Sunday, July 31, 2005

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down…



Now with Extra Santorum!

By popular demand (Ok, technically, “voices in my head”, but they are very persuasive) here is the phosphor-dot pointillistism of a completely inaccurate, biased and profoundly unjust blur that passes for what I saw during my coffee fueled rampage through commercial teevee’s Sunday Morning Mouse Circus...

...made longer, longer-lasting and more manly in every way by the late addition of special, herbal "Actual Santorum Transcript" supplements from “This Week...” via and courtesy of Steve Gilliard.

Foxy Nude?

WTF?

Sorry. Sooo Sleepy.

Fox News.

Well fuck Fox New, because Al Green is on CBS. The good Reverend’s singing the dirty stuff again. I mean, “secular”. Yeah. Sec-ul-ar, baby. Gimme some more of that!

Local ABC telling me that the Chicago River is clean again. Or cleanish. Or at least if you’re fishing you’re not 50/50 to hook into the corpses of cattle or horses or shoe salesmen who couldn’t make the vig three months running. And all kidding aside, it is cleaner. The number of fish species has jumped from 10 to 68 in the last decade.

What they don’t tell you is that 20 of the new species are eleven feet long, pissed as hell, and they swarms ashore and feed on the big men who slink in shame in the pre-damn hours to walk their girlfriends itsy-bitsy teacup dogs.

And the Elotes vendors.

Last night the teevee tells me it was apparently Venetian Night in Chicago. A flotilla of boats on the Lakefront, tied up and dandied up. Lots of music. Dancing. Hella fireworks. Probably Al Green. Around 675,000 people.

And I missed it.

Damn! I thought they said “Phoenician” Night, and I don’t want any part of that madness.

Fox talking to Shuttle Astronauts and Bill Nelson, former Astronaut and current Senator. I hate that. I hate it because I unreservedly love the space program. I think NASA has gotten way off track with it’s timid, short haul mentality...budgeting only the pfennigs to the right of the decimal place for long-range-thinking, long duration projects. With the discovery of a new fucking planet in our back yard, we can say with perfect, timely, literality that there really are new worlds to conquer.

A whole Solar System to stretch our legs into, and here we still are, still fucking around in the cradle, letting superstitious dimwits scare us out of our birthright.

So believe me, I am all about talking space exploration, anywhere, anytime, over a bottle until the wee small hours, or listening to JPL geek lecture on Orion – and this week was an especially good one for that conversation (Hell, even John Tierney over at the NYT go into the act) – but to hear it on Fox?

That’s like finding out Phyllis Schlafly is your phone sex operator.

Ew! Just....Ew!

Chris Dodd squares off with Mitch McConnell.

First up, Rove? Is it Rove? Gonna talk a little Rove maybe?

Nah. Treason is such tiny news now that Frist has agreed to lay down suppressing fire for the White House on Stem Cells.

Mitch sez, roughly, “When Fristina talks Health Care, we all need to listen. I especially admire his Amazing Remote Diagnostic Power. Why, just by rubbing the DVD of “The Right Stuff” on his genitals (known aptly and affectionately around the Frist home as “The Dead Zone”) he was able to ascertain the precise location of the foam debris that fell off the fully-ready-but-oopsie-not-so-much-I-guess external fuel tanks on the Space Shuttle.

At Senate parties he does cold card readings that bring the House down, and has this trick where he slices up the Constitution, rolls it into a cone and pours James Dobson’s diseased jizz down it...and it just fucking vanishes.

Now that’s some goddamned Majyks!”

Dodd – I wish we’d brought this up in July.

Amen.

On to the UN – Dodd sez, “Bolton? Sheeeet. 115 former ambassadors coming out against that beyotch. Colin Powell saying he’d be terrible...”

Chris Wallace’s cranial chip fires off and he interrupts the US Senator three seconds into his comment to tell him that “argument is over”, that it’s a done deal.

Dodd sez, yes, but that would be bad, see? Baaaad. The simple fact that Bolton would be a fucking disaster seems to elude Ace Newspimp Wallace. Wallace interrupts again to ask, “Why would you say that he’d be a bad choice?”

Dodd shows heroic restraint in not garroting Wallace with his own PNAC rhinestone “B.I.T.C.H.” dog-collar while whispering, “I was just explaining that when you interrupted me you wretched little trollop.”

Then we are reminded of three Clinton recess appointments. Clinton apparently did not appointed a person as the Ambassador to Luxembourg, but “Gay Activist" James Hormel.

Saturday? Sunday? Tuesday? Doesn’t matter, ‘cause baby, it’s always Fag-Sniping Day at Fox. And comparing the Ambassador to fucking Luxembourg to Our Man at the UN? Tsk Tsk.

Wallace reserves a whole minute to talk Social Security, split 50/50. And McConnell natters on about the awful Democrats. Wallace hectors Dodd during his 30 seconds about, “Are the Democrats ever, EVER going to come up with a plan of their own.”

Dodd did fine, but again completely failed to thumbfuck Wallace’s windpipe and terminate him like the rabid gerbil he is. He is a far better man than I.

FACE THE NATION:

Brownback vs. Specter. Yes! Ultra Right Wing Fucktard Conservative versus Waffling GOP “Moderate”. This is the debate we want.

Brownback: “This is the first time we’ve ever used tax money for the intentional destruction of human life.”

What a reprehensible doucebag. First, and most obviously, an embryosicle is NOT a human life. I am a human life, even as you are, and Specter and presumably Brownback and the millions of Americans who could potentially benefit from stem cell research.

Second, um, Iraq? How many people there are dead on our dime? Or if you like your atrocities more retail, may I commend to your attention the George Bush Memorial Abattoir that is Texas Death Row. A Lone Star Dickensian slaughterhouse for the Poor, Retarded, Minorities and Children...all at taxpayer expense.

Brownback likened stem cell research to Nazi medical experiments. Hmmm. I wonder if Fox News is prepping a nine-part, frontal-assault on Brownstripe for using the “"N” word?

A lot of words come boiling out his mouth, none of which change the overall impression that he is an opportunistic little equivocator who wants to keep the Fundy Vote Tallywhacker buried firmly in his fundament while splitting hairs over where exactly he does and does not stand on any given thing.

Are you at all concerned that the GOP will be seen as anti-science?

Wow. Like five good questions in a row.

Brownback looks baffled by the presence of queries that don’t end with asking him if he’d like a “happy ending.”

ABC TALKIN’ NASA.

Ahhh. Much better. Don Nelson( NASA Administrator), Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn. Cleaner, tops-shelf space-porn for the discriminating astrovert. Buzz talking about, fuck the shuttle. Fuck the Space Station. Let’s get our asses out of the kiddie pool and out where we belong.

Mars, Bitches!

Then around the dial and back to ABC for Santorum!

Stephanopoulis sez Dobson calls Fristy’s stand, “The worst kind of betrayal.”

From the Dark Age of Santorum and Dobson, I flip back to CBS and the Space Age. Wayne Hale is on. I am very happy, but I switch back to see...

...Stephanopoulis just beat Santorum’s fucking teeth down his throat.

Oh. My. Lord. I sure hope the good folks at Crooks and Liars have the footage because this is one for the ages. (They do. They are indispensible. Click here.)

It’s the evil feminists. The radical feminists.

Stephanopoulis goes full Georege Patton on his simpering ass -- "Santorum! You magnificent bastard! I read your God Damn Book!"-- and asks the question that Joe McCarthy never answered.

Name one, Senator. Name just one.

Santorum. Er. Um. Er. Um. Crickets. Tumbleweed.

Uhh. “Gloria Steinem.”

That’s it?

Name another.

Er. Um. Doh. The sky blackens with a jillions Flying Crickets. Pages fly off the calendar. Continents rise and fall.

Can’t name one. Not one fucking name. Nothing. And being a True Christopath Shitbag Republican, he doesn’t correct himself, he Just Lies Louder!

Santorum drops back and punts, “Elite Culture. Hollywood. Hollywood Elites. Academia.” His pants are now fully on fire.

Name one.

Man, did Little Ricky ever learn his Five "D's": Dodge, dip, duck, dive, dodge!!

Stephanopoulis doesn’t let up. “Jesus, Senator. You’re making all of these charges. Don’t you think naming specific people who are doing this terrible shit is rather important?”

Tumbleweed fills up the Universe.

Bwahahahahaha, I say to you!

Geroge offers up Hillary Clinton, but with a backhanded twist. “Hillary,” he sez, “agrees with you on this issue, in her book. Is she a “radical feminist”?

Yes. Yes. Yesyesyes! Hillary! Hillary! It’s all Hillary!

Squealing like Winston Smith staring down the barrel of the Rat Cage. Take her! Do what you want with her! Rip her flesh off her bones. It’s all Hillary!

This lying, slope-browed pinhead is a United States Senator. I just can't get past that.

We all know it’s easy to caricature someone in 30-second, unrebutted slander-ads, but with Santorum, the more you see him and hear him talk, the more you are just jaw-droppingly stunned that he isn’t living over a garage somewhere, repairing lawnmowers, sipping Sterno and saving his pennies for a birthday bath and trip to the brothel.

Holy Christmas Cookies, he really IS that stupid!

And this book he’s being very lightly questioned about isn’t the pop-up version of “My Little Goat” that his staff reads to him before bednights. This is a book he allegedly wrote. Presumably, unlike, oh, perhaps (he speculated irresponsibly) his litter of mini-Santori, this is something he didn’t bang out over a drunk weekend.

