Sunday Morning Comin’ Down Part II.

The Republican Refractory Period.

Or when the spoils of electoral victory aren’t the Xbox 360 you thought you were getting, but the festering Holiday Fruit Cake of war, treachery, spying, treason, corruption, incompetence, money laundering and cronyism that you were warned about.

Christ, were you ever warned about it.

So take a biiiig bite asshats. You ordered it; you eat it.

On Meet the Press…

Condi Rice: a Lying vision in White. The same babble-babble. Pick any random paragraph out of any Administration Iraq speech made in the last 2.5 year and that’s what she said. The edible portions are available here, at the fast-becoming-my-political-video-Google, Crooks and Liars.

On the subject of Illegal Domestic Spying. Carl Levin sez, “There is a COURT that is supposed to be the check and balance in this law. In this LAW it’s a Court that is the oversight…”

Let’s just say that Carl Levin repeats the words “Court” and “Law” about 700 times.

Good for you, Carl.


On Face the Nation…

Lindsay Graham is again treading the boards as the Republican Hamlet and asking hard questions of his Party. Again, he won’t actually break with his Party, because the Primary Republican Directive is not fealty to conscience but obedience to the Dear Leader

Joe Biden reminds millions of registered voters that he’s the guy that drafted the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Act.

(Which is “Act”-redundant, like the SALT Talks were “Talks”-redundant. Which is irrelevant, but it bugs me.)

Anyway, Joe points out that Dubya already has the authority to wiretap.

So, he is asked, “Why would he do that?”

“Well,” Joe opines (to the best of my recollection), virtually hooking his thumbs into invisible suspenders, “why would he do what the did with torture? Why their stance on the Geneva Convention?"

Aughhhh! Tom Friedman! Make him go away!

Friedman: [Spying] Thingies happen for a reason. There was a gap in the law. Was this the reason they were doing it?

Biden points out again that they already had the authority. Shit, Dubya can spy on anyone he wants, for whatever reason he wants, free of charge for 72 hours, and then all he has to do is go before a secret court and get a warrant.


On Fox…

Hahaha. Hume shaking his head over torture, spying and the Patriot Act Games.

Y’know, Chris, in a time of war, passions are stirred. And people do things. And, y’know, stuff happens. And people remember the abuses back during the Vietnam era. And unfortunately, this “torture” label has stuck.

The grinding sound you hear is Hume forced to shaking his slab of skull and say “Tsk. Tsk.”

Sounds like a cement mixer full of scrap metal, cinderblocks and bile.


On Chris Matthews…

Kathleen Parker. Joe Klien. Andrea Mitchell. And my pal, David Brooks.

Not much of note except Brooks asserting that while he “has no position on this” [That’d be Illegal Domestic Spying] he warns that the Administration had “better have a good explanation why they did this.”

Ahhhh. There’s no aggression like passive aggression.

So, why, BoBo?

Seriously?

Why in the world would this Administration need a "good explanation" when the journalistic world is populated by Muppets like you? You could not survive for five minutes on your talent and smarts alone out in the Real World. Like a factory foie gras duck, you’re professional nutrients are all pumped into you via that wingnut dick in your mouth, so what the Hell kind of threat is it that the Administration -- at this late date -- better not mess with you?

Or what? You’ll suddenly get up off your knees and act like a man?

Please.

You know the joke about a frog trying to escape from a bucket of milk?

He hops in there by mistake and in his panics he thrashes and flails until he actually churns it into butter and then climbs right out.

BoBo, face it. It does not matter how awful these despicable men behave, because they can always count on people like you to thrash and flail and conjure rationalizations for their criminality out of thin air. And when that fails, no matter what degenerate friezes they are caught enacting -- en flagrante -- people like you will reliably and reflexively assert that the Dems are somehow, magically, equally bad.

Being a stooge is why you are allowed to exit, so hush up and go back to corn-rowing Bill Frists’ hair.

BTW, BoBo also opposes current immigration policies because the people that come here come with a “culture of criminality”. Because they broke the law to get in.

OK, immigration policy in this country is a mess. A Sybil-ish, multiply-and-incoherently-personalitied mess, but what a fucking racist thing to say.

Yes, the people – the mostly brown people -- who break a law to get into this country to work the shittiest jobs we have and raise a family have committed a crime to do so. It is, however, in the end a very Jean Valjean kind of crime, and to tar them all of them with the brush of a “culture of criminality” and radically differentiate them from all the immigrants that have come before them because they break a law is racist to its core.

Viewed from the other side of the border, the law – in this case – looks an awful lot like just another barrier. Like a sea or a desert or a range of mountains. Or poverty. Or famine. Or political persecution. Or genocide.

Crossing a wide and dangerous ocean to get here doesn’t make you an admiral, and breaking a single law to get here doesn’t make you Alphonse Capone.

But if you believe BoBo’s racist fig leaf of an argument that breaking one law – regardless of magnitude – taints you forever as a lifetime member in good standing in a “culture of criminality”, consider;

Prostitution in America…

A 1994 study found that 16 percent of 18 to 59-year-old men in a U.S. survey group had paid for sex (Gagnon, Laumann, and Kolata 1994).

Traffic violations in America…

With thousands of pages of traffic laws it's inevitable that even safe drivers will eventually get stopped. … The average ticket is about $150.00 with penalties and costs. But the real consequences are the insurance rate increases or cancellations, loss of points and possible loss of your license which makes it difficult to work and support yourself or your family.

…
175 million tickets are written each year. With the help of this book you could be one of the people that were stopped and not given a ticket because they "talked" their way out of it.

Smoking a little weed (source is a PDF)…

Close to 100 million Americans—including more than half of those between the ages of 18 and 50—have tried marijuana at least once. Military and police recruiters often have no choice but to ignore past marijuana use by job seekers.

The public apparently feels the same way about presidential and other political candidates. Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and John Kerry all say they smoked pot in days past. So did Bill Clinton, with his notorious caveat. George W. Bush won’t deny he did. And ever more political, business, religious, intellectual, and other leaders plead guilty as well

And, finally, consider that veritable Mos Eisley Spaceport of criminality -- Sommers Point, NJ…

…where a state helmet law is in effect, found that only 24 of the 359 students who rode to school in one week of the Winter of 2002 wore helmets (6 per cent) until the School District adopted a helmet rule.

Now if they were only Republicans and they were, say, lying about War…sending our children off to die on the basis of those lies…committing voter fraud…illegally gerrymandering voting districts…laundering money…breaking all kinds of federal laws to engage in domestic spying…well of course that's different.

But they weren’t, so forgiveness and mercy is out of the question.

Criminals! Criminals all! And deserving of nothing but the back of our collective hand.

Because by BoBo's metric of criminality you will truly never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Sommers Point, New Jersey.

End Part Two of Two.