The Connecticut Manqué

in King Dubya’s Court.

(Pictured above: my impression of what Holy Joe’s Inner Freaked Out Child is looking like these days.)

There’s a saying that goes, “When you’re sick, that’s all you are.” That came to mind when these three items of interest blew in on the wind this last week. Because for whatever lateral thinking, synaesthetic reasons, they seem to me to be strongly related.

First, this idiocy passed on via Steven Gilliard...

Atrios posted this up and I wanted to comment.

Journamalism

Murdoch's rag in London:

“Any payola allegations or some quid pro quo deal involving Markos and myself are complete fabrications,” Armstrong responded on the web last week. The two bloggers believe it is revenge for their success as opinion-formers, which in the words of a friend “has freaked out a lot of people”.

Moulitsas himself has said little about the controversy, short of rubbishing The New Republic and other critics. In an e-mail to supporters, he suggested: “It would make my life easier if we confine the story . . . let’s starve it of oxygen.”

The email in question had absolutely nothing about any "controversy" regarding "payola allegations" or "quid pro quo" deals, and was only about Jerome Armstrong's SEC issues.

Well, let's try.

First, Shapiro works for Salon, who once hired whiny ass titty baby Jake Tapper. Second, that's not how it works. You could kiss Kos's ass all day long and that doesn't mean the community will rally behind you. Kos is not some kind of kingmaker, he basically serves as a community center for a lot of other people's ideas. His power is more like Steve Rubell's at the height of Studio 54 than some kind of powerbroker.

You go to Kos because that is the happening place to be seen, that's it. It's not because we are barons and he is our feudal lord.

When someone makes a better site, that's where people will go.

I have friends who dislike Kos and his site, but like me and mine. So, does that mean I am insufficiently loyal to him and his "cause".

Why do reporters persist in being lazy? Why?

…

Which is a pretty damned good question, and it never, ever gets answered.

This whatever-it-is gets a deeper and more ridiculous framing by the recent embarrassing hindbrain eruption from David Brooks entitled “Respect Must be Paid”, reproduced here because they keep that shit locked up at the NYT. And proving once again that there would be a lucrative market for Cranial Depends, should anyone want to go halvsies with me on the initial investment.

Observe while BoBo

unleashes a veritable whiny-titty-baby humannequin wave attack of these kinds of strawmen…

“They say that the great leaders are gone and politics has become the realm of the small-minded. But in the land of the Lilliputians, the Keyboard Kingpin must be accorded full respect.

The Keyboard Kingpin, a k a Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a mighty force in his own mind, and every knee shall bow.
…”

Of course, in Bobo’s case, to get to the General Theory, you have factor out the fact that here is someone who is essentially a royalist. A lad lashed from 401K to book deals to gonads in a Gordonian knot of self-interest and self-image to the sinking, stinking hulk of Modern Conservativism. A failure on so many intellectual levels that it would be hard to catalog them all without a bar code reader, a staff of fifty, a long weekend and a step ladder the size of the St. Louis Arch.

But it’s more than that.

So let us consider last, but not least, the problem of Holy Joe: That vexing Connecticut Manqué in King Dubya’s Court who cannot seem to get it through his Neutronium skull that Democrats do not like it when he plays loyal Media to Bush’s Jason.

We do not like it that he routinely and merrily stabs Democratic Values in the back and lobs them over the side of the boat to help the Dear Leader make his escape.
The summary is also via Mr. Gilliard…

The Lieberman conundrum
A party at war

What has mystified me from day one about Lieberman's campaign is the way he's actually campaigning. He seems to be oblivious about offending the vast majority of war weary Democrats, by calling them haters.

The thing which is weird is that Lieberman, with all the advantages of incumbency, seems to be intent on pissing them away.

What is even more striking is that he's setting up the anti-Lieberman party for every pol who asked him for help and got a cold shoulder. Lamont may be inexperienced but he's got a lot of organic suppport, driven by Lieberman's arrogance.

What is clear from the local papers is that Lieberman has made a lot of enemies over the years and all the blogging in the world couldn't create them. The explosion of the Lamont campaign, something I didn't think would be much more than a challenge to teach him a lesson, is about to cost him his seat.
…

So let me posit the following in response to Steve’s original, rhetorical question and tell you the Parable of Xerox PARC, which I’ll bet most of you already know.

See, once upon a time, there was a Big Company called Xerox.

They made copies.

And lo, one day the Corporate Overlords who ran the company saw the dark cloud of something called the coming “Paperless Office” looming darkly on the horizon. And being Overlords with tons of cash and an abiding interest in people using lots of paper, they gathered up the finest engineers and programmers and thinkers and suchlike in all the land, handed them a sack full of loot, sat them down on a lovely campus in Palo Alto and gave them their charter:

“Invent the Future.”

(Not that Xerox ever really had a lot to worry about; every “breakthrough” in paperless office technology has been accompanied in my guesstimation by a four-fold increase in dead trees products.)

