Village Courtiers By: Mark W Adams

Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero (who really has one of the coolest obscure handles on the interwebs) and Digby have been trying to get a handle on what to do about The Villagers, those out-of-touch, self-important, insulated members of the Washington D.C. elite. Stoller has picked up the meme and Glenn Greenwald connects it to Adam Smith's 1776 treatise, Wealth of Nations, warning us of the dangerous behavior of our Washington establishment's orthodoxy, the immunity the "Beltway Village" enjoys from the consequences of their imperial intrigues.

Useful as this cute metaphor can be to illustrate the sequestered sense of parochialism and disconnect that informs the pampered malignancy infesting the ruling class mentality of the Capital's group-think, it doesn't quite capture the essence of what we are witnessing today -- the Imperial Reality.

When Jay Rosen spoke of the "Palace Press," it clicked for me. Rosen remembers well the phrase, ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." It's the same thing that bothers Chris Matthews about Hillary's campaign strong-arming G.Q. Magazine over an uncomplimentary article with threats to restrict their access to Bill. The palace at the center of Disneyland on the Potomac is built entirely on the sycophantic dance of power -- those with it and those who want it.

Information and access is their currency. Hillary's team playing this out in public threatened to expose the charade. It's not what she did, but that she didn't care to be discreet is what violated the rules of Higher Broderism.

Naturally, in this "Information Age," the truism that "Information is Power" plays out with even more vengeance than when feminist Robin Morgan coined the phrase. What we usually miss is the ritual involved in accumulating such power, through secrecy, that her entire quote warns about:

"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility."

Taking their cue from this most secretive of administrations which has dispensed with the outmoded notion of humility by going directly to the tyrant stage, the "Courtiers," the Beltway punditry and D.C. journalists in consort with bureaucrats, officials and advisers play the game of "who can tell what to whom." Were it not for the Valerie Plame affiar, Judith Miller would still be the belle of this ball.

If the dance should remind you of anything, try thinking Louis XIV's royal court at Versailles consolidating all power in the Royal Person himself, an absolute monarchy that controlled all rituals of power and association of the government's functionaries and the aristocracy with one goal: perpetuation of their privileged position. It's the Peter Principle writ large, or more precisely, fear of Negative Selection that keeps the dancers moving to the tune.

Hardly the same mental picture you get when thinking of a quaint little village.