This Old Blog

Time to spruce up the old place.

Knock through a new door.
Lick of paint here and there.
Retuckpoint the brick.
Get the goldfish and paper boat regatta outta the bidet.
Put a spit shine on the cat's ass.

Because change is good.

And it's only 1's and 0's.

Boo!

Well Boo Radley, because tonight it's All Hallows/All The Time!

After scaring the Holy Grey Poupon out of half the Eastern seaboard with his Halloween broadcast of a conspicuously Tom-Cruiseless "War of the Worlds", Orson Well famously ended the night by telling his audience:

"This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears..."

And since I can't get each and every one of you snockered and sneak into the coatroom with the all libidenous liberal ladies for a quick round of "Storm the Bastille", I promised instead a bit of flash-fiction suitable for All Hallow's Eve.

So here goes, and very Happy Halloween to you, one and all :-)

Formative Education

by

driftglass

After a week on the job, McPhearson began to lose patience with Bobby Schramm.

The little, blonde boy sat right up front. Each day he was dressed in threadbare jeans with three white lines showing on the cuffs where they'd been let out, and a plain white tee-shirt that smelled sharply of bleach. He was a thin boy, with the faint, tan color of someone who was bathed irregularly, but had clear, vigilant eyes and no overt signs of abuse or neglect. And Bobby paid attention. Very, very close attention.

Sometimes McPhearson found his unwavering stare unnerving.

Bobby played quietly during Creativity Time, snapping Legos together into bridges and towers, but always kept McPhearson in view. On Tuesday, McPhearson had asked him to go get the box of safety scissors out of the wooden chest, and he had done so, but had kept glancing back at McPhearson as he walked to the back of the room, and had eyed him steadily as he carried the box to McPhearson's desk.

Bobby's file showed good scores and Mrs. Navid, his first grade teacher, noted that he got along well with other children. McPhearson had seen a notation on a death in the boy's family last year -- the father had died of cancer -- but Bobby appeared to be coping well. No digging at his skin or overly violent drawings; none of the usual signs. Mrs. Navid's comment sheet had mentioned her concerns for the boy, but McPhearson regarded the old woman as something of a fuss pot. She had no degree in Education Science and swore by phonics.

Hell, she still brought out yellowed copies of McGuffy's Readers from the dusty cardboard boxes she kept in her cloak room.

Finally, on a Monday, McPhearson ignored other anxious, waving hands. Pointing to the big, multi-colored map of the United States hung from hooks over the blackboard, he asked, "Bobby, can you show me where our state is?"

Bobby shook his head. No. McPhearson persisted. Still no. McPhearson moved on to another student.

When the bell rang for recess, McPhearson asked Bobby to stay behind.

"Is there something the matter Bobby?"

"No."

"Did you understand the lesson?"

"Yes."

"Then what's the matter?"

"I dunno."

McPhearson squatted down so that they could speak eye to eye. He lowered his voice, making the moment intimate.

Fatherly.

"I know you pay attention son."

Bobby shrugged.

"I see how alert you are. How you watch me all the time."

Bobby said nothing.

"You pay such good attention, Bobby. Such very good attention," McPhearson murmured. "So what's going on?"

Bobby looked left and right. He squinted intently into McPhearson's eyes and pointed at McPhearson's head.

"I'm tryin' to grow a cancer in you," he whispered, and then, tapping his own head with his finger, he added, "With mah mind."

McPhearson stood up suddenly.

"With mah mind," Bobby repeated.

McPhearson stared into space, saying nothing. Seeing that the conversation was over, Bobby turned to go outside to play with other children. Swinging his arms, hands in little fists, Bobby marched past the globe and the flag and out into the world.

* * *

The greatest trick...

...Dick Cheney ever played was convincing the world he wasn't really in charge.

The Real President reminds potential Rats...

...before I go down, you'll all sleep with the fishes.

Why this is So Fucking Bad – Part II

The underlying motives of the Modern GOP.

You and I, we live in a house built by giants.

Flawed giants to be sure – we’re all sinners here – but the men and women who made this place for us stood a full head taller than their times and looked to make us as fine a future as their magnificent, damaged vision could perceive.

The planks of the floor tongue-and-grooved together by Jefferson’s prose. The bricks laid straight and true by Washington. The kitchen kept tight and warm by Franklin. The Southern Wing fumigated by Sherman and made beautiful by Ms. Rosa Parks.

Everywhere the joins and seams are sealed against the elements by the blood of patriots who died at Omaha Beach, and Gettysburg, and Philidelphia, Mississippi to keep our house safe, or to force the landlords to keep their promise and make our house a home for all who live here.

It’s not a perfect house – it has always been a fixer-upper – but it’s our house, yours and mine, black and white, man and woman, conservative and liberal, rich and poor, new arrival or DAR.

And we work on the place, year after year. Some of us, sadly, have little or no interest in the basic duties of citizenship, and believe that the Democracy Fairy comes and snakes the pipes, weather-strips the doors and re-caulks the tub. Some of us involve ourselves in the running of the country with varying degrees of passion and duration because that's what we can afford. And some of our fellow citizens spend their lives at it because we understand that keeping up the Old Home Place is the slow work of lifetimes. A task that is incremental, blooms only rarely and usually lacks heroics.

It is rarely the lifers that militate for Revolution Now! because they well understand what is at stake and how hard it is to build and govern once the revolutionaries are done knocking it all down and dancing around the fires. No, it is usually the uninvolved -- the sleepy ones who have little or no understanding of how the political process works, how a bill becomes a law (Schoolhouse Rock, People!) or how a minority party has to fight with finesse and under the radar -- who come tumbling down from the attic full of drive-by advice on the futility of hard work and how the fact that everything isn't perfect yet proves that we need to burn it all down and start over.

Fine. As the boys and girls of Fireside Theater once said, "I Think We're all Bozos on This Bus." This experiment has been running for two-and-a-quarter centuries, and it has been every bit as much a Freak Carnival and Tijuana Donkey Show as it has been High Mass.

So what?

We all work in the dark and we all do what we can. That’s the social compact. That’s the deal, and from generation to generation our house gets little additions. New furnishings from Imperial to Populist to Early "Whip Inflation Now."

Sometimes we paint the place Red, and sometimes Blue, and sometimes what those colors mean changes completely, but the compact requires -- absolutely requires -- that we respect the house itself.

And it is in this signal betrayal that the Modern Republican Party is singularly infamous.

They are not remotely interested in changing the artwork or the crown molding; they're going after the walls, the floor and the brickwork. They're setting fire to the foundation stones themselves, and the indictment of Scooter Libby is only the latest link in the chain.

Consider just these few core samples taken from the anthracite soul of the Party of Darkness:

On Making War.

There is a proper way a modern Great Nation goes to war. When describing how a Great Nation undertook the gravest decision any country can make, the watchword damned well better have been "Deliberate". And Cautious. Reluctant. Even Sad. As a last, possible resort. The gravity a Great Nation must feel down to it's bones before going to war might best be summed up by Lincoln in his Second Inaugural:

"All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.

And the war came."

For sober-minded adults, the days of undertaking mass slaughter for martial glory and piqued pride disappeared in the trenches of World War I, and were permanently entombed under the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But instead, this Chickenhawk Administration came to the table iron-hard, leg-humpin', Priapistic for war. For the profit it would bring as well as the suppressing fire it would provide for its political agenda. War as Distraction. War as Photo-Op.

And to accomplish this end, they ate away at the decision-making apparatus itself. When, like this Administration, you see war as just another means to a profitable end -- and you have no ethics-bound limits on what you are prepared to do to advance your partisan agenda -- you end up lying lavishly because you no longer recognize Truth or Falsehood as points on a moral compass.

Bush did not seek to prove the case for war; instead he strove to destroy the very mechanism by which such decisions are made.

He did what he has done his whole life. He cheated, and his Party cheered, and in doing so he took a sledgehammer to the floorboards of democracy,


On Appointing Judges.