And he’s been on a book tour for weeks now, where he was been asked these questions many times. Also presumably his staff did not let him out on the road before they’d prepped him, even if the best they could do with The Man from the Isle of Dog, Senator Foamy Rectal Discharge, is use flash cards to help him remember what he believes and sound out the big words, and pack him extra Pampers.

And yet a couple simple questions about what he himself wrote and he falls apart and starts yelling. This is how deep in the silty end of the gene pool the GOP now dredges for warm bodies to stuff into high office.

Then George downshifts to Boston and Catholic Priest Perdophiles and, again, Santorum shows himself to be nothing but Jerry Falwell’s Snowflake Baby: As Falwell and Roberston leaped to blame 9/11 on gays and feminists and the ACLU, Santorum is an evil, vacant dope who has never had an original or complex thought in his entire life. Who knows nothing except his own hateful and pig-ignorant dogma, and reflexively tries to ram every problem in the world into its grubby framework.

Here, courtesy of Mr. Gilliard, is the actual transcript.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s talk about something else in the book, radical feminists. A second quote from the book, you say, Respect for stay-at-home mothers has been poisoned by a toxic combination of the village elders’ war on the traditional family and radical feminism’s misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect.

Let’s get specific here. Name one or two of these radical feminists who are on this crusade.

SANTORUM: Well, I mean, you know, you have — you go back to, what’s her name, well, Gloria Steinem, but I’m trying to remember — I can’t remember the woman’s name. It’s terrible. Anyway…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it’s kind of an important point. Because you paint this broad brush: radical feminists, village elders. Name one.

SANTORUM: There’s lots of — no, there’s lot’s of — well, Gloria Steinem. There’s one. I mean, there’s lots of writings out there…

STEPHANOPOULOS: She’s been on a crusade against stay-at-home moms?

SANTORUM: There’s lots of writings out there, and there is an opinion by the elite in this country across academia, across the media, that stay-at-home motherhood is not adequately affirmed and respected by our society.

SANTORUM: And if you don’t believe that, get a panel of stay-at- home moms here on your show, and you ask them whether they feel affirmed by society, whether they feel affirmed by the culture.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Listen, I can go home. My wife Wendy both works and stays at home at various times. And sometimes, when she’s not working, you know, she gets upset, but it’s not some message that’s being driven by…

SANTORUM: Isn’t it?

STEPHANOPOULOS: … specific people.

SANTORUM: Isn’t it a message for us? I mean, where does this come from? Does this come from the ether?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I’m asking you. Where are these radical feminists?

SANTORUM: It comes from an elite culture, dictated, again, from academia, dictated, again, from the Hollywood culture and the news media, that says, the only thing that’s affirming, the only thing that really counts is what you do at work.

And that goes for men and women. And it’s wrong. It’s wrong to tell that to fathers. It’s wrong to tell that to mothers. And we need to value mothers and fathers spending time with their children much more than we do in America.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hillary Clinton wrote much the same in her book, It Takes a Village. Do you believe she’s a radical feminist?

SANTORUM: Yes, I do. I mean, read her work and what she’s done on children’s rights. I mean, that’s radical. I mean, you’re talking about giving children the same — that children have rights equal to adults. I mean, that is not a nurturing atmosphere of mothers and fathers taking responsibility for shaping the moral vision of their children. She doesn’t agree with that, at least if you look at her earlier writings.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Have you talked to her about your book?

SANTORUM: We’ve had conversations in passing about it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Tell us about them.

SANTORUM: Oh, just, you know, pass in the hallway, you know, she made a comment to me about that it takes a village, and I responded, no, it really does take a family.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no serious debate?

SANTORUM: No serious debate. I’d love to have a serious debate.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You may have drawn her out now, calling her a radical feminist.

SANTORUM: I’d love to have a serious debate. If she’d like to have a serious debate about her view of how society should be ordered and structured — I believe her view is one that says government and top-down. I believe my view is the view that’s held by most Americans, which means we need strong families and strong communities, and we don’t need government really dissembling those institutions, which I think her view of the world does.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s move on to another controversy you stirred up, the question of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church. You made a statement in July 2002 which has drawn a lot of fire. You said, in a publication called Catholic On-Line, When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While there’s no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

You’ve reaffirmed that just a couple of weeks ago. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry say you have to apologize. Mitt Romney, Republican governor, says basically you don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you still stand by that statement?

SANTORUM: Look, the statement I made was that the culture influences people’s behavior. I don’t think anyone…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Isn’t that what conservatives used to say about liberals, when they used to say they were trying to excuse criminals?

SANTORUM: I think what I’m saying is that the culture of liberal sexual freedom and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s had a profound impact on everybody and their sexual mores. It had a profound impact on the church.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you singled out Boston in…

SANTORUM: I singled out Boston in 2002. In July of 2002, that was the epicenter. We did not know…

STEPHANOPOULOS: That is simply not true. I went back and looked at all of these clips. We had stories in 1994, going back all the way to 1984 in Louisiana, in just about every archdiocese in the country.

I just don’t understand why you stick by this, because we now know it was widespread. It was in every city in the country.

SANTORUM: Well, at the time, we did not know it was in every city of the country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We knew a lot of that.

SANTORUM: It was — look at the press reports. It was the epicenter.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I have them right here.

SANTORUM: I think it’s taking it out of context…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1994, it cites instances of abuse in Santa Fe and Chicago, as well as Lafayette, Louisiana, and Camden, New Jersey. 1994.

SANTORUM: I understand that it was in other places. All I’m talking about, at the time, what everyone was focused on at the time was Boston.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you stand by it?

SANTORUM: Look, I will admit that Boston is — that using Boston at the time was appropriate. Now, I would not say it would be appropriate. I would say that Boston right now would — we’d say a whole lot of other cities in the country and a whole lot of problems.
But if you read the article, that was one of about four or five things that I said…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I did read it.

SANTORUM: … and I talked about the problems within the church. I wrote the article in 2002. Ted Kennedy and John Kennedy wrote no articles in 2002 criticizing this church. I went out and talked to bishops. I went out and talked to cardinals. I was very concerned. I was offended and hurt by a church that betrayed me by not doing what they should have done, and I was angered by that, and I spoke out about it, and I spoke loudly about it.

The senators from Massachusetts did nothing. They spoke nothing. They sat by and let this happen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re standing your ground.


Bwahahahahaha, I say to you yet again!

Modern Republicans are to tragedy as diarrhea is to famine; preventable, opportunistic diseases that barely exist in a healthy society, but come on with a vengeance when society is sick. And Santorum is the one of the most virulently transmissable of these human stool samples.

He shambles smack into the middle of a true crisis in American families and writes a whole book for the sole purporse of hijacking genuine problems and press-ganging them into his ongoing Jihad against the hated Feminist Army (none of whom he can actually name.)

And to this slab of offal -- I'm sorry, the Honorable Senator Slab of Offal -- the molestation of children by pedophile priests is just another chance to blame Evil Liberal Elites for everything bad that has ever happened. To rip open a fresh, deep wound and for wretched partisan gain, pee salt and rat poison into the genuine pain of real people and then pray for the infection spreads to the brain...rending the victim stupid enough to actually vote of a perambulating shit-heel like Ricky Santorum.

This sentence sums it up: “STEPHANOPOULOS: I have them right here.”

The problem, as always, is that scum like Santorum are simply, factually wrong and when they crawl out of the fart-rebreathing Republican Propaganda Bell Jar and have to deal with the Real World and Real Consequences and Real Evidence that they are Wrong Wrong Wrong, these humble, God Fearin’ Men absolutely fall apart.

And not gently.

Since they are literally nothing without their dogma, they thrash and foam like the devil getting a firehose Holy Water high colonic. And since their vile anti-Christian Cult prohibits them from admitting error, the more they public humiliate themselves, the louder they scream.

Sadly, for many of our more sharply inbred citizens, braying like an ass that's stuck its snout in a wasp's nest actually constitutes clever rejoinder. It is the lasting legacy of Hate Radio.

So if you voted for him, kindly find the nearest working mother or abused child and apologize to them immediately and profusely. And then swear before Almighty God that you will never, ever vote for a despicable, America-hating Christopath ever again.

Paul Hackett’s Cinderella Candidacy is coming on ABC and I have an appointment to go a’brunching.

Damn!

Damn you Gloria Steinem!

Damn you to Hell!

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Hitler got my knickers...


...but I got this! Posted by Picasa

This Happy Fun News from the NYT.


July 30, 2005
Bolton Not Truthful, 36 Senators Charge in Opposing Appointment
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, July 29 - Charging that John R. Bolton was "not truthful" in answering questions about his record, 36 senators urged President Bush on Friday not to make a recess appointment of Mr. Bolton as United Nations ambassador after the Senate's failure to confirm him for that job.

But one Republican official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the president has not announced his decision, said Mr. Bush would probably appoint Mr. Bolton next week.

In a letter to Mr. Bush, the senators cited the disclosure on Thursday that Mr. Bolton had been interviewed by the State Department's inspector general in an investigation of intelligence failures related to Iraq, even though he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March that he had not been involved in any such inquiry.

