Look Who’s Balking II

Unspiraling the double-helix of GOP DNA, it seems perfectly clear that both halves of the Party of God are still getting their marching orders fresh from from the White House Rec Room.

Different codes for different nodes, of course, but like the Mendacity Extrusion and Molding factory that it is, the GOP bullshit machine can sometimes seem to make little sense when viewed in grainy snapshots -- a conveyor belt moving raw sewage from somewhere to somewhere else, next to a pic of women in smocks and crosses tearing condoms in half, chock-a-block with images of dead American soldiers.

Just…Dada.

But when viewed in its totality?

From that vantage it is a very efficient Abattoir of the American Dream staffed by smiling Christopaths working elbow-to-elbow with bigots and bankers to snuff this nation out and replace it with something dark and fearful and vicious.

So, on the one hand we find the Rubberstamping Fist of the Party – the larcenists formerly known as the United States Congress -- acting in its role as Presidential Prison Bitch and whipped-spouse-enabler of White House criminality. Beseeching us all not to notice that it has jettisoned any pretense of interest in the idea of a check and balance against an Imperial President on a rampage through the Bill of Rights, and has decided instead to go all-in with the whole crazy, faith-based worldview and just go into its new business.

Simony II: This Time It’s Congressional.

Look here for a more, uh, peppery description of the first pass at Simony the GOP tried to palm off as the Pure Quill. Namely just ignoring Dubya’s Big Crime Party, which of course only encouraged the Toddler Prezit to struggle further and mightier to find the limits of law-breakiness up with which his Party would put.

Which turns out is up to and including announcing on the teevee machine that he had, in fact, broken the law repeatedly and did, in fact, intend to do so again.

Now on the old “Dragnet” teevee program, that’s what Joe Friday would have called “the easiest fucking confession we ever got out of any cocksucking skell in the history of this show, right Bill?”

And then able partner, Bill Gannon, would say, “A-fucking-men, Joe.”

And then would come the perp montage of Dubya, Cheney and most of the Cabinet…followed by 26 minutes of perky organ music, ‘cause the show would have been o-v-e-r.

But that was long ago and far away, in a fictional LAPD that hardly ever beat anyone into a coma.

In the here and now, a mere public, Prime Time, televised confessions of past felonies and intent to conspire to commit future felonies is not enough to elicit even a death-rattle-fart of disapproval on the part of the jellyfish congress.

Au Contraire!

THE FIX IS IN FOR BUSH
SENATE RACES TO MAKE THE ILLEGAL LEGAL

ACROSS the U.S. capital, lawmakers are scurrying from pillar to post in a frantic effort to put lipstick on a pig.

In an attempt to rein in the Bush administration and its cowboy tactics with the illegal wiretapping of Americans making calls overseas, various Republicans are floating proposed legislation that would make the president's actions legal.

Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine is proposing exempting the warrantless surveillance program from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which determines who and under what circumstances the government can spy inside U.S. borders. In general the law has explicitly prohibited the government from sneaking a listen into the phone calls of American citizens without approval from the federal intelligence court.

To our mind, the surveillance act has been good law. It gives the government the go-ahead to spy, even without a warrant, on Americans suspected of helping terrorists, so long as the government gets one within 72 hours.

DeWine, however, wants to give the administration even more time - 45 days. Which makes us wonder why he didn't just give the Bush team an entire year.

…
Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts is also mulling legislation and is reportedly annoyed that his committee is being ignored. He wants any bill that passes out of Specter's Judiciary Committee to be reviewed by the Intelligence Committee.

To us, this is mopping up after spilled milk, while the guy who spilled it, the president, gets off with a smirk.

Rather than trying to fix a law that wasn't broken until Bush decided to break it, Congress should be considering censuring the president. Otherwise the message from Congress to future presidents will be break any law you want.

We've got your back.

They view this as a fabulous “Trollops On Parade!” opportunity to scrub off the last vestiges of shill-moral-hectoring rhetoric which with they were so incredibly lavish just one, short Administration ago, trick themselves out in their crotchless hearings, bottomless earmarks and taxi-shoes and see which among them can out-slut the others.

They do this by taking the bold step of codifying their informal Master-Slave relationship with the White House and taking up the matter of issuing actual Presidential Indulgences for crimes already committed.

