Guest Embellishment

Did you check out the Louis Freeh interview on The Daily Show tonight?  What a snorefest.  It was hard to tell if Jon didn’t know much about the guy, or if he was just being nice.  But that’s the way Jon is too much of the time.  It’s gotten to the point that I sometimes wish he didn’t have serious guests anymore, because he doesn’t ask the questions that I want asked. And if he’s not going to ask my questions, he might as well not ask them to a celebrity, because I really couldn’t give a shit what they say.

But did you hear his FBI agent story/joke towards the end?  What a pile of shit.  I’m sure that it was somehow based on a true story.  He probably did have to bug a mobster-type guy, and there probably were dogs involved that they may have had to bribe with food.  I don’t know enough about Freeh to suggest that he would have invented all of this up, so I’ll give him that much.

But it all falls apart when he gets to the part of the mobster guy doubting that they could have gotten passed his dogs.  I mean, come fucking on!  If someone reaches in and pulls an electronic bugging device out of my ass, I’m going to assume that he somehow neutralized my anal defenses and leave it at that.  And I paid a good bit more than one thousand dollars for it, let me tell you; but if the FBI tells me that that’s what they did, then who the hell am I to doubt it?  So the whole thing just sounds like bullshit invented to make a boring story sound less boring.

But it’s just dumb that the mobster guy would have so much faith in his dogs, that he’d completely forget about the reason why the FBI is there; namely, to bust him.  That’s what a normal mobster guy would be worried about, or so I would imagine.  But oh no, this mobster spends his time focused solely on figuring out how they got past his dogs.  Most guys would start thinking about jail-time or perhaps even worry that he might get whacked to prevent him from squealing.  But not our mobster.  Oh no.  He’s more like the killer in a cheap whodunit; all he wants to know is how the detective caught him.

Equally dumb is the FBI agent in this story, who’s so proud of getting past the dogs that he’s actually arguing with the criminal over it.  Going on and on to prove that they really had gotten past the dogs.  Hell, it’d have been smarter to make the guy think that it was an inside job, with the bug placed there by one of his own guys.  You should always take advantage of the other guy’s ignorance and make it seem like you’ve got him far better than you did.  

So if this story’s true, it makes Agent Freeh out to be an even bigger putz than we had at first imagined.  But it’s not true.  He just made it up to improve his story.  And now he’s improved it so much that he’s forgotten how “improved” it really is, and insists on repeating it for all of America.  Repeating an obviously embellished story.

And the overall tone between this supposed mobster-type and Agent Freeh sounds more like two Rotary members reminiscing over a successful pranking.  The reality of the situation seems to have been sucked right out, and replaced with Humorous Anecdote reality.  Where anything goes and an interesting story always beats a true one.  And the ending with the dogs coming over and licking Freeh’s face is just stupid.  It makes for a good story, but it’s crap for reality and an insult to all of our intelligy.

And it’s obvious that he tells this story a lot.  At dinner parties and whatnot.  He probably once told the story without the elaborate ending,   And while it was only marginally interesting, it was probably the best story he had.  And so smarter people slightly punched up the story for him after he got done with it, and he eventually incorporated those better elements into his story.  And now he’s got one interesting story he can tell.  One interesting story from an otherwise uninteresting man.

And that’s just crazy.  This guy was Clinton’s FBI guy since September 1993 and he stayed on until June 2001.  He has inside info on Whitewatergate, Filegate, Travelgate, Monicagate, and all the other Gates.  He oversaw the investigation of the Davidian/Waco Fire and Ruby Ridge.  Vince Foster.  Richard Jewell.  Wen Ho Lee.  All that stuff.  This guy was fucking there.  Right in the fucking middle of it all.  And yet the most interesting thing he can say is a semi-true story about a mobster’s guard dogs??  The one topic that really seemed to light up his eyes wasn’t even completely real??  What the fuck is the matter with that guy?

At this point, I wrote something excessively mean towards Louis Freeh, his dullness, and certain places he might like to stick it.  But I can’t say for certain that these remarks were entirely deserved, so they’ve been deleted.  If you’d still like to read these remarks, please send me a self-addressed stamped-envelope and I’ll see what I can do.  But needless to say, Louis Freeh told a bullshitty story and it was the only real thing he seemed to want to talk about.  And that tells us a lot of the man.

BTW: Per Wikipedia, Freeh is now senior vice chairman and general counsel at MBNA. So now when you fail to pay your MBNA card on-time, you’ll know that it’s not because you’re a bum who can’t afford his own purchases.  Nope.  This time, it’ll be because you’re sticking it to the Man.  The really boring man with the marginally boring story.