Mr. Bolton "did not recall this interview" when he assured the committee that he had not been questioned by any investigators, according to a letter sent Friday from the State Department to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations panel.
...
The State Department has admitted that, as Mr. Biden charged, Mr. Bolton had been interviewed in a previous inquiry into one particular intelligence failure on Iraq, the finding that Iraq had tried to buy raw uranium from Niger for a nuclear arms program. That finding turned out to be based on forged documents.

Administration officials appeared shaken by the disclosure, and some worried openly that it might hurt Mr. Bolton's chances of a recess appointment, a tactic that a president is permitted use once Congress is in recess in August. The appointment would expire at the end of next year, however.
...
Dear Jebus,

It’s driftglass.

Longtime listener; first time writer.

Let me just say, I loved your early work. The acoustical stuff. Loved it.

Before self-hating, closeted-gay-spin-doctor Paul came onboard and overproduced the Holy Shit out of everything. Started fucking with the Product, and by the time your clear and deceptively-simple, Jordan Delta Hebrew Blues had been run through the whole Wailing Wall of Sound, remix/sampling/trance-lets-market-to-the-Romans crap-factory, you could hear it blaring out all day and night on the radio and never know you wrote it.

Before everybody got SFX, Cross-and-blood-happy and forgot to just read the fucking lyrics.

Sadly, this is not theoretical: we do hear these perversions roaring out on Hate Radio and satellite teevee 24/7, and like many of the lily-white rockers who never gave a dime or a moment’s respectful nod to the black artists who they ripped off so lavishly, your legacy is in the hands of talentless hacks. And swindlers. And evil men who’ve phished your identity and Bowdlerized your Ageless Truths. Lonesome Rhodes’ stalk the land in their thousands under aliases like Hinn and Dobson and Falwell; they cash in on your Good Name while they methodically rape your Good Word.

That fungus-skulled, queer-bashing theological garage-cover-bands are making Big Cake running one paragraph out of Romans at 150 decibels in an over-amped feedback-heavy roar to justify their bigotry must make you sick.

That overfed, overdubbing, comb-overs flog every single thing You actually ever said or did to death in a blizzard of White Supremacist Noise and recrucify You with every hateful word that passes their lips must piss You off rather a lot.

That Corporate posers crank on the Parable of the Talents like speedmetallurgists working the bass, banging it out at 120 beats-per-minute, drowning out Your gentle, radically humane Aramaic poetry with a mad-beast-howling justification of rape-the-planet Capitalism and eat-the-weak Christianity must make adding Here and Now to Your tour schedule in the immediate future kind of unlikely.

In case You’re not following events day-by-day, those that hate You now run a fair number the courts in this country. Those that pervert You and privately work night and day to destroy You run our Congress. Those that vilify everything they touch and destroy everything they claim to hold dear occupy our White House and commit their slaughters and treasons while wearing "Jebus Loves My Swingin’ Dick", Day-Glo bibs and tuckers to keep the spattering of innocent blood off their sharp, gray suits.

So if You’ve read this article, I commend to Your attention the following paragraph in particular:

“The State Department has admitted that, as Mr. Biden charged, Mr. Bolton had been interviewed in a previous inquiry into one particular intelligence failure on Iraq, the finding that Iraq had tried to buy raw uranium from Niger for a nuclear arms program.”
Like a string of poison-pearls, each of the myriad, loathsome crimes this Administration has committed against the Constitution, the citizens of the United States and the people of the world seem to be threaded together with the lies that put us in Iraq, and Niger and the Plame Affair is the key that opens the whole, reeking can of sardines.

The Superheroes of the New McCarthyism: Traitor Rove, and his youthful turd Scooter, are both implicated.

And Abu Gonzalez – our post Y2K John Mitchell – for giving a 12-hour head’s up the Undersecretary of Shredding that the indictments were en route.

And Cheney.

And Bush.

And Republican disinformation sewer-pipe, Judy Miller.

And Future Satrap of All Petrolvania and Judy Miller’s pudgy French Tickler, Chalabi.

And our Nation’s own Bile-duct Coptic jar, Robert Novak.

And Scotty the Pooh, with his fat head stuck 8.5-inches-cut-deep in the Plame Hunny Pot, wandering around behind the podium, muffled voice barely audible as he bleats “ongoing investigation” to every question, including, “What’s your name?”, “Who is buried in McClellan’s Tomb?” and “Would you like some help getting that pot off your head, Pooh-bear?”

And Ari Fleischer, who one hears is now hiding out in a disused 1950’s, Zeus/Nike missile defense silo with 100 pounds of buffalo jerky, 100 gallons of distilled water, strapped up with enough C4 to alter the rotation of the Earth, and keeps the dead-man’s switch clamped between his ass cheeks.

Ain't nobody gonna depose Ari.

It would be funny, Jebus, if the antics of these human bilge-pumps hadn’t bankrupted my country, gotten a whole lot of people killed and made the world much more dangerous place.

And now Bolton who, despite overwhelming evidence that he isn’t just massively unqualified for the job of U.N. Ambassador, but actually might be the single, worst possible person for the job, once again bobs to the surface like a bloated corpse in a stagnate mire.

So if You could grant me one wish today (Tomorrow, all new wishes. Hurray for Jebus!), with Your Magic Jebus Powers, pleeeeease make Bush appoint this human spit-valve via a recess appointment. Pretty please!

One can only surmise why Bush is still pushing this watery discharge uphill. A pig-headed gangster who will happily kill thousands of human beings and piss away the reputation of his Nation rather than admit he made a mistake is certainly not prone to back off any fuckup, no matter how much ruin is left in his wake. Straight-up Feudal-MBA attitude; Fuck any little people who get hurt, and lobbing scapegoats onto catastrophes until they go away is why God made underlings.

Then again, I kinda wonder if Bolton has something on Bush? What’dya think, Jebus? I figure everyone in this administration must to have photos of everyone else boinking otters or strangling puppies. How else do they enforce collective loyalty? Seriously, given the petty, vicious, shallow arc the life of the Idiot Wastrel of the Bush Family has described, who but the retarded, the perverted, the extorted or the sociopathic could be so slavishly devoted to such an hollow and unworthy creature?

Anyway...

First, this would put Bolton back in the headlines with a hard link to the Plame story over a hot summer when ordinary people are beginning to use the words “Rove” and “treason” in the same sentence a lot. The forthright, straight-shootin’ Bush looks more and more like a gutless, dickless, little wimp hiding out from the latest consequences of his Highest Crime, and Bolton is another bolt of wild lightening in a tinder-dry political landscape that is already alive with wildfires.

Second, a recess appointment tells the Whole Fucking World that George Bush is now officially Peking Lame Duck L'Orange. That he can’t get his pet stooges rammed into any gummit job he wants any more. Had Bolton sailed through, he could have spent the next few year of his already-iniquitous career swaggering around the halls of the United Nations, punching smaller countries in the throat, or pinning them to the ground and socking them in the head their own fists, repeating “Why are you invading yourself? Why are you invading yourself?” until they pass out.

As it is, the other kids at the International High School will be laying for him.

(Here’s my one, free hint to Bolton: to avoid a “Doctrine of Pre-emption” atomic wedgie that would make Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Wedgie [Ah, the point of the pic slowly emerges.] look like a little friendly, bi-lateral cunnilingus, go underpantsless for the first few weeks.

Oh, and don’t pay cash for your “Elevator Pass.” )

All in all, it gets Bush nothing, makes him look yet again every bit as weak and stubborn and stupid as his critics have always charged, unnecessarily pisses the hell out of the Moderate Republicans in Congress, paints the whole Administration ever more so as a feckless Monarchy and enemy of the Constitution, and calls even more unwanted attention the rapidly spreading Rove-melanoma at the very moment the White House is bending every oar to get attention the hell off of that particular issue.

So Jebus, if you could swing that, that’s be sweet.

Oh, and hot women.

If you could open the Progressive Heavens and shower this sinner with Libidinous Liberal Lasses, that’d be cool too.

Yours in You,

dg.

Sorry, Tom


This ain't Roma and you ain't Caesar. Posted by Picasa

You live here for awhile, you read the papers, you learn to sift out the significant news from the fluffernutter news. Winnow the water-skiing squirrels from the Operation Gambats. The White Sox starters from the Greylord line-up. It was a service that the irreplaceable Mike Royko used to provide all of us hungry, little news-nibblers. His column inches and his alter-ego – Slats Grobnik – would cut through the day-to-day bunko, bunkum and bungholery that you’re going to find in any Big City, and go right to the meat.

And like the featured eats at his beloved RibFest, his words practically fell right off the bone and tasted like smoky, slow-cooked verdad going down.

So as a service to those of you not living within sight of the Sears Tower, and who think Block 37 is just what goes between Blocks 36 and 38, lemme tell ‘ya, this article made us locals sit up and go, “Uh oh.”

This from the Tribune:


Key figure pleads guilty to Hired Truck charges
By Matt O’Connor and Dan Mihalopoulos
Tribune staff reporters

July 29, 2005, 8:37 PM CDT

A former high-level city official admitted Friday he participated in a widespread fraud scheme that awarded jobs, promotions and overtime to city workers who campaigned for Mayor Richard Daley and the mayor's favored candidates.

