Sunday Mornin' Coming Down

Does anyone know
Where the love of God goes
When wankers turn the minutes to hours?

Around 200 million miles from here, deep within the asteroid belt, there is a silence as bottomless as can be found anywhere. A shattered wheel of dead stones mutely moaning as the pressure of distant sunlight faintly licks over them. A convergence of photons, vacuum, physics and freefall that, over the course of millions of years, shepherd the chips of a failed planet into a kind of uniformity.

An inaudible chorus of bone-conduction clicking as one pebble taps another, each describing its fated course through cold space.

Why do I mention this?

Because this morning the sepulchral quiet of the Belt was like unto the roar you’d find sticking your head inside a jet engine compared to this morning’s silence across the whole of the Mouse Circus that accompanied the absolute embargo on any mention of Steven Colbert’s 15-round, cockpunching tour de force of every Beltway sacred bovine gonad last night.

Holy Christ. Watching the Whores of Pennsylvania Avenue, and their retainers and lackeys in the MSM being fed, nipples first, through the Colbert Woodchipper it felt – for a moment – like a free country again.

Where people walk right up to trolls and monsters, bold as brass, and call them by their True Names.

It was – for that interval – a vision of a world, not without peril or enemies, but without fear.

It was also painfully funny (link here thanks to the faboo Crooks & Liars) in the purest, Swiftean sense of that word, and anything the Bobble Heads were going to do was going to disappoint, so lets get it on.

(UPDATE:

To give the C&L Servers a rest, here are the links to YouTube's Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Steven Colbert's Armed and Truthy beatdown.)

On Fox (the local franchise) Walter Jacobson retired today.

He went out classy, his very last guest being his old WBBM-TV news running buddy – Bill Kurtis (“I’m….Bill K----hurtis”). If you don’t know Kurtis, he’s does his business over A&E, and has become the self-parodying voice of the fatuous anchor in such fine uses of celluloid as “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”

Jacobson was a scold and an irritant who tried to straddle the infotainment line and be two parts journo to one part Geraldo.

He often got the mixture wildly wrong.

In recent years, as he moved onto the Fox platform, he has become more and more a reflexively calcified conservative idiot.

Which is a pity.

On Regular Fox...an unsightly display of Fox-on-Fox Frottage.

It’s the 10 year anniversary of this embarrassment; long past time to reclassify it from “painful ass rash” to “chronic genital infection”.

Colin Powell gets cited (via a British teevee interview) as having told Rummy to use more troops and that Rummy belw him off.

Wow. I was unaware that such huge advances were being made in spine-regrowth technology as are now daily on exhibit among this Administration’s League of Expatriated Generals.

Josh Bolten, intro-ed by the only footage of Bush from the Correspondents Dinner, says -- actually says --this is a chance for the White House to “get its mojo back.”

Yeah, Baby!

The Big Strategy is to put the Preznit in the field and to be more accessible to the press. Like here! Portrait of Josh playing 84” softball pitch-and-catch with Chris Wallace.

Hey, (you might fairly ask) what about energy prices?

Bolten: “We came in with a recession on the doorstep. 9/11. Corporate corruption. The worst disaster in American history.”

Notice how he immediately clicks on the Smudge Icon and quietly smears the “We came in with...”, “Blame Clinton/It ain’t our fault” tool right over everything that’s happened since the Gang that Couldn’t Loot Straight rolled into town.

Over half a decade ago years ago.

Wallace: Some say the best way to improve relations with the press is to end the televising of the “posturing” of the WH press corps.

Yes, “some” do say that. Douchebags, mostly. Here’s the footage.

Bolten: Rove remains an important voice in the White House. Rove remains not only an indispensable political serial rapist strategist, but he has one of the most “brilliant policy minds”. Aalways cheerful, positive and optimistic.

Yup. That's Don Karleone.

Just keep him supplied with bunnies and puppies and fresh drill bits and claw hammers and he’s as happy as the Ripper, dosed to the gills on Viagra, on a foggy night.

(I lose interest as a mini-blitz of spams arrived between 9:15 and 9:19. And I snag their IP addresses. Maybe some Big Fun there one day soon.)


