What are Democrats "For"?

Live free.



Die well.



Leave a good-looking planet.

Any questions?

We’re All Liberals Now.

Maybe I’ll call my teevee show “The 700 Martyrs Club.”


Yesterday, today, and presumably tomorrow the media will somewhere carry the same story they have been reporting for almost three years: that yet more U.S. soldiers have been senseless killed in Iraqi Civil War.

Stories like this one…

Bomb Explosions Kill Two GIs, 3 Iraqis

A bomb exploded Sunday at a crowded bus station south of Baghdad, killing at least two people and injuring four, police said. Two U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi police officer were killed in other explosions.

A bomb detonated as passengers boarded a bus in Hillah, a predominantly Shiite city about 60 miles south of Baghdad, police Capt. Muthana Khalid said. The vehicle was destroyed in the blast.

Jawad Khazim, a bus driver who witnessed the attack, said a man boarded the bus carrying a bag and disembarked moments later empty-handed. The explosion occurred minutes later, Khazim said.

Sunday was the first day normal traffic was allowed in Hillah after the strife-prone region was placed under an extraordinary daylight curfew to curb a deadly wave of sectarian violence unleashed by the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.
A vehicle ban remained in effect in Baghdad and its suburbs, but traffic restrictions were lifted in three surrounding provinces.

Passengers fled the bus station and shops closed after the blast.

"Every day there are explosions," said Abdelallah Hassan, who runs a pastry shop at the bus station. "The main blame should be directed not at the terrorists, but at the government which stands helpless in front of them."
...

Which is desperately sad, but has become an every-day ache against which we have girded ourselves.

Because we must.

Because some of us saw this coming, years ago.

And it is at times like these that this little exchange from “Broadcast News” comes unbidden to mind:

Paul Moore: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room.

Jane Craig: No. It's awful.

That, at bottom, is what stupid people, drunks and Fundies never grasp: That it is in no way delightful to be the one who sees the disaster hulking out of the darkness.

The analysts who were screaming into the fucktard void of the Bush White House that they needed to wake up and pay attention to al Qaeda and Bin Laden before 9/11 aren’t glad they were right.

The scientists who have been warning us of Global Warming and have been blown off for years as tree-huggy egg-heads because the facts were inconvenient to the Oil Junta that runs America aren’t pleased that the ice caps are melting.

Those who were begging for help before and after Katrina as the Bicycle Chief rode in circles and Heckofajob Brownie worried about the roll of his cuffs aren’t doing smug happy-dances about the death of New Orleans.

The list just goes on and on and on, but the song remains the same. Stupid, venal people amply warned that they were driving us all off yet another cliff.

Stupid, venal people shrieking that everyone else is a traitor and that they didn’t need no smarty-pants liberals telling ‘em how to drive.

Squealing, “Hey, we won, so shut the fuck up.”

Then wheeeeee! Off the cliff we go-go-go…

Then the Bad Thing happens.

Then…crickets and tumbleweed and an airless, freaked-out silence from the Right like unto a mime having a panic attack lying face down in the dust on the dark side of the Moon.

Followed by a spongy, squishy sound made by millions of baffled brows beetling in that damp confusion that the s-l-o-w children get when confronted -- yet again -- with overwhelming evidence of the consequences of their reckless, arrogant moronity.

Followed by a return to their default, factory setting of running in hysterical circles and wildly blaming Evil Liberals or the French or Bill Clinton or feminists or queers for the blood on their own hands and the dead on their own watch.

“We didn’t knooooow!” they wail, as we roll in wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of evidence that they damned well did know.

“No one could have predicted...,” they whine, as we chopper in ton after ton of proof that Iraq/Katrina/9-11/Global Warming/North Korea/Iran/Every-other-fucking-thing were all quite predictable, and had been foreseen, but their Dear Leader had simply chosen to ignore the inconvenient mile-high, DayGlo warning signs on his way to and from vacation.

‘Cause they won, which means 2+2 no longer equals four Mr. Fancypants liberal.

So they’ll sprint in diminishing circles until the Limbaugh Chip in their tiny heads is reseated by a licensed GOP thrall tech, and which point they’ll blink owlishly for a moment or two, and have that Very Special Republican “Memento” Moment when they forget every single thing that has actually happened in the last thirty years and go right back to being furious at Liberals…for…something.

At which point they take what’s left of the country and hand it right back to the same boobs and hucksters and sociopaths that wrecking it in the first place, and tell everybody to Shut The Hell Up, ‘cause nobody wants to hear from no God Damned negative, critical know-it-all’s yappin' about who did what to who and who drove whose country into oblivion.

It is the same pathetic, shirker's anthem sung by every irresponsible drunk I have ever known.

Alla that’s behind us now, so Shaddap! And besides it was probably all of that angry, negativity that was what really made the car fly off the mountain anyway!

And off we zoom. The Sweet Baby Jesus Dashboard Buddy covering his eyes with his tiny, stigmata-ed hands and moaning for dear life as Dubya mashes down on the accelerator and makes a perfect bee-line for the next precipice, while the Rat People snarl that ain’t no God Damned Liberal gonna show us how to drive.

And then we’re off to the Wacky Races.

Again.

And while there is no point in this drunktard’s mental Moebius loop at which the Republican rank-and-filer's mind ever become susceptible to reason, for a bitterly amusing moment, consider the plight of the average dumbass GOPer and what he has coming at him down the pipe he himself has laid, inch by inch.

He has been told that his Party’s plans in Iraq were well intentioned, but poorly executed. That given enough time, money, dead American and daisy cutters, we could sorta bomb the Iraqis back to the Enlightenment, and from there yummy-yummy democracy would flourish.

Now you and I know this was and is so much bilge water – that this Administration started gearing up to lie us into Iraq literally while the 9/11 fires were still burning – but remember that in the long ago and far away land of 2004,

…the American public has been presented reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the heads of the Iraq Survey Group David Kay and Charles Duelfer (chosen by the president), concluding that before the war Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction, nor even a significant program for developing them.

That is about as cut, dried, stacked and packed as facts ever get. Unambiguous to the point of being cartoonish, and yet when confronted with such blunt, clear truths, how do members of the Cult of Bush always react?

(from the same report

Nonetheless, 72% of Bush supporters continued to hold to the view that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%).

And

The pattern on al Qaeda is similar. Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters think the Bush administration is currently saying Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda (56%) or even that it was directly involved in 9/11 (19%). Furthermore, 55% of Bush supporters say it is their impression the Bush administration is currently saying the US has found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda (not saying clear evidence found: 37%).

You can go right on down the list, checking off the same kind of childishly delusional belief by the same group of people on issue after issue, but it would only tell us what we already know: The GOP Rat People are stoopid.

Waaaay stoopid.

Aggressively and chickenshittedly stoopid.

And now, from their POV, look at how they see the enemy they face in Iraq.

An enemy that refuses to listen to you or “be reasonable” even to the point of sabotaging their own interests.

An enemy that will take a bite out of you whichever way you step. If you try to compromise, you’ll lose face and get beat on as “weak”. If you try to leave, you’ll be blamed for everything and called cowards. If you try to escalate, you’ll feed into every stereotype the enemy has of you. If you try to extend a hand, you’ll pull back a stump.

An enemy who repays your “kindness” – however poorly executed – with venom.

An enemy who believes some kinda alien, terrifying religion that sounds to you like one, big rationalization of fascism and bigotry all wrapped up in God’s Own Blank Check.

An enemy who seems completely deranged and hell-bent on just destroying everything according to some bizarre ideology that you cannot comprehend.

An enemy whose land and condition you have spent oceans of blood and treasure to improve, only to be told that they hate you, that you are the source of Every Evil, and if they had their way they’d annihilate you all.

An enemy that elects dangerous, crazy religious extremists on the electoral dime you provided them, and then tell their “benefactors” to go fuck themselves, ‘cause they won.

Well my Republican friends, welcome to the wonderful world of being called destroyers for acting on your "principles" ("Principles", mind you, that normal humans find ridiculous and degenerate, but which you hew to so fiercely.)

Of seeing mindless raging God-stoked mobs pissing away all the lovely Democracy that you’ve spent so much and worked to hard to create.

Of practically begging them to stop for a moment and consider all that they’re throwing away, and being called weak and cowardly for your trouble.

Of being shrieked at that your existence and everything you believe is a massive insult to God.

Of seeing politically-wired religious leaders whose agenda is overtly theocratic standing behind the mobs, pulling the strings and laughing and laughing and laughing.

In other words, welcome to what it’s like to be a Democrat in America.

Welcome to Liberalville, bitches!

Population: You.

Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down

In which George Bush shoots his base in the face! Again!

And they apologize to him! Again!

