Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

In which we are compelled to ask: why does Pat Buchanan want to cut-and-run from Korea?

And then muse over that little Dorset village of Wainscotting ... Wainscotting ... Wainscotting ...

On Fox News Sunday, we learn many, new and exciting words as State Department Guy Nicholas Burns (followed by a round table of smirk muppets) plays the entire DVD of Bush foreign policy and “Bush Doctrine” backwards at approximately 3 millions RPM. Rewinding every manic, ideologically-petrified Doctrinal Absolute they have ever said and done back so fast and frantic that the disc spun right on past the stolen election of 2000 and smack into the middle of the Clinton Administration.

All over a kooky little locked ward called North Korea.

Apparently “we” didn’t have a “consensus” on how to cope with Korea “a few years ago”.

Now, thanks to Chancellor Decider Von Uniter-Not-Divider, we have forged a new and hitherto unheard of mechanism to deliver a lethal hammerblow of international pressure to Kim Jung Il evil coin-purse.

What is this unimaginable new and radical League of Heroes?

It is something called the “United Nations”!

Yay!

And this highly secretive group apparently has an even more clandestine and powerful inner circle called the “Security Council”.

Double-Yay!

Patience, however, is advised.

“The world is more complicated than that," we are cautioned.

A “snapshot” on Sunday is not how you judge diplomacy.

The situation in Iran is “much better” than it was four years ago. We are “far better off”.

Shorter Bush Administration: “We are quietly trying to unfuck a fraction of what six years of loutish, loudmouth, dimwit, drunk dude-ranch cowboy bluster has fucked so deep into the ground that we are searing our foreskins on the Earth’s molten core. Which is why everything we ran against and mocked to win the votes of our Christopath legions -- patience, consensus-building, internationalism and the U.N. -- is now back on the table and spoken of with reverence.

At least on Sunday morning.

Oh, and no fingerpointing allowed! Fingerpointing, blaming and retribution are the exclusive and shriekingly self-righteous province of the Party of Personal Responsibility, and only when the President of the other Party is involved in premeditated fellation.”

Later, responding to Chris Wallace’s determined dissembling, former Clinton Administration Ambassador Wendy Sherman reminds him that, under Clinton and the Agreed Framework, the situation was genuinely, measurably better.

Less dangerous and at least trending in the right direction.

And that it was President ADHD that violated the terms of the agreement and ultimately handed North Korea a made-to-order excuse to bail and restart its nuke program in earnest thanks to Dubya’s torrent of bellicose, “Bring ‘Em On”-grade trash talk.

But trowelling the jingo, queer-bashing and flag-flogging on by the job-lot makes the no-necks feel smart and virtuous, so this is what we get now.

Wallace kept asking all of the professionals at the table, “Why should we trust, North Korea? Don’t they violate agreements?”

Of course the professionals has already taken pains to explain to Wallace a dozen times – individually and in shifts – that NO ONE had ever or would ever propose that, so when he refused to take his Asshat off and stop kicking the backs of their chairs and whining “AreWeThereYet AreWeThereYet AreWeThereYet AreWeThereYet AreWeThereYet!” they look at him as if he has a chaw of weasel droppings caught in his teeth and kept on rolling.

Bill Kristol advises what he always advises: Strut away, baboon-ass proud and red. Tighten the sanctions. Spank Russia. Spank China.

Mara Liasson: The problem is, the Bushies set the bar soooo fucking high that there is now no way to actually back off and do anything constructive without looking weak and impotent. And asshole, if you want to toughen the embargo on North Korea, you have to get China to cooperate.

So how EXACTLY do we do that, tough-guy?

If Kristol were a Saturday morning cartoon instead of a Sunday morning Mover in the GOP, he would have been hilarious; cavalierly tossing around gassy, delusional advice about what we should and should not do with China like a 19th Century railroad baron talking about the fate of "his" coolies.

I must say, watching Hume lecture Kristol on how things work “in the real world” was priceless, after which he acidly tells us all us kiddies he is dandling on his gouty knees that we certainly could “take out the missiles on the ground.”

And then, finally, Juan Williams asks the Dreaded Question that no Conservative will ever answer, and that a frightening number of Dems refuse to ask:

And Then What?

After you feed Social Security into the woodchipper…then what?

After you gut public education down to the studs at exactly the moment when the fate of our nation depends more than ever on a well-education citizenry…then what?

After you’ve taken out the Deck of 52 that we were told was all we would ever need to worry about in that land of explosively fermenting pre-Democratic Impuses called Iraq….then what?

After you let Osama Bin laden slip away…then what?

And the answer? To everything? Uh, blah blah blah the marketplace. And then, uh, yadda yadda yadda, “freedom on the march”. Then, uh, something about tax cuts. And the Culture of Life.

And then, well, it’ll all just sorta work out Ok.

Somehow.

Man oh man; when did become OK to be this stupid and open your pie-hole in public?

On CBS – Same Deal. Same ambassador.


On This Week… -- Dick Lugar. And the Allen vs. Webb race.

It is always amusing to see a slab of hair like Allen form sentences out of bumper stickers and blather.

George Allen all cranky abbout Democrats who resort to politics and “I told you so”.

James Webb: There are a lot of people who don’t like to be reminded that they were warned. But there has to be accountablility.

George Allen: You can “Monday morning quarterback” all you want, but the world is a better place with Saddam in jail instead of in his palace.

