gotten rid of, then peace and justice will reign. It never happens, though, because the fault lies in ourselves.

If you want to look at it from a Christian viewpoint, it was Satan who blamed his problems on everyone else, and who wanted to rule. And it was Jesus, who when he was offered political power over the kingdoms of the world if he would just worship a deluded and incompetent buffoon, declined. He also suggested people change their own "hearts and minds," instead of trying to force others to do so.

The Children of Darkness – not only in the past, but now – promise glory and grandiosity and political power over the kingdoms of the world. It always ends up in death and destruction, as hubris always does. One of the reasons – maybe the main one – is that ultimately the Children of Darkness are incompetent. Nemesis is always the penalty for hubris. Brain and Simon and Marvin always fail. Brain usually conked his head and staggered around dazed. Marvin sometimes even disintegrated himself, although, like Ares, he was always resurrected.

What lessons from all of the above can we find for today? Well...we have people in the administration who are "hiding from the light" and not telling people the truth. They are trying to conquer a large chunk of the world, and promising honor and glory. Even though one only has to look at the story of Jesus refusing political power over the kingdoms of the world, a lot of doofuses still believe the Children of Darkness and are following them, even though they're incompetent and will fail.

Even something as simple as children's cartoons are telling us these would-be world conquerors are bound to fail. Not surprisingly, as the plans of these conquerer-wannabees unravel, they're rapidly failing, although in their self-delusion and hubris they can't admit it to anyone, including themselves. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of Pinkys and Cads who still haven't opened their eyes. Until they do, they will remain doofuses.

posted November 14, 2004 06:50 PM              

Thanks for posting it for us. So many spiritual truths in this article. I was struggling myself with the question as to why bad always has lot of following.

posted November 15, 2004 04:22 PM            

How else could those who marched off the cliff for John Kerry be called? A man who is a traitor, liar, political opportunist and appeaser with absolutely nothing to recommend him as a Presidential candidate.

Who but doofi could idolize Michael Moore, a man of girth with a brain the size of a shriveled pea, who calls them idiots and morons? And who but doofi could be on the wrong side of every issue of importance in America?

Of course, we could just call them lemmings because they're all set to repeat the process in 2008. Perhaps this time, instead of marching off the cliff in lockstep, they'll march into the sea and just keep going until they finally reach the land of their dreams.

I'll post some signs on the Long Island beach.

Paris 3620 miles

Whoops, liberals like the metric system...let me fix that.

posted November 16, 2004 02:49 AM              

Perhaps other people have a different idea than you do about what is important for America, jwhop. Apparently hate, predjudice, and division are important issues that you see for America.

posted November 16, 2004 08:58 AM            

I guess it's insults which pass for spirituality on the far radical left where you reside and you've sure proven that over the last 3 years with your constant insults of the President, support of terrorists and your favorite terrorist dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Besides, what I posted is true and Wallace is full of it.

Truth is the spiritual high ground and it would be refreshing if you tried it once in a while instead of your constant stream of BS.

posted November 16, 2004 07:44 PM              

quote:

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The Children of Darkness – not only in the past, but now – promise glory and grandiosity and political power over the kingdoms of the world. It always ends up in death and destruction, as hubris always does. One of the reasons – maybe the main one – is that ultimately the Children of Darkness are incompetent. Nemesis is always the penalty for hubris. Brain and Simon and Marvin always fail. Brain usually conked his head and staggered around dazed. Marvin sometimes even disintegrated himself, although, like Ares, he was always resurrected.

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quote:

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The real heroes never have doofus sidekicks because they don't want anyone slavishly obeying them. Only people who desire to conquer want slaves. The real heroes, whether in cartoons, or old myths, or in real life, want people to be free, and to be responsible for themselves. Even it if means not wearing a seatbelt.

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quote:

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Cartoons are just modern-day myths; good ones are just as accurate as any ancient myth, because they tell the same stories and same truths, just dressed in modern clothes.

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- some of my favorite parts.

I can see why you would be mad jwhop- the article is insulting. But, I still think that when you look past that, you know. Yeah. *Sorry for the Piscean rambling*

posted November 18, 2004 11:31 AM              

The spiritual message that eluded you, jwhop is contained in Scripture where Jesus said, "Beware of wolves who come to you in sheep's clothing. You will know them by the fruit they bear. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit."

