The Thirty-Thousand Feet Level

Chuck Todd is a straight up moron. I mean, look, if I could have occupied Chuck Todd's grotesque pinnipedal FlavrSavr form at any point during that interview with Glenn Greenwald, I'd've said, "Look, Glenn, you're being painfully naive. The Augustus retains the forms and rituals of the Republic even as he exercises ultimate authority. It isn't just, fair, or Democratic, but it's the way things work. Some squishy homunculus with no pull and no friends like Johnny Yoo may one day get tossed to the bleating mob outside the palace--if, that is, the mob can unhook its high fructose corn syrup drip and haul its fat diabetic ass from the couch to the palace in the first place--but no one important is going down for this, because yes, they are quite literally above the law, as immune to it as sharks to cancer."

But as I do not yet have such powers, I listened with bemused, giggly horror as Glenn made Chuck Todd appear even dumber than Chuck Todd is ordinarily able to make himself appear in bright lights of teevee land. Lest you think I damn with faint praise, let me just say that I honestly believe this to be a remarkable feat on Glenn's part, the equivalent of unscrambling eggs or multiplying zero by some other figure and ending up with a negative number. Chuck's "view from thirty-thousand feet" seemed to be no more or less than the matte wing of the aircraft carrying him along at that breathless height, and while Greenwald strove to discuss the topology below, Chuck could not tear himself from all the fascinating patterns of rivets. By the end of the interview, I felt actual sympathy, true and honest pity, for as Glenn needled him for trying to wheedle out of first-person statements by claiming to have acted as a mere interlocutor, it became perfectly apparent that poor Chuck Todd has no opinions of his own, no cognitive process to speak of, no moral sentience if I may turn a phrase; he is more than a mirror, less than an empty vessel.

Finally, on a related but different note, American "issues" have a curious geometry. All off them, apparently, have two sides. There are no triangles in politics, only two perfectly parallel lines, like train tracks, which, though they never meet, always seem to end up at the same destination.