“Once you eliminate the impossible...

..whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

So sayeth Sherlock Holmes and as with the fictional villains invented by Arthur Conan Doyle, so the noose of implacable truth tightens daily around The Rove and Scooter and the rest: The slavishly loyal family retainers who have had their consciences excised by Imperial Conditioning.

Shit, don’t these people know that the Butler always does it!

There’s this part, at the end of the “Case of the Six Napoleans” (which, I’ll admit, like most of the Holmes stories after he came back from Reichenback Falls, was never as good as the early stuff. But, we do what we can with what we have, right? Anyway, the game’s afoot...) where the Consulting Detective upends the plodding Inspector Lestrade’s Mafia theories and lays out, in high style, like a great conjurer, exactly what did happen.

I always felt that Lestrade never quite got his proper due.

He was a working-class cop, probably running his jurisdiction well, if unimaginatively. He probably closes most of his cases and has risen through the ranks by dint of hard-if-dull labor. Doesn’t fuck around on Mrs. Inspector Lestrade.

An honest copper.

It’s not his fault Holmes is a fucking genius.

Even Watson, who had been at Holmes’ heels and fingertips for years – who documents his cases – even he couldn’t match the Great Man when it came to inhaling the facts no matter how seemingly-trivial and dispensing with the trivia, no matter his urgently it keened for his attention. In the world of fiction, of all the solvers of crime, no one was more gifted at disassembling the “disassemblers” than he, which is why everyone else looks like an idiot when they stand next to him.

And, sure, Lestrade bungles and buffalos along, alternately full of brag one minute, and in the next soliciting the Detective’s help as gingerly and indirectly as, oh, say, strictly fictionally and theoretically, Scotty Dog negotiating over an open phone line to take whatever figurative or literal maidenhead Ken Mehlman might have left.

“Uh...yeah...uh...there might be...uh...a taker...for, uh...that...uh...item. Yes...uh...ferrets, PVC lederhosen...uh...military-grade flare gun...and, uh, a wheel of Venezuelan Beaver Cheese...might be...uh...made available.”

It’s a tricky business, but in Lestrade’s case, when shown to be in the wrong, he didn't try to blow Watson's head off in retribution. He was an honorable man who put his ego in check for the greater good and told Holmes he’d never seen a case solved in such a workmanlike manner. That Scotland Yard wasn’t jealous of Holmes; they were proud of him.

“...and if you come down tomorrow, there’s not man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”

Consider that when reading this (passed along by the benevolently omnipresent DC Media Girl):

Meet Larry Johnson

The CIA official turned Democratic spokesman has a pre-9/11 mindset.
by Gary Schmitt

ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of House and Senate Democrats on Friday, where he made similar criticisms of the president. A self-described Republican, Johnson argued that the failure of the president to fire Rove and anyone else supposedly involved in the leak had severely damaged national security and would certainly hamper future efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror.

Well, it's good to see that the former CIA employee is now worried about the war on terror. But it's a bit late. On July 10, 2001--two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--Johnson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times ("The Declining Terrorist Threat") in which he argued that Americans were "bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism" and, in truth, had "little to fear" from terrorism. And, in turn, he rebuked his former colleagues in the national security bureaucracy for using the "fiction" of the terrorist threat to pump up their budgets.
...

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Gary Schmitt, the article makes clear, is executive director of PNAC – which I always thought stood for Punk-assed Nuclear Armed Cowards – but turns out actually means, “The Project for the New American Century.”

You know, the tubby, pasty, think-tank-vat-grown draft-dodging wingnuts (Just what every Yellow Elephant boy and girl dreams of growing up to be!) that cobbled The Slamdunk, Cakewalk, Liberator-greetin’, Self-fundin’ Iraqi Debacle out of whole cloth, old "Speed Racer" scripts and the Kleenexes they wank into.

Then used 9/11 the way trichinosis uses bad pork.

Then lied and greased us into quicksand, ignoring every warning signal and red flag.

And now that that gendarmes of Reality and Causality have them completely cornered and the petropium-fueled ideas and excuses are gonegonegone, these selfsame Nature’s Noblemen think smearing honorable and honest men and women is their Path of Glory.

Seriously, if one were to judge solely by the premeditated ruin these cocksuckers have inflicted on America, if these were brown men named Muhammed and Ali instead of pale, dickless men named Dick and The Other Dick...they’d be in cells in Gitmo today with their withered testicles plugged to car batteries, instead of running the country like a Cosa Nostra front company.

But it didn’t have to be this way, and the fact that it is is all the fact anyone over the age of five should need to see them for what they are.

As a simple test, just invert the events: consider how any other Administration would have acted and history would have unfolded if the fix hadn’t been in. If the decisions to invade and loot Iraq weren’t already primed and armed and waiting for a trigger.

Any trigger.

Consider what the world would have looked like if we weren’t in the hands of sociopaths and criminals who don’t give a shit what happens to America, but instead, in the care of men who genuinely wanted to do what was best for their country.

In that world where Joe Wilson comes back from abroad to save the Bush Administration from lying in the State of the Union, at the UN, and generally flushing its credibility down the shitter.

Where he would have been quietly thanked and feted. Maybe even decorated.

If the Bush Administration had ever been even slightly interested in the facts or the truth or the good of the country, having been shown to be wrong, and having been spared the embarrassment of butt-scooting (I know how fond some of you are of that phrase :-) that grotesque error all over the planet, Bush would have taken the Lestrade role.

Having made such a big deal of retaining and then listening to the experts he hires, Bush would have been appreciative of a delicate job well done...and he would have won himself an ally instead of making an enemy.

Bush would have told Wilson, “... if you come down tomorrow, there’s not man, from the oldest Cabinet Member to the youngest staffer, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”

Instead, they and their toadies went after his wife like the gangsters that they are. Then they went after him. Then they went after anyone who called them on their thuggish behavior. And the only explanation for this behaviour, now that every other alternative has been eliminated, is that they are desperately covering up a crime. And the magnitude of their desperation tells us that it was a Big One. Probably several, commited by several people, acting in concert.

Elementary.

And of course the cowards and Vaseline-spined Moderates in the Press and in their Party are the dogs that conspicuously do NOT bark in the night. Their silence deafens, and is the alarm bell that loudly announces their complicity to the whole world.

Instead of honorably wanting to get to the bottom of this disaster, the PNAC Polka and Prevarication Squad rolls out the Slimemobile. Instead of honest outrage at being pimped and lied to by his Beloved Masters who shelter traitors in the West Wing, David Brooks jets off to Ignore-it-allvania and uses his influential position at the NYT to boldly take on the powerful “Babies Crying in 1st Class” lobby.

Of course the traitors of PNAC and their minions and creatures are all-too-real, and Lestrade, Holmes and Watson are fictional, written a century ago, but they still command our attention because the characters are people we know, with motives we can understand. They tell us about morality and purpose and concealment, but more than that, they tell us that facts in your hand and reason on your side are powerful weapons.

And the truth that positively radiates through all of the clutter and clamor of the Right Wing Boom Box is the truth of the basic character of these people.

With Social Security, they came after your Mother.

With Terry Schiavo and Valerie Plame, they’ve shown they have no problem coming after your Wife.

And in Iraq, they show us every day that to cover up their bloody failures, they’ll sacrifice your Children while theirs stay safe and snug at home.

Damn them to Hell, certainly, but commit to a special Malebolge of Hell those “Good Germans” who see and hear and know better...and stand silently by as it happens.