And in the act of sprinkling Magical Faery Forgivenesses upon their Dear Leader for using the Constitution as ass-floss and then rubbing their faces in the brown stripe, they also consent -- now and forever -- to be publicly “Cheneyed”: Shot in the face by a drunk and then forced to apologize to that drunk for having the temerity to get in the way of his felony.

That’s one side of the whorehouse: The money/power/legislative side.

And working the other side of the same wharf, is Dainty David Brooks.

Plying his mushy, wistful trade, in this little gem of a turd entitled, “A Vision, Bruised and Dented.”

…
If you wanted to put these changes in a nutshell, you'd say the Republicans have gone from soaring Bushian universalism to nervous, dumbed-down Huntingtonism.

Just over a year ago, Republicans were thrilling to the lofty sentiments of President Bush's second inaugural: that freedom is God's gift to humanity, that people everywhere hunger for liberty. To explain his efforts to democratize the Middle East, Bush hit all the high notes of the American creed, while not dwelling much on the intricacies and stubbornness of foreign cultures.

Today, many Republicans have lost patience with Bush's high-minded creedal statements. Like the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, they have come to believe that culture matters most. Lofty notions about universal liberty splinter on the shoals of Arab customs.
...

In the realm of foreign affairs, we have seen the rise of what Richard Lowry of National Review calls the " 'To Hell With Them' Hawks." These, Lowry writes, "are conservatives who are comfortable using force abroad, but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable, or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem."

…
Finally, there is the issue of domestic poverty. Hurricane Katrina rekindled a brief resurgence of compassionate conservatism, at least for President Bush. But Republicans in Congress were having none of it. They appropriated the money they had to, but they had no confidence that the federal government could do anything effective to transform the culture of poverty: the out-of-wedlock births, the family breakdowns and so on.

In short, Republicans seem to have gone from believing that culture is nothing, to believing that culture is everything — from idealism to fatalism in the blink of an eye.
...

European conservatives from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott usefully remind us of the power of culture and tradition. But American conservatives — from Hamilton to Reagan — have never taken that path precisely because they believe in the power of the American creed, precisely because they have an Enlightenment faith in the power of reason to change minds.
…

Oh my my, where to even begin with this slurry of straw men, mental lard and whinging nostalgia for a Glorious Conservative Past that never was, except to note the reason why I co-joined Roberts and Brooks in one post: because they are what the Republican Party has been reduced to.

Two-bucks-a-wank skanks, each working their own specialty, but both – all – in the stable of the same Unitary Executive Pimp.

Bobo presents himself here, Voguing his usual studied and highly-practiced pose of pious obliviousness ‘neath the flickering gas-lamps, tricked out in a thousand, feculent journalistic petticoats, wondering where all that “poo smell” is coming from.

While whizzing all around him like a school of blood-drunk land sharks -- close enough to tatter and flutter Bobo’s flounces -- cruise a veritable mob of Rippers. Red State Jacks and Republican Leather Aprons, decapitating and then tax-cutting the kidneys out of one vital department and program after another.

Picnicking on the misery and want they inflict on the many for the sake of the comfort of the very few.

Leering at dead New Orleans.

Laughing as the planet melts.

Blooding each other’s hollow faces with the remains of slain soldiers, dead for lack of a sane mission, a competent leader and material enough to keep them from their losing their limbs and lives in this idiotic war.

“soaring Bushian universalism”?

Who but a human vacant-lot ever believed that for a minute? Bush was elected and then reelected by a team of the most divisive, reptilian, strategists in modern political history by appealing to an confederacy of hatreds, bigotries and Suicide Jebusism who saw him as the delivery system for the overthrow of the United States government.

Period.

“Just over a year ago, Republicans were thrilling to the lofty sentiments of President Bush's second inaugural…”

Are you fucking kidding me?! The eleven minute speech were Dubya repeated the word “Freedom” 198 times and Cheney looked like he nodded off for half of it?

Can you find one Republican that can remember one line from it who doesn’t work as a White House stenographer?

Does Brooks believe even half of what he writes anymore?

The punctuation?

Anything?

Because the only thing memorable about Bush/Cheney 2004 was its soaring vulgarity.

It’s willingness to air-lift a backhoe into the White House basement to bore into the D.C. bedrock, because there were possibly depths to which they had not yet sunk in order to win.

It was an repulsive spectacle replete with death threats again America’s children if their parents voted wrong, and made possible only because a vast majority of the GOP Electorate were actually pig-ignorant enough to still believed that Saddam Hussein planned 9/11, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and Infallible Angels guide the steps of the Dear Leader.

