The State of the Union?

One word: "It kicks ass!"

I'm sorely tempted to heap up the adjectives, but why bother? This was warmed over turkey dinner. From 2003.

We can disagree...as long as you capitulate with everything I say.

I want to compromise...as long it's only you who gives anything up.

We can debate...but you are forbidden from bringing up the inconvenient fact of my five years of lies, incompetence and serial reckless fuckuppery.

I want to keep this civil...as long as my racist, Christopathic Party gets to continue to march unmolested under Karl Rove's banner and keep calling you cowards and traitors for political advantage.

Ignore everything we have said and done and not done for the last twenty years -- and in the last twenty minutes -- and bend over.



Well I guess I'm just an uncivil isolationist to point out that if you meant a single, fucking word of what you said, Mr. President -- if you had as much as a thimbleful of integrity -- you would fire that ratfucker Rove.

Tomorrow. 8:00 a.m.

Period.

Because I can't take the "Trust me" gospel too seriously from a man with blood on his teeth and Karl Rove still by his side and running his White House, instead of behind chicken-wire and trading cigarettes to get the good trailer and his hair done up real purdy for his conjugal visits from Jeff Gannon.

This is the bitter and divided world you and your minions created, Mr. President. And you did it deliberately, calculatedly and with premeditation.

On September 11, 2001, without earning or deserving it, you were handed a Truly United States of America. And for tawdry, partisan motives you and Karl and the rest of your Shitkicker Mafia decided to drive a venomous wedge straight through its heart without any regard of the poison you were unleashing into the body politic.

Congratulations; you have reaped what you have sown, and if you want anyone but your tailor and bootblack to believe that you're sincere about cleaning up the mess you made, it falls to you make a show of good faith.

So fire the fucker. Or shut the fuck up.

Because in the Dubya Era a person can be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but they can no longer be both.

And that, Mr. President, is quite obviously the world you wanted all along.

In less than one lifetime...

This is will be all that remains of the Mainstream Media...

One of the sublime pleasures of being an upright-walking child of the Enlightenment instead of a knuckle-scraping, fear-injected, Christalopithecus is that we get to contemplate the Really Big Universe.

We get to sit back and think about Deep Space and Deep Time (a term possibly coined by Greg Benford, but I could be wrong about that) with out being awash in fear that God will kick in the door like Raging Drunk Dad, catch us shamelessly playing a fast game of “Accelerate the Particle” with the neighbor girl, and smite the flesh off the bones of every living thing in a five mile radius.

We get to celebrate and cerebrate the fact that we don’t have to spend our lives cowering in squealing, reptilian terror inside a cramped, mingy, 6,000 years-old, geocentric God-hovel but get to run barefoot and nekkid through the spectacular complexity that a 13-and-a-half-gigayear-old, 20-billion-light-year-wide Universe affords.

In our big sandbox, we are free to cogitate over phenomena like singularities and superstrings and dark matter. We feel no need to force such grandeur into cobbled up tissue-box-diorama-sized religious explanations for what can only be explained by the actions of a nearly infinite amount of matter and energy dirty dancing over the span of a nearly infinite amount of time. We see what we see, and we marvel and clamor for more, and feel no need to try to scuff away at such things as event horizons by demanding that physics classes in public school refer to them as “The Almighty’s Holy Taint”.

And because of our freedom of thought, and its range of motion, we can appreciate the phenomenon of evolution…even its failures. Predators with teeth grown so long they slit their own jugular, or butterflies that only breed on continents that are slowly receding from their summer homes.

So behold one such evolutionary dead end – the Modern Gay Republican. Motivated by some kind of single-minded self-loathing that is startling to behold, he wholeheartedly embraces the political companionship of people who openly want to annihilate him, and will hold himself willfully and astonishingly ignorant of the true nature of the enemies in whose beards he nests.

So when I read Andrew Sullivan’s jeremiad entitled “Getting Their Wives” – about how his shock in learning the precise level of barbarity to which his good, good friends and Republican Overlords have descended – it was grimly interesting in a “Nature Channel” kind of way. I mean who besides the self-lobotomized can claim to actually be surprised that this government is now openly behaving in ways that are morally indistinguishable from the tyrants we used to claim we opposed...for doing the very things...that we are now doing? The hard-core GOP portion of the country is delighted that we’re finally getting around to torturing innocent brown women and children. These blood-drunk creatures live for this shit, and I suppose we should all consider ourselves lucky that they don’t demand that Rummy put it up on pay-per-view.

The rest of us are, of course, horrified, but hardly surprised – only a straddling, self-blinding evolutionary failure like Sully would have the nerve to pretend astonishment that same thugs who publicly sneer at the ideas of Law and Constitutional safeguards – and who he so volubly supported – would now turn around and behave like…thugs…who have no regard for the rule of Law.

I looked on his electronic lamentation as one might look upon a particularly death-wish-intensive mollusk, Lindy Hopping its merry way along the shallow bottom of a primordial sea full of huge mollusk-eaters, but in this case, Sully the Mollusk has chosen to voluntarily cohabitate with the predators in their smelly Republican tide pool.

And then, out of the grimy depths, a huge shape swarms into view.

All teeth and torture and talking points…and Sully the Mollusk frantically one-foot’s it toward the shore. Towards the safety of the dry land, where he can lie panting on the sand, under the blazing sun, and pen this little diary entry:

Getting Their Wives

27 Jan 2006 08:39 pm

You may have heard of the tactic. As a way to leverage information or capture an enemy, terrorists sometimes kidnap innocent women and children in order to put pressure on their husbands or relatives. It's called kidnapping and blackmail. Except that in Rumsfeld's military, the United States now uses the tactic. Sure, it's against the Geneva Conventions. Sure, those Conventions are supposed to apply in Iraq. But this is the Bush administration. King George doesn't have to obey the law; and his military can do anything they want. The Pentagon has gotten used to denying hard evidence of abuse - and no one, of course, has been disciplined for following the instructions given ultimately in Washington. "It's very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened," says the Pentagon spokesman. No, it isn't. And so we slowly descend toward the level of the enemy. Because King George can.

Fascinating, isn’t it? That Sullivan has so succinctly described the danger to himself and his country? And that he could, if he chose, presumably extend his scrutiny to any number of anatomical details of the monsters that own his Party, and the closer he looked the more horrified he would become.

What is surprising is that, in peak moments like this, he demonstrates that he really does very clearly understand the nature of the Enemy Within, and the lethal threat they pose to him, to his country and to everything he claims to value.

What is equally surprising is that after a day or two on the relative safely of beach, after his fury cools and his sense of danger and integrity fades, he will dutifully slide right back onto the filthy GOP tide pool, still teeming with the same maneaters that drove him to shore.

He will write jaunty articles defending them, and make the rounds of the Tide Pool talk shows taking their side and doing his little bit to bait other Mollusks into the killbox.

He will swim out among the Roves and the Bushes and the Rummys and beg them to let him frolic and play with them.

And then one day they will eat him.

And that will be the story of Sully the Mollusk.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Through an ass darkly…”

Wherein the GOP demonstrate their “Pre-1776” mindset.

Two quick-and-dirty highlights right up front that had me worried about my mental health.

Consider…

On Fox….in his ongoing fit of “Everybody Does It!”, Dirty-Jack was-a-bipartisan-pimp compulsive onanism, Chris Wallace frantically Abramoff’s himself all over his guest’s clean, Progressive suit, followed by an interview a coupla “Young Guns of the GOP”.

(Last week it was three Republican “reformers” that had squeegeed enough Dirty Jack Wank off their faces for us to see their lyin’ eyes and, forming a Papa, Mama and Baby Bear GOP Denial Kickline, managed to force their mouths to say the words “GOP Reformers” without that chemical cocktail that supersized The Joker’s pie-hole in “Batman”.

The contest, last week and this, is now how far and how fast can you distance yourself from Abramoff, and how many times can you repeat a variation of the phrase “bipartisan scandal”.

Abramoff? Never met the man.

Jack Abramoff? Never heard of him.

Lifelong-GOP-powerbroke-and-my-son’s-godfather, Jack Abramoff??? Why, he doesn’t even really exist. He’s just a Neocon Kaiser Soze we dreamed up; a myth to scare little Republicans.

As twas prophesied, they shall deny him three times before the cock crows. And Andy Sullivan wasn’t even on the Matthews’ Show this week.)