Donald Tomczak, who was the top deputy in the Water Management Department, became the highest-ranking Daley loyalist to plead guilty in the ongoing federal probe of City Hall corruption. He is also the first former official to admit in court that the city rigged the hiring process to favor the politically active in violation of long-standing court orders against patronage.
...
In return, prosecutors are backing a sentence of just under 4 years in prison for Tomczak, 70, of Crest Hill. He faced more than 7 years in prison if he hadn't cooperated. Sentencing was postponed indefinitely.

Tomczak's age, as well as heart problems he and his wife have, were instrumental in his decision to cooperate, said his lawyer, Patrick Tuite.
...
Tomczak admitted that he extorted bribes from at least 10 trucking companies seeking business in the Hired Truck Program and didn't report those payoffs on his income tax returns for four years.

"I was involved in the illegal hiring process at City Hall," Tomczak also declared when U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan asked him to state the wrongdoing in his own words.
...
The "principal purpose" of Tomczak's political street army was to campaign for politicians blessed by "top political operatives of the political organization supporting the mayor of Chicago," the plea agreement said.
...
To lobby for rewards for his political workers, Tomczak would meet at intergovernmental affairs offices in City Hall also while on city time.
...
The plea agreement noted that Tomczak, ironically, knew the Shakman [federal consent decree] regulations well because he had once unsuccessfully sued the city. Tomczak, who retired as first deputy commissioner, contended that he had been fired in violation of the federal decree for supporting Jane Byrne's re-election bid in 1983.
...
You might have heard of the local GOP dumbass who offered 10K for information leading to the conviction of etcetera, etcetera. The only reason I mention it is this: You gotta love Illinois Republicans.

Just when you think they might not publicly humiliate themselves as horribly as humanly possible, they go all-in and decide that a multi-layered fuck-up is better than a singleton. So, for example, instead of sticking with Jack Ryan for the Senate and losing honorably, they decide to not only dump him, but replacing him with a straight-up, ranting mental-case in the person of Alan Keyes. Nasally, smarmy, and so Christopatically Right Wing that Jesse Helms has to squint to make him out on the far, right horizon of rabid, self-ass-chewing fucknuttery.

Oh and he’s Black, because the GOP here apparently thought that only one ‘a them “coloreds” could beat Obama, thus not only showing themselves to be racist and foolish, but also pissing off all nine black Republicans who actually live here by telling them that only imported Negroes need apply for any of the Big Jobs.

Genius!

It appears that it’s always Amateur Night at Lincolnland’s Party of Lincoln Kegger and Cow-Pie Tossing Gala. Like this “reward” idiocy: a bush-league, one-shot headline grabbing designed to burnish the resume of the mope who dreamed it up. Just another man-bites-dog spasm from the twitching corpse of the Illinois GOP.

What is not trivial are the events outlined in this article.

Note his age: 70. Note his former position. Note the clarity of his public attestation.

What we locals understand is that the prosecutor has now found his own Frankie Pentangeli.

(Google Godfather II if you don’t know the name. Better yet, go rent it. Right now. It is indispensable to understanding politics – especially family, dynastic politics – in America.

I mean, Je-sus! You’ve never seen Godfather II?

Lord help me, I’m among the heathens.)

They’ve found their own Frankie Pentangeli...and they’ve flipped him.

One of the men for whom there was no buffer between him and the Godfather. One of the men who did not live off the orts, tossed third hand from the Grown Up’s Table, but who pulled up a chair and supped there every day.

And in this case, there’s no brother to bring in from the Old Country to hold over his head and shut him up.

In this case, they didn’t even drop his sentence to zero; just from seven years to four. That’s a very important metric for measuring exactly him much of his Jimmy Stick they have in a vise. That means the lever the prosecutor is leaning on is veeery long, and the fulcrum of the short end is practically wedged under Mr. Tomczak’s wedding tackle.

In Godfather II, Frankie was paid a visit by family consigliore Tom Hagen. Tom waxed poetic about the glorious Old Days, and the part Frankie had played.
“You were around the old-timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman legions and called them Regimes, Capos, and Soldiers. And it worked.”
Frankie took the hint and opined, “They, they went home and sat in a hot bath, opened up their veins and bled to death. And sometimes they had a little party before they did it.”

And right now, just from what little the average Chicagoan can glean from the papers, nothing short of a hot bath and a straight-razor is going to stop this most Rara of all Avises from opening up his lungs to Sing! Sing! Sing!

Friday, July 29, 2005

Get Up, Stand Up...



...stand up for your right.
Get Up, Stand Up,
don't give up the fight

Thanks, Bob.

Holy crap what a long day yesterday.

I was using a nail gun to keep my eyes open by the end of it, and the evil trolls of Increased Productivity seemed to have somehow found a way to tap extra work hours into a 24-hour day with their tiny, terrible troll-hammers.

But the second-to-last thing I did last night was go to community group meeting. A public hearing.

I love community meetings.

Doesn't matter what the topic is, the breakdown is always the same.

Experts with blueprints who tell you more than you’ll every want to know about whatever to subject might be.

Wanna know about berms, or beetles or the regs governing the signage, sidewalk-access and smoking restrictions at bistros? Go and ask.

Then there are the ramblers: the guys who do all 18 minutes of their own, personal Alice's Restaurant.

Then the business guys. Suited up and on the prowl for government sugar...and want to also be sure to tell the government to fuck off if anything that's being planned might bump up against their bottom line.

The ranters. Always amusing.

The fat guy with a sheaf of grubby paper who takes an hour to make it to the mike while the temperature seems to rise one degree every minute. Then he gets to the mike and rants about whatever the fuck happens to be romping through his mind at the moment.

Proving definitively that humans don't possess telepathic or telekinetic powers because if we did, Horton would have heard all us Whos’ mentally shouting, "Shut up. Shut Up. Please, Holy Mother of God, it's 170 degrees in here and why won't this asshole Shut The Fuck Up!"

Also his head didn't explode.

The Community Activists, for whom every forum is a Nail for their particular Hammer.

You always see it coming.

There's a few moments of frosting where they talk a little -- very little -- about the reason the meeting was called in the first place...then on to the Bitch List.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s often a valid Bitch List – or at least portions are – but every meeting is an occasion for telling whomever is gaveling the session that the neighborhoods are getting screwed. Whatever’s on the flyers – a dog park, a bond issue, bike trails or mosquito abatement – you’re going to hear 30 seconds of symbolic abatement chatter, and the rest is how they’re getting screwed in various ways by the allocation of government money, or gentrification, or The Man generally.

Then somebody rises to tell us that his cousin was arrested on totally trumped up charged. Didn't have anything else to say; just setting the record straight on that particular matter, in case we were interested.

Then there's the fragile, old woman that also take a long while to make it to the microphone, and then tells a story that breaks your heart. I remember one such woman who began her remarks at a large hearing with the Mayor present, "Your honor, your father and mine were both Sons of the City..."

Brought the fucking house down.

And for anybody who thinks that the Left is secular, Jebus-hatin’ monolith of queers and abortionists, you will hear more “Tell it!"’s at a community meeting and exactly as many “Amen”’s as you’re likely to hear in church on any given Sunday.

And I wouldn’t have any of it any other way.

It’s raw, pure, unstepped-on democracy, which is why I love it. It draws the committed and the “should be committed” both, and if you’re not used to them, committed people can make non-political, I-don’t-wanna-get-involved, day-to-day muggles feel very uncomfortable.

"Cause" people: They don't blink much, and you're either useful to them, an impediment, or furniture.

If you’re a community leader or activist, you know everybody on your block and in your area. The Alderman knows you by your first name, and maybe to Mayor does too. Most likely you’re in the pew every Sunday because you grew up “church” and that’s where you got your mission and your vision of public service and activism: it’s the pivot around which action often turns.

These kinds of meeting are a singular opportunity; your chance to make your government listen to you. You can hold the floor and make them pay attention to you.

Then you can come back in a few weeks and make them listen again.

Government goes where the people push it, and absent the constant pressure (translation: bitching) any government will wander off into the weeds and start fucking with you and telling you what to do.

But your rights and freedoms don’t come from them; their freedom of motion comes from you. Its hard fucking work, and Big Money talks, but at the end of the day (sometimes a very long day) the government moves where we will it to move.

See the guy in the Rockwell painting of the “Freedom of Speech” above?

He’s nervous. Really nervous.

By his tan and his hands and his clothes, you can tell he’s a working man. Everyone around him is wearing a tie; his collar is open.

Those are his remarks there in his pocket, which he probably spent a long time writing out, tossing out, and then rewriting.

He probably told his family that tonight he’s gonna go down to the meetin’ and give those Big Guys what ‘fer.

His wife was probably very proud of her man; he can swing an ax or drive a dozer, but he’s never been too good with words. Maybe she helped him with his remarks; maybe he didn’t want his woman to see him struggling with something that he has trouble mastering.

His kids are bustin’ out loud proud of him. He’s been talking about what degenerate asswipes the politicians are for years (of course, he reserves the “degenerate asswipe” talk for the tool shed, or maybe the bar.) Now he’s really going to march down there and kick a little ass around.

Way to go Pop!

But now he’s there, in his laborer’s clothes, and all his neighbors are looking at him, and his wife and kids and the warm comfort of his home are across town.

He stands.

He grabs the pew in front of him for dear life; sinks his nails into the wood.

It’s something solid. Something real. He perhaps gains strength from hanging on to something hewn and boned and made straight and true by honest hands. This is something he understands in his skin.

