All The Kings Horses

The Dream Is Dead
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 12, 2007

`... There's glory for you!'

`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

- Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass

Today's ire is focused on the man called by General Tommy Franks "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet" (with Maureen replacing the f-word with "[expletive] "). And when Dowd's dander is up we get alliteration.

Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.

But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.

Normally eggheads are pointy-headed with no experience with the real world. The neo-con variety comes with pointy chins instead. Like Feith, Humpty Dumpty firmly believed that he was in no danger because the King’s men would immediately come running and put together any mess he made.

Mishegoss means crazy or senseless activity or behavior. It’s a variation of the Yiddish word meshuga and was presumably picked for it’s consonance with egghead, but it also evokes another thread of the column.

Feith’s disdain for diplomacy and his credo that weakness invites aggression were shaped, Ricks reported, by personal history: “Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the Nazis.”

Completing the Fiasco Troika are fellow neo-cons sitting together like another duo from Wonderland, TweedleDee and TweedleDum.

His former boss, Paul Wolfowitz, and the former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle sat supportively in the front row.

And there they sat making excuses for the scrambled mess they left behind.