“Hurricane Katrina rekindled a brief resurgence of compassionate conservatism, at least for President Bush.”

“Rekindled”? Are you shitting me?

Republicans believe in the elimination of the Government, and have been chiseling and blasting away at its foundation stones for years.

Katrina did nothing more or less that give Americans a prequel of the world that Conservatives are preparing for them.

And it scared the Holy Hell out of -- among others -- viscous-spined “they don’t really mean it” White House apologists like Brooks.

But of course, they do mean it.

Iraq is precisely what NeoCon and Fundamentalist Foreign Policy looks like when it’s allowed to metastasize outside of their circle-jerk think tanks.

Katrina is exactly the fantasy of a post-government, pre-Rapture Utopia on which Libertarians and Christopaths both spend their noxious seed.

And when the nation freaked out, the White House did what they always do; copied, pasted and "repurposed" some glib nonsense from the 2000 Campaign into the TelePrompTer, had Bush strap on his “I Wuuuuv You” face, and hope that the rubes would forget these promises that they never had any intention of honoring to begin with.

“Today, many Republicans have lost patience with Bush's high-minded creedal statements.”

Ahhh! So that’s the problem! The High-Minded, “Sekrit Genius” George Bush is being deserted by his disloyal retainers.

Well, it is a terrible thing to lose one’s mind, especially when you run it into a creedal and get it all banged up.

Bad orcs! Bad, bad orcs!

“But American conservatives…have an Enlightenment faith in the power of reason to change minds.”

And

“In short, Republicans seem to have gone from believing that culture is nothing, to believing that culture is everything — from idealism to fatalism in the blink of an eye.”

Like a week-old-dead-clown, Bobo manages to be both amusing and nauseating at the same time.

No, Mr. Brooks, the anthracite soul of your Party hasn’t fundamentally moved one inch in the last three decades, it's just gotten more and more brutally proficient at implementing and capitalizing on the same, loathsome strategy year after year.

Your Southern Strategy Party welcomes, waters, fertilizes and then cross-breeds new generations racists, Bobo…as a matter of policy.

Your Lee Atwater/Karl Rove-addiction keeps the air full of bile, the communal well of culture full of poison, and the nation at each other’s throats for no other reason than partisan gain…as a matter of policy.

Maybe in whatever fart-propaganda-rebreathing Bell Jar you call home, Mr. Brooks, your ravings sound reasonable. But out here in the Real World you simply sound insane.

Your “analysis” bears no relationship to any country, party or movement I have ever heard of outside of, oh, maybe, lurid "Shocking True Collectivist Sex Slave Stories!!" in the yellowing pages of "The Objectivist" magazine circa 1961.

Out here in the Real World, even your own Party’s founders flinch in horror at the irrefutable fact that your Party is now owned an operated by an raving mad cult of anti-Enlightenment/pro-Dark Ages freaks who think of the End of the World as an action plan.

To the left them are the racists, and to the right, the “Fuck ‘Em All” libertarians.

That’s your Party, Mr. Brooks.

Your Party, your movement and your dogma, which have now shown themselves to be so spectacularly corrupt, and on a scale so massive, it’s hard to gauge how deep the cancer goes.

What is clear is that Republican Conservativism has failed.

Republican Conservativism has failed because when given a chance to express itself fully, cities die.

Republican Conservativism has failed because once it gets its stinking paws on the helm of the Ship of State, it rams the nation into reckless and incompetent war.

Republican Conservativism has failed because it would rather the world perish than pay to save it.

But like the Commies before you, Bobo, you are almost congentially incapable of facing up to the idea that your Holy Writ is toxic, intoxicating, theoretical drivel that will always come to tears when applied to the Real World.

And so, like the Commies, you comfort yourself by whimpering that the Plan was perfect; it was the People that failed.

The Dear Leader was Great; it was the Peasants that let him down.

That there is nothing wrong with the disaster Republican Conservatives have wrought that a steaming load of More Republican Conservativism can’t fix.

With is why, in the end, the likes of David Brooks and Pat Roberts will always find their way into each other’s arms out behind the barn where no one looks.

Because men like Roberts wants the change the law to make Bush’s criminality retroactively licit, and men like Brooks wants to change the subject to make Reality the criminal and Dubya the victim.

Whores both, and the price men like these exact in American blood and treasure for their wretched social experiment is far to high to bear any longer.