No big mystery here. When Harriet Miers got into choppy water over her utter lack of qualifications for the job to which Bush had nominated her, he casually played the Evangelical Card.

He didn't even encrypt it -- he just up and said that Harriet should be trusted because of her specific and rancid views on Christ. Period.

From Terri Schiavo, to Justice Sundays, to anointing John Ashcroft as Inquisitor General, to the whole "Torture? So what!" stance of the GOP, to veiled death threats against "activist judges", to Pat Robertson's psychotic and unrepudiated assertions that "liberal judges" are the greatest threat to American civilization in history, to James Dobson's flaunting his ownership of Bill Frist's testicles and reassurance that Dear Harriet would've voted the right way...the GOP has made it explicitly clear that they have no use for an independent judiciary. They have set an overt Christopath Evangelical Test for holding the gavel; a perversion that our Constitution was explicitly set up to guard against.

As is true in the Prosecution of War, in the Prosecution of Justice the GOP have no use for the mechanisms the Founders put in place. They don't make war on a given judge: They make war on the very idea of Justice.


On the Idea of the Commonweal.

Begin with two, filthy words: Grover Norquist.

Then comes Katrina, Barbara Bush, "Brownie" and showing our racism to the world.

"AARP's Gay!" attacks on Social Security, backed up by the likes of Brit Hume lying as loud and often as necessary to blowtorch the last line of defense between senior citizens and penury.

The Modern GOP rides to electoral victory on the stooped backs and sloped brows of ten million loyal bigots, segregationists, and American Swastika flyin' wannabe Klansmen. It's not that they object to this program or that; they loathe the very idea that the government should be in the business of helping its citizens at all, especially "those people."

Understanding racists is really not that difficult: For these degenerates, the Government Is the Problem because it takes their tax money and gives it to Mud People, fags and Furriners. Period. And on that basis, they are completely cool with the idea of gutting government itself. And as they have made crystal clear, if they can't milk what they want from their conservative manques and stalking horses, these types are perfectly willing to go back to blowing up Federal Buildings and Family Planning Clinics.


On the Primacy of Reason.

First and foremost, we Americans are the Children of the Enlightenment.

We were born during the rise of the Rational against the the dark tide of Superstition and Fear. It was because of our willingness to swear fealty to Reason even though it might doom some of our sacred cows to the slaughter line that we truly were a light unto the world; and it is this primary, prenatal fact of our origins that is most despised and conspicuously ignored by the current crop of Fundy "Originalists" who only want to ram the Ten Commandments down our throats and send all those scarily emancipated women back to purdah.

So again we see the perversity of the GOP on a cellular level.

Because it affronts the sensibilities of its loyal swine, the Republican party is actually willing to wage war on Evolution; a science whose fundamentals have been settled beyond any serious debate across an entire, global community of literate, learned humans for over a century.

Except here.

Except with the panderers that run the Republican Party who, for sordid electoral wages, are more than happy to run three centuries of Enlightenment through the wood chipper. Who cheerfully retard our children -- that face a future of fierce, technological competition -- by forcing the schools to teach that the ignorant superstitions of snake handlers are every bit as 'scientifically" valid as the results of a century and a half of careful observation, exploration and experimentation.

And because it might impinge on the bottom lines of their corporate overlords, these same illiterate, innumerate whores are quite willing to rewrite the laws of physics and meteorology in Crayola, and pretend that Global Warming is just the kooky notion of a handful of addled intellectuals, even as one "storm of the century" after another beats the coastal United States to splinters, and sheets of polar ice the size of states continue to "melt, thaw, and resolve themselves into a dew."

Again, it is not a particular decision or theory against which the GOP has set themselves, but the entire idea of Man using Reason to make decisions against which they have set themselves.

They make war on the idea of Enlightenment itself.

How much more of an enemy of Democracy could they possibly be?

And now...Scooter Libby.

What is the Scoot Man charged with?
Blow away the smoke and just listen to the sturdy poetry of the indictment itself to understand what is at stake here.

When all is said and done, what Libby tried to do was no less than attempt to destroy the instrumentality by which the truth itself could be found.

On a matter of National Security.

During a time of war.

He did it as cooly and deliberately as a suicide bomber going after a troop carrier, which is treason to the bone, and only a traitor would defend it or spin it as anything less.

And the best either the Real President and the Potemkin President could choke out were a few words of non-specific regret, padded out with praise for all the Goodness Scooter had ladled over the Constitution.

Conclusion:

In the end, there is always room in our raucous, national chorus for voices of discontent, dissent and disputation. That's how our house was built; that's exactly what its checks and balances and tightly toleranced acoustics are designed to modulate.

What cannot be tolerated are those whose goal is the razing of Liberty's Temple.

Those who carefully nurture ignorance, deliberately foster bigotry and fear, and take up arms against the muscle and sinew of Enlightenment itself.

The vermin that dare to call themselves "Republicans" while working day and night to cripple and kill the Republic.

The termites in the joists and tenons of Democracy's home.

The Real President administers a pep talk

to the rest of the traitors...

Why this is So Fucking Bad -- Part I.

Why this is bad For Republicans.

Lets face it, the White House has only two tenses when it comes to the framing of any narrative, and they both stem from Preznit Drinky’s strategy of dividing and conqueringTime.

First, there is the alky’s Best Friend: the eternally Bright Future about which they talk endlessly. The Bright Future is a wonderful, scrum-dee-lee-icious realm full of Iraqi Corners that are juuuust about to be turned, booming prosperity, magically evaporating deficits and rising Republican popularity. Just one orgasmic, dogmatic victory after another, forever and ever, amen, and escaping into the Bright Future is the single-minded goal and fantasy of every abusive drunk.

No matter how badly you may have fucked everything up, no matter how many years in a row you have made the world a misery, the lure of leaping into the motorcade bound for the Bright Future is irresistible. Hiding in the back seat and watching with glee as the rubble and ruin and felonies and piles of dead bodies for which you are responsible disappear safely into the rearview mirror.

Then there is and the Dim and Distant Past, which addicts and their Spokesmen like a whole lot less.

The Dim and Distant Past is that scary place full Dubya’s draft dodgery, drunkenness, lies, broken promises, blood-soaked treason, treachery, betrayal of the nation’s trust, breathtaking ineptitude, fatal arrogance, casual thuggery,

And that’s just in the last two weeks!

So the White House does not talk about the past – even when that past is five minutes ago and the bloodstains are still warm and spreading across Cheney’s drooling chin. They toe-dance around it with phrases like “I’ve already addressed that” and “We’re not going to go over that again” and “We don’t believe in looking backwards.”

No junkie looks back.

To look back is the first step to taking ownership of your mistakes, and if there is one thing the Party of Ownership and Personal Responsibility tries to thrash and worm out of harder than a vampire strapped into a tanning bed it’s owning up to their own Personal Responsibility.

This has traditionally been a Winning Strategy because the media have traditionally been so pussywhipped, co-opted or outright-purchased that they usually refuse to look at the horror even when the Truth drops -- rotting and hogtied -- smack in their laps.

And the rank and file of the GOP ain’t gonna hold Dubya to account for any-fucking-thing ever, because they are, by-and-large, kinda stupid. And at a visceral level, most of them really, REALLY hate this country in their own way as fiercely as any Wahabi Muslim. Listening to professional liars like Limbaugh or Hume or Coulter year after year has left them with a kind of Mendacity Melanoma. Riddled with a cancer of lies so bone-deep that they have developed a life-threatening allergy to anything that has the faintest whiff of fresh air and Facts.

Simply put, if a Republican ever sat quietly down and examined the simple truth of what they have allowed this Administration to do in their name and with ehir support, honor would demand that they either repudiate Bush and his whole nefarious enterprise every bit as loudly and rabidly as they supported it in the past, or eat a bullet. Now since Honor has long been exiled from the GOP, that ain’t gonna happen, but what this status quo means for them is bad times ahead as far as the eye can see.

