To: Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Re: Richard Perle on "America at a Crossroads"

The early episodes, by Frontline, were excellent. But now you have a clearly deluded maniac, Richard Perle, serving up the most contradictory, self-aggrandizing rubbish, and it is by no means journalism, but rather is an advertorial for the ranting menace of savage evil.
My objection isn't only to Perle's politics, which are in any case so incoherent as to be unworthy of categorization as politics, rather than mere opinion. What really is grotesque about his contributions is that, first, you paid him to compile them; second, you inflict them on Americans trying to sort through incredibly complex and baffling events; and third, they are underpinned, laced, and riddled with sheer insane ramblings about why he has been right to advocate, influentially, a whole string of miserably failed American incursions into unwinnable foreign wars: He is right, he says, because he grew up somewhere or other, is really a Democrat, loved JFK, and is as a result passionately in favor of defending oppressed peoples, everywhere. He so lacks introspection that he cannot see how highly selective he is in which incursions he backs, and favors, and with what duplicitous "evidence" of need. So, not only does he remain utterly silent and in stunning denial about the disasters that have accompanied every single campaign, but he also has no sense of hypocrisy in his ignoring the cruel despotisms that we have at best ignored and in many cases supported in Central America, East Timor, and countless other places – the dozens of interventions that the US has shunned or lied about staying out of, always in favor of its "interests."
The man is so deluded that it's simply outrageous that you give him unchecked air time. In one way, fortunately, his addled, self-congratulatory, self-absolving contributions serve the ends of helpful presentation of complex issues: He is so far gone in his self-delusion and hubris that he interviews a series of people who demonstrate clearly why he is abjectly wrong about everything -- there are mothers of dead American soldiers who shame him with their empathy for the dead on all sides; there are observers with a knowledge of the interests of other madmen, like the devils of Al-Qaida. The latter tell Perle, quite plainly (sounding the same notes that many other informed observers did in earlier episodes) that the actions of Rumsfeld and his co-conspirators have been as if sent by Allah to the depraved likes of Usama bin Laden.
And yet, Perle gleefully grabs onto every demonstration of his nonsensical, fanciful, international-relations-101 thinking. Why? Because he believes that it only reinforces his all-seeing wisdom on all matters of US foreign policy.
His diatribe tonight was a classic evocation of pathologized belief, at work. I trust CPB is deeply ashamed to have aired it.