And then, on NBC – this week as last -- Chris Matthews doodles “George + Chris 4ever!!!” all over his Sunday Morning spiral-notebook, and openly pines and sighs for his Strong Man President to Rhett Butler him up the stairs, into the Lincoln Bedroom, for some rough, fascist sex that will finally make a real woman out of him.

Which is the point at which I raised my hands over my head, smiled, and recited my name out-loud to make sure that I hadn’t had a stroke, because weren’t these exactly the same fine examples of the GOP Predator Drone Media that they were flying last week?

Regurgitating the identical Neocon topic heading, in very much the same order?

On “This Week…”

Barack Obama making the rounds.

Gotta do better, Senator. I lova ya to death, but I agree with Atrios, seconding TPM that:

Let me second what Josh says here and add something. I get very tired of Democrats using their very limited TV time to say things like "we need to do better" or "we need to do a better job explaining our views to the America." Just do it! Start explaining! Do better!

Senator Chuck Hagel is the Obligatory Dismayed Republican this week who – along with Lindsay Graham and John McCain – take turns strapping themselves into their Brooks Brothers sackcloth and ashes and bemoaning the awful awfulness that the leaders of his own Party keeps perpetrating and perpetuating.

But never…quite…gets around to actually DOING anything about.

Chuck goes positively medieval on Karl Rove’s chubby rump, saying (all citations herein are driftglass approximations, not to be take as an actual quotes) , “I didn’t like what Mr. Rove did…

And, “National Security is bigger that political parties…"

And, “It is wrong to frame national security issues as political issues…”

Poor Chuck sez he doesn’t understand why the President won’t come to the Congress to help him make or tweak the tools he needs to fight terrorism. After all, “We are co-equal branches of government”!

He can’t just unilaterally decide he’s going to violate that 1978 law. He can’t just decide he gets to whatever he wants to do, and ignore the Constitution.

Uh, apparently he can, Chuck, because your Party chooses to give him a pass on such things. See the fault, dear Chuck, is not in your stars, but in your own damned self. Jesus’ Special Dauphin thinks he’s Charlemagne because you let him get away with his mad shit, and ain’t nobody “co-equal” to an Emperor.


Everyone on “This Week” is just shocked that when people between the River Jordan and the Ukraine are given a choice, they choose to shift hard-hard into Radicalville, and tell us more and more violently to step the fuck off of their territory.

Dismayed that every single thing the Bush Administration has done has made everything much, much worse.

E.J. Dionne -- bracketed by puckered fusspot George Will on one side and leering, shambling DLC Sockpuppet Joe Klein on the other -- explained gently that “we have been on a holiday from complexity in this country.”

(Full Disclosure Moment: OK, I’m 80% pretty sure that’s what Dionne said. I only half-finished making notes on the funny men at the Mouse Circus before I had to run out for what turned out to be a very long day, so when I got back to the castle, all I had written was “we have been on…” and had to backfill from memory.

So he could have said, “we have been on…our guard against the largely imaginary dangers of feet-eating geckos for too long and ignoring the real threat from gypsy cotton-candy vendors, who refuse to speak English and I’m pretty sure are mocking me in their fancy gypsy lingo. Also their cotton-candy smells like the glue George Will uses to keep his rug on straight.”

But he probably didn’t.

End Full Disclosure Moment.)

Which is nerdspeak deployed by a geek that doesn’t wanna get beaten to jelly with a tire iron in the Green Room -- but still wants to poke his tormenter in the eye -- to say, “See, George, this is what happens when you let stupid people run the fucking country.”

And when in comes to the U.S. unsheathing the saber in Iran, George Will put a grim, angry smile on my face.

Will unpacks his wee soapbox, clambers atop it, and says, sure, we can bomb the crap out of Iran and knock it back ten years or so.

But, Will asks, “Then what?”

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask bef…”

And in that perfect little jewel of a moment you could positively smell Karl Rove tickling the joystick that controls the high-voltage, barbed wire cock-ring that the GOP keeps wrapped around the withered sac of its pet journalists.

George unwrapped his lips from around the words he was just about to say like a man stung in the gums by a wasp the size of an Escalade. He then quickly shifted gears and began nattering on about Admiral Yamamoto telling the Japanese high command that, sure, he could attack the U.S. fleet and run wild in the Pacific for a “year and a day.”

…but “Then What?”

Of course the statement Will was verging on making before Karl the Klown jolted him back to goodthinkfulness was this:

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask…before we invaded Iraq.”

But of course, that’s kind of a sore subject; one that the Stalinist Right has striven mightily to stomp down the ol’ Memory Hole and piss away into the mists of forgotten myth and lore.

Because, of course, people did ask that question before Dubya rolled our children into Iraq to be slaughtered behind his PNAC fantasies and petroleum dream, didn’t they George?

Millions and millions and millions of people asked that very question.

Very Loudly.

They were called Democrats, George.

And your Party called them unAmerican, remember George?

And even the Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq –- and there were many of them -- made it very clear that they were not giving your President a blank check.

The Dem’s made it abundantly clear that there needed to be concrete, convincing evidence of an imminent threat. Evidence of WMDs delivered by inspectors on the ground. Evidence of some linkage to 9/11.

They demanded that enough troops be used to get the job done. And they insisted on a clear exit strategy.

And your President mumbled, “Yeah…Ok…whatever”, blew off every warning and caution, grabbed the keys to the car and drove it right off the fucking cliff, didn't he George?

And the Democrats who had made the epic mistake of trusting a dim little creep like George Bush to behave responsibly with the national Credit Card?

Your Party called them weak and cowardly, remember George?

Funny how you seem the effortlessly remember, oh, say, every stray stat surrounding Cal Koonce’s ERA, but can’t seem to remember these rather vitally important, life-and-death facts about your Party and President, isn’t is George?

Joe Klein thinks its “absolutely shameful” that the President keeps using national security for political gain.

Gee, Joe. Really? Wow? Who'da thunk it?


On The Chris Matthews' Show...Also a thematic rerun of last week’s twaddle.

Every single fucking question framed as “Just look what at what a muslim-whippin’ badass Bush is! How vewwy vewwy manly. Look how snugly his balls fit in my mouth.

And Holy Crap what a bunch of whiners and quibblers the Democrats are! With all their whinging and wheezing about this mysterious Constitution and 'civil liberties'.

Jeez! What a buncha brittle old women the Dems are talkin’ about the fact that the foundation stones of American Democracy are being sledgehammered to sand by that tough, musky, Hombre-In-Chief, a man who’s taint sure tastes like peppermint ice cream to me!"

What was missing was anyone uttering a discouraging word.

Last week the Bush-luvin’ pee party was at least momentarily broken up by…

Cynthia Tucker throwing a hard elbow right in the throat of the cocka-suckas on her right and left. She actually said the words, “Southern Strategy.” Spoke of the Original Republican Sin of choosing to deliberately and shamefully pander to racists. Of always swinging through the Segregationist Academy of Bob Jones University when out making the presidential campaign rounds.

Which was followed by…silence. In memory, what seems now like a million years of crickets, broken only when Andrew Sullivan announced that he thinks the President is genuine. In his heart. It is wrong and irresponsible to ascribe racists motives to Blah Blah Blah.

Cynthia Tucker didn’t say Dubya’s a racist. She didn’t say Dubya hates black people. No, Dubya hates poor people: he just sucks a lot of racist dick, uh, recreationally.

But alas, that was last week.

This time around Chris made sure no one was on the panel who would challenge him when he leaped up on the table, ripped his shirt off to reveal his Bush/Cheney ’04 pec tat and commemorative GOP nipple clamps, and screamed:

“Sure Dubya might be a liar and a dimwit, torturer and thief. But for God’s sake people: just look at the ass on that man and tell me you could say “No” to that!”

Two cents on a Million Little Pieces.

“And then a rabid dog…bit off my genitals…and it turned out…that dog – that dog – was my father!"

Though not an actual line from the King of All Over-Emoting, for some reason Shatner's acting style leaped to mind when the topic of Frey's book-thing came up.

And although it's also not, so far as I know, an actual line from a Creative Writing class, it absolutely could be, so file this under: The Revenge of the Writer's Group...

I have not read James Frey’s biofiction, or Auto Da Fake, or bogus a clef or whatever face-saving categorical rug his publishers will invent under which to sweep it (although I can guess that the words “dangerous”, “controversial” and “firestorm” will be involved.)

And I never met the guy.

But I do know a little bit about writer’s groups.