And another breathtakingly ridiculous talking point – “Having looked into the abyss, the Iraqis have pulled back..." -- is born.

Again!

Well, not so much “born” as stillborn. Squeezed out DOA right into the ranks of “greeted as liberators”, “cake-walk”, “regime dead-enders”, “Mission Accomplished”, “final throes” and a thousand other feculent bumper-stickers this Administration uses to keep its Rat People supporters dizzy enough to ignore its lies and catastrophic failures in Iraqi for one more day.

Again!

And thank goodness. I was worried there for a bit that, what with all the clusterfucking going on in Iraq that things were, maybe, y’know, getting worse, but now that I have bitten into the latest GOP talking-point and gotten to the chewy-chewy center, I am just chock-full of confidence in the inerrant wonderfulness of Our Dear Leader.

So no tricksey, A-List White House Prevaricators doing the Mouse Circus today which can only mean one of three things:

1. Bush is on vacation again.

2. They’re so scared stupid by yet another week of their own ineptitude blowing up in their own faces again that even Scary Mary Matalin can’t get her bile-erection up two weeks in a row.

3. It’s Two-For-One Day at Manwhore Gannon’s Bareback Shack

But let us slog into Sunday's febrile awfulness anyway, always remembering that all quotes are “Based on Actual Events”, which means they’re either loose approximations (curse my never finishing typing class) or fictionalized-but-spiritually-true-and-occasionally-fulla-swears.

And everywhere today, there was the Big Question -- "Iraq. Civil War or Not?" -- and the corrolary question -- "WTF is wrong with the idjits at the White House that they did't think outsourcing U.S. port security to a Mideast royal family wouldn't raise eyebrows?"

On Fox -- Joe Biden, WH Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend talkin’ Dubai, and Mitt Romney, talkin’ Mitt Romney.

Short Fran Townsend: Trust us. Everything’s cool. And even if it weren’t cool, the deal’s done. But even if it weren’t done, everything’s cool. Trust us.

"Good" Joe showed up today, so I’m glad to see that he has gotten his meds rebalanced and has brought his raging Vichy bullshit glossolalia temporarily under control.

Biden: All allies aren’t created equal. NATO gets the big, family discounts, and non-NATO doesn’t. This is no different.

Biden: This isn’t just the Coast Guard covering our asses. The law says these Dubai Guys can have access to, and set the standards and make the plans for all kinds of super-secret security shit.

Wallace: But…but…but…it’s the Democrats. It’s all the Democrats. What about the Democrats?

Biden: No dumbass, real, actual Republicans are worried about this too. And let’s be clear -- This President can’t be trusted any more. The 9/11 commission flunked his sorry ass and this time all of Daddy’s money and contacts can’t buy him a gentleman’s “C” for sleeping through yet another critical exam.

Wallace: Isn’t this just anti-Arab bigotry?

(When Fox-poo-nozzle Chris Wallace has the temerity to try to tag Joe Biden with a race card and Wallace doesn’t disappear in a flash of holy fire accompanied by a thundervoice intoning, “Alright, that’s it. I am a patient Diety, but even I have finally had it with you screwheads.” it’s enough to make me doubt the existence of a benevolent God. On a Sunday no less!)

Biden: Yeah, there is some bigotry around this issue out there, but I hold this Administration accountable. Come on, Chris. Secretary Snow saying he didn’t know about this? Wasn’t even there? Pulling the Bush Daddy Iran/Contra excuse out of the playbook? “I din’t know nuffin! I wuz out getting’ the big guy a sammich and then went down to the White House launderette to make sure they wuz doing that detergent-rubbing-in-thingie to get the brown streaks out of his underpants. I warn’t in the room and no one tol’ me shit.”

The diplomatic failure here is entirely the Administrations fault. Their tone-deafness.

And so forth…


Short Mitt Romney -- I want to be President soooo bad, but the Dear Leader of my Party sucks ass. But because I am a Republican in the Age of Dubya, I will always put my Party ahead of my country so let me outline a few eansy-beansy differences between me and the Dear Leader so that I can call myself independent while still allowing the Dear Leader to use my face as a bicycle seat.

Wallace: But you’re a Mormon!

Romney: People want a person of faith in the WH, but American’s don’t really care what faith you are.

Oh Mittsy; you are in for such a world of hurt.



On Face the Nation -- Nat’l Security Advisor, Steven Hadley.

Iraq. Civil War or Not?

Hadley: Nah. In fact, this last week will, uh...bring them together! Yeah, that's the ticket. Hey, maybe we should blow up some more holy sites, since that breeds such unity of purpose! I believe that they “looked into the abyss” and maybe stepped back.

Bingo.

Bob Schieffer: Well fine, people agree that WWI wasn’t a good idea, but they did it anyway.

Captain Obvious (they'll let anyone on teevee these days): Are there Shiite Death Squads working out of the Ministry of the Interior?

Hadley: Could be...which is why this year we’re gonna focus like crazy on training the Iraqi po-lice.

Bob Schieffer: Because we’ve done such a brilliant fucking job training the military, right? The USMC can take any random number of young men and women off the streets of Anytown, U.S.A. and train 'em up into Marines in 16 weeks. We've been in Iraq for nearly three years. Last year we had only one Level One battalion, and this year we don't even have that anymore. Were going backwards!

Had: No we’re not! You’re reading the number’s wrong. We read the numbers differently.

(Remember that this is the Administration who lied so lavishly about the number of Iraqi troops that were ready to fight and mocked anyone who questioned them about it. Based on the training curve they were bragging about during the Presidential Debates, every single living thing in Iraq should be Audie Effing Murphy by now.

Lied about Iraqi's "leading" battles.

Lied two years ago about there being are only “pockets” of anti-coalition violence.

Lied two years ago that the “Iraqis are ready to fight for their own freedom.”

And on, and on, and on...)

driftglass (shouting at the teevee): Yeah, OK, I guess I could turn a chart of the Crash of ’29 upside down and claim that the Black Monday and the Great Depression never happened, but what kind of moron would listen to me if I did that?


Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer then sing a bipartisan, interfaith chorus of, “Are you fucking kidding me with this Dubai thing?!”


On This Week … McCain & Carl Levin. Iraq: Civil War or Not?

McCain going full Yoda (OK, only in my head): Hmm. Dangerous, it is. Much tension there. Always emotions, the future. “Into the abyss they looked” and maybe stepped back.

And B-I-N-G-O is his name-oh.



On the "This Week..." Roundtable:

Torie Clark (former Pentagon spinanatrix, now known as The “Lipstick On a Pig” lady): The whole Dubai thing is an over-reaction.

Fareed Zakaria: This is racism. It’s fear of brown people running our ports.

George Will: It’s the Democrats…something…something. The Republican are having their own, “hysterical”, “Terri Schiavo Moment.” What a creepy little stoat George Will is.

E.J. Dionne gets it right: No this is the Administration’s Problem. Period. They have reaped what they have sown. They have used the politics of terror over and over and over again, and now they say, “Trust us” to hand over our port security to a Mideast government.

Then the Buckley Article is brought up…

George Will does get this part right: Our policy is now only about building up the Iraqi army. That’s what we’re down to. No more pretense about delivering democracy or WMDs or “flypaper” claptrap. All we are doing is training people to use military force whose loyalties and agendas we do not know.

Will: This is a civil war.

Zakaria: No it’s not.

Will: Yes it is.

Zakaria: Shut up!

Will: No, you shut up!

Clark: This was perhaps a catalyst for change (didn’t quite say “looked into the abyss and pulled back…” but was thinkin’ it awfully hard.)

Will: Does Iraq have a government? If in Los Angeles the Crips and Bloods were in charge, policing the city, enforcing order in their areas, how could you say Los Angeles has a government?

But…but…aren’t elections brimming with Special Majyks, George? Isn’t that what your Rat People legion of Doom tell us every single day?

That you won, so we all should just shut the fuck up? That elections trump physics and causality and human nature? That there is no global warming, we’re winning in Iraq and the Earth is only 6,000 years old…because you voted it so?

Stephanopoulos (finally getting frustrated) busts out with: We keep saying that the next corner is the definitive corner. Elections. Interim leaders. More elections. Presidents. Constitution. On and on, year after year. And yet the only matter that has ever really been of any importance is power sharing, and that’s the hard job that we have deliberately postponed over and over.

Dionne (later, on the winnablity of Iraq): This is a disaster and this was predictable.

Almost correct, E.J.

“Predicted”. This was “predicted”. By lots of people, who have been called traitors since the day they spoke up, by the selfsame cowards and criminals and chickenhawn cheerleaders who got us into this mess in the first place.

On Meet the Press -- In which Punkin' Haid hangs out the shingle reading: "Three Republicans/No Waiting!"

