Arthur Alpert Pic2Talking about l’affaire David Letterman, one Eric Dezenhall, a consultant on crisis management, told the N.Y. Times on Sunday: “With the death of shame and geometric shortening of attention spans, yesterday’s crisis is today’s blip.”

Shame is dead, true, and nowhere more so than in politics.

Consider the militarists pressuring President Obama to follow the Army’s advice in Afghanistan exactly and ASAP. As if the brass reporting to Donald Rumsfeld weren’t terribly off-base. As if the Bush junta did not elbow aside generals skeptical of neo-conservative scenarios.

Yet these self-styled patriots – many still to grasp that we wounded ourselves grievously by invading Iraq – presume to advise on policy in Afghanistan.

That’s shameless, lacking any sense of “guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace.”

The ear-splitting silence, even carping, at Obama’s present deliberations may not be shameless but qualify as stupid and mean. Americans should applaud his wisdom in first reconsidering strategy, from which tactics and allocation of resources should properly emerge. Knowing what you want to achieve and how to get there before sending innocents to death may seem elementary, but it was beyond The Decider. His gut sufficed.

Shamelessness is not a rightist monopoly. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wants dollars to fight Republicans “obstructing” the Obama agenda. The DSCC never mentions that it’s corporate Democrats – Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln and pals – who are murdering real health care reform.

And then there’s climate change. Our local utility, PNM, is part of a business exodus from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that includes California’s PG&E, Chicago-based Exelon and Nike. PNM says the science is compelling and it’s time to enact “comprehensive federal legislation to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect customers against unreasonable cost increases.”

Why, then, does the national business lobby reject science? Because bare-knuckle capitalism (not the enlightened kind) gobbles up public goods like air, water and land in pursuit of profit, unless restrained. Talk about shamelessness!

Ready to explore a tangent here? Reading the Albuquerque Journal is fun these days as expert reporters like science writer John Fleck (climate, energy) and business maven Winthrop Quigley (health) explore the real, complex world while the paper’s bare knuckle management shamelessly promotes an alternative universe.

In its partisan sci fi, the Journal advocates for rightists of the “subsidize business, not people” persuasion and the libertarian “neuter government” sect. Doctrinal differences aside, Journal management promotes a beatific vision of USA, Incorporated.

But among the shameless, the most hypocritical are today’s deficit worriers, dire prophets of an apocalyptic future. Most are the very people who cheered, or yawned, as the Bushies magnified Sandias of debt into Himalayas.

“You know, Paul,” said Vice President Cheney, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Paul O’Neill, Bush’s fired Treasury Secretary, reported that.

So, deficits differ. Republican deficits are godly; the Democratic kind, Beelzebub’s handiwork. Borrowing to buy a trillion-dollar war is virtuous; doing so to duck Great Depression II, save jobs or goose a frozen economy is socialism. True, cutting taxes on the most affluent while spending wildly seems irresponsible, but when Republicans do it….

These deficit hawks won’t tell you that Ronald Reagan and the Presidents Bush racked up 90 percent of our current $11 trillion hole. (Clinton started to shrink it.)

And the Federal Reserve boss from Reagan to Bush II was Alan Greenspan, a Republican libertarian conservative who tolerated bubbles, blessed tax cuts in wartime and resisted regulation of mysterious derivatives.

This is the genius George Stephanopoulos fawned over on ABC-TV’s “This Week” Oct. 4. And whose wisdom the Albuquerque Journal published at length next morning.

Who gets the shamelessness prize there? Mr. Greenspan or journalists who lionize failures?

To my shame, I don’t know.