Bolten tells us that taxes are, in fact, even more progressive than ever before. Even more fair to the po' and more burdensome to the rich, because the top 10% of income earners now pay 66% of the tax burden. Used to be 64%.

Bolten uses around 100K as the cutoff point.

Here’s your daily driftglass “Watching the Defectives” rule-of-thumb: when a White House flak starts slinging percentages around, they are lying. Only question is how.

Hey, apparently the Preznit actually welcomes internal disagreement. Who knew? Bolten sez Dubya prizes people who come in and tell him new stuff. There’s no penalty for disagreeing, but he’s every inch the model of the modern CEO. Once the Decider Speaks, our job is to shut up and salute.

Which is completely appropriate. Problem is, The Dauphin thinks everyone needs to shut up and salute when the Decider announces that 2+2 = a billion.

Citizens.

The press.

The membership of the Mathematical Association of America.

The American Statistical Association.

Reality.

Everyone.

Then we get a quick peek of what sounds a lot like the new Chief's e-Harmony dating profile.

We find that Josh Bolten is not an early riser. Is “good friends” with Bo Derek (we are shown a photo of Mr. Bolten walking stiffly alongside same, looking for all the world like her tuxedo-clad caddy.)

Likes soul kissing. Foot massages. Long walks on the beach at sunset during the Rapture.

Then Bill Kristol came on, but all I could see of him was the “portion for foxes” that Hurricane Colbert left behind.



On This Week...It’s Condi!

And Iran.
Iran so far away.
Couldn’t get away.

Then Chuck Schumer talks energy. You wanna drill in Alaska? Fine. But you have to also agree to conservation legislation. Higher CAFE standards and the like. A bluff dropped on the table that won’t be called because the “White House does the bidding of Big Oil.”

Not true.

The White House doesn’t do the bidding of Big Oil: the White House IS Big Oil.

The comes the panel: George Will. Fareed Zakaria. Jay Carney. Claire Shipman.

Icky.

Zakaria: The major driver of global demand is…American drivers. The problem isn’t that gas prices are too high – they are where they were in adjusted dollars during the peak in 1981. The problem is that those jacked prices are not going into the Treasury and into long-term energy investment. They’re going into the cavernous pockets of the men who hold Dick and George’s leash.

Claire Shipman: Don’t blame Big Oil. Big Oil are just big ol’ snuggly teddy bears.

Will: Makes snuffly little noises about Liberal alarmists and Global Warming and how awful and contradictory everything everyone else says is.

Stephanopolis has enough of the "I Heart Exxon Hot Oil Wrestling Love Match" and points out that Big Oil’s fat profit comes to them having already been given massive, crazy, indefensible tax breaks.

Zakaria: The Energy Bill has been nothing but a giveaway to Big Oil.



On Face the Nation...It’s Condi! Again.

And yes kids, when pushed even slightly she unhesitatingly shows just what a lying bint she actually is.

Bob Schieffer: Seems like Powell was right that we never had enough troops on the ground.

Condi: Yes we did.

Bob Schieffer: Oh come on. Shit, woman; clearly we did not have enough troops on the ground.

Condi (clapped her hands over her ears and whirling in circles): Yes we did. Yes we did. Yes we did. Yes we did. Yes we did. It’s not our fault that the Iraqi Army disintegrated. And there was systematic looting that was obviously planned by Evil Doers!

(Funny how, at the time, Don “Hey, shit happens” Rumsfeld couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about looting. That no one was saying a single fucking word about it being “systematic” back when it was happening.

Back when it was preventable.

Back when we were told it was just a few vases being stolen from a museum.

Back when it was just the “messy” placenta of Iraq squatting and birthing a Jeffersonian Democracy in the desert sun...nothing to be concerned about..and yet somehow we managed to stack troops and tanks like cordwood around the Oil Ministry?)


Bob Schieffer: But it was the United States – it was us -- that gave the order to disband the Army?!