Republican Peter King “debates” Republican John Warner as Timmuh cites quotes and furrows his mighty brow.

Well, John Warner’s Hair is there, and noises keep emerging from beneath it, so I’m sure he’s saying something, but when asked “Is Iraq in a civil war?” he bibbles on about what “civil war” may or may not mean, so I can’t be completely sure what he’s talking about.

However one thing that John Warner’s Hair is God Damned Positive about is that we need to act decisively! Much more jaw-jutting is immediately required. Even if we have to job it out to China or import it from Syria or somebody. And even though John Warner’s Hair is completely unable to state simply and clearly exactly where those fresh reserves of Mandibular Juttiness (tm (pending) and coming soon as a Googlewhack to a search engine near you) should be deployed, or in what direction they should be pointing.

Just “More Decisiveness Now! Get that gummint up and running and kicking ass!”

And if there is a civil war, however you want to define it?

Warner: The U.S. troops should not be involved in any sectarian violence. Right now, we have trained enough Iraqi troops to take on the problem of a civil war with minimal US support.

OK...so if they can “stand up”, why the Hell aren’t we standing down and getting out? Isn't that the plan?

But of course no one is going to ask John Warner’s Hair that scary question, because he’s old and dotty and Don Knotts just passed away for Christ’s Sake, and he was about the same age as John Warner’s Hair. Jeez! What, you wanna kill the stupid old fart?

Peter King: Sure it’s bad. Sure it’s hard. But going into Iraq was the right thing to do and we need to stay and get the job done. Because…wait for it…wait for it…”Having looked into the abyss…”

B-I-N-G-O! Give the monkey a cigar and a hearty “heckofajob”!

So according to King and Warner, we’re right on the verge of everything being OK, and the Iraqi gummint has just been flaking off when they should have been buckling down and hitting the books (So at least we can say that the Bush Administration has successfully exported one of its cardinal values) and all they really need is a little slapping around.

And maybe stern talking-to by Ward Cleaver.

Whenever Ward sobers up and wanders back to the Oval Office.

And then came Governor Ahnuld, and I couldn’t care less, although I must admit I love The Ahnuld describing foreign policy in his own special, meathead way.

That the invasion was good because of “de terrism tret”.

That it’s easy in hindsight to “criticizing de President”, but that no one could have predicted what has happened in Iraq.

That it's “like de Korean voor, or the Veetnam voor”; sometimes you get into a “sitchashun” where you’re in there for good reasons, but you can’t get out.

Really? We’re still fighting in Korea? We’re still in “Veetnam”?

Holy Ho Chi Minh, Gropenator! Quite bogarting whatever Dutch Cleanser you’re shotgunning, and pass it on.

That Iraq is a “hassle”.

On the plus side, I do believe the one thing The Gropenator did not say was that the Iraqi’s “Have looked into the abyss...".

Could it be that, unlike everyone else in the GOP, he knows the whole, original quote, because the author of same hails from Ahnuld’s part of the world?

Maybe Conan the Rotarian is a closet Nietzsche fan!

Nah.

However the whole quote does seem particularly apt these days, especially given the fact that its origins and irony clearly escapes the loyal GOP date-rapists who tried to slip it into our national cocktail:

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

And heeding that bit of wisdom, in defense of my soul, I now stop gazing into one, tiny abyssette, turn the Sunday Mouse Circus off and head out for brunch and a stiff drink.

The Enemy Within.

This is what a Consie Rat in a hat looks like.

Hat-tip to commenter Frank for pointing this out from “Unqualified Offerings”

Outraged Moderate got hold of Steven Cambone’s handwritten notes of his meeting with Donald Rumsfeld from the afternoon of September 11, 2001.

The notes confirm CBS News’ report of September 4, 2002 that, at that meeting, Rumsfeld was already thinking of using the atrocities as an excuse to go to war with Iraq. It’s important to stress: Rumsfeld is not wondering if Iraq did it; he’s wondering if it can look enough like Iraq did it to pin the blame there.

It can’t be stressed enough: the Pentagon was aflame; there was smoke pouring from a hole in the Pennsylvania fields and the World Trade Center complex was belching its ghastly cloud, and already our rulers were thinking not, who is to blame? but what can we get away with? What will the still-bubbling fat of the murdered serve to cook?…

The article he refers to is this from CBS News…

Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2002

(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.

At 9:53 a.m., just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, and while Rumsfeld was still outside helping with the injured, the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden's operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The caller said he had "heard good news" and that another target was still to come; an indication he knew another airliner, the one that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania, was at that very moment zeroing in on Washington.

It was 12:05 p.m. when the director of Central Intelligence told Rumsfeld about the intercepted conversation.

Rumsfeld felt it was "vague," that it "might not mean something," and that there was "no good basis for hanging hat." In other words, the evidence was not clear-cut enough to justify military action against bin Laden.

But later that afternoon, the CIA reported the passenger manifests for the hijacked airliners showed three of the hijackers were suspected al Qaeda operatives.

"One guy is associate of Cole bomber," the notes say, a reference to the October 2000 suicide boat attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which had also been the work of bin Laden.

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

So what?

Another piece of titanium-clad evidence that the Administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq for secret reasons of its own that long pre-dated 9/11. That they saw the slaughter of 3,000 civilians not as a cause for mourning, but as Christmas morning.

Partisan, Neocon ghouls that looked at the dust of the dead sifting down into the hair and cloths and food and tears of the living as manna from Heaven. A cornucopia of corpses on which they could feed and feed and feed.

The sadness is that this will change nothing.

To those of us who care about this country even a little but, the FOIA-ed proof of this Administration’s decision –- mere hours after the worst attacks on US soil in history and while the WTC and Pentagon pyres were still burning -- to cynically exploit 9/11 and pimp our grief and fear to further their own, private agenda is not exactly a surprise; just another underscore and exclamation point on a matter long settled.

And of course, to a Republican this is all irrelevant.

Anything crime that their Leadership committed before breakfast this morning is irrelevant.

And, of course, any crime after breakfast will be conspicuously ignored until tomorrow...by which time it will technically have occurred before today’s breakfast, which means that it has now become irrelevant.

Anything that involves facts or proof or causality is irrelevant.

Anything that has even the faintest whiff of criticism of the Dear Leader is irrelevant.

Anything that doesn’t come vomiting out of Ann Coulter’s lie-hole is irrelevant.

And this is because Republicans don’t give a shit about anything to do with this country that doesn’t affect them personally and directly, so that anything that doesn’t kick in their door in the middle of the night and ram the business end of a shotgun against their forehead is irrelevant.

So as the world falls apart around them because of the treachery of their leaders they will do what they always do: blame Bill Clinton and turn Rush up louder.

Because to remain a Republican in the Age of Dubya is side with criminals against your own country.

Why does William F. Buckley, Jr.

Hate America?

This from Progenitor Conservative and professional petit éminence grise, Bill Buckley (passed along by our own Dr. BopperTHP), would have provided the “Walter Cronkite Moment” among conservatives a generation ago.

An acknowledgement by one of the Big Giant Heads of the Consie Movement of what was self-evident to normal humans two years ago -- that we have lost in Iraq, and that every day we linger there makes the situation worse -- would have driven a redwood-sized stake into the heart of the Keyboard Kommandos and Koolaidians, were this all happening in, say, the Seventies.

But of course this is 2006, and we have all lived through five painful years of near-daily crisis, criminal incompetence, corruption, lies and treason at every level of the Republican Government at a scale that dwarfs -- by any measure -- anything the Dems have ever been guilty of in living memory.

And of course, buttressing the long, sad litany of Republican High Crimes and failures -- always riding reliably alongside GOP treachery like the Horsemen of War, Famine and Pestilence -- has been the chittering applause of the fascistically inclined Rat People who make up the GOP rank and file, and an absolutely deafening, willful silence from the Vaseline-spined Press and the Republican Congress.

The Congress -- responsible for holding the Executive branch to account for it’s actions -- and the Press –- responsible for rigorously investigating the government and helping to keep the public informed – have both been completely AWOL during this time of war. In what I can only compare to very worst traditions of the CPSU and Pravda, these same people who hunted Democratic President Bill Clinton for seven, long years over trivia, have utterly abandoned their duties, and have shown nothing in the last five years but a steadfast and craven refusal to investigate and report on the serial catastrophes of the Bush White House.

They have failed us all and disgraced themselves unforgivably.

So a generation ago, this column by Buckley may have tipped the scales, but in 2006 we are deep in the terrible shadow of the Age of Dubya.

And in the Age of Dubya, the GOP has gone stark, raving nuts.

In the Age of Dubya, the Party of God hasn’t just fallen down the rabbit hole, but has positively hurled itself down into darkness with JATO units strapped to their little, webbed feet to help rocket them to the bottom faster.

