Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 1.

Farewell to Jurassic Pork, a friend of this blog, who has opted to pack his own site in and go dark.

Go in peace, amigo.

On Fox…

Tony Snow was welcomed back to “the other side of the table” (although presumably the Fox R&D Department “Anti Sinisterization Term” is working on a monodextrous table that has no left side.) and right out of the box we get:

Wallace: What do you have to say to the people who have our soldiers?

Snow: “Give ‘em back.”

Wow. Flip. Cavalier. Heedless that these are actual lives they’re playing with. More and more, Tony forgets to us his Outside Republican Voice when facing into the camera thingie and speaking for the White House.

But he does serve up valuable reminders of those subtle, important verities that we in our busy, workaday lives have clearly forgotten,

Such as: “Chris, you gotta understand, we’re in a war in Iraq.”

And: “You can’t conduct a war based on opinion polls.”

Well thank God for TonyTonyTony! But for his wise admonition I would not be sufficiently rhetorically girded against the verbal predations of those who are constantly insisting that we are NOT at war in Iraq.

That Iraq, in fact, does not exist at all.

That we are actually battling Glaroon, the Chief Manipulator. Or perhaps the Sons of the Bird, (And oh yes, “The Bird is Cruel”) Or maybe Red ‘Lectroids.

But Iraq? Not so much.

Of course, the Persistent Insistors who make these bizarre claims exist largely in Karl Rove’s TuffBook laptop, preloaded along with “Liberals who want to give terrorists therapy” into his Talking Point Word Template. Or on the showroom floor of GOP Strawman dealerships scattered around in the simpleton Red lands.

Also good to know that we’re not making war based “based on opinion polls”, but sticking with Don Rumsfeld’s tried-and-true method of following the strict protocols generated by his NeoCon Magic-Eight-Ball-and-Oiuja-Board set.

Any chance Dubya might eventually tire of rubbing Djinn Rummy’s lamp and listening to his twaddle while American get fed into the meatgrinder?

My sources say…”Ask Again”.

Q: Where does the Preznit view the Democrats on Iraq?

The Preznit’s not thinking about the stinky Dems. He has the Big Job of building a Jefferesonian Sandcastle in Iraq out of bear skins and stone knives and shrink-wrapped bricks of thousand-dollar-bills and has no time for provincial, reality-obsessed non-believers.

But don’t you have the problem of showing progress in five months? Because if not, don’t you stand a chance of losing at least one house of Congress? And then the Bad Thing happens? The End Times? The Suboenaville express en route to Perpwalkylvania?

Don’t you run the real risk of suddenly facing a Congress that remembers what “oversight” means, and from there face the danger that Americans might actually find out what in the fuck you have been doing in their name?!

Nah. Leadership’ll win. Fuck yeah! I mean sure, every stinkin’ little car bomb, mass execution, kidnapping and so forth gets reported as if it's "news". And if you read the Bad News Press you’d believe that there weren’t happy puppies prancing through the streets of Baghdad.

Sure, it’s more difficult to show the incremental and/or invisible and/or completely fictitious good news. Like those tiny, happy puppies.

Or the Good News of Continental Drift that takes place every day and that the Liberal Press refuses to report on may well be moving the whole Middle East into cooler, smaller and more manageable latitudes than you see today.

Or take global warming! Some alarmists want to see that as a bad thing, but imagine how much less threat there would be from roadside bombs if the roads were under 20 feet of water? How much easier would be to fight the terrorists on the high seas of Tikrit? Go Navy! How much simpler it would be to keep the streets free of sewage if they were canals? And how much closer the tankers could get to the wellheads, thus making pipelines obsolete and the supply of oil that much safer.

Which may lead some to wonder why glacier-lovers like Al Gore want the terrorists to win?

But of course there are some metrics like the electricals, supplies, availability of really high-tone porn at low, low prices, the number of bodies stacking up in morgues (Which could very well be a positive, even though the Liberal Press won’t tell you about the upside! Because remember, every dead civilian is one less set of “hearts and minds” to lose! Thus lowering the total number of hearts and minds in the mix, and making our jobs in Iraq just that much easier. It’s statistics, people; you can look it up. And it is also quite possible I boosted that whole line of “reasoning” from Stephen Colbert.) by which you can sorta measure progress, but this will still take a long time.

And if we even dare to guesstimate how much time it’ll take, it’ll make it take even longer, so if you support our brave troops, best thing an American can do is to shut up and don’t ask anything. About anything.

Because it is only walled safely up in a stone niche behind the sturdy brick of complete silence and mortar unquestioning obedience to the Dear Leader that freedom and democracy can flourish.

Sorta the “Constitution of Amontillado”.

That was the Fox under-card.

The title bout was billed as a punch-up between John Podesta (Liberal) and Simon Rosenberg (Centrist/Moderate/Not Liberal of the New Democratic Network).

And it wasn’t bad.

If we can keep this kind of party unity -- where we can pivot off of our strong, common goals instead of allowing the GOP to play “Crack the whip” -- we have a future.

Democrats are united…in that they all believe Dubya would have to lay on extra dimensions to find different angles from which he can fuck Iraq up futher than he has done so far.

Podesta: There’s a lot of agreement and unity the Party. Sure, Republicans have unity but only around politicizing the war.

