CLEVELAND, OHIO—On Monday night, the Republican Party staged a compelling revival of the classic Rod Serling script, The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. Of course, this became lost in the festival of Melania Obscura
that broke out over many platforms. By one in the morning, everyone had
forgotten the relevance of Rod Serling's closing narration from 1960 to
the events of the first night of the 2016 Republican National
Convention.
"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices—to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill–and suspicion can destroy—and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children—and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is—that these things cannot be confined—to the Twilight Zone."
I'll say.
(Also
lost to history is the dramatic disrespect shown to my new friend,
United States Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, whose putative
primetime speech was pushed into the Kimmelsphere because they had to
wedge in Antonio Sabato, Jr. and the Duck Dynasty spalpeen. I am only
joking a little bit here. Ernst is a rising star in the party; on
election night in 2014, Luke Russert, late of MSNBC, called her the
"crown jewel" of the new Republican Senate majority. And she winds up
speaking to the custodial staff because a parade of D-listers had to
pass by first. I am offended by the sheer inept politics of this.)
So,
after a night like that, there was nothing else to do but spend Tuesday
morning noshing on bagels with the Dark Lord of this curious Sith,
Roger Stone. In the luxurious rumpus room that it sponsors at every
convention, Tiger Beat On The Potomac hosted
Stone as part of its breakfast speakers series. Mike (Payola) Allen was
our host, and a fine host he was, too. (Perhaps he has been overtaken
by the spirit of local hero Alan Freed, whose attitude toward airplay was generally similar to Allen's attitude toward political journalism.)
For his part, Stone was jocular, jovial, and resplendent in a summer
suit and white shoes, tipped in black. It was like watching a
well-dressed cobra at rest.
It was like watching a well-dressed cobra at rest.
Right now, Stone is plugging a book which is something of a Malleus Maleficarum of
every charge that ever has been made against Bill and Hillary Clinton
regarding Bill's alleged sexual history. His co-author on this
masterpiece, a guy named Robert Morrow, is a nasty bit of work who long ago bought a luxury condo on the grounds of the Mena Airport, and we have encountered him
here in the shebeen before. This will become important later. On Monday
afternoon, he held a rally down by the big lake—co-hosted by space
alien celebrity Alex Jones—at which he once again explained
that the late Vince Foster had committed suicide in the White House and
that Mob Boss Hillary Clinton had called in Winston Wolf to move the
body to Fort Marcy Park.
"They don't tell us about Vince Foster," Stone said at one point—after shedding his jacket and tossing it aside. "There was carpet fiber all over his body. They rolled him up in a carpet."
As
I said, over breakfast, Stone was quite the raconteur, going into
detail about his long friendship with He, Trump, including trying to get
him to run for president as long ago as 1988, which, I confess, had
slipped my mind. But there were the occasional glimpses of the reptile
beneath the spiffy, tailored human suit, usually in asides that Stone
dropped smoothly into the conversation and which seemed to lodge in the
wall about eight feet over Mike Allen's head. For example, when the
subject of Melania Trump's troubles came up, Stone began by explaining,
quite reasonably, that it probably was the product of "sloppy staff
work." But then, he went on and, oh, the places he went.
"Do we know who wrote the speech? I concluded it was Bill Ayers. I mean, Barack Obama didn't write his own book."
It is an article of faith on the far frontiers of the anti-Obama fringe that Ayers ghosted Dreams of My Father,
the president's first book and one that went very far toward defining
him to the large majority of non-paranoid Americans. (The next stop on
the crazy train are the people who think the president's real father was
Frank Marshall Davis or, perhaps, Malcolm X.) Give him this—Roger Stone
is the most elegant maître d' the American political sewer ever has
had.
Which
is not to say he's always wrong about everything. He was politely
scathing about certain obvious aspects of the Trump's campaign
disorganization. "Campaigns are not democracies," he said. "Campaigns
are dictatorships and the campaign manager's authority has to flow from
the candidate himself. If your mind is somewhere else, if you're
thinking about the job you'll have in the White House, if you're already
measuring for the curtains in your office, you are doing a disservice
to your candidate."
"I mean, I
don't think you ban a reporter. You can argue with reporters. You can
argue with them after a story is printed when you think it's in error or
needs a retraction. But banning reporters is absolutely not something I
believe in."
Reasonableness,
of course, only goes so far. An intrepid reporter from Media Matters
rose and asked Stone about the fact that his co-author, Morrow, has been quite open about his personal belief that Trump once raped his wife.
"Where are you from again?" Stone said.
"Media Matters," repeated the questioners.
"I'm sorry, but I don't answer questions from illegitimate news organizations," Stone replied.
Knowing
his cue, and realizing that actual news was about to break out, Mike
Allen leaped into the breach. "What," he asked Stone, "is Donald Trump's
path to the White House?"
Roger
Stone knows what that path is. It's a path through the dark and tangled
forest of fear and anger. He is the finest guide anyone who ever walked
that path has had. He's Natty Goddamn Bumppo in there. It's the path
the entire convention walked on Monday night. It is Roger Stone who is
the alien on the hill, manipulating the panicked humans down on Maple
Street into destroying themselves.
Listening
to him answer the polite questions from Mike Allen, you came to a
fundamental realization about human nature: If you accept that everyone
is capable of almost anything, life becomes more brutal—but a helluva
lot less complicated.