In the Age of Dubya, rabid weasels like Coulter and Hannity and Falwell speak for the Party and enforce Orthodoxy with a sledgehammer, and however untouchably revered Buckley might have been in Conservative circles a week ago doesn’t matter. He can become just another Swiftboated unperson in the twinkling of an eye because in the Age of Dubya, Truth and Principle have long ago been bound and gagged and duct-taped into a duffle-bag in the trunk of the GOP Deathmobile.

In the Age of Dubya, the only Evil is to speak against the Dear Leader no matter how lunatic and patently ridiculous his lies may be, and the only Good is blind Loyalty to the Dear Leader.

Because in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.

So file this under "Duh", and cross-index under, "Well you certainly took your sweet fucking time, didn't you?"

IT DIDN'T WORK

By William F. Buckley Jr. Fri Feb 24, 9:05 PM ET

"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes -- it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunnis and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samarra and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that "the bombing has completely demolished" what was being attempted -- to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each other's throats.

A problem for American policymakers -- for President Bush, ultimately -- is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

…
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.

And as a public service to those of you on-the-goers who don't want to wade into Buckleyese this afternoon, this shorter version of Big Bill's article:

As 49 million Americans warned you, the Dear Leader has now lied himself and this country right off the proverbial cliff Wile E. Coyote style.

And as 49 million Americans warned you, while the bizarre GOP strategy of simply refusing to look down and hoping that will keep us aloft might seem viable in cartoons or in your Jebus-For-Dummies anti-religion, it doesn’t actually work out here in the Real World where cause and effect will have its merry way with you every, single fucking time.

And now that Buckley can actually feel the wind from our accelerating fall whipping through his comb-over, he thinks maybe someone should maybe do something about it.

Why fixating on your hit counter

Will drive you mad.

It was just an ordinary Monday, following the lazy trickle of traffic of an ordinary Sunday, when, boom!

Hey!

How, y’all been?

Whatcha been doin’?

Me?

Well, I’ve been hauling my pasty ass from one end of this dirty, old town to another, working surrealistically long hours, and paying the price in sleep, meals and exercise (personal hygiene is still barely passable, although I was awakened by the cat trying to clean me up. She just looked at me pityingly, shook her head, and went back to trying to get my ankles to smell cat-mouth fresh.)

Now if I were a cagey dog, I’d have called in sick or disgruntled or something ominous to the various places that contribute to my bank account, pounced on the generous hat-tip that Crooks & Liars tossed my way a few days ago (Thanks again!) and have marketed the daylights out of this little site. However I opted not to for two reasons:

1. I like a roof over my head, and to feed my meager vices, and I’m not a Nebraska meat packer (which, you’ll pardon me for saying so and maybe it's just me, sounds vaguely…uh…dirty. “Yeah, Jim, I know! I never thought she’d go for a ‘Nebraska meat packer’, but she had a couple of martinis, and bless her heart, you know down deep she’s a bit freak-ay.” ) so it’s into the labor pool for this working man.

2. Getting a hat-tip is nice, but it doesn’t mean anything kin the long run. For a day it’ll spike, but it always settles back down to a previous level, plus a few new friends picked up along the way (and a troll or two). And them things return to their proper cruising altitude.

I understand and feel a particlar kind of sorry for people who chase the spike in any endeavor: the Ahabs, forever stalking their particular White Whale, because IMHO, nothing I know ever works that way.

Bill Macy didn’t get to be a star today based on "Fargo"; he got to "Fargo" and beyond by practicing his craft like any other working man. Asimov wrote a jillion books, one at a time, year after year. Hell, Lincoln lost every damned election ever until the big one.

There are people -- people I know -- who routinely wager large parts of their lives and futures on the Big Score, and it just never works out that way. And so I don’t know if its blog taboo (blogboo?) to flash one’s hitcount to the world (as if the world were watching or cared :-) but while a daily total of visitors is satisfying and I cherish the comments and emails I get, the number itself is not relevant to me one way or another; the process, the work and the people I get to interact with are what matter, so I posted it up here just to illustrate a larger point.

That anyone can hit it big on any given day, but the inflation of the moment has no nutritional value, and it evaporates like dew in a firestorm. What matters is the work, and the residue of what endures after a freak sunny day in February has gone. And my reason for using this, specific example during this political season is this:

It is especially important to remember over the next nine months that the world we living in and the nation we love will not be changed by massed millions in streets on a Sunday, but by a few hundred scattered here and there in polling places on a Monday.

That winning back our nation is the hard, steady, behind-the-scenes work of thousands of volunteers – and, yes, I’m looking at YOU -- that does not come with the sugar-highs of huge spikes and fanfares and giant novelty checks.

Because virtually nothing of value ever does.

We win this country back one vote and one voter at a time.

We will kick the everloving shit out of these people…if we can just get used to the fact that this is a game of inches and single digits. Marches and rallies and petitions and blogs and so forth are terrific and I’m all for them, but in the trenches of the political universe, damned good ass-whippings are administered in the aggregate on election day, and that aggregates comes in small, unspectacular increments.

Or, as Voltaire said, "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

Ok, just one more...

A Cheney walks into a ranch.

He orders a couple of shots of Jack, drinks ‘em, then pulls a shotgun and proceeds to shoot his friend in the face.

He then walks away, shrugs it off, telling everyone to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible.

"Why?" asks the confused reporters about the whole, botched mess, as the Cheney goes about his business. "Why did you do this?!"

The Cheney produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a Cheney," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The reporter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Cheney. Large mendacious Neocon, native to the GOP.

Drinks, shoots and leaves."

Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down

In which “Too Much Birdshot Bukkake Makes the GOP Go Blind.”

One personal matter about which I’d like to do a little happy dance first:

This is my 500th Post.

Ta Da!

Comments and the conversations they create are terrific and informative: I look forward to them more than you may know. The emails I get are usually thoughtful and/or informative, and often really funny. Rising hit counts are dandy, and awards or nominations or suchlike are things about which I'm deeply ambivalent, but I appreciate the sentiments they express.

But in the end, writing is about sitting down and writing, and with my tempus fugitting away these days towards every horizon like a Baker’s Dozen of Runaway Brides, to look back and see that in less than a year I’ve piled up half-a-thousand essays, poems, lyrics, PhotoShopping Expeditions, etc. is very satisfying.

But enough about that, ‘cause I don’t know if you heard, but Dick Cheney shot some old guy!

In the face!

On Fox...

Chris Wallace asks if using terms to describe the Dread Lord Cheney like “Above the Law” “Arrogance of Power” isn’t the kind of language that makes the Dems look silly.

Evan Bayh, eager to look squinty and Presidential and eat whatever orts he is offered off the Fox table, urges Dems to drop the Cheney thing and get on with other stuff.

Lindsey Graham, fearfully aware that Big Dick is lurking in shadows, armed, deep in his cups, and mouthing “Wanna birdshot facial pretty-boy?” at him, sums Cheney thusly: Great Hunter. Nice man.

Wallace: Isn’t this White House “too secret”?

Graham: Nah.

Wallace faults the Dems for “killing the Patriot Act”. And wanting to get out of Iraq. Not very manly…

Graham: The Preznit has a theme. We have a theme. The Dems don’t have a theme. Agree with him or not, he’s got theme shooting out of every pore, whereas the Dems are “all over the place”.

Funny, I always thought that’s what a democracy engaging in a national debate over vital issues sounds like. Whereas demanding “One Party. One Leader. One Identity.”?

Doesn’t that sound just a wee bit…Teutonic? And not in a good blonde hottie kind of way?

Bayh: There can’t be a choice between cost and protecting America.

Hey, what about that White House plan to sell major US ports to a firm based in Dubai…

Graham: It is unbelievably, politically tone-deaf for the White House to approve the sale of major American ports/ port security to a company in the UAE.

Wallace: So Softie McSoftington, how about what you said about you guys being seen as soft on security.

Bayh: Yeah, we have to work on that.

Waiting…waiting…waiting…

Nope.

Bayh is palming the same card as many of the rest of the leading Dems: more talking about the day when we’ll talk about stuff.

More “pre-meeting, meetings”.

Chris Wallace then disinters the GOP’s favortite Crazy Uncle Fester -- Alan Simpson -- to ramble about the non-story that everyone on Fox insists that everyone ELSE needs to Stop Talking About: Dead-Eye Dick Cheney.

Wallace all but 'umbly pardons himself for giggling and swooning like a crushing school girl every time Simpson opens his quirk-hole. And then opines that ”some worry” that this may take a toll on poor Dick Cheney.

