Funny how all the commenting dried up with that last post…
And for today, we've got a fascinating look back at 2002, when the Weekly Standard, that bastion of neocon philosophizing, had the good grace to explain just how screwed up we really got as a nation in terms that everyone who was a kid in 1977 could understand. I don't know how I missed this comedy goldmine back then, but in this piece, Standard online editor Jonathan Last tells us why the ocassionally genocidal Darth Vader was the good guy. Did he not get the memo or what? He evidences a full ubergeek working knowledge of Star Wars, which makes the whole thing even funnier. It does explain a lot, especially why Democrat Zell Miller gave the 2004 Republican convention speech as Emperor Palpatine:
I always sided with the Rebel Alliance, like pretty much everyone on Earth except that weird kid who interrogated neighborhood kittens. I guess we know where he ended up working.
Behold:
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator–but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen….
And while it's a small point, the Empire's manners and decorum speak well of it. When Darth Vader is forced to employ bounty hunters to track down Han Solo, he refuses to address them by name….
The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder–planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true. …
Leia's lies are perfectly defensible–she thinks she's serving the greater good–but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless. If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.
I believe the operative phrase is "Kill them all. Let God sort them out." After all, they were a bad planet. A very bad planet. Well, possibly. They also might have been a major force in butterfly farming. Read on if you can take all the references to the Expanded Universe.
Fascinating deconstruction of killing millions of innocent people, and yet another example of how fictional worlds seem to be the last, hilarious (if it weren't so scarily earnest) recourse of neo-con justification. Dressing up such obviously immoral clap-trap as polite discourse seems to be one of the primary missions of the Weekly Standard. And who knew Pinochet was a "relatively benign" dictator? I mean, what's disappearing people between friends? He had such good manners!
Palpatine also is described as an "esoteric Straussian," because he says, "There is no civility. There is only politics." Strauss is the heart and progenitor of the neoconservative movement, and well worth reading up on now that his philosophy has largely destroyed political discourse. For some reason, this bunch of yahoos never notices that nobody except them wants a world full of politics and free of civility.
I'll give Last this: this is a completely parody-proof piece, and that is an accomplishment to be proud of. I hope he will undertake telling us why my favorite villain of all time, the warden in Cool Hand Luke, was really a misunderstood genius. The Prince of Darkness also gets a bad rap.
ADDITIONAL: Libertarian shock jock Eric "Mancow" Muller tells Keith Olbermann that, after two days of after-effects from his own waterboarding, he maintains his change of mind–he now believes it's torture, period. This one ought to be seen by all those fine folks who keep telling us it's no big deal. He says it's actually worse than drowning, which he had the misfortune of experiencing as a kid.