Let me explain the spiritual message in the article for you, jwhop. Evil aways disguises itself as good. The reason for that is that we humans are all created good. For that reason we are repelled by what we see and know to be evil but we are attracted to good. That's why the evil of this world always presents itself as good. It is the best deceptive weapon that evil can use to trip us up. Even when we sin it's normally because we find some good in it for ourselves.

That is why millions of people blindly followed Hitler and Stalin. They presented their evil intentions as good. That is also why Fascism and religion are always intertwined. Evil often hides behind the disguise of religion using it to attract believers.

While everyone else seems to have caught the message it appears to have eluded you and made you defensive. I would think about why that is if I were you, jwhop.

posted November 18, 2004 11:47 AM              

quote:

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Here's where things get scary. All of them have what I call an "amiable but stupid sidekick." Marvin has his robot dog. Brain has Pinky. And Simon has Cad, who can do little more than say, "Duh...okay, boss!"

On the other hand, heroes almost never have sidekicks, and when they do, they're not stupid. Did Underdog have a sidekick? Superman? Batman had Robin, but Robin never said, "Duh...okay, boss!"

When Superman said he was defending, "Truth, justice and the American way," he wasn't asking for anyone to say, "Duh...okay, boss!" to him or anyone else.

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Published: November 18, 2004

WASHINGTON

I went to see the magical "Pericles'' at the Shakespeare Theater the other night.

In ancient Greece, the prince of Tyre tires of all the yes men around him. He chooses to trust the one courtier who intrepidly tells him: "They do abuse the king that flatter him. ... Whereas reproof, obedient and in order, fits kings, as they are men, for they may err.''

Not flatter the king? Listen to dissenting viewpoints? Rulers who admit they've erred?

It's all so B.C. (Before Cheney).

Now, in the 21st-century reign of King George II, flattery is mandatory, dissent is forbidden, and erring without admitting error is the best way to get ahead. President Bush is purging the naysayers who tried to temper crusted-nut-bar Dick Cheney and the neocon crazies on Iraq.

First, faith trumped facts. Now, loyalty trumps competence. W., who was the loyalty enforcer for his father's administration, is now the loyalty enforcer for his own.

Those promoted to be in charge of our security, diplomacy and civil liberties were rewarded for being more loyal to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney than to the truth.

The president and vice president are dispatching their toadies to the agencies to quell dissent. The crackdown seems bizarre, since hardly anyone dared to disagree with them anyway and there were plenty willing to twist the truth for them.

Consider George Tenet, who assured Mr. Bush that the weak case on Iraqi W.M.D. was "a slam-dunk.'' And Colin Powell, who caved and made the bogus U.N. case for war. Then, when he wanted to stay a bit longer to explore Mideast opportunities arising from Arafat's death, he got shoved out by a president irked by the diplomat's ambivalence and popularity.

Mr. Bush prefers more panting enablers, like Alberto Gonzales. You wanna fry criminals or torture prisoners? Sure thing, boss.

W. and Vice want to extend their personal control over bureaucracies they thought had impeded their foreign policy. It's alarming to learn that they regard their first-term foreign policy - a trumped-up war and bungled occupation, an estrangement from our old allies and proliferating nuclear ambitions in North Korea, Iran and Russia - as impeded. What will an untrammeled one look like?

The post-election hubris has infected Capitol Hill. Law-and-order House Republicans changed the rules so Tom DeLay can stay as majority leader even if he's indicted; Senate Republicans are threatening to rule Democratic filibusters out of order.

In 2002, Cheney & Co. set up their own C.I.A. in the Pentagon to bypass the C.I.A. and conjure up evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. Now Mr. Cheney has sent his lackey, Porter Goss, who helped him try to suffocate the 9/11 commission, to bully the C.I.A. into falling into line.

In an ominous echo of the old loyalty oaths, Mr. Goss has warned employees at the agency that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work.''

Mr. Bush doesn't want any more leaks, like the one showing that he was told two months before invading Iraq that such a move could lead to violent internal conflict and more support for radical Islamists.

Mr. Goss has managed to make the dysfunctional C.I.A. even more dysfunctional. Instead of going after Al Qaeda, he's busy purging top-level officials who had been going after Al Qaeda - replacing them with his coterie of hacks from Capitol Hill.