Because with the indictment of Libby, the hammer has fallen, and trials will one day begin. There will be subpoenas and lawyers, discovery and depositions, and a lot of decomposing bodies will come tumbling into the light. But that could all be chalked up as nothing more than a small cloud on the far horizon of the Bright Future, were it not for the fact that Rove – like Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse-Five" – has come unstuck in time.

He has been exiled to Indeterminateville, where his fate cannot be whisked or whiskeyed away into the locker of the Recent Past about which the Administration never speaks, and yet he cannot be promoted to the faraway Bright Future; that phantasmagorical land where everything is always fine and where lions and lambs go to Denny’s together, where their kids share pudding cups.

Instead, it is the combination of a Libby indictment and a Rove trapped for the moment in a Limbo that sticks like a bone in the throat of the GOP Wurlitzer and strands Dubya in the terrible, eternal Now. That awful place full of blame and shame and consequences.

Marooned like Tantalus between the two narrative boltholes where has always fled when the shit he heaves into the fan comes a’whirling back at him.

Dick, George and Karl

The Early Years

There’s this story about an entomologist living in the city, which may be apocryphal, and will certainly count as such once I’m done smudging up the details. And which I may have mentioned before.

But I have been known to repost a good shaggy cricket story more than once and amplify a few details here and there, and most folks are kind enough to smile indulgently and let my encroaching dotage slide. So what’s say we call it a parable and split the difference?

Anyway, this insect specialist is walking around on the Near North Side during rush hour one summer day, talking with a friend. The ambient environment – near an “el” stop and hard by one of the ubiquitous construction sites – was warm-weather busy. As if someone had accidentally knocked over a bee hive full of workers dressed in bike pants, short skirts or business-casual suits and loosened ties.

It was loud.

And that’s when the entomologist stops his friend and tells him the he hears the distinctive chirping of a particularly uncommon species of cricket (BTW, feel free to re-tell this story using the ‘White House’ and Jiminy Cricket if you’d like. With a dollop of AstroGlide it fits like a pair of bunny slippers.)

His friend is dubious, to say the least.

“Quit screwing with me, Dwight (we’ll call him ‘Dwight’),” Larry said (we’ll call the other guy ‘Larry’.) “you know you can’t here a damned thing in this din.”

Ok, “din” is my word. Larry wouldn’t really say that.

Dwight shrugged, and took out a small handful of coins – nickels and pennies and a dime or two, (Possibly exactly the same combination of coins O. Henry used in “The Gift Of The Magi”) – and tossed them up and out onto a temporarily vacant spot on the sidewalk. The instant they hit and started pinging and jangling around, everyone in earshot ceased what they were doing, stopped talking, and turned to look at the source of the sound.

“It’s not how loud it is,” Dwight said. “It’s what you listen for.”

So by turning up the gain, and filtering out the Rich White Noise, we can listen to what's going on between the notes and discern if there is anything there worthy of note.

I’d argue there are at least two things.

First, the one defense of Karl and Scooter that virtually no one in a very long time (other than a pudgy, ClayMation mouthpiece like Scotty Dog McClellan) has made has been an appeal the Ethos. The “These Honorable Men would never..." defense.

Now because every Republican boat is tied to the Good Ship Barleypop – and because deep in their hearts, most Republicans simply don’t care if their Leaders committed treason and slingshat (which, if it isn’t a word, it damned well should be) our country into a disastrous war based on premeditated lies, as long as they get their tax cuts – they are forced into this Fevered Funhouse Mirror debating mode. This bizarre alternate universe where literally point for point, step by step, every single charge they hung on Clinton during their corrupt, partisan lynching party that leaked like a pair of month-old Depends has now boomeranged around the Moon and is bearing right back down on them.

Except, of course, the underlying crime with Clinton was a hummer in Oval Office, whereas with the Bush White House, it’s traitors in the White House scamming a wounded and grieving nation into an illegal war. Which should certainly outrage-to-the-point-of-implosion any Republican with one scintilla of principle, but as we know from the election of 2004, if they had a single iota of principle and self-respect, they wouldn’t be Republicans.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

And yet even this shameful, shambling pack of jackals has by-and-large not been able to suppress whatever vestigial gag-reflexes the have left and form their mouths to defend Rove and Libby on the grounds that such men as these would never, ever, ever do such a thing.

This silence has quietly ceded the argument that the Bush Administration is run by sleazy, dishonorable men; they argue instead that treason is no big deal.

Second, the GOP is behaving like the Dems during the closing arguments of the Clinton Impeachment; in the throes of a genuine crisis. A genuine crisis in the sense that events are now completely outside of their control and that no one knows how this will end.

With one big difference; Bill Clinton was the fucking President!

Rove is an aide. Libby is an aide. Unelected helper monkeys who’s job it is, in theory, to hand the Master-Surgeon-in-Chief the proper scalpels and rib-spreaders as he does the hard job of keeping America alive and healthy.

In theory, aides are infinitely replaceable. You want a hundred knuckle-draggers, knee-walking-drunk on Neoncon corn liquor and willing to beat the teeth out old women and crippled children for the greater glory of the House of Bush? To work 24/7/365 to reformat the United States into a fascist kleptocracy policed by Wahabi Christian? Shit, just post a notice on the job board at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or Focus in the Family and they’ll ooze out of the floorboards by the thousand.

Even Senior Aides are, in theory, hirelings. Use ‘em up, set ‘em up on a corporate board, get another one.

But not Rove.

Why?

Well, we all know why, don’t we?

Bush is a bolt of convenient winding cloth to hide the moral leprosy of the Right. Bush is the Halloween Costume Rove dresses up in when he goes abroad in the land to slander and defame and destroy. The math is simple:

Bush+Rove = Swift Boat Liars, gay-bashing ballot initiatives in 2004, smearing Max Cleland, John McCain’s Black Baby.

Bush-Rove = Katrina, “Brownie”, Harriet Miers, the First Debate, Cindy Sheehan.

As we on the Left of Crazy have always known, Rove is our Domestic President in charge of dividing and destroying the country from within, and Cheney runs the Foreign Plunder division, tasked with pissing away our reputation abroad, while lining the pockets of his shareholders.

And as long as he sticks to the script, Bush -- the feeble-minded codpiece used to cover up their crimes and betrayals –- gets to play at being President.

But now, despite all of the insipid rhetoric on the Right about Bush the Wise, Bush the Sage, Bush the Brilliant, their own hysteria gives them away.

All along, Bush has played “Madame” to Karl’s “ Wayland Flowers”, and by their panic the Right now shows that they can’t afford to pretend otherwise any longer.

Now by their silence the Party of Morality and Personal Responsibility is compelled to admit to itself that treason and treachery in the Oval Office is, by their own lights, No Biggy. And by their shouting they own up the the fact that it's the Real President that's under the hammer.

I'm sure Lincoln would be soooo proud, and it'd be Holy High Fives all around for everyone in the White House should Jesus decide to return for Fitzmas Part II: Karl's Gone Wild.

The clock ticks down towards High Noon

and The Man approacheth.

My antique laptop just started showing me a PAGE_FAULT_IN_A_NON_PAGE_AREA (rampant against a striking blue background) and began denying me access to Safe Mode, which means it's almost certainly time to start digging a PC hole, and rather a lot of work has probably gone to digital heaven.

Which, if I were better rested, would be freaking me out no little bit right now, and which is why I had to unship the borrowed-and-hadn't-yet-returned-Mac (And thank's be to you-know-who-you-are.)

But frankly I'd be in a lot less of a jolly mood if I hadn't stopped around Steve Gilliard's for a nightcap and found that Commentor Randy McGowan had penned this terrific parody

Thanks Randy; laughs are just a mite short-stocked around here these days, and this is some For Sure Grinnin' Funny sausage you're packin'.

So, let me step aside and just let you read on...

Twas the nite before Fitzmas and through the White House
Not a neocon stirred, even Cheney, that louse
The documents were shredded and all burned with care
Even Judy was smart enough not to be there

The liberals were snuggled all warm in their beds
Convinced that George Bush would no longer be led
With Laura in her burkah and George in his cap
He thought to himself, can I beat this wrap?

