Drinky and The Brain

How you gonna stay out of the Big House now, Brain?

Shut the Fuck Up, Drinky!

Oh, it was a good morning to go Starbucks-diving and pilfer some slightly distressed pages of the NYT for Low! Low! Prices!

MoDo is now on day 107 or somesuch of converting her column inches into a Columnated-Energy Weapon Platform of daunting wattage, and Tommy Friedman leaps once again from the lap of his masters and pees on their penny-loafers.

Good thing Dubya isn’t a reader.

Just imagine the whimpery boo-boo face he’d be hanging over reading a mere few paragraphs of even one of Dowd’s elegiac stinkeye bullwhippings. Just imagine the wear and tear on the White House carpet with him pattering down the hall every few minutes, busting into Karl’s office, holding the NYT in his little paw, shrieking, “Does ‘masticate’ mean what I think it means?!?”

And then he notices crates stacked floor to ceiling marked, “Hermann Goering & Son -- Art Movers.”

Followed by, “Karl…why’re you boxin’ up alla them paintings an’ silverware an’ stuff?

“It’s complicated, Mr. President,” Karl mutters, not even looking up. “National Security. And there’s a lot of…math…involved. “

He finally peeps wearily at the little man in his doorway, hop-footing back and forth for the millionth time in “Flowers For Algernon” indignation over words and concepts that are completely beyond his comprehension.

Karl smiles his tiniest mousefuck smile and says the magic words that he knows will get the Boss out of his office…

(Insert horror movie, duh-duh-duh-DUUUH music here)

“Do you want me to brief you?”

“No, no, no. You know I don’t like to get all boggled down with the details. But what about this ‘masticate’ deal? Can we sue ‘em? Or maybe just, y’know, Plame this Dowd bitch?”

The Brain stares at Drinky for a loooong minute as the reality of maybe doing actual hard-time sinks in. Somewhere nearby Karl can almost hear federal marshals revving the engines of their sleek, armored perp-wagons, waiting for the word to come down like the wrath of a vengeful God. And now he pauses for a tiny moment to reflect on the fact that he has given his whole life to make this jug-headed, sneering drunk the most powerful man in the world.

And that it was all turning to shit right before his eyes because turning everything he ever touched to shit had always been Dubya's single magic trick.

And if you think destroying things -- rotting things from the guts out – is an unprofitable pursuit…then you apparently slept through the 1980’s. To eviscerate a whole company, beggar and bugger the workforce, rape the pension funds, bleed off the profits, break it all up and sell it for scrap..that's what CEO’s that ran in Dubya’s pack feature in the first line of their resume.

They lard a lot of MBA-speak around their pathology to dress it up for polite society, but what it comes down to is really simplicity itself:

1. Fuck the healthy company to death

2. Fatten as many cronies as possible in the process.

3. Sell the corpse for medical research.

4. Move on to the next victim.

And whichever little piggy scores the next sweet giggy rings the dinner bell and finds plush sinecures for the whole parasite army.

That was the Promise of a Bush Presidency.

That was why he got both Theocons and“100%-Tax-free”-o-cons so damned horny.

That’s why Karl could broker a deal between the Mammonites and Falwellians, and install a see nuthin’, do nuthin’, perpetually vacationing “Coalition of the Chillin’” Administration right in front of the whole world.

The promise that, what Neil Bush did for Silverado and George W. Bush did for Arbusto, Dubya could also do for the United States of America: fuck it right, straight into the ground, let his pals loot the pension fund and sell the “little people” to debt bondage to their new overlords -- the People's Central Bank of China and their 700 Club Virtue Enforcers.

And now Karl was very likely going to go to jail where big men with whole stained-glass-windows worth of art tattooed on their backs would make him their third favorite ass-puppy, while Pinky would endure.

The Crawford Puddin' Haid would abide, and bumble along, and find himself a new Brain. He’d get a Library, and as grotesque and tainted as it would be, he would also get a Legacy.

That’s where Karl had always dreamed of finding his own Minion Immortality; in the footnotes and insets of the Bush 43 Pages of History. Karl the Architect. The Brain. The Puppet Master.

And now it looked an awful lot like the first line of his obit was going to read, “Karl Rove, Presidential Advisor indicted on conspiracy and treason charges stemming from his involvement in blowing the cover of an undercover CIA…”

"Jagoff!” he said loudly.

“Whassat, Karl?”

“Uh, ‘jag off', sir,” he said. “That’s what ‘masticate’ means. It's another one ‘a them Liberal Elitist words for, uh, self-gratification.”

"Self-...? What?"

"Uh what the First Lady talked about that one time. With you and that horse. But without the horse."

“Really? You sure? That Dowd bitch callin' me a Onanist?!”

“Oh yes sir,” Karl said, heroically suppressing a smirk. Which was, in fact, the only remotely ‘heroic’ thing he’d done his during his whole, filthy life. “And I think you should definitely make a big deal out of it today. Tell ‘em you are outraged that the New York Times would allow language like that, and so forth. Might take some of the attention off of the Judy Miller story, and that little cock-up we had scripting the soldiers.”

“Ah get it! It’s about moral leadership, right Karl?”

“Yes it is, sir.”

"And fightin' the Evil Dewars!"

"Right again. Sir."

“Thanks Karl,” Bush said, turning to go. “You still a good boy.”

The sound of feet padding away.

“Jagoff.”

And in sorta actual news…Lassie bites Timmy. Again!

This little bit transcribed from a paper copy of Tom Friedman’s column entitled, “Leading by (Bad) Example”

A delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists abruptly left the U.S. today, cutting short its visit to study the workings of American democracy. A delegation spokesman said the Iraqis were "bewildered" by some of the behavior of the Bush administration and felt it was best to limit their exposure to the U.S. system at this time, when Iraq is taking its first baby steps toward democracy.

The lead Iraqi delegate, Muhammad Mithaqi, a noted secular Sunni judge who had recently survived an assassination attempt by Islamist radicals, said that he was stunned when he heard President Bush telling Republicans that one reason they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court was because of "her religion." She is described as a devout evangelical Christian.

Mithaqi said that after two years of being lectured to by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad about the need to separate "mosque from state" in the new Iraq, he was also floored to read that the former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now a law school dean, said on the radio show of the conservative James Dobson that Miers deserved support because she was "a very, very strong Christian [who] should be a source of great comfort and assistance to people in the households of faith around the country."
"Now let me get this straight," Judge Mithaqi said. "You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.

How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: 'Don't pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.' Is that the Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don't think so. We can't have our people exposed to such talk.

Friedman ends with the caveat that…

“Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren't so true.”

Jiminy Jillickers, Radioactive Man!

Looks like somebody actually woke up Captain Obvious to the fact that, at a time when we are supposedly trying to export democracy at the point of a sword, every time we remind the world that we let pinheaded theocrats run our country – and that they make religion the litmus test for EVERYTHING – we send yet another blast wave of hypocrisy roaring around the globe, embarrassing the few countries that still speak to us, and handing our enemies one marketing victory after another.

Well, as usual Friedman is about five years too late to the party, and several hundred billion dollars short, but at least momentarily he’s peeing his weak tea in the right direction.