This, and that come what may, he’s a goddamned American Citizen, and has every right in the world to be there, to stand, and to be heard.

When did we forget that?

His remarks – toiled and sweated over as much as anything he’s done at any job site – stay rolled up in his pocket.

He doesn’t need them.

All he has to do is plant his feet, stand straight, tell the truth like he sees it, and speak from his heart.

At the end of the day, that’s all any of us are called to do, but we must do it. Even if yours is a quiet voice, or is falters, or you don’t have all the just-right words laying around at your finger tips to make your points perfectly and in perfect, pear-shape tones...fuck that.

Just get up. Stand up.

Stand up and speak your mind.

And don't give up the fight.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

This is what it sounds like...



...when dopes lie.

You want to piss me off quicker than almost anything, insult my intelligence.

Not mock me for my ignorance of this or that (although that won’t exactly get you invited over for Beer Can Roast Beast during the Holidays) because there are whole reams and tomesfull of things I know nothing at all about, so you’re bound to catch me out over my not knowing something --

(And, to self-editorialize, shame on one anyone, including me, who hollowly boasts their way so far out over the ledge that one or two well-placed questions dislodge them. OK, now on with our Feature Presentation.)

-- but don’t treat me like an idiot. Oh, veeeery bad things happen then, but if you were ever bound and determined to goad me into going “Hulk, Smash!” nutty on you, here’s the formula:

First, say some silly or idiotic or factually ludicrous thing to my face.

Second, tell me you really didn’t say what you just said. Or because I’m such a dribbling halfwit, I somehow misunderstood.

And be sure to be veeeery patronizing about it.

Which leads me to the story of this boss I had once, and how, after a few twists and turns, it relates to the GOP. Swear to God.

You probably worked for someone like her.

To pare a long, meandering tale full of pustulent cul-de-sacs down to the lean meat, suffice it to say she was weak and stupid and deathly afraid of looking weak and stupid, so instead of doing the thing that will earn the respect of people who are brighter or more expert than you – namely just being up-front about it and asking for their help in a collegial way – she instead chose to compensate for her mediocrity by issuing directives that got progressively more and more ridiculous.

And the more absurd the situation got, the more intractable she got, and so the individual fuckups spiraled and evolved and mutated into clusterfucks.

She had our goodwill at the beginning, and she had to work her dim-witted ass off to lose it, but she managed to do exactly that.

What made it especially bad was her constant lying, but what made it Extra Super Ooper Duper Bad was what I call “Closed Door Lying.”

People like her, they always fall into the same, boring pattern. Big institutions or small, private or public or educational, it doesn’t matter.

Usually such a person is hired during the death-spiral of an organization by a President or a Chancellor or CEO who is every bit as flailingly inept as they are. And hired on the basis of some reeking, Park-District-outhouse-rat fucknut cray-gee scheme to Turn It All Around in one, sweet move.

Like, “We shall defeat Magnetism in our Time.”

Or, “Pepsi...Blue!”

Or, “We know where they [WMD’s] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

God help us all.

Then, like Stalin, comes the purging of anyone who has enough competence and guts to try to warn them they're headed over the cliff.

Then comes the long free-fall during which people are more or less randomly blamed for the catastrophe and tossed to the wolves – all while the boss carefully avoids referring to the general downward plummeting (that is now accelerating so fast that the wind is blowing people’s pants off and blasting their lips clean over the tops of their head) in anything but the most glowingly positive terms.

Whee! We’re flyyyyying!

Then as the finer features of the terrain towards which everyone is undeniably hurtling become visible, all pretense that we’re really flying along a-ok are lost. That’s when the boss bucks up the troops by beginning the Cowardly Recriminations phase of the project; stirring speeches to the already demoralized troops blaming everyone else for not doing a better job, or not having enough faith, or one way or another thinking bad thoughts, because badthinkfulness, and not her epic incompetence was apparently the real problem.

The things get extremely ugly, but the worst moment was the Closed Door Lie: the moment when she invited me into her office, closed the door, and lied right to my face.

No one else around and she flat-out denied issuing a very clear directive to me – and a whole bunch of other people – just a few days before.

I think I actually looked around, trying to figure out who the fuck she was talking to.

There was just me, who knew the truth, and her, who also knew ...and that was the most insulting, infuriating thing of all. I’d seen her lie in public, in groups, trying to shift blame for her myriad fuckups onto others...but behind a closed door, when there was no one else around?

There was no audience there, no gallery to play to, but she didn’t even have the balls to play it straight with me for five minutes in private when both of us damned well knew the deal.

There is something especially sinister about being lied to in that way.

To try to coerce someone go along with a lie to fool...who? If there are only two of you and you both know better? To be pressured to essentially conspire against yourself. This is the hallmark of someone who is so hopelessly, sociopathically steeping in an entire, rickety Universe of interlocking faslehoods that they lie with every breath. They lie in private. They lie to themselves. As Scott Peck wrote about in “The People of the Lie”, these people have disappeared so completely into their depravity, they don’t lie like normal people do.

Lying is not a means to a particular end any more.

Lying is their oxygen, and the utterly False Reality they have constructed for themselves is the ONLY thing that matters to them. That Palace of Deception in which they live must be defended at all costs, because if any truth is allowed to penetrate – on any subject on which the Lord of the Manor has already lied – then the whole enterprise collapses.

So why do I go on at length about this?

Because I believe that, far from being powerful and surging, the GOP is in fact trapped and doomed, and if we’re smart enough to capitalize on, it we really can take this country back.

I mean, we know they’re lying and, more and more, the facts on the ground are making them look progressively more ridiculous and borderline insane...so who are they lying to?

The answer is, their base.

The reliable base who happily sit like baby chicks and believes every little thing that the traitors in their party regurgitate into their mouths. The have no critical thinking facilities. No higher brain function. The GOP has carefully cultivated these Christopaths as their loyal orc army. Pig-ignorant, Creationist-ranting fucktards bred for loyalty and their ability to vote Republican as automatically and mindlessly as a meth whore raising nickel-bag money one $2 handjob at a time.

But this is also why, despite having a solid base, the GOP can’t advance any further than where they are.

When congenital liars like Keh Mehlman or Mary Matlin make the rounds of the Bobbleheads, they’re not talking to you or me. That's what is so creepy about it. We are watching as they desperately lie to their own base, and the more they do that for short term survival, the more they cut their own throats in the long term.

This is why they’re stuck.

This is why they’re trapped trying to quietly convince black voters that the GOP campaign of actively courting bigots and segregationists for the last 35 year was all just some kind of terrible misunderstanding. Just a Merry Mixup, because it they actually told the fucking truth, those same racists on which they are so dependent would bolt, and the Party would collapse overnight.

So since they are prohibited from telling the simple truth, they’re stuck telling black folks a bunch of Closed Door Lies – ridiculous bullshit that everyone on both side knows are lies, and which not only fails, but has the additional, salutary effect of actually being vastly more insulting to black voters that just being openly racist.

Because by continuing to spew lies that we all know are lies, you are also calling them stupid.

Nice move!

This is why Bush surrounding himself with eely sycophants is becoming such a disaster for Republicans. Why the “Flowers for Algernon” popularity of Bush that artificially peaked during the months following 9/11 enough to make tragedy-blinded GOPhers actually elide right over the fact that he was still a vicious, half-bright drunk, has stopped being Marx Brothers funny and every day becomes more and more the last act of MacBeth.

Because they’re cornered. It’s a big corner to be sure, but they have left themselves no room to maneuver.

There’s a quote by John Stuart Mill that goes, “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

That sums it up very nicely I think.

Because I don’t know any fence-sitters anymore, do you?

I don’t know ANYONE who honestly can’t quite make up their mind whether or not Bush is a disaster or not. The Liberals, Progressives and Moderates Dems I know are all united one one issue: that Bush should have been impeached long ago. Not that he’s a little bit wrong, or slightly unpleasant, but that he is a traitor and a war criminal of the First Water.

As as their Palace of Deception begins to fall apart, more and more the Administration is stuck playing to the “stupid people”, and so more and more anyone who isn’t a hardcore wingnut starts to feel lied to, insulted and shat upon.

That was the astonishment of his re-election: that 51 million Americans looked a criminal in the eye, steeped in his crimes to the point of bloody saturation...and then looked at a genuine war hero, a grown-up and, for all his flaws, more of a statesman in any contiguous five minute period than Bush has ever been his whole, sorry life...

...and said, “I’d like a double scoop of Criminal Dumbass please. With extra treasonous sprinkles!”

And if we lived in a static Universe where the rules of Causation had been suspended, that’s where we would be forever: Thanks to the simultaneously craven-and-arrogant failure-citizens who hold themselves aggressively and willfully blind to the consequences of their cupidity in order to keep America eternally tipping ever so slightly – 51/49 – in the direction of Corporate Theocracy.

But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live within the Veil of the Maya; in the Field of Time, and once events are set in motion, they will have their Newtonian way with us.

You can’t wish it away, or pray it away or vote it away. Heave a million metric tons of raw sewage straight into the air and turning 51 million pairs of blind eyes to it won’t affect the relentless ballistics of its arc in the slightest. Not all the Administration Lies or Congressional Refusal to investigate those lies will make any difference.

Which leaves the Administration stuck and fucked.