Mr. Cheney is letting his old mentor, Rummy, stay on. What does it matter if the Rummy doctrine - dangerously thin allotments of forces, no exit strategy, snatching State Department occupation duties and then screwing them up - has botched the Iraq mission and left the military so strapped it's calling back old, out-of-shape reservists to active service?

Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley did not do their jobs before 9/11 in coordinating the fight against Al Qaeda, and they did not do their jobs after 9/11 in preventing the debacle in Iraq. They not only suppressed evidence Americans needed to know that would have debunked the neocons' hyped-up case for invading Iraq; they helped shovel hooey into the president's speeches.

Dr. Rice pitched in to help Dr. No whip up that imaginary mushroom cloud. Condi's life story may be inspirational. But the way she got the State Department job is not.

Not only are the Bush officials who failed to protect the country and misled us into war not losing their jobs. They're getting promoted.

"Duh, Okay, Boss" pays off in the Bush administration.

Hey, jwhop, don't kill the messenger just because you don't like the message. Instead, think about it and apply it to the things that have happened over the last four years.

The article really does not insult anyone because the author makes it clear that we are all doofuses now and then. We all get fooled by wolves in sheep's clothing now and then. Just don't make it a life-style. Realize when you have been a doofus and stop voting for Brain and his side-kicks. Blind allegiance to any leader is dangerous.

posted November 18, 2004 11:47 PM            

Of Course, that never stops Dowd from misquoting or taking statements out of context to make her leftist points in her dreadful columns at that dreadful fish wrapper, the NY Times.

It's my fondest hope that Porter Goss reforms the CIA right down the line and rebuilds it from the ground up into what it's supposed to be. An agency that carries out the directives of the Chief Executive within the framework of the law.

I sincerely hope Goss finds and fires every rogue agent at the CIA who has been leaking classified materials to anyone...including Maureen Dowd.

It's clear that some in the CIA seem to think their job is to oppose the policies of the President and support opponents of the Administration...it isn't.

In typical lying leftist style, Dowd cherry picked the Goss statement she wanted and quoted him out of context. Here's what Goss said in it's proper context and there isn't anything here to indicate the CIA is to be a political arm of the Administration.

Leaked CIA memo: stop all these leaks
By Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 18/11/2004)

The Central Intelligence Agency's new director has called on his staff to stop leaking damaging top secret memos as he seeks to control what President George W Bush sees as one of the more recalcitrant and even mutinous arms of government.

Amid a spate of high-profile resignations over his confrontational leadership style, Porter Goss has told employees their job is "to support the administration and its policies in our work".

Porter Goss: leaks
"As agency employees, we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," he said in an internal memo that was leaked yesterday.

Mr Goss, who took over in September, went on to reassure his staff that their independence was secure and indicated his concern was rather to staunch the flood of leaks attacking the White House and its policies over the last few years.

"We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker," he said. CIA employees should "scrupulously honour our secrecy oath" and leave contact with the media to its press office. "We remain a secret organisation," he wrote.

But amid the greatest turmoil in the agency in two decades, critics of the administration - of whom there are many in the CIA - inferred that this was "political payback" and that the White House was hoping to mould them to fit the policy agenda.

The stand-off has highlighted how the image of the agency has metamorphosed from the "dirty tricks" of the 1970s to a disloyal opposition, as it is now seen in conservative circles in Washington.

The leaking of the memo to the New York Times yesterday epitomised the trend that so frustrated the White House over the last four years during which a flood of damaging confidential documents has seeped from the agency on to the front pages of newspapers. Particularly irritating for the administration were two gloomy intelligence estimates of the situation in Iraq leaked just as the White House was battling to defend its record.

The leaks reflected the frustration of many agency employees who believed their expertise was being ignored by more ideological officials in the administration.

But administration officials saw it as a deliberate attempt to undermine Mr Bush's chances of re-election.

The agency's internal anguish has intensified in the last week as several senior officials have resigned amid mounting tension with Mr Goss, a former Republican congressman who was a CIA officer in the 1970s.

Senator John McCain, the maverick, hawkish Republican who vied with Mr Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, has backed Mr Goss to do "whatever is necessary" to reform the agency.

He told Mr Bush last week that the CIA was "dysfunctional and unaccountable and that they refused to change" and had been acting as a "rogue agency".

But Democrats are warning that Mr Goss's drive for reform is unwarranted and threatens an implosion within the CIA which could deprive the United States of some of its most experienced and badly-needed officials.