Oh my yes.

I may have been part of one or two during my sordid youth. I may have even led one or two. The historical record is somewhat murky, but let's just say that I’ve had good times and bad in the company of writers, and by-and-large, the group dynamic pulls it two directions: the people who favor the “vivid moment” – something shocking or tear-inducing or sometimes just nauseating hove up from memory or the gut – and the people who are all about plot, structure, character development, etc.

Truth is, no one can teach anyone how to write. But it is very much the case that you can teach someone who wants to learn how to write better. A good group or class has, in the end, helped four or five people hone their own, unique, idiosyncratic voices in front of a supportive but very critical audience.

When those strains – the memory-making power of the prose, the structure of the plot and the vibrancy of characters – all pull in the same direction, you can end up with brilliant work. But the Muse, as the saying goes, is a tough buck. It’s an elusive art where competence comes from mastery of the tools, and greatness comes from breaking them, but you reeeeally need to learn to work the forge and pound the anvil before you decide to become Frank Gehry.

A bad group, OTOH, rapidly develops an awful glory all its own.

It can quickly turn into a viper pit, or a leader-knobbing contest where everyone’s stuff starts to all taste like the inside of the facilitator’s mouth. Or a one-upping contest to see who can outdo who when it comes to grossing each other out.

And among writer’s of a certain age, I have found that wandering down into this last, gently downsloping cul-de-sac is the easiest mistake to make and the hardest to redeem. Because let’s face it, if you take, say, your average, suburban Caucasian male at a certain age when he gets the artist’s itch, odds are he hasn’t yet done anything yet that will win him the accolades of his peers when he puts it down cold and clear on paper.

So during the first week or two, vanilla. Then comes a vignette about a gym coach trying to molest someone.

And everyone gasps.

And by the next week, five other people who had previously written about their jello shot adventures at Senior Frog's have decided that they, too, have been touched inappropriately by some Authority Figure.

The following week, someone’s “I was so stoned” weed-tale has become, “I was seriously into heroin”. And his girlfriend's a junkie too.

And now we're off the fucking Shock-‘n-Awe races.

By the next week, GF was also a stripper. At a roadhouse. Full of bikers.

Gay bikers.

By the next week, the poor girl is dead in a manner eerily similar to the way a hooker was murdered on "CSI: French Lick, Indiana" a few nights before, and the writer is on the run from the Chinese mafia, living off of the checks he's kiting to keep body and soul together. In an attempt to kick his by-now-raging smack habit he had become a “sorta Buddist”. Dad – who had been a claim’s adjuster a month ago – has been repurposed into a serial rapist wanted in Florida on weapon’s charges.

And magically, an overnighter in a suburban drunk tank for DUI has become seven months in Joliet, praying for death and being gang-raped by skinheads.

One story of moderate embarrassment involving a girl having the trots at a party and having the potty door swing open mutates into something involving projectile vomiting, which induces uncontrollable diarrhea at Thanksgiving dinner. All due to a bad reaction to a heroin-and-howler-monkey-pituitary-gland cocktail her boyfriend – a bi-prostitute – had shot her up with in the bathroom to help her cope with the loss of her mother in a recent carjacking.

Later she will discover her father and uncle having bondage sex with her boyfriend in the carport.

And at some point her beloved puppy -- Sniffy -- will die.

Horribly.

And as this race to the bottom accelerates, each writer will insist – often tearfully – that it’s all Absolutely True. Not because it's factually correct, but because their own prose is now causing a self-perpetuating emotional reaction in them.

Because it feels true, and because people love a freak show.

As "true" as mass, hysterical accusations of witchcraft. As "true" as mass, hysterical claims of a plague of child molestation based on “recovered memories” that came on as a fever-tide that swamped and swept away whatever kernels of truth might have been there at the start.

And that’s the key.

Is this the path James Frey followed to fame and infamy? And is this the reason so many people – including Oprah – are so credulous about Shaggy Dog That Almost Died of an Overdose and Then Found The Lord stories?

Is this why the myth of "George Bush: The Redeemed Wastrel" is played as a trump to chump the public over and over again?

I don’t know.

I do know that once upon a time I dated an otherwise nice woman who insisted that her “emotional truths” be given equal weight to mere “factual truths". So for example, on several occasions when she got all cranked up believing she had been wronged, after she clearly and verifiably learned that she had been in error, she was of the adamant opinion that she was still owed an apology.

(And in the interest of full-disclosure, at some point, near the end of our brief sojourn together, having grown tired of it, it is likely that I might have loudly opined that she was out of her fucking mind. And she might have insisted that I take it back. And then it’s possible that I might have suggested that whether or not it was really-for-real-true, she should honor the fact that I “felt” she was nuts as being “emotionally true” and get a doctor to write her a scrip for lithium ASAP.

Because I can be kind of a bastard sometimes.)

She was quite insistent she was right-ish, because in her mind, a thing and how you feel about a thing were both equally valid and correct ways of being “true”.

And in my travels I have met a whole lot of people like her, and they are all, to varying degrees, just plain wrong.

To be clear, I emphatically don’t want to live in a world of bloodless Vulcans and androids where emotions and passions are pooh-poohed as irrelevant or atavistic. Passion is as imperative to our species as air. However, as trivial and silly as some example from a writer’s group or the free-fire-zone of modern dating may be, the idea that the intensity of my feeling about something on any given day should be given weight and status co-equal to the actual facts of the thing itself is both deranged and incredibly dangerous.

Because it all lies along that grim and ugly continuum of magical thinking and superstition that we as a culture fought so hard to rise up out of and into an age of Enlightenment.

At one end are the small things. Little stuff, like coming to believe our own bullshit.

But at the other end you find lethally self-inflicted idiocy like Heaven’s Gate.

You find Creationism and the Rapture.

You find politicians blaming school shootings on condoms and preachers blaming 9/11 on feminists and the ACLU, because they and their followers have become so completely sealed into the Bell Jar of their insane ideology that they can no longer distinguish between the real world, the compassionate summons of conscience and Christ, and the gibbering, terrified voices shrieking around inside the echo chamber of their own mushy skulls.

Lynching in the name of Lord is down that road, and lie-and-fear-based warfare in the name of Jesus, Freedom, Oil and Preemption.

If in the end there is no check on the insistence that the emotional “reality” of the phantasms of our imagination and the bogeyman under the bed be equipositioned (which Merriam-Webster tells me is not a word but damn well should be) with real, actual concrete problems out here in the real actual, concrete world, we are well and truly fucked.

Because down that road lies a New Dark Ages.

And on your way, somewhere halfway between here and there, you’ll pass a sad mile-marker called, “A Million Little Pieces”.

This Via Steve Gilliard

Retreat? Hell, we're just advancing in a
different direction

Click over to Mr. Gilliard's shoppe for all the intact links. And then stand up and fight.

WE CAN STOP ALITO THIS WEEKEND

http://www.democrats.com/we-can-stop-alito

The last two days have been amazing.

Early Thursday afternoon, we broke the news that Senator John Kerry would lead a filibuster against Judge Sam Alito if he could get 41 Senators to sustain the filibuster. Three hours later, CNN confirmed our story.

Naturally, the White House freaked out and told Senator Bill Frist to schedule a cloture vote as quickly as possible - Monday at 4:30 p.m. - to prevent Democrats from uniting behind Kerry.

Then the White House called its media whores at the NY Times (David Kirkpatrick), AP (Jesse Holland), Pentagon Post (Charles Babington), CNN (Miles O'Brien), and MSNBC (Chris Matthews) and told them to trash John Kerry for daring to challenge the will of Emperor Bush, and to repeat over and over that Democrats did not have enough votes to stop Alito.

But even as Karl Rove was doing his dirty work, progressive activists like you were calling your Senators urging them to support John Kerry's filibuster.

And one by one, Democratic Senators began to turn around.

http://democrats.com/alito-48

At the start of the day, only Dick Durbin and Debbie Stabenow supported Kerry and Kennedy. Just before noon, Hillary Clinton's office called to say she supported us. Then Harry Reid came on board, along with Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Ron Wyden, Chris Dodd, and (I think) Chuck Schumer.

Most importantly, we even picked up Dianne Feinstein, who just yesterday said she opposed a filibuster.

That's 12 votes for a filibuster - and exactly 12 more votes than we had two days ago!

I believe we really can stop Alito by Monday at 4:30 p.m. - but here's what we must do.