They could theoretically start telling the truth and practicing a little good, old fashioned American Glasnost. That’s ceratinly what would be best for the country, but go ahead and blow in a call to Mikhail Gorbachev and ask him how easily a policy of openness can be controlled once it is unleashed, and how gently a such policy treats the regime in charge when they have plenty to hide.

And anyway, the “good of the Nation” has never been of the slightest fucking interest to George Bush.

Or they can continue as they have been, playing more and more to Potemkin Audiences of soldiers and boyscouts and hand-picked “citizens” who will flagellate themselves into multiple, frenzied orgasms every time Bush comes within a Gentleman’s “C” of conjugating the verb “dissemble” correctly. Getting more and more Nixonian in their collective detachment from and seething hatred of Reality.

Leaving swing voters who may have liked Bush when he said all that cool shit on the rubble to ask, "Who the fuck is this guy covering up for the guy who blew the cover of one of our spies and the front company she worked for?

Where’s Mr. Integrity now that the GOP is being asked to actually live up to all of those High Falutin' Standards they set for everyone else when it was all just talk they could use to make Clinton look foolish?

Where’s all the lacerating wit and outrage about parsing what “is” is...now that we’re parsing what “imminent” meant, and there are 1,700 dead Americans because of such verbal weasling?

Where’s all of that big, “Bring it on” talk now that they went and brought it and we can’t cope with it?

Because their Dear Leader will never allow a single discouraging word from the real world to be uttered in the halls of his drunken, Liberator Barbie and Konservative Krisitian Ken Go To Baghdad Dreamhouse, and because those around him were chosen for their ideological purity, slavish loyalty and toadying expertise, the GOP is doomed to telling ever more and ever more outrageous Closed Door Lies to keep their base from rebelling...

...and in the process, permanently alienating and insulting the very people they need to make their majority last.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Strike shutters Preznit Medal of Freedom Factory.



Traitors must settle for cash…

…or Chalabucks, redeemable only in Iraq, GOP Fundraisers and the NYT Gift Shoppe.

‘cause traitorin’ is hard work.

It’s hard!

This via The Stakeholder…





Rove Gets a Raise!
Posted by jesselee
Wednesday, July 27, 2005 at 9:35 AM
Top Bush Aides Get Small Pay Boost [CongressDaily AM]

The top pay for senior White House aides, including Chief of Staff Card, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Legislative Affairs Director Candida Wolff, was boosted to $161,000 at the beginning of July, according to a list sent to Congress and obtained by National Journal.

(Comment added by poster): Amongst the others receiving the bump: Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby. The era of personal responsibility is dead! Long live the era of personal responsibility!

Ok, it’s not the kind of Visa Plutonium Card money that Cheney and the Chenettes are raking in.

Not the kind of Big Pimpin’ war profiteering bling you get looting entire countries, “mislaying” billions of Iraqi reconstruction dollars, and generally toe-dancing over the bodies of dead Americans and across the terrorism-and-depleted-Uranium strewn, Hieronymus-Bosch-landscape they have created to take another trip to the Operation Bottomless Mendacity ATM.

Which is exactly what makes this story worthy of note.

Because most people work for a living, and most people understand what a raise means.

Most people can't relate emotionally to Halliburton plundering their Treasury, or hired mercs exempt from the chain of command and rules of engagement going Full Mad Max and killing at will in Amok Iraq.

Not that they don't get that it's bad, but it’s too big, too far away, and besides, based on the blur of daily headlines, isn’t every company in America ripping off the public? It just blends into the background. As immutably huge as God, and as part of the ecology as PBS running commercials or, if you live near the “el” in Chicago, the rumble of the trains as they roar by.

Stuff you swore you’d never get used to it…then you did.

But 161K? People get that.

It’s about the price-point at which every working-class guy I know would say, “Yeah, you pay me that, and I’ll never bitch again. Pay me that, and I’m set.”

Rich-ish, but not outlandish. Not impossible. You’re never going to be a millionaire, which is why you play Lotto, and you’re never going to be awakened by Rosario Dawson with an affable morning blowjob and fresh pancakes (Ok, I am, but you’re not.) which is why guys buy stroke mags (and watch the Food Channel)….although for the life of me why anyone does that when there are perfectly serviceable internets around still mystifies me.

Shit, maybe we DO like the articles?

So we know we’re probably not going to garner a lot more cash or a lot more Jennifer Garner than we already get, but 161K we can definitely feature.

We know that you probably have to work pretty hard for that kind of coin in the Real World. Long hours. Probably get yelled at by the boss, and all of your bills don’t just magically melt away.

Then we look at Fat Karl, who has a pretty interesting job already.

Karl’s job, when it comes right down to, its to fuck people over.

People who don’t deserve it. People who run the gamut from basically decent to genuinely heroic, and Fat Karl’s job is to take millions and millions and millions of dollars from douchebags and cowards and lunatics and use all of that money and all of his art to fuck them over so badly they wish they were dead. All in the slavish service of a feeble-minded waterhead dolt, who was a national joke before he became President and since his "election" has now upped the ante to international, pandimensional Shakespearean-grade-tragic…joke.

Fat Karl, who already rides in Jags and jets and never has to say, “OK, then how much without the fries.”

Fat Karl, who can get anyone on Earth to take his calls, and can have newspaper subscription cold callers killed.

Fat Karl, who, given the leather-slave GOP Cult of Personality that treats this silty dregs of the ethical barrel as if he were Quetzal-Fucking-Coatl, could spend the rest of his life rolling from Coulter’s sodden, reeking crypt, to Mehlman’s Giant Race-car Playbunk, to Scotty’s Doggie-bed with nary a moment when his evil wick wasn’t being eagerly dipped in some Republican cum dumpster.

Indoor work mostly, a lot of deference, and not much heavy lifting.

Stealing a billion dollars we cannot fathom, but a guy who gets to live a little bit like James Bond, we can kind of understand, and envy and we might think it’s cool, except…

…that he’s also the guy who blew the actual James Bond’s cover.

WTF!?

Working in our government? Working for Bush? Outing a CIA Agent?

That we hate, and that we want punished. Screw the legalese; some pudgy little pig-poker who already has it made thinks he can fuck with an American spy for laughs?

And now he’s hiding behind Bush like a little pussy, who’s hiding behind McClellan like an even littler pussy, who’s hiding behind “the ongoing investigation” like the littlest pussy in all the land.

Man, we really hate that. I mean, back when the GOP worshipped Reagan and made Clint Eastwood mayor of Carmel...didn't they used to get all apopleptic over pasty governement bureacrats all drunk on their martinet's power who screwed with honest Americans AND over criminals hiding behind "technicalities"?

Shit, what is Fat Karl but the perfect two-fer?

But you know what we hate most of all?

When in the middle of the scandal, while the men who were so brave when they were sending other people’s children off to die for their lies are suddenly, serially skulking one behind another like so many nested, Russian-puzzle-Coward-dolls, the President decides that NOW is the perfect time to actually reward the little pig-pokin’ cover-blowin’ rat-bastard with a raise.

Global war on whateverthefuck we're calling it today, that we might find a little hard to get our arms around, but giving a traitor a raise?

Shit, we understand perfectly what that means.

Which is why it’s a pretty good story.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

This is what you get…



…when used-car salesmen run your government.

Oh I see; the problem isn’t the lies or the failures.

It’s not having every single predicate for this whole fucking mess kamikaze straight into God's Own Bug Zapper, fall to powder and blow away.

It’s not finding out that every baboon's-ass-rosy-red assessment that these criminals used to slicker a stunned nation of grieving men and women into a Baghdad Tiger Cage was a premeditated lie; a goat staked out at a deadfall to bait us to our doom by dogfuckers that, even now that their lies are exposed, rotting away in the blasting noonday heat for the whole Earth to see, for some inexplicable reason are still worshipped by GOP acolytes like the Sun God?

It’s not that people who committed treason and endangered our national security are given sanctuary in the White House…as if it were the Vatican and they were child molesters.

It’s not that every day we stay in Iraq is another recruiting victory for terrorists.

It’s not that Operation Enduring Clusterfuck hasn’t already been the biggest boon to terrorism in the History of the Universe.

Like Tobacco Executing, cigarettes and lung cancer, when soulless Sanguivores run the shop it’s never the problem that’s the problem, it’s the fucking marketing that’s the problem.

This from the NYT.

U.S. Officials Retool Slogan for Terror War
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, July 25 - The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation's senior military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that "terror is the method they use."

Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require "all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities' national power." The solution is "more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military," he concluded.

Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.


By emphasizing to the public that the effort is not only military, the administration may also be trying to reassure those in uniform who have begun complaining that only members of the armed forces are being asked to sacrifice for the effort.

New opinion polls show that the American public is increasingly pessimistic about the mission in Iraq, with many doubting its link to the counterterrorism mission. So, a new emphasis on reminding the public of the broader, long-term threat to the United States may allow the administration to put into broader perspective the daily mayhem in Iraq and the American casualties.

So lets count this down, shall we?