Shorter Allen: We here in the Party of Personal Responsibility don't "do" accountablility.

Worth +2,500 dead Americans? Worth tens of thousands of wounded? Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis? Tens of billions of dollars wasted, lost and looted by friends of this Administration?

And when did we have that debate?

Then on to the Panel.

George Will: Bush has finally become a Conservative. Finally realized that, as “the government can’t run Amtrak” (actually they could run it just fine if we would dump a tenth of the kind of resources into it that we lavish on highways) it is incredibly difficult to force whole other countries and government to do what we want them to do. It's hard. It requires patience. Etc.

Donna Brazile: The so-called Bush Doctrine is dead.

Brazile: Lieberman as taken out an insurance policy. Like he did in ’00. She was a little bit frowny over that, but not to worry; Donna assures her DLC clientele that, “I’m a Joe Lieberman Democrat!”

George Will: Joe Lieberman is a “good, liberal Democrat.”

Man! In one week, both Frump/Conservative George Will and Mealy/Conservative David Brooks have practically frottaged themselves raw all over Holy Joe to express their support of “liberal Democrat” Lieberman. Both positively steamy with twiddling irk over the Unfairness-of-Jobian-Proportions of a Democratic Senator being forced to face a Democratic opponent in the Democratic Primary.

Lawdy, Ladwy, Lawdy!

These leftwing activists (we are told) particularly in the blogosphere, are the ones a-stirrin’ up trouble.

Seriously, at the rate we get referenced in every other media -- usually ignorantly, as the smelly peasants who are lousing up the Neverending Beltway Beach Party and stubbornly refuse to be mollified with blandishments and offers extra sauce on our cocktail weenies -- and given the little thrill I still get in my tummy when I hear the blogs/netroots showing up all over the MSM as a genuinely new center of gravity, perhaps we need to change the name of the Left Blogosphere to “Wainscotting”.

(No actual photos of the Python “Wainscotting” bit available, so this eerily appropriate “Penguin on the telly” shot will have to suffice)

Ratcatcher: Wainscotting ... Wainscotting ... Wainscotting ... sounds like a little Dorset village, doesn't it? Wainscotting.

Woman (possibly a Kossack): We've been mentioned on telly!
…

Ratcatcher: Right. Well, I'm going in the wainscotting.

(Cut to 'Wains Cotting' woman, who rushes out again…

Woman (possibly an Atriot): They said it again!

Peter Beinart: The Dems are now like the Republicans. The activists see a “lockstep, disciplined” approach as the way to move forward. They see Karl Rove as their model.

Uh, no. We don’t.

Rove is a giggling, conscienceless hit man. A reckless bomb-thrower with his hand on the tiller of the Ship of State who gleefully screams "Traitor!" at the drop of a poll. Who clearly doesn't care how much irreparable rubble and ruin he leaves in his wake as long as he get his quota of GOP meatheads and demagogues elected by any means necessary.

He is the distillation of the maggoty Ends-Justify-The-Mean thinking that completely obsesses and consumes the GOP, allowing them to let their Coulters and Hannitys and Dobsons off their leashes to rage free and unhindered as Party spokesrodents.

And for some strange reason, the GOP rank and file are actually proud of the depths to which they routinely sink to win. This has always been the unbridgeable abyss between us; that these people are genuinely proud of their criminal and incompetent leadership.

Proud that they can hold any serious investigation into the cancers that are rotting the guts out of this country in limbo forever, and piss away our nation's precious time raving about queers and flags and assorted devious brown people.

Just bustin' with Good Christian Pride over the blood on their hands and teeth.

Proud of every leprous inch of their perfidy and perversion, and this double-time parade straight into giddy fascism is led with gusto by Karl Rove.

We, on the other hand, believe the Means by which Ends are accomplished actually mean something. That the Ends the GOP has pursued for 30 years has not been defeating evil or securing freedom, but creating a One Party, Two-Class state.

Creating the White People’s Republic of Jesusland.

And we believe that this is a bad thing. That people who stand arm-in-arm with the Party of Rove need to be called out into the light and made to answer for their choices and words.

Compelled to answer – using language with the same force and clarity that Rove uses to rally his orc army of bigots and theocrats – why they choose to make common cause with bigots and theocrats against liberty and privacy.

Maybe that’s why you’re confused, Petey.

Brazile: Activists and netroots are a net plus for the Democrats. They have energized the Party.

Thanks, Donna: We’ll take ‘er from here.

Tennis consumed NBC and golf ate ABC, so over on PBS (Sunday athletics-free since pricing antiques and ballroom dancing both lost their Olympic Demonstration Sport status.) I while away a few minutes with the McLaughlin Group.

Pat Buchanan advises that we need to move our “hostages” (read: “troops”) the hell out of the DMZ and offshore – closer to Japan – where they can do more good.

Cool.

Now transpose that exact rhetoric over the Iraq debate and what do you get?

John Murtha, chapter and verse…and every Republican within earshot going predictably ballistic.

So why does Pat Buchanan want to cut-and-run from Korea?

Pamela Hess (UPI) spoke up and I confess I have no clear notes on what she said. Honestly, I was mesmerized by her smart/nerdy/sexy thing. Lots of finger titivation, I but no wedding band.

I notice such things.

Hey, whaddya want for my life? Smart/geek-sexy women have always been my Kryptonite.

Especially on a Sunday morn.