Then from the news there arose such a clatter
George ran to his office "what the hell is the matter!?!"
He grabbed Rove and said "what is the excitement?"
And there stood Fitzgerald, hands full of indictments

Karl’s bald head then started to glow
Like George Bush’s nose, in the days he did blow
When what to his bloodshot eyes should appear
But cops and attorneys and all coming near

Fitzgerald was thorough, if not very quick
And George now realized he wasn’t that slick
More rapid than eagles Fitz’s charges they came
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name

"Now, grab all those docs and seize that computer!
Arrest Cheney! And Rove! And Rumsfeld and Scooter!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
Now, lock away, lock away! Lock away all!"

With a wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Fitz let George know he had plenty to dread
He leaked not a word, but went straight to his work
arrested them all and said “Bush you’re a jerk”

And poking his finger in George Bush’s nose
Said time for a speech in the garden of rose
He sprang to his car to his team gave a shout
And away they dragged Rove who started to pout

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight:

F*** You Dick Cheney, and your friends on the right!

You bought it.

Now live in it.

This morning, rolling along into the Loop, full of dying flu virus, I almost felt the meekest, most theoretical peek of pity for the poor Moderate Republican coming on.

Not, of course, the Fundy CHUDS who shame the good name of Christ with every breath they draw.

Not the three-toed, chittering Failed Men who make up the vast George Wallace wing of that Party.

Not the soul-dead, globe-fucking, petro-borgs like Cheney.

But for the Mods...and for only one reason: whatever Santa Claus delivers come Fitzmas morn, in five short years, the Moderates have lived to become everything they detest. Every word of clucking reproach they yelped in snickering glee during the Clinton Age has gotten caught up in the Bush Treason Cyclotron, sped up to light-speed, and is now coming screaming back at them like a sack of radioactive axe-heads.

Their worst nightmare is in the process of coming true, big as a mountain in stilettos, carrying a sledgehammer in one hand and a 40-foot-long straight razor in the other, and there is not shit all they can do about it. Because everything they believed or touted or crowed about or tried to rub in our faces is in the process of coming down around their ears.

Every. Single. Thing.

Every justification that they were fed about their Great Ay-rab Safari is now spilling out into the sunlight and can clearly be seen -- even from High Earth Orbit -- to have been a willful lie.

The leaders who swore to them it was holy and justified to scream their lungs bloody in ecstasy at the thought of their two dearest fantasies -- piles of dead brown people and Low! Low! Gas prices -- coming to pass in One Glorious War are outed as a Confederacy of traitors and liars and fools.

Their pet media, nothing but perambulating pustules, refilled with hate and mendacity every night by White House messengers.

That they have never been anything to the GOP but chumps: little sacs of cash and votes and “mandate” to be squeezed dry with impunity, because Moderates are basically beat-down whores who will always go wriggling back to their abusers.

But now it’s not one thing that’s melting down; it’s everything. The serial cons that have kept the grubby Mods goggle-eyed and heroin-loyal are all falling apart simultaneously and there’s nothing but decibels left in the Shiny Object Bag to keep them from noticing the awful truth.

That their Leaders are traitors.

Their heroes are liars.

Their dogma is a joke.

Their President is a feeble-minded creep who has fucked up everything he has ever touched.

It’s as if their mothers suddenly ripped of rubber masks and have shown themselves to be the spree killers they’ve always been.

How terrifying that must be. I mean, I’m wrong about a lot of stuff...but everything?

Every God Damned Thing?

And worse – so very much worse – not only were they utterly wrong about everyfuckingthing, but the Evil Liberals were right all along.

The big picture. The fussy details. The arithmetic. The real, racist heart of the GOP. The various myriad, casual betrayals by the Bush White House.

All of it.

The Liberals were right, and the Moderates had been given no fewer than 30 years of warning that this is precisely where their idiocy would land us.

I can’t even imagine how it must feel to know at some level that your whole world is a farce, and your whole belief system is a Ponsi Scheme run on you by thugs who never gave a shit about you, or your family or your dearest peon dreams.

Which is why I felt the merest shadow of pity falling on my shoulder today...

...until I flipped past the closed-circuit channel of the Fuhrerbunker, and accidentally stepped in a big, steaming pile of, “Wall Street Journal Report – The Journal Editorial Report.” Where John Fund, Paul Gigot, David Henninger -- three, low-rent, PBS, wannabe Weird Sisters of the GOP (and one, standard-issue, blond, female Republican Pleasure Droid) -- ply their filthy trade unmoored to Reality in any way whatsoever.

And here is what they said, with a little emphasis added by yours truly.

GIGOT: Two of the most influential men in the Bush Administration -- the president's senior adviser, Karl Rove, and vice-president Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby -- waited for word this week on whether they would be indicted in connection with leaking the name of a CIA agent. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has to make a decision within a week and it has enormous implications for the Bush presidency. Dan, how did this investigation over what was after all a routine kind of Washington leak come to this point?

HENNINGER: Well, it came to this point because the original story, the alleged leaking of this covert CIA agent's name, was a mole hill that was generated into a mountain of controversy. The mistake was that the administration decided that the only way to resolve it was to appoint a special prosecutor. Special prosecutors are very unusual institutions. They are not like a normal prosecutor who looks for a crime and then decides whether you have an individual attached to it. They are appointed to investigate individuals, in this case Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. Having spent all this time and money on this investigation, he has to have something to show for it. We are faced with the prospect of the president's closest advisor being indicted which will be catastrophic for the presidency.

GIGOT: It would be damaging, wouldn't it John?

FUND: Very much so and of course the White House is already in disarray on all these other issues that we've been talking about. I have to say though, if it happens, I think it will be one of the strangest stories ever in Washington because there is no underlying crime. Almost everyone agrees that the law that was investigated probably should not even have been investigated.

GIGOT: ... If it is such a difficult decision, if it is such a close call, then why would you make such a momentous decision to indict? You are really essentially torpedoing a second administration and you are doing potentially great damage to the ability of the government to function.

These are the same breed of assworms who warmed their pincers in delight as Bill Clinton was “torpedoed” over lying about consensual sex, and now view treason during wartime as something “routine”, and are shocked that anyone would proceed with indictments over what they consider small matters given the “great damage” it may do “to the ability of the government to function.”

See, I do get some things wrong.

Douchebags like these deserve no pity whatsoever.

They deliberately installed a blood-chugging, HellMouth assassin like Rove...

...and a peevish void like Bush in the People’s House for no other reason than brutal partisan gain, and it will be my distinct pleasure to watch them burn, and their pathetic delusion melt into slag and ignite their bones.

As Steve Gilliard likes to remind us from time to time, “When you’re enemies are drowning, throw 'em anvils.”

And when their heads are on fire, hose ‘em down with mercury fulminate.

So we’re doing this now.

God damned body counts.

Well of course we are.

OK, anybody still think this isn’t Vietnam 2.0?

If so, kindly pick out favorite firearm (and I’m sure you have dozens), jam it down your windpipe ‘til the hammer tickles your uvula, and pull the trigger. Because you, Pooky, are just way, WAY too stupid to live and need to get the fuck off my planet with all deliberate speed.

Unfamiliar with the topic?

I’ll make it easy.

See if you can spot any basic difference between this story, ripped from today’s headlines, with emphasis added by me.

Enemy Body Counts Revived
U.S. Is Citing Tolls to Show Success in Iraq
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 24, 2005

Eager to demonstrate success in Iraq, the U.S. military has abandoned its previous refusal to publicize enemy body counts and now cites such numbers periodically to show the impact of some counterinsurgency operations.

The revival of body counts, a practice discredited during the Vietnam War, has apparently come without formal guidance from the Pentagon's leadership. Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said they knew of no written directive detailing the circumstances under which such figures should be released or the steps that should be taken to ensure accuracy.

Instead, they described an ad hoc process that has emerged over the past year, with authority to issue death tolls pushed out to the field and down to the level of division staffs.