Condi (Now a bit nauseous from spinning so hard and throwing up a little in her mouth): OK, we gave the order, but the Iraqi Army had melted. Sure, anybody can go back and look at stuff. Anybody can get all fussy about facts and events and accountability, but we’re Republicans, Bob! We don’t believe in being picky about who eternally fucked up what, or who doomed the us how.

Unless the President is a Democrat. And what’s at stakes are Presidential penises, and where Presidential penises are being stockpiled and used.

Then it’s Katie-Bar-The-Fucking-Door!

But lies? Treason? Incompetence?

A Republican cares not for such things.

And then Condi Melted Away. Presumably back into Henry Kissinger's meth-shredded imagination from whence she obviously came.

She was replaced by eyelidless shrew, Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who was positively juicing her cotton panels over ANWAR. I swear she was slicking her seat so lavishly I thought she was going to slide into the floor and get washed down the gutter in a cataract of ANWAR-induced lubriciousness.

ANWAR. That’s her “energy policy”. Period.

Sure you should inflate your tires properly and make sure you don’t run the engine when you’re parked in the alley making out with the babysitter, but the Only Real Solution is sucking ANWAR dry.

Senator Maria Cantwell provides the sanity counterweight: We’ve got 3% of the world reserve. The whole of ANWAR would bump the world price down by maybe a penny, in ten years. Domestic security comes down to ethanol, biodiesel, conservation, new tech.

Of course we can’t drill our way out way out if this. The technology, the numbers, the projections of global supply and demand all insist that we pour our national will into developing and marketing alternative energy sources.

Oh, and tax these fuckers. Take back at least as much as Cheney handed over in free gifts from the Treasury.

Murkowski: The windfall profit tax didn’t work under the Evil Jimmy Carter.

On Meet the Press. From their online blurb: “A special program on gas prices with Sec. of Energy Samuel Bodman, American Petroleum Institute Pres. & CEO Red Cavaney, CNBC's Jim Cramer; Asst. Dem. Leader Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, & author & energy analyst Daniel Yergin.”

It was a wide-ranging and reasonably thorough discussion, so let me radically and irresponsibly oversimplify the situation thusly.

As long as a certain warp, frustrated old man...

...and his pet Dauphin body-servant are allowed to rule by decree, we are fucked.

To Lynch Liberty

You gotta make the knot good and tight.

It is important to remember, as Bush continues to keep his dwindling Fundy base mesmerized with his Goober Christ, Superstar act, the men who are doing the heavy lifting and slashing – the oligarchs who are busily ripping to ribs right out of Democracy’s chest – don’t believe one minute in the Father, the Son or the Holy Whatever.

The Bible bibble is just razzle for the rubes.

These are the fuckers who learned at the feet of Nixon. And who believe that the mistakes Nixon made had nothing whatsoever to do with him trying to do a sweep-and-clear of the Constitution with a flamethrower.

According to their Milhousology, the only errors Tricky Dick ever made were tactical. That in the end he didn’t have the nerve to do what needed to be done: burn the tapes, chuck a few dozen journalists and liberals into federal graybar – maybe have one or two executed for ginned war crimes to tune up the rest -- and roll a few tanks in the streets if necessary.

That he pussed out when he should have gone Full Metal Pinochet.

They learned that if you want to garrote Liberty, you gotta grab both ends of the rope and really pull.

Pull until you hear her windpipe pops. Until she goes cyanotic. Until she first goes limp, and then goes into the ground.

Once and for all.

First, at one end of the rope, exempt the loathsome slug who actually runs the government and who nourishes himself by feasting on the heartmeat of the nation from even the most rudimentary check on his paranoid fetish for suppression.

This via the Mercury News

Cheney exempts his own office from reporting on classified material

BY MARK SILVA
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as "top secret" or "confidential," one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and "any other entity within the executive branch" to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt.

Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office's secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is "not under any duty" to provide it.