1. Ignore the media whores. Karl Rove is feeding them lies as he always does, and they are swallowing those lies as they always do. The only media that matters is the media we are creating right here by calling each Senator and getting a YES or NO statement from them.

2. Wake up the sleeping bloggers. Where are the biggest blogs, including DailyKos.com, TalkingPointsMemo.com, CrooksandLiars.com, and AmericaBlog.com? (Complaining about how Democrats played last week won't cut it -we're in the Super Bowl and we can win this damn game if we get Democrats to play their best game on Monday - and hopefully the rest of this coming week.) Thanks to Agonist, BobGeiger, The Democratic Daily, DemocraticUnderground, Eschaton, Firedoglake, MakeThemAccountable, Mark Crispin Miller, PoliticalWire, Vichy Democrats and everyone else who's plugging this.

3. Keep calling the Senators who are undecided or opposed to a filibuster. You can call their DC office all weekend and leave polite but firm voicemails urging the Senators to support Kerry's filibuster. When offices open on Monday 9 a.m. ET, make another round of calls. Let's shut down the Capitol switchboard on Monday!

http://democrats.com/alito-48

4. Call the DNC (202-863-8000) and the DSCC (202-224-2447) and tell them your 2006 contributions will depend on the success of the Alito filibuster. Tell them they need to get every Democratic Senator on board.

5. Call talk shows like Air America, C-SPAN, etc. and talk about what we're doing on this blog and how we're killing ourselves to stop Alito - and how we can win if everyone who cares about the future of our Democracy joins us.

6. Keep hope alive - because American Democracy is worth it!!!

All it takes is a phone call. The fundies held a rally to push this guy, a phone call is all it takes.

One other added bonus of a filibuster: it'd deliver one hell of a kick in the teeth to this Administration's Bullshit Campaign during the State of the Union. Hell, if it was a real, "talking" filibuster, they might just have to reschedule the Preznit's Mendacious Goodtime Iraqi Happy Hour to some other day.

And when the Republicans bitch -- as they surely would -- we remind the country that the President is, after all, an invited guest of the Congress and not our fucking American Pope making pronouncements from a balcony at St. Peter. He works for us, and right now the Alito matter is far too important to put on hold while the President gets another free hour of scripted, all-channels-live photo-op national airtime to lie to us some more.

Win or lose, we fight for every inch.

So what are you still doing here? Go and do, and good luck to us all.

July 4, 2007

"What the fuck do you mean 'subpoena'?"

The years and beers finally catch up with Dubya.

His physical and political collapse comes with Nixonian speed as his cronies fall, one by one, to special prosecutors, federal attorneys and a newly sworn-in and highly pissed of Democratic House, now loaded for bear and aggressively taking on the task of cleaning up the toxic witchbag of corruption, extortion, blackmail, bribery and High Treason that was the legacy of the last Republican House this country will see in a generation.

Now, virtually alone in the White House – except for his loyal, white-gloved Fundy retinue who feed him ice cream and Dewars and dutifully keep and catalog his urine for that special wing of his Presidential Library – Dubya grows increasingly paranoid, calling his Vice-President-In-Exile – Dick Cheney – who fled three months ago to his demesne in Dubai ahead of a truckload of warrants.

(“You told me this’d never fucking happen, Dick! That I'd never have to worry about this shit. Eight years and out was deal; I’ll sign anything you want and I’m set for life, but nobody touches me! I get to do whatever the fuck I want and get my face on the twenty and nobody touches me. That was deal asshole, and now these Liberals have served paper on me. Me!”

“Listen, George, there’s still a way… Wait a minute. Shit! George, tell me you’re not using a White House phone to make this call.”

“What the fuck does that matter now, Dick! Everybody’s gone or in jail or dead. I got little lawyers practically crawling outta the shitters here telling me I gotta be in court at such and so, and they don’t even know about…”

“Shut up, George. Don’t say another fucking word on this line, and you don’t ever call me again. I don’t know you.”)

Abu Gonzalez – himself barricaded in the Attorney General’s Office and under multiple indictments from two separate Grand Juries -- continues to insist that Cheney can still exercise his “magic co-unitary executive powers” to have “anyone he wants shot on sight for any-fucking-thing he likes” even while the Veep is in hiding abroad, evading extradition.

“It’s just another ‘undisclosed location’”, the feisty shyster yelled through the door at reporters. “We won the election, God Damn it!”

But no one listens to Abu G any more.

With fully one-third of the Republican leadership cutting deals with Federal investigators, and another third either on the run, in prison, awaiting trial or having committed .38 caliber sepuku, everyone knows how this will end.

In Iraq, local commanders have taken control of the situation on the ground, and despite a steady stream of increasing incoherent proclamations and “Executive Orders” from the White House to “Finish the mission”, are overseeing the orderly withdrawal of the remaining coalition troops still in Iraq, in coordination with the Provisional Military Command Authority now being run out of the Pentagon under the joint supervision of both congressional Armed Services committees.

With the noose now closing inextricably around President Bush, it now appears to be a grim race to see which will take its course first: The impeachment process, or the multiple criminal investigations that are now underway. However, one thing is certain: even though White House spokesmen, Fox News, a few remaining Republican loyalists and loyal Fundamentalists still speak publicly about how the believe George Bush will eventually rally, in private they confess that they know the end of the Bush Presidency is now measured in weeks. Perhaps days.

In fear for his life from roaming Christopath “Truth Brigades”, one Republican Senator, speaking on condition of anonymity, said:

“Why can’t he just resign! The longer he takes to get the [expletive deleted] message and walk away – pardon deal or no pardon deal – the worse this gets. Every day he stays in office is another year the Party will have to spend living this down.”

“Why the [expletive deleted] did we ever try to make that idiot an emperor,” the Senator added, vomiting into his hat. “I hear that Reid [expletive deleted] is calling him at night. Telling him that he needs to fight on. That the nation cannot do without him during these troubled times.

Holy [expletive deleted] do I hate that mother[expletive deleted] Harry Reid!”

Finally there are strong rumors coming out of NATO headquarters that in the interest of international security, unbeknownst to the Chief Executive and as a hedge against any possible last-ditch, “dead man” strategy to save himself, the so-called “Nuclear Football” has been replaced with a Kosmo Astro (pictured here)


duct-taped to a Wang 500/520 Schematic.

The Anti-Sinatra

Think not?

Frank: Fought for scraps, made it big on his talent.

Dubya: Constantly fucking up, made it big on Daddy’s Rolodex.

Frank: Grew up poor, liked to dress up rich and hang out with his crew.

Dubya: Grew up rich, likes to dress like a cowboy and hang out with lickspittles and yes-men.

Frank: Fell in love with Ava & broke his heart.

Dubya: Fell in love with Dewars and constantly bruising his face.

Frank: Regular guy who hung out with mobsters because he liked the reputation it gave him.

Dubya: A Fredo-grade gangster who rubs himself up against hand-picked “regular people” in hopes of covering his moral stink.


Still not convinced?

Well just look at Dubya’s cover of “My Way”. Then decide.


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


And soon, November nears;
And so we face the next election.
My friends, keep pimping Fear,
It's all that give us our erection.

I’ve lived a wastrel’s life
Should be trailer-bound and selling Amway
But Daddy’s rich; friends richer still
So I get things my way.

Regrets? My drunken kids.
Except for them, I am perfection.
Shivved who I wanted to
And spied on you without detection.

But though I planned Dubya parades;
Down each Iraqi byway,
I fucked it all, fucked it in spades
’Cause we did it my way.

Yes every day, I’m sure you knew
That I bit off way, waaay more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ran away, to wait it out.
While I goofed around, Karl slimed ‘em down;
And called ‘em all gay.

I’m weak and mean and dim
Done more than my share of boozing.
And now that I am SOTU-dry,
I find the real world so confusing.

Hard to believe I told so many lies.
And not one told in a shy way,
Oh no, got right in your face:
That’s lying my way.

For what is a Neocon, what has he got?
If he’s not my ass-man, then he has naught.
The GOP has spines like eels,
When I walk in, everyone kneels.
The record shows, they blow me like pros
In that Mehl-man-ly Guy Way!

Dead Soldiers?

Fuck ‘em.

This via the Sydney Morning Herald (from the NYT) horrifies me.

On the surface it’s about fraud and waste, which are dry, green-eyeshade kinds of crimes. Boring. The sort of thing you go after Capone over when you can’t nail him for murder.