...
[The} Oct. 16 statement reflected some of the pitfalls associated with releasing such statistics. The number was immediately challenged by witnesses, who said many of those killed were not insurgents but civilians, including women and children.

...
"Specific numbers are used to periodically provide context and help frame particular engagements," said Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, director of communications for the U.S. military command in Baghdad. He added, however, that there is no plan "to issue such numbers on a regular basis to score progress."

During the Vietnam War, enemy body counts became a regular feature in military statements intended to demonstrate progress. But the statistics ended up proving poor indicators of the war's course. Pressure on U.S. units to produce high death tolls led to inflated tallies, which tore at Pentagon credibility.

"In Vietnam, we were pursuing a strategy of attrition, so body counts became the measure of performance for military units," said Conrad C. Crane, director of the military history institute at the U.S. Army War College. "But the numbers got so wrapped up with career aspirations that they were sometimes falsified."

The Vietnam experience led U.S. commanders to shun issuing enemy death tallies in later conflicts, through the initial stages of the Iraq war. "We don't do body counts on other people," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in November 2003, when asked on "Fox News Sunday" whether the number of enemy dead exceeded the U.S. toll.

That policy appeared to shift with the assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November, an operation considered crucial at the time to denying safe havens to enemy fighters. U.S. military officials reported 1,200 to 1,600 enemy fighters killed, although reporters on the scene noted far fewer corpses were found by Marines after the fighting.

...
High-ranking commanders also have contributed to the trend. In January, Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. officer in Iraq, said U.S. and Iraqi forces had killed or captured 15,000 people last year. In May, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned the killing of 250 of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" as evidence of progress in Iraq.

...
The release of such figures also can serve to boost the morale of U.S. forces and bolster confidence "that their plans and weapons work effectively," said Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, which operates in western Iraq.

...
Still, defense specialists such as Crane cautioned that enemy body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan are prone to inaccuracy and are of questionable significance. The murky nature of the conflicts, they said, make it difficult to know at times who is an insurgent, a criminal or an innocent civilian.

"There still are problems in identifying who is who, just as there were in Vietnam," Crane said.

And this swatch of photo-realistic dialogue ripped from Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam masterpiece, “Full Metal Jacket.”

LOCKHART
And, Joker ... where's the weenie?

JOKER
Sir!

LOCKHART
The Kill, JOKER. The kill. I mean, all that fire,
the grunts must've hit something.

JOKER
Didn't see 'em.

LOCKHART
Joker, I've told you, we run two basic stories
here. Grunts who give half their pay to buy gooks
toothbrushes and deodorants — Winning of Hearts and
Minds--okay? And combat action that results in a
kill--Winning the War.

Now you must have seen blood trails ... drag marks?

JOKER
It was raining, sir.

LOCKHART
Well, that's why God passed the law of probability.
Now rewrite it and give it a happy ending--say, uh,
one kill. Make it a sapper or an officer. Which?

JOKER
Whichever you say.

Anybody remember how that scene ends? The “weenie”? The fucking cherry on top?

LOCKHART
Grunts like reading about dead officers.

JOKER
Okay, an officer. How about a general?

Or how about yet another “Number Two Man” in the AQ network that no one had heard of before his teeth had been pulled out of the rubble and matched with a name.

If you still can’t see the terrible symmetry and where it is leading us, lay down where you are, draw a chalk outline around yourself and wait for the M.E.

Because you are already as one with the dead.

Harriet and George discuss her future circa 1989.

Stick with me toots!

I’ll make ya’ a judge.

A really-real judge.

One 'a them Supreme Court judges!

But George, you’re not even a really-real cowboy.

Some day, toots. Some day...

(BTW, the photo is from the fabulous midget western – “The Terror of Tiny Town” – via kidshirt’s blog, past which I ambled while peeking, Odin-eyed at the internets from my sick couch.)

Knowing what one knows about the M.O. of the Potempkin Presidency, how to explain Harriet Miers?

In other words, what the fuck was Dubya actually thinking, and has he finally just flipped?

Less than a week ago, this was the best defense the world-killers at the White House could muster. The primary narrative delivered via the NYT...

Plenty of Praise for a Nominee, but Few Details
October 16, 2005

By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 - Ask any of Harriet E. Miers's typically press-shy White House colleagues what she has been like in her years as a top Bush administration staff member, and the praise pours out. She is intelligent. Meticulous. Selfless. Insightful.

But when it comes down to cases, they have a harder time.

"You know, she's a very gracious and funny person," said Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget whom Ms. Miers succeeded as deputy White House chief of staff in 2003. "I was racking my brain trying to think of something specific."

In the next breath, Mr. Bolten recalled relaxing with her at Camp David. "She is a very good bowler," he said. "For someone her size, she actually gets a lot of action out of the pins."
...

[A] lack of specificity [over what she has actually done] has compounded the White House's difficulties in selling Ms. Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court and opened the field to her harshest critics.
...
"You might think anybody who was preparing something to go to the president would already have taken care to see that it was perfect," said David G. Leitch, a former deputy White House counsel who is now general counsel to the Ford Motor Company. "But Harriet always scrubbed them one more time, and managed to come up with things that people hadn't seen or thought of before, from the broad wording of an issue to errors in punctuation."
...

But he added, "What I think made Harriet so successful as staff secretary was that she was a diligent and honest broker, able to digest very complicated material rapidly, and produce a fair resolution for the president, so that the advice that was going in to the president was fully and fairly presented."
...

Kristen Silverberg, a former White House official who is now an assistant secretary of state, spent part of 2003 in Baghdad as an aide to L. Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy to Iraq, and recalled that "Harriet was always the first one on the phone to say, 'Is everything O.K.?' " when there was bad news.

"When the Al Rashid Hotel was bombed," Ms. Silverberg said, "the first e-mail I got was from her."
...

"She's very meticulous," Ms. Silverberg said. "She has a lot of humility in the way she approaches her job. It's never about Harriet. It's always about making sure that everything is perfect and that the president gets the best advice."
...

She’s meticulous and makes sure the spelling is good, so she could probably clerk for a Supreme Court Justice and do a bang-up job. Damn, come to think of it, maybe I could hire her to proofread this blog. Y’know, tap out the dents and lay on an extra coat of lacquer.

And that’s really it. No “there” there whatsoever.

She goes to the Right Church, kisses the Right Ass, and can iron those pesky pluperfect tense entanglements out of the personalized birthday messages the President sends out to his Pioneer Grade contributors.

She punctilious, and positively dotes on Dubya...placing her somewhere between Alice from “The Brady Bunch” and the ideal Miss Moneypenny for the White House Follies production of “Live and Let Die.”

And she bowls well, so...what...The Big Liebowski II?

This is getting comical; turning into an episode of M.A.S.H. where Hawkeye runs around the camp trying to write a eulogy for some dear, departed Nurse Redshirt, only to find that the only thing everyone knew about her was, “Hard worker. Kept to herself. Fucked like a bunny!”

So at the end of the day, what? Why this person?

Is it that her chief weapon is bowling?

Bowling and assiduousness?

Bowling and assiduousness...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Bush.

And nobody, but NOBODY, expected Harriet Miers.

And it was all going so farking well, until this week. This week, when we discovered that her one virtue (outside of her place at the Right Hand of James Dobson in the Kingdom of Heaven and her demonic powers on the lanes at Chucky’s Bowl-O-Rama ) – her positively pecksniffish attention to minutia – was just another White House lie.

That she couldn’t be bothered with keeping up the vig with the Bar Association, and had to get a do-over on the written exam portion of the Big SCOTUS Exam

And the nature of that failure at the One Thing she at which she was supposed to excel, has the Bush/Brownie stink all over it: The complete failure to treat a nomination to the Supreme Court seriously.

The failure to comprehend that the SCOTUS isn’t a test you cram for, it’s a life of excellent you prepare for and lead.