Simpson (and this almost a quote): “The American people know what it is to have someone have an accident on your ranch, when someone gets shot or bucked off his horse or something…”

Really? Most Americans maintain large, private, hunting ranches? They understand shooting accidents on their property? When the shooter is the most powerful man on Earth? Who is somehow so involved with applying direct pressure to the wounds, or CPR, or something for 20 straight hours that he doesn’t bother to tell his alleged boss – the President – or his actual boss – the American People – WTF was going on?

Even though he’s traveling with a phalanx of doctors and Secret Service?

For a guy who constantly flogs the press and the D.C. culture for being too insular – and about that, he is quite right – Alan Simpson needs to spend considerably less time sniffing his own saddle (so the speak) and breathe that clean American air, laden with the perfumes of millions of people who aren’t rich Republicans with 10,000 acre private hunting demenses.

Wallace then tries passing Simpson an, “If you like me, check one of these boxes...” note. Wallace then tries to “yawn an arm” around Big Al and sidle up a little closer. Wallace then tries to slip him a little tongue.

Sadly, Simpson is sitting over a thousand miles away and is appearing on one ‘a them new-fangled video-monitor dealies, so their love must remain unrequited, and all Wallace got was a mild electric shock and mouthful of old teevee screen dust.

Which, come to think of it, is probably quite a lot like soul-kissing Alan Simpson for real.

Eww!

Sorry; sometimes it does not pay at ALL to have a vivid imagination.

Wallace: Hehehe. Could you be more colorful!

Simpson: “I travel all over this country and talk to all kinds of people, and the American People this and the American people that…”

Simpson: “The American people are waiting for something-something the American people, something pitch forward, catatonic coma.”

And then the Ugly People rolled out and I went away after Brit Hume took off after “the press” for acting like “a Pack of Jackals”! Heavens! It’s the Press Corps that’s outta line here! They behaved badly. For Shame. Bad press! Naughty press! You get down off that nice Mr. McClellan right now!

Perhaps it’s just me, but seeing a Fake-Plastic-Joke-Vomit-For-Entertainment-Purposes-Only-“Newsman” like Hume whining about how actual journalists should behave is just plain funny. Like a meth whore taking a 10-second time-out between working a dozen drunks in an alley to scream at passing lady cop that her lipstick is shamefully immodest.

Meet the Press…was MIA from Chicago teevee, displaced by Winter Olympic hockey: Two concepts which, when combined, reach new heights of "Don't Careishness" with me. There is a nice summary of “The many responses of Lady MacCheney” over at the indispensable Crooks and Liars here, and a longer excerpt here.

(My only remaining question is about Lady MacCheney generally is, what exactly is her Botox Injection Regimen that she can so perfectly petrify her face into slate fetish mask of peevish incredulity at every word everyone else utters, while still staying facially pliable enough to allow a veritable Niagra of bile and lies to fountain out of her mouth?)

Note to MoDo (who was on Meet the Press, along with David Gregory): The next time you’re on a panel with this shrike, instead of futilely attempting to engage her in a fact-based form of communication with which she is completely unfamiliar, try pelting her with holy water while firmly intoning “The Power of Christ compels you! The Power of Christ compels you!” instead.

Because I think the resulting detonation of pea soup, head-spinning and potty language would make for some mighty entertaining teevee.


On Face the Nation -- Senator's Frist and Boxer.

Fristy is all a-squirm when asked The Question, because Herr Docktor still dreams of changing his address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and you don’t get to go to that dance by offending the Party Mullahs like James Dobson, and certainly not by taking sides against Dread Lord Cheney.

Wants to leave “The Vice President Who Mistook His Friend for a Hat…and Then Shot Him” alone like crazy, so he does what all savvy pols do under pressure: Break’s into a soulful ballad, covering one of my personal favorites from Emmylou Harris’ “Red Dirt Girl”. …

“… I don't want to talk about it now
I don't want to talk about it now
I don't want to talk about it now
I wanna go down

God knows why you don't want me
No one would do the things I do
But to my grave it's gonna haunt me
How I got down on my knees for you
You are my obsession
And the reason that I live
You already got my soul
There's nothin left to give

But I don't want to talk about it now
I don't want to talk about it now
I don't want to talk about it now
I wanna go down…”

Yeah, that about sums it up. Of course Emmylou sings it much better.

Then he's asked, Hey Doc...Ain’t Cheney a liability?

No! He is a bald leader.

Bald?

Oh. “Bold”. Never mind.

The only other thing Frist is firm about is that he doesn’t approve of injecting “partisan politics” into this.

Don’t worry, Senator. It’s only a light peppering of partisanship. From 30 yards away.

And we feel just AWFUL about it.

Barbara Boxer; silver highlights and concern in front of a roaring fire. Talking about the “secret” study or negotiations (I’m a little dodgy on the details) to sell several major American ports to a Dubai company.

Boxer on that: No foreign company should run our infrastructure.

On Medicare reform, Boxer was good, but everybody – and I mean everybody – was asserting all kinds of things about “The American People” today and what “they” want/need/believe. It is a subject that has irritated me for a long time, and I had intended to finish a long-ish piece entitled “No ‘We’ In America” for my 500th post, but it’s still up on blocks.

Boxer asserts that the more the America people look into this plan, the more they’ll hate it.

Sorry, Senator, but not one American in 30 will “look into” this plan to the level of detail at which they can form the kind of opinion you’re talking about. That’s why we hire you and send you to D.C.; to act as our proxy because we have two or three thousand other things to get to before we can get around to figuring out whether or not some staffer jiggering with the way administrative costs are calculated in some massive bill is a good idea…or a stealth plan to destroy the program by making it unrunnable.


On This Week… Katrina vanden Heuvel! I must have you!

But first there was Michael Chertoff, who said the usual and customary Chertoffy things that a Chertoff is going to say.

I imagine Chertoff on a Republican Space Ark, looking through a porthole back at continent-sized splinters of rubble where the Earth used to be before an asteroid took it out, saying, “Sure there were some mistakes, but we did some things extremely well too. We learned from the experience, and I’m sure we’ll do better next time.”

There should never, ever, ever again be a “next time” for these criminals.

De Facto Republican Senator Joementum and De Jure Republican Rep. Tom Davis debate FEMA and Homeland Security.

Davis: The White House wouldn’t even give us someone under oath to talk about this. The WH has the Magic Wand, and they need to cooperate.

Strikes me that the Congressional GOP talks plaintively about what the WH “should do” in the same way a lot of Moderate Dems talk about “Getting around to talkin’ ‘bout stuff by-and-by.” A wistful, daydreamy wish for some far off tomorrow when things will magically right themselves and the bestial men who run the government will miraculously start responding to reason and legalities, stop behaving like mobsters in a bent town and suddenly sprout some respect for the law.

Seriously, Representative Davis, why should the White House do a fucking thing? Are you planning on subpoenaing them? Sending in the Feds to confiscate records and files? Because if you’re not, then kindly shut the fuck up. If you’re not, then you’re just another Republican wheel-man feigning concern for the fate of your country with fierce, empty words. Another useless Barney Fife, talking big and bold about Law Enforcement, and then hiding like chickenhawk from a Marine recruiter when it comes to actually DOING something about it.

And then…

And then…!

Katrina vanden Heuvel! I must have you!

She of the beautiful, bee-stung lips, razor-studded, pear-shaped prose and raven hair brings the Big Heat and positively kills George Will. Not just hits him, but punches right on through the quivering, truckling piñata of thesauran Jell-O that is George Will. And rolls on so strong and clear and passionate that she actually cracked Cokie Roberts’ Lucite Hair open wide enough that the funky, fungus-y moths that nest up there fluttered out, flapped erratically once or twice and died under the bright studio lights.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Pleaaaase let C&L have this, because it’s both a work of art and a masterpiece of pure verbal craft, and a textbook example of what Not Backing Down One Inch looks like when delivered with a smile.

It was so relentless that Cokie Roberts had to drop any pretense of even token once-upon-a-time moderateness, hop aboard her “Vroom Broom” and fly to the rescue of Po’ George.

Reminded me of nothing so much as the most brutal Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving you’ve ever seen or been at.

George Will, the ossified, thin-lipped Angry Dad who is forever ranting out his charmingly rustic ideas about Dirty Liberals, and Ayrabs and Fem’nists and The Coloreds, and Katrina vanden Heuvel as the smart, emotionally-healthy daughter who left the neighborhood, stopped sopping up her worldview solely from local boneheads repeating what they heard on Rush last night, went to college, learned about the wider world, grew tough and beautiful and has now finally Had It with Idiot Dad spouting his Idiot Drivel.

And then, one holiday over turkey, she just unloads on his dumb, hateful ass with a forcefulness that Bad Dad is completely unprepared for.

Every time he tries to run yet another one of his hoary, ridiculous Conservative clichés at her as some kind of rebuttal, she drops him in his tracks like Cheney bringing down a 78-year-old Liberal Texas Trophy Buck.