That is only one way the Bush administration, from its opening weeks in 2001, has asserted control over information. By keeping secret so many directives and actions, the administration has precluded the public - and often members of Congress - from knowing about some of the most significant decisions and acts of the White House.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the administration has based much of its need for confidentiality on the imperative of protecting national security at a time of war. Yet experts say Bush and his closest advisers demonstrated their proclivity for privacy well before Sept. 11:

Starting in the early weeks of his administration with a move to protect the papers of former presidents, Bush has clamped down on the release of government documents. That includes tougher standards for what the public can obtain under the Freedom of Information Act and the creation of a broad new category of "sensitive but unclassified information."
…

The White House has resisted efforts by Congress to gain information, starting with a White House energy task force headed by Cheney and continuing with the president's secret authorization of warrantless surveillance of people inside the United States suspected of communicating with terrorists abroad. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., recently threatened to withhold funding for the surveillance program unless the White House starts providing information.

The administration has withheld the identities of, and accusations against, detainees held in its war on terror, and it censored the findings of a joint House-Senate committee that investigated the events leading to Sept. 11, including a 27-page blackout of Saudi Arabia's alleged connections to the terrorists.
…
Bush and Cheney have made it clear they are intent on reclaiming presidential powers lost by Bush predecessors. That erosion of power started with Richard Nixon's losing fight over the privacy of his papers after the Watergate scandal and continued through Bill Clinton's impeachment.

"This is a presidency in which, from the start, there were important forces to accentuate the executive prerogative, and all of that became more important after 9/11," said Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University and author of "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino maintains that the White House has "struck the right balance "between national security and openness.

"We need to ensure that national security information is properly classified and protected," Perino said. "We endeavor to make as much information available to the public as possible. ... We are accountable to the American people. The president doesn't want it any other way."

…
Bush has a partner - some say mentor - in Cheney, who from the start resisted all efforts to disclose the inner workings of a task force devising the administration's energy policy. He defeated an unprecedented lawsuit by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to unveil that task force and carried his fight successfully to the Supreme Court.

And as the administration has sealed an increasing number of documents as secret or sensitive, and cut the number of documents being declassified each year, the refusal of Cheney's office to report on the number of its decisions stands out.
…

Cheney's office maintains that its dual executive and legislative duties make it unique, as the vice president also serves as president of the Senate.
"This matter has been carefully reviewed," said spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride. "It has been determined that the reporting requirement does not apply to the office of the vice president."
…

Organizations including the Sierra Club also carried the fight to the Supreme Court, which in 2004 voted 7-2 to uphold "a paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation" and returned the case to an appeals court, which last year ruled in favor of the White House.
…

Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, had insisted on "a presumption of disclosure." But Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, arguing that "no leader can operate effectively without confidential advice and counsel," implored all agencies to disclose information requested by the public "only after full and deliberate consideration ... of the privacy interests that could be implicated."
…

"Anyone who calls or writes a government agency for information encounters barriers that were just not there a decade ago," he said. "The government is undergoing a mutation in which we are gradually shifting into another kind of government in which executive authority is supreme and significantly unchecked."

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but Jesus, this is so deeply, gangrenously sick.

White House sycophants baldly asserting that – surprise! – everything is just Jim Dandy over at the House that Ruthless Built. That after careful review, the spokeslackey for Cheney has determined that Cheney has every right to take a chainsaw to the Constitution and play “Face-Shoot the Founders” with any of those annoying, anti-tyranny checks and balances that are still impeding his turning Pennsylvania Avenue into Red Square.

And now, after Clinton was tasered into a witness chair and then sandbagged by the strategic use of baseless charges in a partisan vendetta-fueled lawsuit, suddenly the Supremes have a come-to-Jesus moment and get very keen on “protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation".

So having asserted limitless monarchical powers on the part of the junta in the White House – with one fat fist firmly grasping the bitter end of the Thuggee scarf they have wound around the neck of Democracy – its time to give a fierce yank on the other end of the line.

Time to roll out the final solution to the few, pesky remnants of a free and fair press that still remain.

From the NYT

April 30, 2006
In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists
By ADAM LIPTAK

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.

But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.

…
Surprising Move by F.B.I.

One example of the administration's new approach is the F.B.I.'s recent effort to reclaim classified documents in the files of the late columnist Jack Anderson, a move that legal experts say was surprising if not unheard of.