And they did! These gadgetteers, code-poets and jimcrackologists sat around on bean bag chairs, smoking the finest Andean hash, canoodling like jackrabbits and cranking out things like the Graphical User Interface, networks, workstations, laser printing, object-oriented programming, AstroGlide, that invisible dog-walking dealy and next-generation plastic vomit that is still in use today.

(OK, about the hash, canoodling, AstroGlide, and novelty items I may be wrong. Or just lying. But about the rest, ’s God’s Truth.)

And so why doesn’t every frigging computer, peripheral and accessory on the face of the Earth have the word “Xerox” tattooed on it?

Because when the Corporate Overlords got a long look at what their geniuses had wrought, their only observation was, “But it doesn’t make copies.”

And so the Future – fully functional and in voluptuous detail -- languished in the PARC labs because it was owned by men who could not comprehend what it was they were staring at. And, prisoners of their own limitations, they let it sit and rot until young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak stumbled on this ultimate swag bag.

The boys picnicked on Xerox’s riches, absorbing the implication of what they were seeing in days – implications that were completely lost on the men who had bankrolled the endeavor.

And even though they managed to pluck only a few of the shinier baubles from the vast PARC treasure-city, the Steves nonetheless managed to change the world forever.

Because like Bobo and Holy Joe, Xerox was unable to project its imagination outside of its own hierarchical vision of how the world must be.

And understand that Bobo’s drivel about Kos comes from someone who, being a died-in-the-Brooks-Brothers Conservative, simply cannot imagine a non-hierarchical organization. Cannot understand what a movement looks like. Cannot comprehend the notion of a system where there are entities other than Law Givers (Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Dobson, etc.) and Followers.

A round table.

His conception of the orderly world is top-down. Master-servant. Then add in the fact that his conception of the political world is also deeply infected with that wretched fallacy of false bisection that I natter on about from time to time.

Since the Right has so obviously failed, and since Brooks cannot face that fact in the wild without risking complete personality implosion, it is therefore imperative for Bobo to imagine the Left and Right as perfectly, equipoisedly balanced Gemini twins; equally awful, equally culpable and identically odious in every way.

The raucous Lefties must somehow be just like the venomous Right, and since the Right has carefully cultivated a lock-steppin’, order-takin’ rank-and-sheeple for the last 30 years, thus it must also be on the Left.

This blinding fiction becomes a chauvinism desperately in search of a figurehead, and so into that role Maximum Leader Markos gets slotted, and the press falls dutifully into line.

To beat Howard Dean, the Right needed him to fit the frame of the “angry/crazy” Lefty, so they took one shout at one speech radically out of context and so let it be written: So let it be done.

They needed Kerry to be a Coward, so in roared the Swiftboaters.

And they need the Progressive Movement to be a commie fiefdom ruled over by Kos, Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi, so Bobo rants out this kind of hysterical gibberish because being a neatly numbered Borg – a dutiful 1 or 0 in the buffer of the Great Conservative Indifference Engine -- is the only method of organization he can grasp.

Just as being the Beloved and Maverick Senator from Connecticut is the only reality Holy Joe can accept.

If someone runs against him, that someone must ipso facto be unfit and possibly insane.

If the citizens can’t stand him, clearly the citizens are idiots.

If he makes his hay sabotaging his Party and our Principles, clearly Party and Principle must change to accommodate his Unalloyed Senatoriness.

What’s Good for Lieberman is Good for American, and so it has become literally beyond Lieberman’s capacity to understand that it is his positions that have gotten him into hot water. Incapable of self-reflection or self-correction, he must find the fault for his situation outside of himself. And the final, absurd logic of his peevish, ego-mad Paternalism dictates that if Democratic voters don’t know enough to renominate Himself, that is the final, water-tight proof that Democratic voters do not know what in the fuck they are doing.

To protect them, he must contravene their wishes. To serve them, he must disregard their will.

The bad news is, there is little point in trying to “debate” such people. Even though, time after time, observable results show their positions on virtually every issue to be dead or hollow or disastrous, you know God Damned well that, even in the afterlife, as he is being slow-roasted for screwing over the poor, Ronald Reagan is still dipping into his wallet for his favorite anecdotal lies, trying to “prove” to the Almighty that the only beneficiaries of the social safety net were Caddy drivin’, large livin’ Welfare Queens.

For the last 30 years they have had their talking points laid out for them by their Brain Caste like their favorite Sunday-go-to-meetin’ togs and bonnets and no amount fact is going to wash the minty-fresh truthiness of their deplorable ideology from their mouths.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is, like Xerox, in the end their fealty to an ossified heirarchy deprives them of the ability to distinguish between gold and Fool's Gold, and they end up picking the wrong fights, waging the wrong wars and going to the mattresses (or wingnut madrasses) to protect the wrong assets.

In the end, robbed of sight and smell, they almost never seen the hammer falling or catch a whiff of the poo they’re drowning in until it’s far, far too late.