And finally Will can do nothing but sit there and seethe. Absolutely unmanned, spidery hands furiously steepled, glaring passive-aggressive “I Hate You and the Air You Breathe” daggers at Katrina with all the impotent irk a little man can muster without blowing a header gasket at this awful, awful girl who dared to stomp the Truth all over his stupid fussy dogma.

And Cokie Roberts was perfectly cast as Terrified Enabler Mom. Positively leaping into her role as Evil Edith Bunker, defending her stupid, ignorant spouse and trying with that desperate rictus that passes for a smile pasted to her face to keep peace at the dinner table.

Oh, Lawdy! Why oh why can’t we just talk of happy things? Why can’t just laugh and stuff ourselves with cranberry sauce and dispense with all of this unpleasantness.

Katrina vanden Heuvel finds it fucking fascinating that the press has suddenly, finally become interested in asking hard questions. And hopes that maybe it’ll set a trend, and maybe they’ll bring the same fire to interlocuting about actual, important matters.

George Will squeaks out “Elite press. Bad Press.” That no one cares about this, and when he stops to take a wee breathe Ms. vanden Heuvel saws his ass off and serves it to him on the good china.

As he goes beneath the waves for the third time over the issue of Hamas, George pipes up with some non-sequitor that “words are deeds”, and gets hit with another anvil.

Ms. vanden Heuvel goes down the whole laundry list like a Very Hot prosecutor reading out the bill of particulars on a mob family. Katrina. Iraq. “Cherry picking” intel. Lies this Administration tells as a matter of course. The sneeringly imperial attitude. The disastrous mess of Neocon dogma and wishful thinking that passes for “foreign policy” and has made the world vastly more unstable and dangerous, not less. The contempt for the Bill of Rights. The secrecy and mendacity and unbelievable incompetence that this Administration has on exhibit every single day.

George Stephanopoulos has to break up the fight, with “well, this debate could go on forever, but now…”.

Except of course it wasn’t a debate; it was a beat-down.

Those Democrats who are forever verging on thinking about drawing up plans to maybe, someday, eventually engage the GOP instead of just standing up -- right now -- and smacking these people need to dupe off 1,000 copies of Ms. vanden Heuvel’s performance, mail it to every Democratic organization, and mandate the watching of same with as much focus as an NFL coach reviewing game film.

She was on fire.

Will was humiliated. Completely gutted.

And soft-boned Dems need to take a lesson.


[Welcome C&L Readers. Bathroom's on the left, and I think I've still got some War on Christmas lemon bars around here if you're hungry.

Also mind the cat; she's a bit of a...disemboweler. Which I believe according to the Dear Leader means she lies a lot.)

Stupid Is as Stupid Does.

Hey Kids! Guess which Party wants to put a little army of Michael Browns in charge of a bunch of these?

Sometimes I talk, sometimes listen, and sometimes I get to point to someone or something that deserves some attention.

This little gem came to my attention as I was looking for a whole other bit of info. And as provisional and diluted as it may turn out to be, it is nonetheless a sweet little win for the good guys, and a model of how the party out of power can pick a battle at the right moment on the right ground and hit their opponents where they’re vulnerable.

Because even when you’re outside looking in, you can meet weakness with strength if you’re smart about it.

Here’s the story (emphasis added by me).

Senate Dems block Bush/GOP insider nominees for TVA
Submitted by R. Neal on Sat, 2006/02/18 - 9:26am.
In huge news that is not getting any coverage, Senate Democrats have taken a stand against White House cronyism and one-party GOP government.

A while back, Sen. Bill Frist ushered through legislation to expand the Tennessee Valley Authority board of directors and appoint a first-ever CEO to oversee operations. The intent was to run the giant federal utility more like a business and less like a government within a government with no elected officials.

The problem is that all six new Bush nominees are unqualified GOP insiders with little or no utility experience. And the current chairman, Bill Baxter, who was recently appointed to that post by Bush, is already a generous Bush/GOP supporter.

But the fact that they aren't qualified isn't what got the Senate Dem's panties in a bunch. This Knoxville News Sentinel exclusive article (registration required) explains:

Senate Democrats Friday blocked approval of six nominees to the Tennessee Valley Authority's board of directors and said President Bush and Senate Republicans are "trying to stack" the nine-member board just with Republicans.

The six were denied a final Senate vote under an open-ended procedural move that could extend beyond the current recess and well past the Senate's next series of votes starting Feb. 28.

"All we're asking for is a guarantee of one Democratic nominee, and to date they have been unwilling to provide those assurances," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

It's not a filibuster of a Bush Supreme Court Nominee, but it's pretty huge, and a nice battle for Senate Dems to pick.

Why?

TVA is one of the nation's largest electric utilities. It is a quasi-federal agency that operates in seven Southern states. It serves more than 8 million people and generates approx. $7 billion in revenues. It operates a system of hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, and fossil fuel facilities including 11 coal-fired power plants. Their operations have a significant impact on the diverse economy of the Tennessee Valley and surrounding states.

They are a huge consumer of coal and natural gas. They are also one of the worst polluters in the South. Their coal-fired power plants are some of the dirtiest in the nation, and they have a long history fighting EPA regulation of coal fired power plant emissions.
…

And does it surprise anyone, anywhere that the Bush White House wants another passel of unqualified Party stooges to run this?

Go read the rest and thank Mr. Neal for limning a news item that is, in so many sad ways, the story of the Bush Administration.

Just another scary, pathetic case of the Republican’s incredibly aggressive Affirmative Action Program for Rich Incompetents, carried out by the Party of Personal Responsibility that swore we had nothing to worry about with a dimwit Preznit, because he’d appoint competent managers to make sure the wheels didn’t come off the Ship of State, so to speak.

But of course as we’ve learned from NASA to the Department of Energy to FEMA to Homeland Security – from the lies that brought us to grief in Iraq, to the catastrophic incompetence of that brought us to such tears with Katrina that we didn’t even notice how badly the same people botched the response to Hurricane Rita – everywhere they go and everything they touch, the phrase that pays is “Stupid Is as Stupid Does.”

Remember, this is the Party whose loony core believes – really, fervently believes – that all Bad Things come from the government, and so the government needs to be liquidated. Creatures bred out of a hellbrew belief system of paranoia, worship of Bizarro Anti Gee-Sys, black helicopters, gun fetishism and hysterical fear of everything that isn’t Just Like Them. A fever swamp of anti-government delusion out of which shambled the likes of Timothy McVeigh.

So keep in mind that the methodical destruction of the government – department by department – isn’t an accident; it’s the whole idea.

Katrina wasn’t a fuckup; Katrina is their vision of Heaven. A callous, “root, hog or die” Libertarian Utopia where they get to play their malicious Randite social experiments out with real human beings, and where those that can’t get out of the way of disaster deserve whatever they get.

Which is why, at every turn, these criminals and criminally inept men can be relied on to do one and only one thing: put lackeys and lickspittles in charge of vitally important government programs.

Let them loot the place and let Gresham's W. Bush’s Law – "Bad hacks with White House contacts will always drive out the good professionals" – take its course.

Let their buddies pick up a fat, government paycheck while they jerk off into their Domenico Vacca stripped silk socks until something blows up or blows down or melts into the Earth’s mantle, which is when the only skill at which the GOP actually excels -- lying -- kicks into action. The Spin Machine roars to life hosing everything in a 100 mile radius down with whitewash, and calling anyone a traitor who calls the administration out appointing yet another unqualified contributor’s idiot son to a position where American lives are endangered.

Well to be fair, it is usually poor Americans, and brown Americans, and no one in the corridors of power give an ounce of diseased anal leakage about them.

And now their plot to put a cadre of Brownies in charge of the safety and upkeep of vital national resources and prime terrorist targets like nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, power grids has been foiled.

It isn’t a clean win, and the motives of the Dems are in no way pristine, but a quiet victory in a stained, partisan dress is still a victory.

And these days, I’ll take my wins where I can find them and with a smile.

Vice President interviewed by own penis.

Film at 11:00.

So great; enough goats were slaughtered and virgins ritually deflowered (then ritually re-flowered, ‘cause you can't have no sluts interning at Rancho Ragnarok) in a manner pleasing enough to coax Dread Lord Cheney from his Undisclosed Location for a little Undistressed Locution and to take-responsibility-but-not-actually-apologize-for shooting a peasant

Which is still technically illegal.

Chosen for this plum assignment was Evil Gumby himself, Brit Hume...a flatly affected human grimace who gave up any pretense of integrity and objectivity around the time Nikita Khrushchev was ousted and now just plies a trade that that consists exclusively of suckling Republican jizz like a blue whale straining krill – and for the same reason.