"Under the law," Bill Carter, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said earlier this month, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them."

Critics of the administration position say that altering the conventional understanding between the press and government could have dire consequences.
"Once you make the press the defendant rather than the leaker," said David Rudenstine, the dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and a First Amendment scholar, "you really shut down the flow of information because the government will always know who the defendant is."

…
Others say the law is unconstitutional as applied to the press under the First Amendment.

"I don't think that anyone believes that statute is constitutional," said James C. Goodale, who was the general counsel of The New York Times Company during the Pentagon Papers litigation. "Literally read, the statute must be violated countless times every year."

Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond law school, took a middle ground. He said the existing laws were ambiguous but that in theory it could be constitutional to make receiving classified information a crime. However, he continued, the First Amendment may protect newspapers exposing wrongdoing by the government.

The two newspapers contend that their reporting did bring to light important information about potential government misconduct. Representatives of the papers said they had not been contacted by government investigators in connection with the two articles.

That is baffling, Mr. McCarthy said. At a minimum, he said, the reporters involved should be threatened with prosecution in an effort to learn their sources.
…

If you believe that democracy is a government that belongs to the people and a free and vigorous press is a prerequisite to the people exercising that ownership responsibly, then you can feel the knife at your throat.

If you believe democracy is a quaint relic that has no place in the modern world, then you love this shit. You’ve been waiting in state of frustrated fascist blueballery since Nixon called it quits.

You believe the people have no business knowing what the government is up to.

You believe your rights as alienable as hell. That they’re on loan to you from the State, who has every right to take them away from you when you get all uppity. Or curious. Or you persistently keep your melanin levels willfully and premeditatedly high.

You believe that the purpose of “News” is to keep you entertained. To slip its aardvark tongue deep into your ear to tickle you and tell you only what you want to hear.

You believe people who tell you pretty lies and fuck your children’s future into a shallow grave are your friends, and people who tell you blunt truths and try to keep you and everyone you love from flying off the cliff towards which you are being stampeded are your enemies.

You are, in other words, a loyal Republican.

He Came In Through

The Touch-Screen Window

(With apologies to John, Paul, George and Ringo)

He came in through the touch-screen window
Protected by a silver spoon
But now he sucks his thumb and staggers
Around his empty, Crawford saloon

{Refrain}
Won't any network tell them
Why can't any of you see
Rummy takes his cues from Cheney
And Fundies run the whole Party

{Refrain}
Oh yeah

You know he's always been a dumbass
He worked through 15 beers a night
But screaming “I Luv Jebus” got him a pass
From Christalopithecans on the Right.

And so he gutted every vital department
To get his “Brownies” steady jobs
And lawmakers try their best to help him:
Congress steals while the Executive robs.

{Refrain}
Won't any network tell them
Why can't any of you see
Rummy takes his cues from Cheney
And Fundies run the whole Party...

Fat Man in a Little Lie.

Dennis Hastert: Auto Redact?

So Denny Hastert was caught in flagrante Canyonnero (From the Medieval Latin for “while the crime is a Blazer”...although there seems to have been a little goof up in the original translation)

Don’t worry, Denny.

Republican voters are idiots anyway, right?



This from the AP (HT to Crooks and Liars…)

House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Ill., center, gets out of a Hydrogen Alternative Fueled automobile, left, as he prepares to board his SUV, which uses gasoline, after holding a new conference at a local gas station in Washington, Thursday, April 27, 2006 to discuss the recent rise in gas prices. Hastert and other members of Congress drove off in the Hydrogen-Fueled cars only to switch to their official cars to drive back the few block back to the U.S. Capitol. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

And the thing is, Denny knows this story won’t matter one fucking bit, don’tcha Denny?

Of course it doesn’t matter.

‘Cause you guys just auger the eyes right out of your loyal base and whiz raw sewage straight into their skulls year after year after year, and yet they obviously like it, right Denny?

I mean after being faced with overwhelming evidence of Republican lies and treachery, who but a pack of catastrophic frontal lobe malfunction cases would actually vote to keep the vortex that was consuming their country whirling?

