perfidy

From Kathleen Parker, who later refers to the boob thusly:

Robertson, of course, is well known for his spontaneous foot tastings. This is the same Pat Robertson who has urged his flock to pray for a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy "one way or the other."

Quite so. Oh, anyhow - that analogy?

Televangelist Pat Robertson's flip-flop on his fantasy moment as an international assassin reminds me of a famous, if possibly apocryphal, story about David Niven as told by Christopher Buckley.

Niven is standing with another gentleman at the base of a staircase as two ladies in evening gowns descend.

Niven says: "That's the ugliest woman I've ever seen."

Other man replies: "That's my wife."

Niven: "I meant the other one."

Other man: "That's my daughter."

Niven: "I didn't say it."

If there were licenses required for speaking in public, Robertson's would have at least been suspended by now.

Our plentiful supply of other public morons is probably embarrassed to be seen around Reverend Pat. If not, they ought to be. Not everything you think is worthy of public exposition.

Unless, of course, you have a blog.

[wik] Other views, of course, can be found. Witness this from Alan Abelson of Barron's:

Predictably, Mr. Robertson's suggestion prompted a paroxysm of harrumphing from lily-livered liberals and the like (if you don't like, just leave it at from lily-livered liberals). Jesse Jackson urged the FCC to launch an investigation as it did after Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction during the half-time show at the Super Bowl on the grounds that "This is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ballgame."

A close call, we'd say.

The fuss proved sufficiently discomforting for Mr. Robertson to cause him to recant. Which, frankly, we feel is a shame. Not that we believe dispatching Mr. Chavez is a particularly compelling priority. But the concept of effecting regime change on the cheap appeals to us.

Certainly, even the most cursory spectator of the global political scene can rattle off the names of at least a dozen no-good-niks who would be ideal candidates for the coup de grâce. And they don't even have to be mass murderers or ethnic cleansers; blamed nuisances would do fine. And we needn't worry too much about world opinion: We could always outsource the work. If the administration is right and everything is going to be hunky-dory in Iraq, there'll be a lot of idle assassins hanging around street corners in Baghdad who'd be only too happy to pick up a few bucks. Or, we could insource the job to the Mafia, whose business, thanks to the zeal of prosecutors and the eagerness of capos to spill the fava beans, isn't the killer it used to be.

Come to think of it, the approach is fraught with possibilities right here in the good old USA. It might be a quite useful device for our own polity as a kind of permanent term limit for especially deserving office holders. It also might prove an extremely efficacious tool for corporate governance as a means of getting rid of crooked CEOs, a quick and irrevocable way to enhance shareholder value (avoiding those costly golden handshakes, etc). And it holds particular promise for our own beloved Wall Street, where capital crimes are committed every day and the perpetrators live to crow about it.

Thank you, Mr. Robertson.

On second thought, he might not be completely serious. It's possible he has a blog on the side.