What it clear is the Dimwit Dauphin, left to his own devices, has jammed both paws in two monkey-traps at once and won’t let loose of either banana: He cannot mollify the Right – the only sorry souls left on the face of the Earth who do not believe he is an arrant liar and an abject failure -- without backing down. And he cannot back away from his declaration that Harriet is the best qualified person for the job without admitting error; and admitting error is something he is congenitally counterprogammed never, ever to do.

After all, if Dear Leader isn’t in-fucking-fallible, then he’s not much of a Dear Leader is he? And the Right – especially the Evangelical Right – would much rather see the Universe burned to stumps and ashes that ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever admit that they have made a mistake.

And so here we are, wondering WTF just happened up on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Well, there is another possibility...

One so disturbing that is almost beggars description.

One that fits in all-to-perfectly with the complete failure of anyone, anywhere to remember anything specific Harriet Miers has done during her entire tenure as Loyal Family Retainer on Retainer. One that explains the citation from Joshua Bolten in the article above, where he, “was racking [his] brain trying to think of something specific."

The possibility that neither Rummy nor Cheney, nor Rove nor Dubya are actually in charge of this reckless, rudderless catastrophe of an Administration.

The real power behind the power behind the Dubya’s empty suit and radio-controlled underpants is none other Harriet Miers, Evil Jedi Master.


O.B. Wannabe K. Nobody, Esq.

The first clue should have been her birthplace –- the hardscrabble town of Midichlorian, TX.

A midlife convert to the Force, Harriet’s devotion to proper subject/verb agreement and symmetry caught the fancy of young, peevish, fake-oilman from Midland.

Or so he thought.

Instead, she found this weak-willed sot with the right name and speed-dial access to both a Rolodex full of “Fuck This Country” capitalists and a mob of ruthless wingnut jihadists, and bent him to her will. Using a wily combination of blunt-force, gagging flattery and Jedi mind tricks, she remade him into a snappy power-suit a woman named Harriet might wear with a few sparkly pins and tassels on her way to a crucial, pivotal job for life where she can change the course of our national destiny for the next twenty years, unfettered, unchecked and unbalanced.

Bush, although almost used up now, can once again play out his role as hollow, armor-piercing shell, suitable for delivering one last charge of Fundy High Explosives through the shield of the Constitution and into the heart of Democracy itself.

And given that the default-setting of the GOP is already “mindless obedience”, and that National Embarrassments like Brownback and Santorum can already be distracted and confused by shiny objects, it looks like all that stands between us and mandatory “Bowling For Jesus: Ten Pins and Ten Commandments” re-education classes may be our own, benevolent Jabba the Hutt...


“Bwahaha! Your mind powers will not work on me girl!”

Go get ‘em, Ted.

"When it is dark enough,

you can see the stars." -- Charles Austin Beard

Some stories just make me smile.

When rocket scientists do something supremely cool and jerk one out of the park, the atmosphere, Earth’s orbit and lay a Tonka toy down on the surface of another world light as a feather...that’s just indisputably cool.

When that little land rover trundles off its platform and starts sniffing around, Swiss MetaArmy Knife in on actuator, and a cell phone in the other, chatting us all back on Terra up about the environs like a teenage girl running down the dateable boys in her class...that’s also just toe-curling magnificent. Both for what new knowledge it actually may uncover, and for what it says about the more hopeful and ass-kickingly angelic side of our species.

And then there’s the story where the obscure grad student researcher accidentally stumbles onto something awesome. Something that will absolutely change the world for the better, in a measurable way, with zero downside.

Something small and huge and wonderful.

Something like this from LiveScience.com:

Accidental Invention Points to End of Light Bulbs
Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer

The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork.

An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. The miniature breakthrough adds to a growing trend that is likely to eventually make Thomas Edison's bright invention obsolete.

LEDs are already used in traffic lights, flashlights, and architectural lighting. They are flexible and operate less expensively than traditional lighting.

Happy accident
Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That's less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair.

Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.

When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.

"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."

Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn't pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb.

...
If the new process can be developed into commercial production, light won't come just from newfangled bulbs. Quantum dot mixtures could be painted on just about anything and electrically excited to produce a rainbow of colors, including white.

That's the pic at the top of this post: a nano-light.

Probably too immature a technology to hope that they can crank out strings of festive lights for Fitzmas, but anyone with a functional imagination can see where this is going.

Whoo-Hoo!!!

Dancing Queen

Meets her Waterloo

What could this latest twist in the Judy Miller, Pandemonium Carnival

NYT, Miller Spar Over Role in Leak Probe
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case.

In a memo to the staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller says Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was not one of the recipients of a leak about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Miller says Keller's criticism is "seriously inaccurate."

"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," Miller was quoted as saying in a Times story Saturday.

...
In recent weeks, Miller testified to the grand jury in the leak probe that she had discussed Wilson and his wife in three conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June and July of 2003.

Keller wrote that if he had known of Miller's "entanglement" with Libby, he might have been more willing to explore compromises with the prosecutor who was trying to get her testimony for the criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's identity.
Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She was freed on Sept. 29 when she finally agreed to testify.

...
"As for your reference to my 'entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social or other relationship with him except as a source," Miller said.
Underlying the issue is Miller's own flawed prewar reporting on Iraq.

...
"It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors," Keller wrote. By waiting more than a year, he said, "We allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers."

Op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd weighed in with further criticism in Saturday's Times. "Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, (Miller) was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers," Dowd wrote.

If Miller returns to covering national security issues, Dowd wrote, "the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands."

Possibly have to do with this bubble-gum headline fresh from the Eurovision Song Contest?

WATERLOO WINS CONGRATULATIONS

Europe has voted; ABBA wins Congratulations, the anniversary show dedicated to 50 years Eurovision Song Contest. Although the selection method raised the eyebrows of many, the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winner can now add a new title to the long, long list; the all-time winner of 50 years Eurovision Song Contest! What else can we say than... Congratulations!

The show
The show itself didn't bring any big surprises. The show's most hilarious moment was Birthe Wilke's intervention in the almost-kiss between Katrina and Renars. Slightly embarrassing was Lys Assia's announcement of Helena Paparizou's song... "what was the song title again?" With all respect for the winner of the first Eurovision Song Contest, of course!
...

The results
Remarkably, fans' favourites Eres tu, Everyway that I can and Congratulations didn't make it to the final five. The songs that made it through the first voting round;

• 1958 - Italy - Domenico Modugno - Nel blu di pinto di blu (Volare)
• 1976 - UK - Brotherhood of Man - Save your kisses for me
• 1974 - Sweden - ABBA - Waterloo
• 2005 - Greece - Helena Paparizou - My number one
• 1987 - Ireland - Johnny Logan - Hold me now
...

Judy...and a list of tooth-rotting, pop-factory, neutron-weapon-tunes topped by the retro-viral "Waterloo."

Well, seemingly, very little. To the untutored eye, nothing at all.

Until you figure in the MoDo-“Becky Sharp/Vanity Fair” tropism trope (and isn’t it a rare day when you get to use those two words, back-to-back) more of which you can read about here.

Add in the presence of a tryst cipher between them. Oh, did you think all of that “aspen turning” nonsense was only Cosa Nostra Fish Email?

And finally dope out -- using a very complex algorithm involving DayQuil, scotch and Wild Berry Zinger tea -- that “their” song was “Fernando”...

That she was his “Dancing Queen of All Iraq”...

And that her pillow nickname for him was the bunny-cute, num-num, baby-talk “Ooter-Scoo”...

...and it all falls into place.

What, do I have to spell it out for you?

Well, OK.

1...2...3...

My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender
Oh yeah, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way
The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself

Ooter-Scoo - I was defeated, your media whore
Ooter-Scoo - promise to love you for ever more
Ooter-Scoo - couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Ooter-Scoo – thought it was my fate is to be with you

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

Ooter-Scoo – now finally facing my Waterloo

My my, I tried to get your back but Fitz was stronger
Oh yeah, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight

So how could I ever refuse
I feel like I win when I lose

Ooter-Scoo - I was defeated, your media whore
Ooter-Scoo - promise to love you for ever more
Ooter-Scoo - couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Ooter-Scoo - knowing my fate is to be with you

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

Ooter-Scoo – finally facing my Waterloo

So how could I ever refuse
I feel like I win when I lose

Ooter-Scoo - couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Ooter-Scoo - knowing my fate is to be with you

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

Ooter-Scoo - finally facing my Waterloo...