Less than one year ago Dear Leader slimed his way back into office in part by mocking anyone who suggest that the police and courts and diplomacy had a place of prode and prominence in the war on terror. They who, less than a year ago, ridiculed any suggestion that the manly art of statecraft was anything more or less that just that killing everyone that disagrees with you, now say, “future efforts require ‘all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities' national power. The solution is ‘more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military.’”…

“Bush’s own thinking” is evolving. Man you know the feces is hitting the cyclotron when you hear anything this close of an admission by anyone inside the Koolaid Factory that Dear Leader might have been wrong. Huzzah! Soon he will discover fire and language and zeroes and hopefully that sacrificing the young and eating their hearts doesn’t actually imbue you with their strength…

The military is getting pissed that the strutting, preening chickenhawks who proudly hold their coats for them while they go off to fight and die are categorically unwilling to put any skin in the game…

The public is starting to wake up and wise up that they have not only been scammed out of their shoes and wallets, but their futures, fortunes, international reputation and epidermis…

What to do?

Quick, Karl, to the Rebranding-mobile!

And may I suggest just a few, just to get the ball rolling?

For the biggest bologna shooter in Bologna Town: "My Bologna has a first name its S-C-O-T-T...".

For PNAC: "I'm a Traitor, he's a Traitor, she's a Traitor, we're a Traitor, wouldn't you like to be a Traitor, too?”

For Manwhore Gannon: “"Choosy Motherfuckers Choose Jeff."

For the deeply confused Ken Mehlman: “"Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don't.”

For the GOP Rank and File: “"Promise her anything, but give her Tikrit.”

For Pat Fitzgerald: “Strong than Dirt.”

For failing us all utterly, the dumbass MSM: “"I can't believe I ate the whole thing."

For Dear Leader: “"Bacardi & Cola. They get the job done!"

For Gitmo: “"Rendition! Take me away!"

For Kyoto: “"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

For the Yellow Elephants: "Ask any girly-men you happen to see, What's the best tuna? Chickenhawks of the GOP."

For the Administration: “"Look Ma, no principles!"

For Bush 41: “"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken."

For all-time, Life-Time, Number-One Bush Contributor, Kenny-Boy Lay: “"I liked it so much I fucked the company."

The Yellow Cake State of the Union Speech..and all other WMD lies: “"Raise your hand if you're sure."

To every cocksucker Iraq Apologist: “"Where's the motherfuckin’ beef you lying douchbags??"

For US Army Baghdad Airport Highway: ““Drivers wanted.”

The NYT: “"Ahmad’s news that’ll fit."

For the ones that make Jebus Cry: “Fundamentalism: The antidote for civilization."

For Fat Karl: “Treason? You’re soaking in it!”

And for Iran: "Like Iraq. Ohhhhh, like Iraq."

** (And I had to add this from mac for obvious reasons: ""What happens in Baghdad stays in Baghdad.")

Monday, July 25, 2005

“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.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Got to get behind the Mule...



...In the morning and blog

From Tom Waits, with some impudent edits, “Get Behind the Mule”:



“Big Jack Earl was 8-foot-1
He stood in the road and he cried
He couldn't make her love him
Couldn't make her stay
But tell the good Lord that he tried?”

Got to get behind the Mule.
In the morning and blog
Get behind the Mule.
In the morning and blog.
According to weather.com, it got up to 102 around here with a heat index of 115 or so. The wind makes the neighborhoods into pyroclastic convection ovens, and instead of 16” softball, kids are out on the sticky, lava streets, puddling copper.

For kicks, I spent the morning lobbing heat-stunned alley rats into direct sunlight and watching them burst into flames.

It’s hotter than it’s been here in six years, and heat makes me slow and dim, and while sunning myself on a flat rock, a question that one reader asked was slowly trotting around in my head.

geox said : “Good rant and all, but I dunno...it seems like you're expending an awful lot of energy shouting at people who are not listening. How many "moderate republicans" do you imagine read this blog, anyway?”

So I thought about that for awhile while the sun tried to kill me and the shadows and cool breezes all ran away to Canada for a long weekend, and here’s what I came up with.

If I thought I was personally responsible for stemming the entire tide of the irrationality in the world, I’d call in sick and hide under the covers. That’s too much to ask of anyone – Dean, Obama, Pelosi, Jebus...anyone -- but the good news is, all any of us have to do is be a voice in the chorus.

Some are big, booming basses and some can barely whisper, but all we are called on to do is our bit, the best we know how. Throw an elbow at the right moment, or be a shoulder to lean on when needed. We need to work at it, but no one of us needs to lift the whole weight of the burden alone.

We are not asked to do more, and as people of conscience, we can do no less.

So speaking only for myself, I’ll tell you some of why I do this.

1. Personal Pleasure.
I write because I’m a writer. I have a bunch of other jobs cobbled together that pay my bills and support my meager vices, but in my heart I’m a writer. As drunks drink and anglers angle, so writers write. It’s what we do. Whether well or poorly is another matter, to be judged by others, by whatever marketplace valuations are going around these days, but the doing of the thing is the thing.

Pity us.

2. Cheerleading.
Don’t knock it. Taut, fleshy pyramids of sweaty, miniskirted, women. So supple. So well-toned. So perkily eager. So...

Ok, where was I?

Oh yeah. Sorry. Sooo hot here.

Look, this is a protracted fight. The Neocons and the Fundys have been waging their Long Stupid March for thirty years and as disheartening as their victories are, WE can take heart from the fact that their example shows one thing conclusively: Politics ain’t a fucking diorama.

Things are not static. The battlefield shifts, and the tempo changes, but sometimes we all get a little tired. When I do, I head over to the likes of Wolcott or the Rude One, or Gilliard or Shakespeare's Sister for a little libation, a vigorous rubdown...and I generally learn a new word or two for “poop hole’, which is always handy.

It is a great goodness to have such oases at which to rest and ogle hot Liberal Women and stuff my face with oven-fresh adjectives, so if I can in any way return that favor to fellow travelers, then maybe I’ve paid a little something back into the pot.

3. Building a toolbox.
I live in a very Blue City, in a moderately Blue State, so I can walk out my door and hike six blocks in any direction, and not trip over a Republican.

But if I or anyone else can hand an argument or a verbal switchblade or a promising axis of attack to someone else, somewhere else, then perhaps they can use it. They can, perhaps, convince one Republican that they know and work with or whose kid they coach on the soccer team that the GOP is out of control. That we need check and balances for damned good reasons – like keeping their kid from dying in a war begun and prosecuted on the basis of lies, wishful thinking and dreams of empire. Or making sure their mom’s Social Security isn’t plundered by pin-striped thieves. And even if voting Democratic is a bridge too far for them, for the sake of their own peace of mind, maybe they just stay home next time and refuse to give their support to liars and thieves.

Right now, the Bad Guys are in a big, heavily fortified castle and we’re on the outside, and things look bad... but only if you don’t understand the huge advantages afforded to those who are fast and mobile and can stick and move and stick and move.

Think about it. The great strength of the Right is their slavish willingness to march in blind lock-step behind any tin-pot drunken idiot who happens to be at the head of their Fundy Blitzkrieg. They have no capacity to adjust and reform; to shed stupid policies and keep moving. To “Adopt, Adapt and Improve.” They’re stuck with a filthy, failed philosophy that is irrefutably fucking up everything they touch, but since Biblical and Ideological Literalists by definition cannot admit error, instead of fixing the problem, they’ve lashed themselves to the mast, nailed the tiller to the deck and tossed anyone overboard that speaks ill of this Enron-shithouse-crazy way of doing business

So, for example, John Roberts will be appointed. By a fat margin too. That ship sailed (to extend the metaphor) the day Bush won re-election. That sucks...but that’s what happens when the Bad Guys win, and we need to stop letting this sort of thing deflate us and start ask ourselves, “How can we use this?” every time something like this happens.

Offhand, it occurs to me in this case, that there are a whole lot of people who don’t vote at all, or vote GOP because they don’t see any relationship between Washington and their own lives. Now Bush has put up candidate who does not believe women have a right to control their own bodies. He has laid claim on the uteri of every woman in the country in the name of Republican Baby Jesus.

Don’t you think that there might be one or two Moderate Republicans or non-voters -- especially woman -- who might have a problem with this?

Just one or two, here and there? Why?

4. The Numbers Game.
This is not a game of millions; this is about 100,000 votes. This is about a paper-thin margin of victory that, due to its unique characteristics, I believe cannot be replicated. If this were an unwinnable fight against an irresistible tide, I’d blow the hatch and move to Ireland...but it’s not. Not by a damned site.

5. I want a fight.
I’m spoiling for a fight. I love it when a Republican gets baited out of their scripted, Potemkin-events and into an actual argument. These fucktards make the same mistake in forensics that they make in foreign policy. They think the Shock and Awe of bellowing slogans and screaming illiterate invective wins the day. They think decibels or nuclear throw-weight is an adequate substitute for being right.

A Moderate colleague of mine who I regularly verbally toss around the room when the subject turns to politics once got so mad at me that he told me the reason I won, and the reason none of my Republican acquaintances would debate me was because I was “too eloquent”.

Too smart.

So...by virtue of the fact that I know more than you, and that five minutes of conversation blows your pro-Bush drivel to flinders...in your mind that actually disqualifies me being heeded?

Talk about eloquent! That was about as perfect a distillation of why bigots cower in Bell Jars of their own propoganda and are terrified of "outside agitators" as I'd ever heard.

So after I was done laughing in his face, I said, shit man, I’ll take any one of you on with my polysyllables tied behind my back. Or all at once...and I’ll do it on one leg. In haiku. I’ll suck helium and do the whole shebang as Minnie Mouse.