Slightly beneath the skin it's about the single most consistently defining characteristic of the Republican Party. Hypocrisy. Because this is also the story of the same people who bellow like you had booted their kitten through a box fan every time the Evil Government asks them to kick to help out childen or poor people, or brown people or old people.

When we ask for tax increases to help the weak or the sick or helpless or just plain unlucky – basically anyone who isn’t them -- these Compassionate Christian Conservatives loudly bitch around the block and back again about the folly of “throwing money at the problem.”

Well, in George Bush’s War it would appear that that is exactly and literally what they are doing: keeping rooms stuffed with shrink-wrapped brinks of hundred-dollar-bills just laying around. But I guess using taxpayer “C”-notes as bathmats and ass-floss is A-OK in Iraq, ‘cause, um, it's about Democracy.

Or Freedom.

Or Terrorism.

Or something.


But fat-assed, dim-wit Republican jackals and hypocrites pissing away our national treasure behind the lies of their Dissembler-in-Chief is nothing new. And doing it to the applause of the trained-seal rank-and-file is nothing new either.

The GOP droogies are so entirely lobotomized that if Dubya announced tomorrow that the only thing that can keep us safe is stripping the remains of the dead of their jewelry and gold fillings, shipping the loot in bulk directly to Jack Abramoff, and then burning their bones in a torchlight parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, there’d be a run on lighter fluid and backhoes in every Red County in the land.

But that’s not what is heartbreaking.

See if you can figure out what it is about this story that should make you unspeakably furious.

Audit finds Iraq awash in fraud and waste
By James Glanz
January 26, 2006

A NEW audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into lockers and filing cabinets, and a US soldier who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq.

In another example, three Iraqis plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital lift that had been improperly certified as safe.

The audit, released by the office of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the US occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004.

The special inspector reports to the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Agents from the Inspector-General's office found that the living and working quarters of US occupation officials were awash with shrink-wrapped stacks of $US100 bills, colloquially known as "bricks".

One official kept $US2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than $US500,000 in an unlocked locker. One contractor received more than $US100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local US officials certified the work as completed.

Agents examined more than 2000 contracts, ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than $US500,000 - about $US88 million in all.

The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing. The audit paints a portrait of abandoned rebuilding projects, non-existent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in the city of Hillah without even a log to keep track of the transactions.

It is likely to raise more questions about how the provisional authority accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.

"What's sad about it is that, considering the destruction in the country, with looting and so on, we needed every dollar for reconstruction," said Wayne White, a former State Department official now at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Instead, Mr White said, large amounts of that money may have been wasted or stolen.
Others had a similar reaction. "It does not surprise me at all," said a Pentagon official who worked in Hillah and other parts of the country.

He predicted that similar problems would turn up in the southern city of Basra and elsewhere in the dangerous desert wasteland of Anbar.

This is a heartbreaking and horrifying story because every brick of hundreds is vehicle armor this Administration said cost too much.

Every brick of hundreds is body armor this Administration said it could not afford.

Every brick of hundreds is a missing leg.

Every brick of hundreds is a stump where an arm used to be.

Every brick of hundreds is a dead Marine.

It’s just that stark and just that simple.

And if you can read this story and not be want to see this Administration rotting behind bars for pulling shit like this every single day, you aren't fully human.

If you can can continue to support an Administration that so clearly does not support our soldiers, you’re a disgrace to this nation and as genuinely supportive of the troops as syphillis.

Biatheletes of the World Arise

Your day has finally come.

Of all the weirdo Olympic sports that have made me shake my head and wonder "Why?", the one at the top of my "I don't get this at all" list is the biathlon.

You ski...then you shoot...then you ski some more.

WTF?

It always seemed so…arbitrary. Specifically, so arbitrarily James Bondish. Like a Cubby Broccoli had somehow slipped onto the event selection committee, gotten everyone drunk, and the next day, viola!

Ski-shootin’!

And after that, the 100-meter breast-stroke in shark-infested waters followed by synchronized pommel horse and parallel bars fencing.

And then a vodka martini (you know which kind), followed by Earth-shaking, allegiance-realigning sex with Honor Blackman.

Unfortunately, this sad old world has at last created a calling for the lonely biathelete …

Snipers, armed skiers help guard Turin Games

By Antonella Ciancio and Sophie HardachWed Jan 25, 3:30 AM ET

Snipers, policemen and armed skiers will watch over the Winter Olympics next month, helped by information from intelligence services around the world, Turin's security chief said in an interview.

Prefect Goffredo Sottile, who is in charge of public security in Turin province, said he met FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday to discuss the situation two weeks before the Games, which will run from February 10-26.

"Of course there will be snipers. There'll be an entire system. All the special police forces will be activated," he said, sitting in an office in the elegant palazzo that housed Italy's first government when Turin was still the capital.

"The times in which we live are the way they are, which is why there's huge attention. In previous Olympics a similar deployment of security forces would have been unthinkable."

Italy, an ally of the United States in the Iraq war, has repeatedly been mentioned as a potential target for a militant Islamist attack.
…

Hey Lapdog

To be sung to the tune of "Hey, Bulldog" and with apologies to Messers Lennon and McCartney.


Lapdog,

Better get out of the rain

Poop-log,

Tryin’ to get back in the game

Your Party’s Felonies are

measured out in miles

What makes you think you're

something special when you smile

Child-man

Jesus’ Special Friend

Jack (the) Knife

Thief with sweatin' hands

Your fed-time sentence will be

measured out in years

You don't know what it's like

to listen to your fears

You can talk to me

You can talk to me

You can talk to me

If you're lonely, you can talk to me**


Big man

(yeah) walking in the park

The New Abscam

Singin’ like a Lark

Some years in solitary
are waiting now for you

You think you know me,

but you haven't got a clue

You can talk to me
You can talk to me
You can talk to me
If you're lonely, you can talk to me

Hey –ey
Rowww,rrrowow

Hey, Lapdog (Hey Lapdog)
Woof

Hey, Lapdog
Hey, Lapdog
Hey, Lapdog

**(Mary K. Butler, the prosecutor in the Abramoff case.)

GOP Fucks Up Two Car Funeral.

Film at Eleven..

These two stories beg to be read back-to-back…

First, this from the NYT detailing how this Administration has fucked up the Iraqi Rebuilding Program to the tune of $25 billion dollars (a figure which, in and of itself, is 25 times higher than Paul Wolfowitz told us would be the price tag for the entire war.)

January 24, 2006
Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds
By JAMES GLANZ
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office.

…

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.

"It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."

One authority on reconstruction who attended the session last month, John J. Hamre, said the report was an unblinking and unbiased look at the program.

"It's gutsy and it's honest," said Mr. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy group based in Washington. He was not the source of the leaked document. Even in the early stages of writing the draft, Mr. Hamre said, one central message on the reconstruction program was already fairly clear, that "it didn't go particularly well."

…

It "almost" looks like a spoils system?

Jeez. No, this is nothing less that the after-action report of the sacking of the Iraqi Rebuilding fund. This is a snapshot of what happens when looting is Job One.

Then this from the WaPo about how the GOP excluded the Democrats and the public and disappeared behind closed-doors to take another whack at Medicare.

When they emerged from their secret conclave, the CBO tells us, the GOP had agreed on a change to the law to screw you the taxpayer out of $22 billion dollars in Medicare Savings and pass the profit along to their lobbyist friends.

Abramoff Lives!

Wheeee!

Closed-Door Deal Makes $22 Billion Difference
GOP Negotiators Criticized for Change In Measure on HMOs
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; A01
House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The Senate version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs their reimbursement, lowering payments $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion of the projected savings, according to CBO and other health policy experts.

...
The change in the Medicare provision underscores a practice that growing numbers of lawmakers from both parties want addressed. More than ever, Republican congressional lawmakers and leaders are making vital decisions, involving far-reaching policies and billions of dollars, without the public -- or even congressional Democrats -- present.

...
"It happens in the dead of night when lobbyists get a [Republican lawmaker] in the corner and say, 'We've got to have this,' " said Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark (Calif.), the Democrats' point man on Medicare issues. "It's a pattern that just goes on and on, and at some point the public's going to rise up."

...
But other lobbyists and aides said too much important work is being done in these closed-door conclaves. That is especially true with the budget-cutting bill containing the change in the Medicare reimbursement formula that is nearing final passage.