I figure every event needs an anthem, and absent something better, this is what'll be banging out of my speakers on Fitzmas Day.

Oh, Lord, help Dubya waste the Ay-rabs...

...and I’ll build You the biggest megachurch on Earth, right in downtown Tikrit.

So, what to do when nursing a big fever?

Sweating and shivering like a White House staffer on Fitzmas eve (and who coined that term anyway? Brilliant.) and working on a second bowl of chicken wondersoup from El Presidente -- a Mexican joint across town and delivered to this locale by a kind soul?

Well, I suppose I could wonder if it's Avian flu.

Nah. It's not, but the cat bit me on the ankle this morning, smiled and said, “Taste’s like chicken.”

But that's probably just be the fever talking.

Or play a rousing game of, "What's that smell?"

Nah. No way of telling olifactory hallucinations from the genuine articles.

No, when the eyes won’t focus and the body holds liquids as poorly as a pane of glass, what to do but read the interview with Juan Cole in the Asia Times.

It’s a long piece and worth a longer read, but I pared it down to a few paragraphs that underscored a point I hadn’t thought about in quite the way Professor Cole lays out (emphasis added by me.)

Asia Times 10/20/05

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Grenades in the global economic cockpit

Tom Engelhardt interviews Juan Cole

...
JC: ...

Basically, the public is informed about things like the Middle East by generalist journalists who were in Southeast Asia or Russia last year, and by politicians and bureaucrats who were dealing with some other region last week. And then there's official Washington spin, and the punditocracy, the professional commentators, mainly in New York and Washington, who comment about the Middle East without necessarily knowing anything serious about it. Anybody who's lived in parts of the world under the microscope in Washington is usually astonished at how we represent them. You end up with an extremely persistent set of images that almost no actual information is able to make a dent in.

TD: Can you apply this to Iraq?

JC: The famous instance is the interview deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz gave to National Public Radio in February before the Iraq War. He said words to the effect that Iraq will be a better friend to the United States than Saudi Arabia had been. It shows you he was intending to replace Saudi Arabia with Iraq as a pillar of the US security establishment in the Middle East. Saudis are Wahabis and they have sensitivities about their holy cities, Mecca and Medina. Iraq, he said, is a Shia society. It's secular. He juxtaposed Shia and secular. And then he added, it doesn't have the problem of having holy cities. The Washington power elite that planned out the invasion appears to have thought that Iraq was a secular society, including the Shi'ites amongst them, and they seem to have been unaware of Najaf and Kabala as among the holiest shrine cities in the world of Islam.

It's not a matter of stupidity on Wolfowitz's part. It's a matter of being uninformed. Willfully uninformed. He just believed whatever people like [long-time Iraqi expatriate politician and corrupt banker, now vice-premier] Ahmed Chalabi told him about Iraq. He probably hadn't read as much as a whole book on Iraq's modern history. Well, Iraq wasn't a secular society.

...

TD: Do you think Bush has dug his own grave?

JC: I mean, this is one of the great foreign policy debacles of American history. There's an enormous amount at stake in the oil Gulf, and Bush is throwing grenades around in the cockpit of the world economy. So I think he has dug his own grave with regard to Iraq policy. Most politics in the United States, though, focuses on domestic issues.

TD: Despite the usual centrality of domestic issues, I happen to think that, above all else, the war has driven the Bush people ever since the post-invasion period. When, for instance, you look at the latest AP/Ipsos poll, what's bothering the evangelicals now above all else? It's the war.

JC: Yes, they are upset about what happened in Iraq because Bush made an alliance with the religious Shi'ites, which meant an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists who have now put a Koran veto on legislation in Iraq. You know, the evangelicals were dreaming big. They thought Iraq was going to be a missionary success, that they would make the Iraqis into Protestants. But any missionary who showed up in Iraq now, we'd soon be seeing him on video pleading for his life. None of their objectives with regard to Iraq have been achieved.

This is something, by the way, that the evangelicals have been dreaming of since the 1850s. It's how the American University in Beirut got there. The Presbyterian missions were the ones that originally tried to missionize the Middle East and they failed all along the line - and they continue to fail. The Bush moment was a moment in which those nineteenth century dreams of evangelical missionizing and imperial might being melded together were briefly revived. Now it's become clear to them that this is just not going to happen, so they're angry, they're disappointed. You can understand that.

All of the facts have always been there. The mass exporting Bibles to Iraq. Casually tossing around the term “crusader” in the early, Cake-Walking days of the war. The strong and explicit “Dubya’s Doin’ God’s Work” Iraq War through-line (up to an including the likes of a our very own, latter-day Col. Jack T. Ripper in the person of Army Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin who was in the habit of launching into evangelical tirades, while in uniform, as infoplease ably sums up here:

U.S. Army general, violated military rules when he spoke in uniform at churches and before religious groups, portraying the war on terror in religious terms. He called the God of Islam “an idol,” and said, “My God was a real God.” He also declared that President Bush is in the White House because “God put him there.” The deputy inspector general for the Defense Department said Boykin made 23 such speeches dating back to Jan. 2002.)

But here Juan Cole synthesized the larger context so correctly and in the proper historical focus that after I read it I had a minor, “Of course” moment. Lightly slapped my head, got dizzy and then went caroming off the walls for a quick false-alarm visit down the hall to the bathroom.

Won’t make that mistake again.

Fucking flu.

Iraq was to be a “missionizing” moment for the Evangelicals that they saw as every bit as theologically target-rich, world-tipping and once-in-a-lifetime as the neocons viewed the U.S. conquest the 2rd largest proven petroleum reserve on Earth as the fulfillment of Phase One of their Imperial Dreams.

Every bit as much as the Patriot Act appealed to the not-so-secret Fascist heart that beats deep in the Republican Body Politic.

Every bit as much as wasting brown people appealed to the Racist Wing of the GOP.

Every bit as much as mutating the Halliburton keiretsu into a not-so-secret Shadow Government and Private Military, funded by American Taxpayers and answerable to no one but their Board appealed to conscienceless Corporatist thugs like Cheney.

In a day or two or three, I’ll have sweated out whatever it is that’s kicking my ass, and I’ll look back and wonder whether or not I really was watching a “Disco Murders at Club ‘Fever’” Starsky and Hutch rerun, because it’ll feel too weird. Too swirlingly dream-logical to have been true.

That’s the thing about being sick or drunk or oxygen-deprived; after the fact it’s sometimes hard to remember – or even believe – how debilitated you actually were or how oddly you actually behaved.

And now, by the grace of God, we hold out a sliver of hope that we may be watching our most ruinous national disease run it’s course. At home, we see indictments and weak but unmistakeable Moderate and Media rebellions popping up like mushrooms around (and even within) the fastness of the Party of God. Abroad, everyone who cheered on this dreadful War now has to watch as their particular slice of the Fantasy Pie curdles before their eyes; Each cult of the GOP coven with nothing left to do but stand as idly by as the head of FEMA while their anti-Democratic fever dreams circle the bowl and gurgle away into the septic tank of history.

And with a lot of luck, a year or two from now we’ll be passably sober and sane again, ravenously hungry and wondering out loud what in the Hell we were thinking ever letting the Gang that Couldn’t Loot Straight anywhere near the Treasury, the launch codes and the U.S. Constitution.

American Gods.

An e-meter measuring the depth of potential mark’s pockets and gullibility.

The quote goes, “Against stupidity the Gods Themselves contend in vain.”

But who contends against Stupid Gods?

In the last few weeks, various aspects of the Fuctard Divine and their errand boys on Earth seem to have boiled out of the censer and run like armed and drunken otters hither and thither.