A man who must to stand on his ippy-tippy toes to reach the yummy dollop of stinkfoot hanging like a summer peach from Dick Cheney’s cybernetic arch-supports.

So what?

I mean, if you want to see a very clear, simple demonstration of ballistic evidence that just demolishes one of the many stupid lies Cheney has been putting out, go the this site and have a look, because baby, Physics Don’t Dance.

So what was the Hume Puppet Show but another fractal of the same nation-gobbling Son of the Blob that Wingnuttlyvania steadfastly refuses to even acknowledge is eating the country alive even as it swallows whole diners and pick-ups right in front of them? A biopsy of the larger disease that accidentally found itself under the dusty microscope that the press should have been using every fucking day for the last five years.

But…

But, there is an initial instant when the GOP squeezes out yet another lie smack in front of the whole world that’s worth watching. That magical moment at the very beginning of the Republican Lie Cycle; when some High Ranking Bush flunky shambles onto the national dance floor, squats right down, and gives birth to another monster while the everyone watches.

And for a looong moment, the music stops, and a hush falls over the Party of Lincoln…because they quite simply do not know what to do.

So for those of us with functional cerebral cortices that watched Cheney being interviewed by his own penis and wondered what possible purpose was being served – who was being swayed or fooled by this ridiculous fraud, the answer is...we’re asking the wrong question.

The rank and file of the Modern GOP – people that have blindly stuck by the Bush Junta despite a daily avalanche of proof of their treachery and criminality that is simply breathtaking to behold – these are not people for whom facts and figures and causality and honor have any meaning.

These are not people of reason, but of ritual.

Sorta Obsessive Compulsive Christalopithecene, who don’t notice or care about the actual lies and treasons of their Dear Leader, but only freak out when the proper rituals are not followed to counter-hex those lies. It is very Old Testament and very schizophrenic, this idea that if you just follow the proper sacraments perfectly, and make the proper sacrifices just so, the High Priests of your Party and Faith will keep the raging Death God you've created out of your own nightmares at bay.

So, for example, part of that ritual is to “Bring out the Gimp”.

When polls show that 98% of African Americans loathe the GOP to the point they wouldn't scrape a Republican off their shoe and feed it to an alley rat…they trot out one of their “Fo’ Rent Two-Percent” hirelings like Ron Christie to spout Party Dogma as if that proves something.

When the GOP claws its way to power by gay-bashing but they have to pretend they didn’t…they trot out Andy Sullivan to show that their Klan is an Inclusive Klan.

When they need to lay on a light coating of “bi-partisan” shellac over the latest pile of dogshit they’re flogging as Kobe Beef Tenderloin Medallions…they trot out Kapo Joe Lieberman who will cheerfully sell out his own Party, anywhere, any time.

Which to an averagely bright eight-year-old would prove nothing except how desperate you are to cover the stink of the massive corpse in the middle of the room, and how pathetically you go about trying to do it with a doily and a schpritz of Lie-Sol.

But none of this has ever been about proof; it is entirely about ritual.

These are solemn rites performed for the Party Golem -- the Men of Mud with no thoughts but the thoughts they are told to think by the Dear Leader, hard-wired with the Prime Directive that Liberals are Always Wrong, Liberals are to Blame for Everything, and that the Dear Leader is a Plainspoken Man and a Per’fessed Christian and therefore is simply incapable of telling anything other than the Unvarnished Truth.

They are brought to a semblance of life by the stamp of hate and fear and greed that the Roves and Dobsons affix to their steeply-sloped foreheads. They are animated by Majyk Conjure Bile words by the likes of Coulter and Limbaugh; the demigods who casually burn yesterday's Scripted Verities, carefully inscribe on Hate Radio Parchment what their thralls are supposed to think today, and slip the new talking points into their mouths.

Their eyes flutter – the Party Golem – and they roar out into the streets to obediently scream today’s lies, which may or may not completely contradict what they were screaming the day before.

These people are not recruited for their critical thinking skills; they are useful only for their stupidity and meek submission to Conservative Authority. For the manipulable hellfest of bad religion and ugly ideology that packs their Creationist Bell Jar skulls. For the leering, jeering delight at that particular bloodthrill pleasure knucklewalkers get when they can pound the shit out of people who are better, smarter and more honorable than they will ever be.

But here's the catch: The rites must be observed.

And if the proper Kabuki is not performed with all deliberate speed, the rank-and-file will start rubbing their little, dry hind legs together and making little frightened chirping noises. Not out of any concern for the “truth” -- they don't "do" truth -- but out of a growing fear of being stranded out in the big, scary Liberal World with no one to tell them what slogans they’re supposed to shout.

So when the Vice President shoots a man in the face, and the story stinks on ice seven different ways, another meaningless bit of theater must be enacted: the “Candid TeeVee Conversation”.

The liar summons the fake press to “tell his story” with just enough truthiness to shut the drones up. A well-compensated peon asking his liege lord softball questions with no substantial follow-up of any kind on any matter.

Me, I have always found that lag time between Republican Lies and the reprogramming of the Republican Golem to be a useful barometer of just how much trouble the Administration is actually in at that moment, because you can always tell when something has gone horribly wrong with the slow and dirty job of reformatting the opinions of the Party Meat.

Since they are unwilling or incapable of thinking for themselves -- many believing free and independent thought to be, in fact, a Snare set by the Devil -- when a glitch pops up, they return to their default setting of running in tight, panicked verbal circles, mindlessly screaming Liberals are LiarsLiarsLiars until they are told what to think and say and feel and blame by an Authorized Party Technician.

Which, in this case meant that Deadeye Dick had to sit still and at least pretend he was fielding real questions from a real reporter long enough to satisfy the minimum needs of the ritual. So that tomorrow or next week when Scotty Dog is “peppered” with questions from thirty yards away, he can say, “The Vice President already covered that” a million times.

And it must be terribly frustrating for not-so-Heart-Healthy Dick not to be able to bust out and just say what is so clearly gnawing and stinking away at the inside of his skull like a rabid skunk.

That, “What I say and what I do is none of anyone’s fucking business. Not the Democrats, not the gibbering monkeymass ‘public’, not the tinned-eel sycophant ‘press’ and certainly not the Dimwit Dauphin.

"Look, I’m trying to get shit done here.

Shit you people are all too fucking stupid to comprehend, but lemme tell you, dismantling the entire United States government and replacing it with a Chief Executive Emperor right in front of your eyes is not a job for a pussy, so quit jiggling my elbow with your stupid questions and your mock surprise and STFU!"

But he must instead bite his tounge and fake contrition.

Because in the end, even the Dread Lord Cheney must bend a bloated knee to a slightly higher power: the empty rituals that keep the Obsessive Compulsive Christopaths from twitching out of control.

Only mostly dead.

This from one of my favorite movies...

Inigo Montoya: He's dead. He can't talk.

Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.

Inigo Montoya: What's that?

Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

Gone for a bit. No mystery or tragedy involved, just another child of bold Eve and craven Adam coping with the legacy of the Fall. That bit about, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Slouching after the buck. Keeping the gato in fresh mousies. Keeping the Wolfowitz from the castle door.

Work. Too much of same.

Too many projects converging all at once with no flex or give in the schedule, and not a one of ‘em something simple and mindless that I can just relax into and let my imagination out-of-body itself into restful climes.

Long gone are the days of days of working a stock room, macking on cashiers and hitting the bar around the corner for an unselfconscious pitcher at lunch.

Scaling a ten-foot fence for a 50 lb. bag of fertilizer because a customer was adamant and some idjit had lost the keys to the garden.

Sorting through thirty identical molded-plastic garbage can lids at five minutes before closing because some martinet knucklehead wants his $3.00 sale junk bucket to have a seal as tight as a NASA clean room.

Continuing to make direct eye contact with the security guy and chatting amicably about the quality of the patty melts in the cafeteria (and they were exquisite) while sloooowly moving your boot to cover up the joint your peripheral vision and paranoia tell you just fell out of your pocket and onto the bright, clean, lineolium floor.

Consigned to the crashing steel-on-concrete purgatory of the loading docks on a hung-over Saturday.

Crushing massively on the do-nothing, think-nothing chick that worked the tiny key-making island just this side of Hardware.

Pallet truck races in the aisles and, since I was the word freak with a book forever in his back pocket, getting a little wasted, climbing up into the grotesque, never-gonna-be-sold sofa four tiers up on the massive shelves and reading “Dune.”

Two words: sledgehammering toilets. What we did with remaindered fixtures that weren’t gone be sold. The funnest job ever, and a mighty fine garage band name too, if I do say so.

And jotting all this down, with the memories coming thick and sweet, let me also say I hag a great boss then.

John.