"I have worked many [budget] bills, and this was the most closed that I've ever seen," said one prominent Republican health care lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his access to Congress.
Another health care lobbyist, not involved with the issue, said the result was a major victory for health insurers: "That's a $22 billion difference; $22 billion is a lot of money."

If no one can say which lawmakers made the change, there is no doubt who instigated it. Last month, as House and Senate negotiators sat down to finalize the budget-cutting bill, the insurance industry moved to thwart the Senate's "risk adjustment" provision.

"It is our understanding that CBO is scoring significant savings from this new adjustment," officials from America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) wrote in urgent talking points sent to Capitol Hill. "The savings . . . are best viewed as a new and unanticipated payment reduction."
...

What more needs to be said?

Scratch out “Iraqi Rebuilding” and insert “The ginned-up predicate for this War”, and it reads the same.

Scratch out “Medicare Cost Containment” and insert “Letting Petroleum Industry lobbyists rewrite scientific papers on Global Warming”, ditto.

Scratch out “Iraqi Rebuilding” and insert “The fatally fucked up execution of this War”, ditto.

Scratch out “Medicare Cost Containment” and insert “Social Security”.

Insert “Katrina and Michael Brown”.

Insert “Vehicle Armor”.

Insert “Body Armor”.

Insert “Treatment of wounded veterans”.

Insert “Clear Skies”.

And that's just an off-the-cuff partial list of the Greatest Hits.

Over and over and over again, the Bush Administration has shown that Republicans push the theoretical upper-limit of just how utterly one gang of hacks and hucksters can fuck up everything they touch.

Everything.

Every single God Damned thing they lay their stinking paws on they fuck sideways. Fuck pan-dimensionally. Fuck them at the quantum level, so hard their superstrings unravel.

Having said that, in the interest of full disclosure, one must admit that they are preternaturally gifted at five things:

1. Letting their friends strip-mine the US Treasury.
2. Scaring the crap outta soccer moms that Liberals wanna let Osama bin Laden kill their children..
3. Convincing inbred gasoline-sippers that Liberals wanna come down and fag-up their web-toed whelplings.
4. Lying.
5. Making Baby Jesus cry.

If they called themselves the “Terri Schiavo Martyr Brigade”, hid out in Carlsebad Caverns and plotted the destruction of America, this Administration could not do more long-term damage to everything that makes our nation magnificent than they do every single fucking day just by being who they are.

But what about the children?

Explaining Dirty Jack to the little ones.

Dick has a wagon company.

And Dick likes Jane.

Dick contributes to Jane’s campaign.

Run, Jane, run!

Quite separate and apart from Jane, Dick is also shaken down for contributions by Human Chupacabra

Jack Abramoff.

Bilk, Jack, bilk!

Dirty Jack uses the cash he has scared Dick out of to bankroll sleazy, despicable insults to Christianity and Democracy like Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed.

Sin, Ralph, sin!

Dirty Jack also uses the cash he bilked Dick out of to finance people who turn around and fuck Dick over.

Cozen, Jack, cozen.

Then Jack gets caught.

Oh, oh, oh!

Caught and squeezed and is now singing (as I once said) like Michael Bolton with his balls dry-shaved and slathered in Tiger Balm.

Which has caused no little fear among his fellow Republican criminals.

The horror, Tom, the horror!

The thing is, while the problems with lobbyists are far and wide, the specific and suppurating Dirty Jack Scandal pustules are Exclusively Republican in etiology.

And given the clarity and simplicity of this story, even an averagely bright eight-year-old could not be able to mistake to morale at the heart of this little parable: Dick helped Jane, and was then fucked over by Jack…and so in what bizarro, alternate Universe does this add up to Jane being Jack’s co-conspirator?

Well, OK: In Republicanland and Mainstream Mediaville –- from whence facts and sweet reason have long been exiled –- drivers, passengers and the guy holding the gun and telling everyone to get the fuck out of the vehicle are all somehow equally guilty of the crime of carjacking.

When the passengers are Democrats.

Because if you’re still a rank-and-file GOPer after the last five years, or a Bigtime Professional White House Newsreading Haircut, lets face it; an averagely bright eight-year-old can probably outclever you three falls out of five.

Having said that, let me say that I have known a wide array of both stupid people and lying bastard in my time, but I must admit that I find the scope and breadth of willful, shameless and public lying and fake ignorance that has attended the Abramoff Affair kinda breathtaking.

And yet there is something oddly familiar about it. Something that has a vaguely 2005ish flavor. Something about it that we Liberals and Progressives need to remember.

The Long March of the Social Security Liars.

You remember the Social Security debacle right?

Wherein video poker slot jockey, bigot and notorious liar Bill Bennett declared, on February 3, 2005 that:

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the guy who established Social Security, said that it would be good to have it replaced by private investment over time. Private investment would be the way to really carry this thing through."

After which notorious liar and Bush Family Suppository, Brit Hume, declared that:

In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

(Both via Media Matters)

That was, of course, patently untrue.

Hume carved up FDR’s original words like Hannibal Lechter doing a guest shot on “Nip/Tuck” and inverted their intent in order to advance the House of Bush’s crusade to destroy the legacy of the New Deal.

He did it deliberately and maliciously. He did it under the color of being a journalist simply reporting the truth, and in the shadow of Dan Rather being run out of the anchor chair merely for making a foolish error in the context of a truthful story.

He remained while Rather was ousted, for the same reason that Clinton was flogged in the Congressional stocks for trivia while the Congress shrugs off and ignores Bush’s serial High Criminality.

Because Modern Republicans do not care about this country.

They care about power, and the amassing of power. Sometimes high dudgeon is the means they use. High flown rhetoric. Pious moralizing. The shedding of public tears and the enraged rending of public garments are useful tools, but only – ONLY -- when the beast in the cross-hairs is a Democrat.

When it’s Rostenkowski and stamps, or Clinton and fellatio, it’s “Pay any price and bear any burden” time, and let the Heaven’s fall…because at that moment outrage and moralizing are the most efficient means of aggregating power.

When its DeLay and Abramoff and Reed leading a vast, criminal enterprise, extortion, gutting the Constitution of Texas and the House Ethics committee…fuggedaboutit.

When it’s Bush and lying about war and peace, torture and spying…who gives a shit?

Because anyone who has survived the moral winnowing process of the last five years and has stayed Republican does not care about this country.

They care only about power, and the amassing of power, because only in that morally degenerate context does the fact that they still lionize DeLay and Abramoff and Bush and Cheney as Gods make any sense sitting chockablock with all of their Righteous Clinton-era Rhetoric about holding public officials to account for any offense against the commonweal, no matter how small.

What some of us forget sometimes – what still never fails to shock me, even though I know better – is that when cornered, these fuckers are in no way subtle or slick.
They just lie and lie and lie. They lie loudly and with a straight face.

Rather than simply living up to their own slogans, rather than standing up like men when caught and taking personal responsibility for their crimes, this party of Personal Responsibility will always and unhesitatingly use blunt, screaming lies like a battering ram to bash their way out of the corner into which they have painted themselves.

And being weak, lazy and spineless, the Mainstream Media will always aid and abet them.

They’ll lie like Nixon whenever it suits them because being a Modern Republican means always putting power and Party ahead of country, and never telling the truth when a lie will do.

When he’s impeached

I wonder if this is what it’ll look like.

(Pic is a Photoshopped Time magazine cover of Ollie North: Another Republican who lied like some people breathe, used the Constitution like a lobster bib and only got interested in law and order – and dug his purdy uniform out of the closet -- when he got caught.)

This from the WaPo…

Bush Defends Domestic Spying
President, Deputy National Intelligence Chief Say Program Allows Better Terrorist Tracking

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 23, 2006; 5:48 PM

President Bush and the nation's deputy national intelligence chief today defended the legality of a controversial domestic spying program, describing it as a vital tool in the war against terrorists and denying that it violates the civil liberties of Americans.

Calling the effort a "terrorist surveillance program," Bush said in a speech at Kansas State University that he authorized the eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in an effort to detect any continuing plots involving members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network overseas and persons operating inside the United States.

…
He said, "I'm mindful of your civil liberties, and so I had all kinds of lawyers review the process. We briefed members of the United States Congress . . . about this program.

"You know, it's amazing that people say to me, 'Well, he was just breaking the law.' If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" Bush said with a chuckle.
Bush said he has "authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance against our enemies," and that a 2001 congressional authorization for the use of force gave him "additional authority" in waging war against al Qaeda.

"Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn't prescribe the tactics," he said. "It said, Mr. President, you've got the power to protect us, but we're not going to tell you how."

…
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters before Bush's speech that "some Democratic leaders . . . have continued to engage in misleading, false attacks about this vital tool."

He said lawmakers "were fully aware of this program" but that "now some Democrats want to try to have it both ways."

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement that "Americans of all backgrounds and political parties are concerned about the NSA's domestic spying program." He called on the administration to "level with the American people and participate fully and openly in upcoming Congressional hearings."

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said, "Today the president spoke for nearly two hours, but failed to explain why he considers himself above the law." Bush "has yet explain why the secret FISA courts are not good enough or fast enough, or tell Congress what changes need to be made in the law," he said in a statement. "It's time for a real investigation to get to the truth."

Philip D. O'Neill, Jr., an attorney who teaches national security law at the Boston University School of Law and supported Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, rejected Bush's assertion today that the 2001 congressional resolution gave him the authority to conduct the secret surveillance program.

"The strained legal excuse of congressional authorization through broad resolution is simply divorced from political reality," O'Neill said.

…
Hayden added: "This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda."
He warned that "if we fail to do our job well and completely, more Americans will almost certainly die."

…
Pressed on why the administration did not seek to amend FISA if the law were inadequate, Hayden said he would express "no view on the political step of going to Congress" for such an amendment. But he alluded to concerns that doing so could "betray to the enemy the tactics, techniques and procedures that we are now using to detect them."
…

And if I may add... Booga!Booga!Booga!

Note Hayden’s openly fascistic contempt for the “political step” of going to Congress to make sure what he is doing is legal.

His utterly ridiculous predicating assumption that if Congressional Leaders were quietly consulted about, let’s say, doubling or tripling the slack time built into the FISA Law under which you have wiretapping latitude without getting a permission slip from Congress – from three days to, say, seven – that even that conversation would have, “betray[ed] to the enemy the tactics, techniques and procedures that we are now using to detect them."

Oh bullshit.

This aren’t the words of men who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States; these are bitching, fear-mongering excuses of men who despise the Constitution. Who view it as an inconvenience. An impeding speed-bump that’s keeping us from drag racing this democracy right off the cliff into Jesusland.

The question is simple: if you know who they are, why aren’t you burying them in agents? Why don’t you have a fistful of warrants to tap everything they touch? The Congress has given you every fucking thing you asked for, served up on the good china with a side of garlic mashed potatoes. Congress would have give Bush Administration light sabers if they’d asked. And a metric ton of blow. And a thousand runway models off of whose asses they could have done said blow.

And a completely prostrate press who would have happily looked the other way and slammed anyone who asked sticky questions about coke haloes around the noses of senior staffers.

So having been given the biggest blank check in modern history, how come the Bushies are now acting like the Constitution is a pair of hurtin’ shoes two sizes too small that their mommy made them wear to the funeral of a distant and unloved Uncle?

Because. They. Are. Liars.

Or, as John Murtha said on “60 Minutes”:

“He’s trying to fight this war with rhetoric," Murtha responds. "Iraq is not where the center of terrorism is. So when he says we’re fighting terrorism over there, we’re inciting terrorism over there.--- He said before there’s weapons of mass destruction. He said there’s an al Qaeda connection. There’s many things he said turned out not to be true. So why would I believe him...

Which is the whole point: Dubya’s has long since pissed away that “Just trust me” trust fund he inherited on 9/11. Now he actually has to prove up, and every time he’s been forced to stand up and earn our trust instead of trying to scare us into it, he has shit his pants and run like the coward that he is.

Bush took his bid for imperial power to his own, pet Attorney General -- John Fucking Ashcroft -- and Ashcroft told him to go piss up a rope.

He took it to his pet Republican Congress – who gave him 99.9% of what he asked for -- and asked for them to install him as an American Napoleon, and the Republican Congress declined.


Per the NYT,

“He also cited a recent Supreme Court decision, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, to bolster his argument that bypassing the courts fell within presidential power during a time when the country is fighting terrorism.”

But…

The Supreme Court agreed that Mr. Hamdi's capture was authorized by the Congressional resolution, but rejected the administration's more sweeping claims…”

This isn’t hard to understand, unless of course you have a vested interest in remaining willfully ignorant.

Bush asked everybody and his brother to let him be King.

Everybody and his brother told him, to fuck off.

He went ahead and did it anyway.

He got caught.

And now he’s making like everyone and his brother just never understood the question and somehow secretly gave him permission to do what he wanted even though they clearly and unambiguously told him, “No!”

This is Constitutional Date Rape.

And now that he’s been caught sans culottes, Dubya wants you to believe that she really wanted it even though she cried and punched and begged him to stop.

Cheney's Halliburton sez:

"Let them eat cake…and wash it down with ass water."

How much do Republicans love our troops?

So much that they lie them into Iraq with no way out in the first place.

So much that they can’t be bothered to put enough of them on the ground to put out the insurgent hellfire they unleashed.

So much that they fuck them out of their benefits.

So much they mock their mothers when they want straight answers about why their sons had to die.

So much they slander them and question their honor and service when veterans stand up and demand an accounting of Republican lies and treachery.

So much that they let them die to save a few bucks on proper armor for their vehicles and their bodies.

So much that they can't be bothered join in fighting the Iraqi War they created from scratch and cheerlead so loudly.

And now this -- so much that they make them drink toilet water...

Halliburton Cited in Iraq Contamination

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer 17 minutes ago
Troops and civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq were exposed to contaminated water last year and employees for the responsible contractor, Halliburton, couldn't get their company to inform camp residents, according to interviews and internal company documents.

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, disputes the allegations about water problems at Camp Junction City, in Ramadi, even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails.

"We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated," said a July 15, 2005, memo written by William Granger, the official for Halliburton's KBR subsidiary who was in charge of water quality in Iraq and Kuwait.

"The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River," Granger wrote in one of several documents. The Associated Press obtained the documents from Senate Democrats who are holding a public inquiry into the allegations Monday.

...
The company's former water treatment expert at Camp Junction City said that he discovered the problem last March, a statement confirmed by his e-mail the day after he tested the water.

While bottled water was available for drinking, the contaminated water was used for virtually everything else, including handwashing, laundry, bathing and making coffee, said water expert Ben Carter of Cedar City, Utah.

Another former Halliburton employee who worked at the base, Ken May of Louisville, said there were numerous instances of diarrhea and stomach cramps — problems he also suffered.

…
Halliburton has contracts to provide a number of services to U.S. forces in Iraq and was responsible for the water quality at the base in Ramadi.

Granger's July 15 memo said the exposure had gone on for "possibly a year" and added, "I am not sure if any attempt to notify the exposed population was ever made."
The first memo on the problem — written by Carter to Halliburton officials on March 24, 2005 — was an "incident report" from tests Carter performed the previous day.
"It is my opinion that the water source is without question contaminated with numerous micro-organisms, including Coliform bacteria," Carter wrote. "There is little doubt that raw sewage is routinely dumped upstream of intake much less than the required 2 mile distance.

"Therefore, it is my conclusion that chlorination of our water tanks while certainly beneficial is not sufficient protection from parasitic exposure."

Carter said he resigned in early April after Halliburton officials did not take any action to inform the camp population.

The water expert said he told company officials at the base that they would have to notify the military. "They told me it was none of my concern and to keep my mouth shut," he said.
…

I guarantee you that Dubya’s dog has never had to drink shit-laced water, and the Aquafina his daughters suck down between mojitos never smelled like ass.

Every day, in every little way, the GOP telegraphs exactly how much contempt they have for working men and women. Hillbilly armor. Charging the battle-wounded for their meals while in hospital. And now this.

But of course we’re told that somehow this Administration's habit of treating soldiers like souvenir baby alligators that they’ve gotten bored with isn’t what lowers troop morale. No, the sin, we are told, is in having the temerity to talk about the fact that this Administration doesn’t give a shit about working-class people who volunteer to serve their country.

Because in addition to everything else, Republicans think soldiers are playthings who can be used to fight and die at the whim of the President, but aren't nearly clever enough to figure out when they're being screwed and treated like disposable field hands.

Jesus Christ.

With friends like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, who needs enemies?

WaPo Hazel Shocked to discover

That it’s not 1952 anymore.

First this squishy apology from Deborah Howell.

