Hello from 8,000 feet. I'm in Aspen, where the conversation, thankfully, is much thicker than the air. I'm here for the inaugural 21st Century National Service Summit, sponsored by the Franklin Project, a new venture of the Aspen Institute. For two days, speakers will be discussing all the ways in which we can scale the idea of giving back into a robust program of national service. The goal is to make universal national service a new American rite of passage by creating one million national service positions for those aged 18 to 28.If she's for universal national service, there must be something wrong with the idea. What you should focus on here is the fact that Arianna Huffington -- a one-time Republican firebrand who tried to Lady MacBeth her way into the White House -- claims to be a progressive convert. Yet here she is, leading a panel at the Aspen Fucking Institute.
Remember Scooter Libby's coded message to Judy Miller about the Aspen Institute? Here's a list of the Institute's bigwigs. Some of these folks aren't so bad -- Gabby Giffords, Herman Wouk (author of The Caine Mutiny, born in 1915!) -- but there are plenty of "usual suspects": Richard Armitage, David Koch, Henry Kissinger...
You know. The gang.
According to this rather funky source, the Board of trustees also includes this country's most powerful backers of Israel, including "Frederic Malek, major Republican financier and member of the board of the America-Israel Friendship League." This is the same Malek who helped Nixon's "pogrom" against Jews in government. Malek later became an advisor to Sarah Palin.
The basic point is this: Don't trust Arianna. Don't trust any courtier to the Dodekatheon who floats down from Olympus to tell the common folk which rites of passage they should observe. Or, to switch metaphors, the author of a book called Pigs at the Trough shouldn't pal around with pigs.
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