As old as Cheney is evil, with a grimace like Popeye’s Pappy, it was darkly rumored that he had been a Very Big Deal Financial Wheel at a large chain store before the thing-about-which-one-never-spoke happened and he fell from his great, high place and crashed down among us stockroom Morlocks. Lord Jimming it in his twilight years with us hormone cases in the back rooms of a department store, taking orders from preening dolts half his age, John taught me more than almost any other man about how to treat the people who work for you.

Not the mechanics of the job, but the guts of it. How to keep the flack off your boys, but kick ass without hesitation if they start to take their basic responsibilities for granted. Keep a loose rein and lead always by example. I’m quite sure he knew most of what we did, but he also knew we always took care of business, and always would make an extra-extra effort for John if he asked, because he never, ever went too often to that well.

In your life you’ll have a lot of bosses, and in your life you’ll probably be a lot of people’s boss, and I got luck with John early.

And when, like these last many months, I’m sprinting from one complicated and exhausting project to another, eating and sleeping to accommodate the load, I find it very easy to miss those days.

Writers, we are pitiful creatures.

We work every kind of job -- any kind of job -- to feed the spike; make enough to keep body and soul together enough to fool around with a few words enough and see if we can strike sparks with ‘em. It’s a weird calling, this compulsion to fill up blank pages, and when you stack too many work hours one atop the other, sometimes you find to your chagrin that the labor hasn't bought you the space and time to write but has displaced the writing altogether.

And I also just noticed that I’m very close to a Big Blog Milestone, which has added a kind of retroactive-tired to the mix :-)

So I’m off to sleep for a bit: ahead are three solid days of catch-up tasks before the formal work week starts again, so yikes.

But let's be very clear: I am not trapped in Iraq with people trying to kill me behind a pack of lies my own government told to strand me here, or stranded in a coal mine, or trying to live and sleep on an American street, or trying to hold onto hope while desperately trying to dig the people I love out from under a mountain of mud, or living any one of a thousand other every-single-day tragedies that push human beings to the upper limit of the load bearing capacity.

Nah. All I am is busy and exhausted; nothing a shiny, new low-stress-high-cake job and two weeks on a toasty beach with a Libidinous Liberal Lass wouldn't cure.

And if tonight, alone with our thoughts and hearts, or warm next to the person we love, the very worst any one of us can say is that we are stressed and tired then, as the saying goes, we are truly blessed and highly favored.

Vice Emperor Creosote sez:

“We’re not full yet.”

When reading this article, it’s helpful to remember that the ball-less, Slavish Deference to this Administration by the press and Congress was not a product of 9/11: It was a pre-existing malignancy that certainly got a massive dose of nutrients on 9/11, but it was always there.

Remember too that United States Energy Policy was handed over like the keys to the national liquor cabinet to Dead-Eye Dick Cheney the day his youthful, feeble-minded ward was sworn into office.

Cheney then proceeded to take every one of his fellow oil execs into a back room, bar the door, and carve up the world’s petroleum future like the Christmas Pig. Of course, this all took place long, long before the invasion of Iraq on trumped up evidence and rumor has it that maps of Iraq and who was gonna get what were a part of that meeting.

Strange how that worked out, eh?

Of course there is no way of knowing the details of what really happened because Dead-Eye stamped the whole thing “Classified” – a move which would have raised a hurricane of newsprint and a rip-tide of ink if it had happened under the Clinton Administration, but barely raised a gentle bunny fart of a breeze in the press when done by the GOP. My oh my how the Republican rage over the horribly, intolerably icky “secrecy” around the Clinton Health Care brainstorming sessions instantly evaporated when it was Cheney lowering the Cone of Silence over his own pet projects.

So last month it was the announcement that Exxon (for example) had fourth quarter net income of $10.7 billion.

That’s “Billion” with a “B”.

10.7 b-b-billion dollars. Net. In one quarter. And, “For the year the company earned net income of $36.1 billion, or $33.9 billion excluding special items. That's up 31 percent from the $25.9 billion it earned on that basis year earlier.”

And now, in a textbook-perfect example of the only thing the GOP agenda has ever really been about – looting and bankrupting the government of the United States and transferring its assets to Republican-friendly private corporations – this story the sheer scope and shamelessness of which almost completely robs me of my words. (emphasis added)

February 14, 2006

U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
…

But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.

Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.

Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.

Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.
…

"It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."
…

Based on the government's assumptions about future prices — that oil will hover at about $50 a barrel and natural gas will average about $7 per thousand cubic feet — the total value of the free oil and gas over the next five years would be about $65 billion and the forgone royalties would total more than $7 billion.
Administration officials say the issue is out of their hands, adding that they opposed provisions in last year's energy bill that added new royalty relief for deep drilling in shallow waters.
…

By contrast, the White House bluntly promised to veto the Senate's $60 billion tax cut bill because it contained a one-year tax of $5 billion on profits of major oil companies. …

"The [Minerals Management Service] only has the authority that Congress gives it," Mr. Hunter said. "The legislation said that royalty relief for these leases is automatic."

If that view prevails, the government said it would lose a total of nearly $35 billion in royalties to taxpayers by 2011 — about the same amount that Mr. Bush is proposing to cut from Medicare, Medicaid and child support enforcement programs over the same period.

Just as another point of reference, $35 Billion is also roughly what the Bush Administration has already pissed away in its failed “Iraqi Reconstruction” debacle, although as always, Cheney’s friends made out like King Rat and His Rodent Posse, armed and footloose in Cheddarvania.

And $35 billion would buy enough body armor to keep every man, woman and mascot in Iraq as safe humanly possible from IED attacks.

Hey, fuck the body armor: $35 billion would buy more than 35,000 “Rhino Runners” The all-but-impervious-to-anything-but-a-tactical-nuke carriers that Rumsfeld and Cheney tool around in when dropping by Baghdad to see how the looting is going, but are far, faaaar too pricey to be letting your average mudfoot sweat up it’s New Carrier Smell.

And even then, you’d have enough left over to the left of the decimal place to make up for the massive fraud that FEMA has let run riot with Katrina relief funds. Fraud that runs "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."

Maybe even have enough left to pay for Ted Steven’s “Bridge To Nowhere.”

Funny, I remember when a few million in fraud was enough for the GOP to slate whole programs for demolition: even if they were only doing OK, but not spectacularly, they would scream to bring the hammer down.

Now it’s not millions but tens of billions.

During a time when we will all have to pay dearly and for the rest of our lives for the Republican lies, treachery and the Republican war in Iraq…

With gargantuan Republican deficits looming at us just over the horizon…

With the destruction of a major American city happening on the Republican’s watch, and made vastly worse by the malignant neglect of Republican stooges…

Billions lost through the sheer incompetence of one Republican arm of the government, more billions looted and paid out to Republican cronies by another arm…

all paid for by proposing cuts to the weakest and poorest among us, and fighting their war on the cheap.

Why?

Simple.

Because to be a Republican is to believe that there is literally nothing of higher and purer moral virtue than cutting the taxes of plutocrats.

No greater glory unto God than throwing money at rich people.

That to disinter the bones of Joan of Arc and use her remains, splinters from the True Cross, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to set fire to the Virgin Mary…would be preferable to even incrementally raising the taxes on the richest people in the history of the world to pay for their war, their criminal incompetence, and programs for the poor and the powerless.

And that it if Our Lady got up and ran – hair on fire – through Arlington National Cemetery,

and the White House,

and Walter Reed Hospital,

and the Air and Space Museum,

and the Smithsonian,

and the Library of Congress,

and the National Cathedral,

and the “Falling Waters” Frank Lloyd Wright home,

and Yellowstone National Park,

and a hundred hospices,

and a thousand assisted living facilities

and ten thousand public schools…

…and set each and every one of them ablaze…

…and Republicans were told the only way to save these sacred, irreplaceable treasures was to up the tax rates on the wealthiest 1% of people and corporations…

They would still opt to try to smother the fire with the poor, or beat it out with the Body of Christ, or set up a bucket-brigade to douse it in the Blood of the Lamb -- or just let it all go up in flames -- before they would ever consider discommoding their Overlords by 1%.

‘Cause “We don’t need no taxes, let the motherfucker burn!”

I don’t know what to say, except that if you are a Republican, this was your choice, and now you are each personally complicit in this disaster of a government, because this is exactly what you voted for.

And that if you had an ounce of humanity among you, you should feel nothing but fury and terrible shame that your Party can let the pillaging of our nation by its Plutocrat Masters continue while Katrina survivors are being booted out of their rooms for want of a few bucks, and American soldiers you sent off to fight and die for your lies are maimed and killed for want of proper protection.

But then again, to continue to be a Republican these days, you really have to have had the capacity to feel any shame about anything surgically removed, don’t you? Or to save time, does Cheney just blow it off?

Because in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.