Rosenberg (Who kept looking at his notes, which was annoying): People want politics taken out of this debate. Republicans confuse politics with policy. On most major things the GOP have turned everything they touched has turned to offal.

Mindless unity isn’t everything. Republicans (for example) are unified…in doing nothing. In ignoring the problem and hoping it’ll all work out. In “staying the course” long after the course has led you into the exurbs of Hell, because Republicans are apparently congenitally unable to admit error and change direction.

Worse, since they are slaves programmed for loyalty, they believe robotically repeating the same, failed policy over and over and over again is actually a virtue.

But the “debate is good” strategy can’t work over the long term because, in the end, one is elected to govern, and since it is not possible to do all worthy things, governance is about choosing, and not among saints and heroes.

Or between angels and devils.

Sorry chillun, but your range of viable choices are almost restricted to “Ruinous” and “Does not trigger my gag reflex”, and the last six years have been textbook examples of what happens when certain people cannot or will not distinguish between the two.

Wallace: But we beat you in ’02. and in ’04. Because we’re united, see. United. Sure we’re united around disaster, delusion and deficits, but here in Jesusland unity is the absolute value, not the piddling details about what bolting ourselves to the deck of the Lusitania might mean in the long term.

And then comes the Fox Trademarked Question:

“Some might listen to John Podesta and say that you are rooting for failure in Iraq.”

The proper answer to which is A) Who, specifically, would ask such a craven, asshatted question as that? Because some may say that any hack of a Blackshirt who would try to roll out the swiftboat like you just did under the pretext of being a journalist should be hung up by his heels and have his taint belt-sanded until we hit sternum.

Not me, of course. Just “some people.”

And with statements like…

…Broadly speaking, the “fact” is that the Democrats aren’t serious about national security.

And

…If we’re at war with anyone, we’re at war with Al Quaeda. And they’re the one’s we’re fighting in Iraq.

Brit Hume continues to dominate the field as the nation’s number one practitioner of Lying as Public Performance Art.

On Face the Nation: Tony Snow. Then the And-and-Barney duet of Joe Biden and Lindsay Graham: the Senators from the great state of Teeveeland.

Fox faxed over the Qs and As for Snow to follow, and he did, letter by letter, beat by beat.

Short Biden: Sure almost all of us supported giving the authority to make war to the Preznit so he would have the room to negotiate. But we all massively underestimated how utterly incompetent the clowns in the White House are.

I have always asked for benchmarks. For metrics. This Administration is always a year late and God knows how many deaths short. A year ago I asked for the White House to lay out specific benchmarks. Three years ago, Lindsay and I both came here and told you what the Administration was doing with the Iraqi Army and police wasn’t true.

Q: Would you have voted for this, knowing now what you knew then?

Biden: If I were President, I would have asked for it. But as a Senator, if I knew how completely this Administration would fuck this up, I never would have given it.

Graham: There’s no viable alternative from the Democratic party. What other strategy is there? What’s left but to stay…and stay…and stay…forever and ever?

On Meet the Press it was Jack Murtha. And Little Russ rolled out the carpet for Big Oil.
Video and transcripts are available everywhere, so I’m not going to comment.

Instead I’ll chat a little about Russert’s icky turn on the Charlie Rose show in a part deux.

This Week…was cancelled due to a conflicting sporting event.

Apparently there’s some big soccer dealie going on somewhere…


The Chris Matthews Show was lively for one and only one reason.

Matthews is a shill, and is usually firing blanks or blowing fat, bubbly kisses to the Bush White House while the bulk of his scuttlefish panelists line up to kiss whichever Administration ass is planted in front of them.

But once in a while he racks a live round, and it catches the lickspittle patrol wildly off-guard.

One such moment happened Sunday when the subject of Don Karleone came up, and his shift from indicted to unindicted co-conspirator. And for the most part, the panel was (per my gauzy, non-note-taken recollections) anxious to brush it back under the throw rug and move along to gleefully sawing the legs out from under the people who actually stand up to the criminal junta that runs the GOP...and then mocking them for being short.

So when Matthews wheeled the giggle gun around and fired this sort of thing off into the Kewl Kids Klubhouse (remember, all quotes approximate) -- “But the President did promise he’d fire the leaker. And indicted or not, we now know Rove is the leaker, and he’s not being fired. So is this where we’re at now? That the President of the United States can just lie to the American people about this…and that just OK?” – the sound of Joe Klein filling his Depends was actually audible.

And oh dog, if looks could kill?

Klein is a fifth columnist of the first water and was clearly amped up to do what he does for a living every week; namely shivving “fellow” Democrats in the kidneys while decrying the general state of awfulness and lack of Party unity and purpose.

So when Matthews lobbed that grenade into his fruit salad it was really quite amusing to see Joe squishing around in his own shit, eyes getting soft and piggy, trying to crouch down behind his own ridiculous beard, groping around for a glib and preferably monosyllabic answer that would not bring down the wrath of his corporate owners.

Hume, at least, is a straight-up thug who wears his brownshirt with a certain grunting, meatheaded pride. But Klein sleeps inside our perimeter and make his wage by draining off the blood of his “friends” by the pint and selling it to the bad guys as ink by the column-inch.

“Some may say” that the best creatures like Klein deserve is a napalm colonic capped off with a car-flare butt-plug.

“Some” may say that, but of course not me.