Who but the worst kind of suicidally self-loathing dolts would line up behind the GOP after Katrina?

Who but an oil drum full of gila monsters wouldn’t vomit up their last nineteen meals at the thought of associating with a Party led by degenerate hatemongers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell?

So not to worry, Denny: You’re safe.

If the Intellectually Left Behind that prop up your Party can’t work up anything but the creepiest kind of shrieking, zombie Maoist loyalty for a gang of liars, brigands and halfwits who have lied them into a catastrophic war and mortgaged their children’s future for the greater glory of Exxon, it’s not like one more Republican Lie is going to matter.

Of course if it were a Democrat doing it, your Party would have convened hearings on it and have sworn in the first witnesses by the time you pulled your Escalade into your garage.

But now, three years after the preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation on false pretenses and over five years since 9/11, your Party still categorically refuses to look into any of the genuinely crucial questions behind those disasters.

Shit, your Party doesn’t even allow its lobbyiest pimp overlords friends to be put under oath when you do actually bother to look into things, so don't sweat it. In the verity free-fire zone that is the GOP, your little deception is no more statistically relevant than a teaspoon of matchheads in a solar flare.

Behold the Amazing Jebusaurus!

Because stupid people need museums too.

This is about the distinction between form and function. Specifically about the talismanic power stupid people invest in the former in the hopes of conjuring the latter.

(Emphasis added)

Genesis of a museum
Creationists, saying all the answers are in the Bible, put their beliefs on display in $25 million facility


By Lisa Anderson
Tribune national correspondent

April 25, 2006

PETERSBURG, Ky. -- The recent fossil discovery of a 375-million-year-old fish that could lurch ashore on bony transitional fins--apparently a long-sought missing link between sea creatures and land animals--made a spectacular splash in evolutionary science circles. But it created nary a ripple on the placid American campus of Answers in Genesis, where an enormous museum chronicling the biblical six days of creation is rising fast amid rolling fields.

Ken Ham, co-founder and president of Answers in Genesis, believed to be the world's largest creationist organization, and most "young-Earth" creationists are as unimpressed by science's finding another piece in the evolutionary puzzle as they are with science's finding the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old.

Using biblical calculations, young-Earth creationists believe the planet is about 6,000 years old; old-Earth creationists believe it could be older. Both, however, take the Bible literally and reject Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory that all life, including human, shares common ancestry and developed through random mutation and natural selection. Evolution enjoys near-universal support among scientists.

Not so among the American public, about half of which endorses creationism, according to polls. While new concepts such as intelligent design, which posits that life is so complicated that an intelligence must have devised it, recently have suffered setbacks from court rulings and scientific findings, creationism thrives, and Answers in Genesis is a strong sign of that.

Just hours after the fossil fish, called Tiktaalik roseae, landed on the front pages of many newspapers earlier this month, it also surfaced on the Answers in Genesis Web site. In a posting titled "Gone fishin' for a missing link?" the organization, in effect, threw Tiktaalik roseae back.

"Because evolutionists want to discover transitional forms, when they find a very old fish with leg-bone-like bones in its fins, they want to interpret this as evidence that it is some sort of transitional creature. . . . It may be just another example of the wonderful design of our Creator God," the posting said.

Absolute certainty

For creationists, there are no transitional creatures and no doubts. In the Book of Genesis, the biblical calendar of creation is as clear and simple as it is sacred: God created creatures of the sea and the air on Day 5. Land animals and man appeared on Day 6. And all of this, including the creation of Earth, happened about 6,000 years ago.
...
According to nearly a quarter-century of Gallup polls, about half of all Americans consistently agree with the biblical account that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Polling also indicates that a majority of Americans say creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public school biology classes.

"It is strengthening. It's not adding more proponents, it's growing in terms of giving increased confidence to those who share that belief," said Ronald Wetherington, an anthropologist at Dallas' Southern Methodist University. He cited an American political climate in which creationists, who include many so-called values voters and evangelicals, feel politically and culturally empowered rather than marginalized.
...