The big ones – places where humans are mown down like wheat by the trembling of the planet – are obvious. And ancient. And not to be taken lightly.

In Iraq, daily the Bush Family makes blood sacrifice on the Altar of Mars: one Child of God after another – soldier and civilian, young and old, man and woman – are shepherded into the abattoir and into the insatiable belly of the War God by its NeoCon High Priests.

The victims are herded down the Avenue of the Prince of Lies, named in honor of the another Old Immortal before which the Bush Family makes obeisance. After all, without a breathtaking concatenation of deception, the road to Baghdad would have been permanently barred, and Mars would have gone hungry. This way, both Mammon and Ares get Happy Meals made of manflesh, treasure and our international reputations.

And above it all, from New Orleans to the United States Supreme Court to the Oval Office, Hack-Ra -- the God of Arrogant, Privileged, Third-Rate Poltroons -- reigns across the land with his hand-maiden, Susej -- the hate-filled Anti-Jesus that is worshiped with such pinheaded fervor by the dribbling kinder of Falwell and Dobson.

But at least three of the lesser gods have been fighting to get a little press in recent weeks.

For starters, how to explain the letterboxed reference(s) to “Valerie Flame” by Queen Judy other than as her finally, publically copping to her own Basement Zoroastrianism. Her deep and abiding belief in the teachings of Zarathushtra, founder of one of the oldest religions extant, as well as being what may have been the first monotheistic religion.

This of course put on a collision course with “Scooter” Libby’s almost fanatical Druidism.

You didn’t know?

"It is fall now … Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life."

C’mon! If that’s not animism, then I don’t know my Neo-Pagan codes.

And then came this about the Tom Cruise’s Crazy Spaceship Religion from the LA Times via the Chicago Tribune.

Mock them using another name
Scientology lawyers order website devoted to ridiculing Cruise to stop using domain name scienTOMogy.info.
By Scott Martelle
Times Staff Writer

October 19, 2005

Some things just aren't funny — at least to the Church of Scientology.

A New Zealand-based website that says it is devoted to "exposing Tom Cruise's moronic behavior in his relentless crusade to promote the Church of Scientology" has been ordered by church lawyers to stop using the domain name www.scienTOMogy.info.

The reason: Web surfers might confuse it with the real thing.

The site states that it has no connection with the Church of Scientologists and offers a link to the Scientology home page. Then it post links to a series of videos of Cruise talking about Scientology, including a sci-fi video parody of the actor's infamous May television appearance on "Oprah," in which he appears to electrocute her.
...

The scienTOMogy.info website has posted an exchange with Moxon & Kobrin lawyer Ava M. Paquette, which began in September, in which Paquette warned that the Church of Scientology owns the trademark to the word Scientology.

"The fact that you have changed one letter ('m' instead of 'l') does not protect you from trademark infringement," Paquette wrote before pointing out that infringing on a trademark could lead to a $100,000 fine. Paquette then demanded that the domain name be transferred to the Church of Scientology.
...

Or to paraphrase Gypsy Rose Lee, “God Is Love...but get the Domain Name.”

And you know, I’ll take ‘em all, on one condition.

All of them.

The Latter Day Saints and their absurd angel. Buddhists. Sikhs. More kinds of “Christians” that Hines has flavors. Jews, three different ones. Agnostics. Righteous atheists. Existentialists. Muslims. The Nation of Islam. Frisbeetarians. A thousand more.

I want them all making a glorious Carnival of stupidity and morality, farce and faith. I want 200 million Americans debating ethics from every angle and I want my inalienable right to mock any one or all of them without mercy protected like a sliver of the True Cross.

And all of that only happens when the Public Square is kept Scrupulously Secular.

That’s why, until the rise of the Bush Regime, the fact that the U.S. Constitution explicitly bans religious tests for public office has been honored by one Administration after another. That’s why the meaty thumb of the Federal Government needs to stay the hell off the scales.

That’s why a fastidious and heavily-armed Neutrality is the only Gospel any true lover of democracy ever wants as a State Religion.

Why this particular ramble?

Well my favorite holiday –- Halloween –- is just around the corner. It’s our dark, tamed, national Bacchanal, but it still gets me right in the Bradbury every year. The leaves are coming down in a profusion of all the colors that we never see during Spring. The air stings on the cheek, and the white rime precursor of genuine winter and death is on the ground every morning.

Carrying groceries –- now a little heavier with taters, peas, ham-hocks and other soup fixin’s -- you suddenly notice that you can see your breath. Your heel finds a small patch of paper-thin black ice and as you stumble just a bit, you remember that you have to be careful of the ground again. The odometer in your head rolls over and suddenly Summer is far away, and gauzy memories of the groaning tables of Thanksgiving and Christmas are abruptly in front of you and frisking along in your direction decked out in Brown and Red and White.

We put on masks, get goofy and try to scare ourselves, and if we don't we wish we were. We look Death respectfully in the eye and laugh. (Which reminds me, in honor of the coming day, maybe I’ll post of a nasty, little story I wrote a few years ago. Flash fiction –- less than 500 words. A little, seasonal Trick or Treat sumthin’ from me to you.)

Halloween stirs up recollections of a hundred horror stories from the years past, one of my favorite of recent vintage being Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”. If you’ve never read it, you really should; it’s very much for adults, and perfect for this time of year. A novel that asks you to sit down and understand this country through the filter of the bloody, Old World Gods that were imported from abroad and forced to mutate and assimilated themselves into the New World.

Helluva book.

And it also led to the title of this post, and put me in a mindset to pen this strange, weaving interlude.

So the circle of life is complete...

Drinky and The Brain

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

Shut the Fuck Up, Drinky!

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

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

Good thing Dubya isn’t a reader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you want me to brief you?”

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

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

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

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

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

1. Fuck the healthy company to death

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

3. Sell the corpse for medical research.

4. Move on to the next victim.

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

That was the Promise of a Bush Presidency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jagoff!” he said loudly.

“Whassat, Karl?”

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

"Self-...? What?"

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

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

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

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

“Yes it is, sir.”

"And fightin' the Evil Dewars!"

"Right again. Sir."

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

The sound of feet padding away.

“Jagoff.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friedman ends with the caveat that…

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

Jiminy Jillickers, Radioactive Man!

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

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

Killer Queen

I blame Steve Gilliard for this.

Specifically his “Which champaign goes with frogmarching post?” in which Moet is prominently mentioned...

‘cause then when I rolled out of bed this a.m., the music started...

And this popped out.

Also large apologies to the late Freddy Mercury, and small apologies to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge for one line.

1...2...3...

He swills Moet et Chandon
In front of his petty Cabinet
'Let them eat cake' Bar says
Just like Marie Antoinette

A built-in remedy
For Katrina and Sistani
An ethanol invitation
He can't decline

Fuck ‘em all with no regrets
This is what a Mandate gets
Proficient in every vice

They’re the Killer Regime
Gunpowder and Jimmy Beam
Nothing but an empty meme
Guaranteed to blow your mind

Anytime

Fucktardery of rare device
Naught but ass and appetite
Wanna try ?

To avoid complications
In the State of the Union Address
In conversation
They kneecap both the Wilsonses

Sold the place to China
Hid out in Condis Vag**a
(Careful of Dick’s Angina)
Then again Gannon’s ready...
If you're that way inclined

Harriet came naturally from Texas (naturally)
For boys she couldn't care less
But she's fastidious and precise

They’re the Killer Regime
Gunpowder and Jimmy Beam
Nothing but an empty meme
Guaranteed to blow your mind

Drop of a hat they’ll invade your soil
(If you’re brown and have some oil)
Then go eternally On Vacation
While we're nationally out of gas

To absolutely drive you wild, wild..
They are out to get you

They’re the Killer Regime
Gunpowder and Jimmy Beam
Nothing but an empty meme
Guaranteed to blow your mind

Fucktardery of rare device
Naught but ass and appetite

Wanna try ?
You wanna try...