Still At Large And Presumed Dangerous

Mr. Charles P. Pierce has some questions:

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I can hardly wait for this week to end. If it's not Dean Baquet, copping a cheap alibi for his newspaper's unforgivable malpractice, it's Richard Perle. who should be displayed in a pillory outside Walter Reed for the next 10 years, being allowed to vomit blood all over the op-ed section of USA Today.

Many commentaries on the Iraq War, including the one to which this is a response, show little understanding of what it means to manage risk. We do not normally consider it to have been foolish to pay for fire insurance when the house does not burn down - or particularly clever to have done so when it does. When thousands of American lives are at stake, insurance, sometimes pre-emptive military action, is not cheap.

And precisely what risk did you "manage" ? What chance did you take? You gambled with other people's children in a game you'd helped rig. What cost was exacted from you, sitting your fat ass in a swivel chair at a wingnut intellectual chop-shop while kids are still staggering around the wards without legs and arms, or the cognitive functions to get them through the day? What price did you pay? You have to send out for lunch one day? Show me the butcher's bill for the Perle household, you vampire son of a bitch.

And let us not forget Perle's onetime co-author, David Frum, who's mysteriously been allowed through the tradesmen's entrance back into the discourse conducted by decent people.

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There is a velvet rope at that tradesmen's entrance, Charlie.

And there are people with names and titles and paychecks and plans for the future lifting that rope for some and keeping others out.

And I'm betting that getting their names and reasons on the record would make a pretty good story.