"The 250,000 people going to it will go back to their legislators and pressure them to vote for Jesus," said Volney Gay, director of the Center for Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "There's a suspicion of science and a suspicion of intellectuals in general."

Said Ham: "What we see is if you can get information to people, their worldview will be changed, and the way they vote on issues, on a school board or whatever, will reflect that change."

…

The dinosaur replicas, many of them animatronic, are spectacular: Creationists say dinosaurs lived simultaneously with humans because their death came only after original sin. Some of the more compelling effects are in the key rooms depicting what are called "The Seven C's of History." They are: creation, corruption, catastrophe (the destruction of the world by Noah's flood), confusion (Babel), Christ, the cross and consummation (his death and resurrection).

Along the Creation Walk

For instance, soft lighting, gentle sounds and pleasant fragrances will mark the Creation Walk, where Adam and Eve chat with God in the Garden of Eden before they are corrupted to commit original sin by an animatronic serpent. The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.

"We're trying to make this the most uncomfortable place in the museum to show how original sin has corrupted the universe," Zovath said on a tour through the site.

...
- - -

Terms of debate

Evolution: Charles Darwin's theory, accepted nearly universally by scientists, says that all life on Earth, including human, shares common ancestry and evolved to its present state through random mutation and natural selection.

Creationism: Advanced by religious conservatives in response to Darwin's theory, creationism adheres to the biblical account that God alone created the world and all life in it, much as it is today, at one point within the last 10,000 years.

Creation science: Claims scientific evidence for the biblical version of creation.

Intelligent design: Considered a successor to creationism, intelligent design became popular in the early 1990s after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the teaching of creationism in public schools in 1987. Intelligent design posits that there are weaknesses in Darwin's theory and suggests that an unnamed intelligence must have designed some aspects of life.

-- Lisa Anderson

Future historians -- probably Indian -- will disinter this animatronic idiocy and admire the handiwork of the Pre-Columbian natives who fashioned such cunning, pre-literate totems.

Then they will note the date – the early 21st Century – and the location – at the heart of what was then the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth – and they will laugh and laugh and laugh.

Clearly the Americans, being a generous and noble people, had found a wise and humane was of dealing with the residuum of mentally stunted halfwits that every society will inevitably produce. Those few angrily underclocked child-men who cannot cope with the rigors of math or science or conjunctions or hitting the bowl when they pee.

Like Colonial Williamsburg or South Dakota, Americans had manufactured another wholly fake community for some socially intriguing reason that our descendents (or the descendents of the people we speak to when we call the 800-number on the back of our major appliances when they flake out) will theorize cleverly about.

That rather than efficiently generically engineering the incapacitating disease of conservative fundamentalism out of our blood, we humanely gave them their own s-l-o-w children’s camp. It was a dim-but-cheery place with its own, comforting fake history of the planet, its own cartoon God, and even its own news network that told the stupid people that God loved them better than anyone else. That they didn’t need sense enough to pound sand or as much compassion as God gave a Pitcher plant, as long as they were “Saved”.

And anyway, they weren’t really stupid.

The “elites” were stupid.

And maybe these “Flowers For AlgernonLand” designers even had a few chuckles at the expense of their devolved fellow citizens; perhaps once in a while laughing themselves to tears as the dense denizens of the place scared themselves over and over again scampering down “The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.”

Dumbing down by several orders of magnitude a complex allegory about the inherency of pain and loss in a dualistic Universe within the field of Time…into God’s own a Pull-My-Finger joke.

At least I hope that’s the tale they’ll tell themselves, because the truth is so much simpler and sadder.

The truth is that for all of its think tanks, fake media and Small Gummint bluster, the Republican Party would evaporate tomorrow like dew in a firestorm if it were not kept lavishly stocked with bigots and idiots. Without its bumper crop of racists yielded from the Southern Strategy, its millions of fanatically anti-Enlightenment Christopaths and the millions of garden variety stupids, the GOP would be one dead fucking parrot…and the people running the Party like a Long Con damned well know it.

Which is why every strategy is aimed at creating more stupid people.