As Morpheus said in “The Matrix”, “Your weakness is not your technique.”

Your weakness is simple: You. Are. Wrong.

That you are so fucking cool with your President and his Administration being so fucking wrong when you were so fucking willing to lynch the last President for much more trivial offenses, I find sickening.

And that you are so fucking cool with your President and his Administration being so fucking wrong when his lies have bankrupted the country you claim to love and killed so many people, I find tragic.

In an actual debate, these clowns blow out like Krustyland Killbots in a flurry of flashbulbs, so I say bring ‘em on.

And lastly, since I started this out on “Mule Variations”, I’ll end there with one, last reason, which is again courtesy of Mr. Tom Waits:


Well, go ahead and call the cops
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops
She said baby, I still love you
Sometimes there's nothin left to do

Oh you got to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you got to
Just hold on.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

The Ongoing Adventures of Captain Obvious - Part 2



Picking up where we left off...

...are we at war with Islamic terrorists?

Damned betcha we are, and have been for years.

It was a low-level conflict ignored and marginalized by the Bush Administration right up until September 11th, when it was Supersized into a front-page global conflict. And after behaving like an Actual President for a few weeks, George Bush and his Administration did what it always does in every crisis, manufactured or real: Had Karl Rove carefully scrutinize and rectally-probe it to determine how it could be perverted into an opportunity for crass, partisan gain.

But yes, Tom, we are at war with Islamic terrorists.

And since we are at war, we should be taking every measure to fight them intelligently, using every tool at our disposal. And, conversely, every time someone gives aid and comfort to our Enemies -- every time someone makes it easier for them to recruit new blood and harder for us fight them – that person deserves public censure, prison and, if necessary, a firing squad.

But on the face of your Flat Earth, Tom, our enemies are Small and we are Gargantuan.

Like the Titan that we are, we have to be very careful where we put our feet. We can roll over while watching a ball game and crush entire economies. One especially zippy ad campaign for Coke can obliterate a local deity.

Now some of our more thuggish and brick-stupid citizens think this is cool. They are moral and theological weaklings and pussies and like all those of their ilk, they can only overcome their mental and emotional impotence and feel the flush of what they mistake for courage by beating the shit out of other, weaker people.

We call these types “Republicans”.

Others of us very much like all of the amenities afforded to us by the luck of the birth-lottery that landed us in the United States. We love our country. We love what it is supposed to stand for, and against. We love the liberty of it. The freedom of motion and belief and the Constitutionally-burned-on-fucking-the-motherboard ideal of tolerance that makes the whole thing go.

And boy-howdy do we hate it when so-called-Christian Americans work day and night to eviscerate that ONE thing that sets us apart from fascist and theocratic states.

It is unarguably true that, time and again, we have failed and we have fallen and we have come up short when we measure ourselves against our own high-flow rhetoric.

So what? The key is to keep trying. The solution to the problems of Democracy is More Democracy.

OTOH, the eternal Enemy of Democracy is Theocracy.

Everything in which we take a measure of justifiable pride is made possible by having a Tolerant and Explicitly Secular Nation, and every time an enemy rises up to harm us, they march under the banner of God’s Mandate. Or the Divine Power of the Dear Leader, or the Chairman, or the Fuhrer...but it all comes to the same thing.

On the face of your Flat Earth, Tom, we cast by-far the longest, deepest shadow. There really isn't even a close second. And in spite whatever megakill-the-brown-people fantasies Limbaugh and Cheney and DeLay jerk off to at night, we really can’t just slaughter everyone who pisses us off.

Or, to very aptly paraphrase Victor Lazlo from “Casablanca”, “What if you murdered all of them? From every corner of your Empire, thousands would rise to take their places.”

“Even Rumsfeld can't kill that fast.”

And that fact is the simple, clear heart of the matter.

Either every Muslim is our Eternal Enemy and we have to kill them all...or the Muslim world is every bit as complicated as ours, in which case we have to fight smart. We need to empower Moderate Muslims who want to put their culture on a more tolerant, democratic footing. And we need to geld the extremists.

And since that is how we must fight if we are to win, we need to promise with our words and deliver with our deeds solid proof that we are not a nation of stupid, Fundamentalist, Nuclear-tipped fanatics. That we are not Christian Pakistan. That we are not bent on a global, Join-Or-Die rampage to loot the petroleum nations of the world of their wealth and impose a dark, Armageddonist vision of Christianity on everyone we decide leave alive.

(And the rest of the world really does pay attention, doesn’t it Tom? I mean, if your entire life existed in the shadow of a single, lethal hyperpower State, wouldn’t you pay very close attention to its every tic and spasm too?)

So I’m sure you will agree that presenting a Fanatical Fundamentalist face to the world, and openly using the word “secular” and “tolerant” as partisan pejoratives would be an insanely stupid way to fight this war...and yet that is exactly what we have done and continue to do.

And as long as Republicans run this country, and they are run by scum like Frist and Cheney, Dobson and Falwell, this will be our fate.

As long as the owners of the GOP insist publicly that we are a Christian Nation first and foremost, we will continue to drive away potential friends and give aid and comfort to our enemies.

As long as the leaders of this country openly make war on the very idea of a Free Press and state that judges should bend a knee to the whims of Tom DeLay and his Christian Sharia and kick the shit out of gays in the name of Jesus every time they need a few votes...as long as this is the case, the Republican Party acts as nothing less that a traitorous Fifth Column for our terrorist enemies.

You wrote: "Whenever they are exposed, they react the next day," Mr. Carmon said. "No one wants to be exposed in the West as a preacher of hate."

But what about in the West, Tom? Why is it that not a single Christopath with a megaphone in our country fears being exposed as a, “preacher of hate.”

Shit, why are they actually proud of it? And why does every, single Republican of note cower like beaten, temple eunuchs every time douchbags like Ken Mehlman or Mary Matlin or Pat Robertson shows the nakedly hateful face of the GOP on nation television?

This is indeed a war, and in a war words matter, so where in the fuck are your words, Tom?

Why aren’t you following your own prescription -- the one you so freely use to hector those brown people far, far away -- and question the Extremists here? The ones that play straight into the hands of the terrorists who are trying to kill us?

You know, the ones that own the Republican Party and run the country?

The ones that use their own Christian Al Jazeera Networks to make war on tolerance and secularity.

The ones that sanctify every hateful drop of sulphuric-bile that drools out of the slobbering pie-holes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

The ones who paved the rhetorical road for terrorists like Eric Rudolph and Tim McVeigh.

The ones that used the Bible to fuck the corpse of Terry Schiavo for partisan gain.

The ones that all-but-explicitly-advocate the murder of judges that don’t take their marching orders from James Dobson and Tom DeLay.

The ones that are trying to ram the Ten Commandments up everyone’s ass while they decry sodomy as a sin.

The ones that are opening their own Segregation Academies all over the South?

The ones that run a Christopathic Hate School like Bob Jones University...and the ones that stump for votes there every four years?

Where’s are all the Cleansing Sunshine Boys and Girls in the American Media who will hold a continuous and merciless light on the Theocrats in our midst? Who will boldly use their column inches, bandwidth and teevee appearances to act as a purifying antiseptic to the rot that festers at the heart to the GOP.

Because Tom, on the face of your Flat Earth, everyone in the world can see them for what they are. They see them as the True Face of America. See them running and ruining our nation. See them as the Christian conquerors, Holy Petro-Crusaders, that every one of them proudly proclaim that they are.

They are the ones that allow our country to be painted as a bunch of hypocritical, imperialists thugs trying to expand their perverse version of Christendom to cover the Earth. And if you actually believe a single word you are saying, then going after them is your job Tom.

Your job is to hammer the shit out of James Dobson when he opens his pie hole to jerk Bill Frist's leash.

Your job to beat your Wingnut Apologist reach-around buddy, David Brooks, when he refuses to demand accountability from his Republicans Masters.

Your job, Tom, because you make your journalistic your home on some very high ground indeed. And we are at war. And since you believe in this war, and believe in us winning this war, it is Your Job, Captain, to use your High Ground to expose and shame those that make winning that war harder.

Or, to use your own words – alerted very slightly:

“Every quarter, the New York Times should identify the Top 10 hatemongers, excuse makers and truth tellers in the Republican Party. It wouldn't be a cure-all. But it would be a message to the extremists: you are free to say what you want, but we are free to listen, to let the whole world know what you are saying and to protect every free society from hate spreaders like you. Words matter.”

Words do indeed matter, Tom.

Your words do indeed matter, so when I see you using your words to protect our free society from hate spreaders and their apologists like Pat Robertson, Ken Mehlman, Tom DeLay, David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol, Brit Hume, Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly, Dick Cheney, Bill Frist, George Walker Bush and the rest of that long, long, looooong list...I’ll start taking your snuffly outrage seriously.

But then again, what would all of those Mr. McGoo CEO Apostles who snap up and tout your “Flatness Makes The World Go ‘Round” manual say if, in addition to questioning the conduct – by name – of our enemies in faraway lands – you were to swing your guns around and start firing some simple, basic questions – by name -- about the conduct of this Administration? An Administration that I kinda think might be “Friends with Privileges” with the Captains of Industry that buy up your books by the job-lot?

Sure it might hurt the book sales a bit, but surely if this is a Real War and you are Really Serious, trifles like that shouldn’t matter.

Right, Tom?