The Firestorm Over My Column
By Deborah Howell
Sunday, January 22, 2006; B06

Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column, e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down.
…
I wrote that he gave campaign money to both parties and their members of Congress. He didn't. I should have said he directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.

My mistake set off a firestorm. I heard that I was lying, that Democrats never got a penny of Abramoff-tainted money, that I was trying to say it was a bipartisan scandal, as some Republicans claim. I didn't say that. It's not a bipartisan scandal; it's a Republican scandal, and that's why the Republicans are scurrying around trying to enact lobbying reforms.

But there is no doubt about the campaign contributions that were directed to lawmakers of both parties. Records from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Public Integrity show that Abramoff's Indian clients contributed money to 195 Republicans and 88 Democrats between 1999 and 2004. The Post also has copies of lists sent to tribes by Abramoff with his personal directions on which members were to receive what amounts.

Michael Crowley of the New Republic said in his blog that "while for all practical purposes this is indisputably a Republican scandal, the narrow liberal-blogger definition of whether any Democrats took money 'from Abramoff' -- which neatly excludes contributions he directed his clients to make -- amounts to foolish semantics.''

These facts have been reported many times in The Post and elsewhere. So why would it cause me to be called a "right-wing whore" and much worse?

…
But it is profoundly distressing if political discourse has sunk to a level where abusive name-calling and the crudest of sexual language are the norm, where facts have no place in an argument. This unbounded, unreasoning rage is not going to help this newspaper, this country or democracy.

I didn't ask washingtonpost.com to shut down an area reserved for comments about me, as it did on Thursday night. And I know the decision is being greeted with great disdain.

Jim Brady, editor of the Web site, said that when the site was set up, "there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to this."
…

Ok, Ms. Howell, since you are apparently new to these shores and this century, let me explain.

You toe-danced into the middle of a minefield and you should damned well have known better. Either you’re just not very bright – which doesn’t seem to be the case – or you have been living in a culturally hermetically sealed bubble that makes a JPL clean room look like a Park District locker room after a Friday Night pie-eating and poo-flinging contest.

You see, once upon a time there was a very Bad Party called The Republicans. They had some good ideas, but got such a priapistic hard-on (that’s "crude, sexual language" for a painful, perpetual male erection in this case symbolically sported by Neocons who who want to fuck the Constitution. To death.) for winning at any cost that they invited some of the filthiest, most loathsome groups in this nation into their electoral Big Tent.

Ever since that decision was taken, the GOP has grown more and more dependent on these groups for their razor-thin margins of victory.

The hallmark traits of these groups are hatred, fear and an arrogant, oozing, bone-deep stupidity. Berserk hatred of blacks. Jews. Liberals. Environmentalists. Groups that defend civil liberties. Hysterical hatred of gays.

Seething hatred for intelligent and independent women such as I’m sure you believe yourself to be.

And because the GOP has grown as helplessly dependent on them for victory as any junkie depends on his dealer, the inevitable has happened: the heirs of Jefferson Davis and all the rest of Conservative Children of the Corn are now no longer simply and recklessly pandered to. These hucksters and bigots and pinheads have taken over the Republican Party, wholly and outright, and one important pillar of their takeover of the Party – and the country – has been the creation of a vast, malignant propaganda machine to feed back to them the lies they want to hear.

As the Terri Schiavo Debacle clearly demonstrated, for hurricanes, tsunamis and the grieving mother of a dead soldier, the Bicycle Chief could not be bothered to interrupt his important pursuit of his brush-clearing merit badge… but when James Dobson snaps his fingers, George W. Bush obeys.

And as the new owners of the GOP have gotten louder, crazier and more viciously partisan, the voice of the mainstream media – such as the WaPo – has gotten weaker, pussier and more attenuated. Again and again the mainstream media has failed spectacularly in its job to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Year after year we on the Left have looked to people like you to take on the rise of an explicitly and radically anti-democratic religious cult to political prominence. And years after year the mainstream media has steered a blind course towards a wholly imaginary “Middle”, without any recognition that while the Left has grown more Centrist, the Right has gotten positively Stalinist…so that the Middle that you reflexively covet is now several thousand miles to the Right of where Barry Goldwater used to stand.

This is frankly because the main stream media is lazy, and instead of reporting loudly and clearly (to take one recent and obvious example) that Creationism is arrant, superstitious nonsense, we hear about the “controversy”.

There. Is. No. Controversy.

And the illusion of such controversies only exist because Conservatives figured out about 30 years ago that all they have to do is keep staking out positions that are further and further Right and screaming about a non-existent liberal bias…and you will all continue to automatically and reliably shamble to the Right, ceding them half the field, and then half of what remains, and then half again, while you pretend to call it “balance”.

They know that because the mainstream media no longer has any fixed star by which they navigate, you will go where they herd you.

So why did you get the chamberpot emptied on your head?

The fact that you are perplexed by the public reaction to your “mistake” shows that if you are not unqualified to ombudsman the Post by virtue of partisanship, you are ludicrously ill-equipped for the job of overseeing a journalistic enterprise based on the degree to which you must be completely out of radio contact with reality to even ask such question.

The reason you got shat upon is simply that we on the Left are tired of you in the MSM letting the Fox/Rush/Robertson/Hannity/CNN/Dobson/DeLay Republican Lie Machine get away with murder.

We’re tired of you pooh-poohing the barbarians at democracy’s gate as being annoying rabble instead of being a clear and present danger to our country.

We’re tired of a former Vice President (who was cheated out of his rightful office) making a major policy address and having it almost completely ignored.

We’re tired of you bending over and grabbing your ankles for liars and thugs and traitors.

We’re tired of finding out that – as we long suspected – far from being crusading truth-seekers, the likes of Judith Miller and Bob Woodward openly stooge for this Administration.

That the Bush White House’s open, sneering contempt for the Free Press is greeted by the Free Press, not as one Hell of an Important Story in and of itself…but with pliant taint kissing. Rolling over. Selling out principles for “access”. The shrugging acceptance of a creature like Manwhore Jeff Gannon in the WH Press Room. Planted stories. Payola and journalists for hire.

We were tired of seven years of screaming headlines and impeachment over trivia when the President is a Democrat, but would have swallowed it if it hadn’t been followed immediately by five years of stupefyingly conspicuous silence over a Republican Administration that fairly brags on the air in prime time about its crimes, both High and Low.

For the last 20 years – since the beginning of the collapse of genuine, investigative journalism in the United States, the death of the Fairness Doctrine and the Rise of Rush – we have seen the Right use the tools of mass media to wage a relentless and ruthless war on very idea of democracy and of free and fair press.

We have seen them lie and lie and lie and lie.

Slander and slime and fill the air with white-hot, pig-ignorant rage and we have seen the mainstream media do…nothing.

We have waited and waited for those who are most protected by the First Amendment to rouse themselves from their ivory towers and incestuous entanglements with Power and rise up to defend the noble document from which that protection is derived.

And now we are tired of waiting.

Where there should be a robust and free press – where the likes of Edward R. Murrow or Mike Royko (who I understand each might have actually used that terrible, pee-pee, ka-ka, scatalogical language that seems to horrify you so) once stood lively guard -- there is gaping hole though which the wingnut Visigoths are pouring.

You have hobbled off the field of battle, feebly abandoning your Washington post at the moment the public most needed you to be fearless and strong, and we are through waiting for you to distinguish your asses from your elbows and figure out what's up.

We’re through with this being a one-sided joust.

It’s too bad your remarks blundered you into a firestorm that you apparently were unaware even existed, but frankly how can we take that as anything but further confirming evidence of how sadly, institutionally out of touch you have become.

So now you know: This is what the future looks like. A place where every fucking time a representative of the “objective” mainstream media opens their mouth and sloppiness or ignorance comes burbling out --and the results of that laziness just so happens to redound to the advantage of the corrupt and criminal Right -- expect the fucking wrath of God to come down on your head, studded with both well-articulated rebuttals and assorted potty words that you may need to go here to translate (site not work-safe.)

Speaking only for myself, I accept your apology as genuine and in that spirit, let me offer you a bit of advice:

The easygoing days of the Left courteously letting this shit slide while the Right shells us 24/7 and the MSM shrugs and tries to pretend that both sides are equally culpable are over, Ms. Howell.

Welcome to the 21st Century where, if you want to keep the title of Ombudsman for a major American newspaper and avoid another public shellacking, you can either catch up, join up and bone-up, or you can damn well shut the fuck up.