The Romulan Ambassador to TV

Posted on March 28, 2003    Posted by John Scalzi

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of Richard Perle that isn’t like this: Gob open, eyebrows arched, looking vaguely irritated that those at whom he is pontificiating can’t understand the fundamental rightness of whatever bit of horrifying spew he’s masticating on before spitting it up onto the desk of whichever Sunday morning talk show he’s visiting. He’s like the Romulan ambassador to broadcast television.

One wishes it were possible to travel back in time, not to wrap the infant Richard Perle’s face in Saran Wrap before he could grow up into a soulless yammering neocon talking head, as you might suppose, but to provide him with a nice fuzzy stuffed animal or maybe a hug or two; Perle strikes me as one of those poor kids who came from a family where they believed emotional interaction was for pansies and Communists. I could be wrong — it’s entirely possible Perle is a quite amiable person to know — but since Perle’s inside-the-beltway knickname is “The Prince of Darkness,” I’m pretty sure I’m on to something.

I don’t know nearly enough about Perle as I should, considering he’s one of the godfathers of the Dubya administration’s foreign policy (which, boiled down to its mealy bones, seems to be “Screw you if you don’t speaka the English”), but I know enough to know that I’m glad he appears to be on his way down the power slide — he’s had to resign his position as head an influential Pentagon advisory panel, apparently just ahead of the hounds, although Donald Rumsfeld (another candidate for time-traveling plush toys) is keeping him on the panel just the same. Be that as it may, he’s taken a hit, and it’s likely that in the short run at least he’ll have to find something else to do with his Sundays than get miked by Tim Russert’s pretty production assistants. One can hope, at least.

The reason I’d be pleased to see Perle tumble into oblivion is that he’s the personification of what is so dislikable about the current crew in Washington: Yet another unelected yet influential career seether with undiguised disdain for people and viewpoints not grown like mushrooms in the dank feculence of a conservative think tank. I have a natural aversion to people who want to fiddle with the real world without actually having lived in it, and I have a deep suspicion that Richard Perle hasn’t spent much time in the real world. A spell in it, or at least a whack from it, might do him some good.