Because the more logic-intolerant the base, the easier everything gets.

For example, imagine how much less you have to spend on marketing when you no longer have to worry about making a well-reasoned argument…about anything.

Piss in their hair and when they start to notice something is wrong, all you need to do is flash a picture of two men kissing and they’ll charge obediently off of whatever cliff they’re led.

Take a massive dump in their mouths and when the start to gag on it, and all need to do is scream “Ted Kennedy!” at them as loud as possible and they’re swallow your excrement like baby birds and beg for more.

Lie them into a ruinous war, send their kids off to die for the greater glory of Exxon, and when they verge dangerously on the edge of beginning to add two and two together correctly, all you need is (HT to the irreplaceable Billmon at the Whiskey Bar for his brilliant post from which I nicked this)…

The programmes of the Two Minute Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teachings.

George Orwell
1984
1948

However, in the end the stupids already have buildings -- constitutionally inviolate buildings -- in which they can enact their own, ridiculous creation mythology over and over again to their widdle heart’s content.

They’re called “churches”, so why do they need a museum?

Because this is about the distinction between form and function.

Deep, deep down these people suspect they’re morons, which is why they need the constant reassurance of their Leaders and their God that they are not. They’re a mob, and a mob can always provoke fear, but in the end they crave the one thing they do not, and never will have: respect.

Respect, and the matriculation into the halls of wisdom of their idiotic ideas.

And since that’s never, ever going to happen, they need an alternative. One that their leaders are happy to provide.

Because part of the tragic deficiency of these people is that they cannot comprehend the difference between an Idea and a Representation Object. A pathetic fact they prove over and over again.

This is what every American Flag Burning debate boils down to: the rage of people who reflexively choose to value a Symbol over the Constitutional Ideal for which that symbol is a proxy.

This is what every Confederate Flag Worship debate boils down to: the rage of people who demand that the fake, manufactured history of their hate rag efface its actual history as a calculated symbol of segregation, lynching and Southern terrorism for much of the 20th century.

This is what every Fundamentalist punch-up comes down to: the rage people who furiously fetishize the literality and inerrancy of a book which is neither, and demand that their Idol trump both the Constitution and genuine religious scholarship.

These are the people to whom the GOP panders because these are the people on whom every one of their victories depends. And to that end they are they are cultivated, fertilized and praised to rafters.

And since they cannot comprehend the distinction between a Building and the Academy, WTF? Animate a few dinos frolicking with Adam and Eve, call it a Museum and Bingo!

Instant parity with actual Science!

Sure it’s every bit as childish and ridiculous as me putting a pair of Eisehower’s underpants on my head and claiming that I'm the co-architect of the D-Day invasion.

But of course, I’m not the GOP’s target demographic.

(Oh and one correction to the actual article. Ms. Anderson explains the several words and phrases at the end of the article under the heading of "Terms of debate".

She is mistaken.

There is no debate.)

UPDATE: Welcome Crooks & Liars visitors.
Beer in the back, and bathroom on your right.

Cure found!

Yet Wingnuts mysteriously unrejoiceful.

I was disheartened to see a recent article (referenced in this Think/Progress piece) by flabby Young Turk (well, Tur-Duck-En), Jonah Goldberg.

Jonah Goldberg: Concerns About Climate Change Are ‘Millenarian Battiness’
In today’s LA Times, columnist Jonah Goldberg – following George Will’s lead – argues that global warming may not be a problem (or even exist). Goldberg writes that “we don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening now, never mind what will happen.” He calls concern about climate change “millenarian battiness.”
Here is the only “evidence” Goldberg provides to support his contention that the science of climate change is in dispute:

But it’s also true that we don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening now, never mind what will happen. Just ask the 60 climatologists from around the world who wrote Canada’s prime minister that “observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future.”

The letter by a dwindling club of “climate skeptics” is misleading and not supported by scientific evidence. A subsequent letter from “climate science leaders from the academic, public and private sectors across Canada” to the prime minister corrects the record. That letter states that since 2001, advances in climate science provided “confirmation that warming of the atmosphere near the surface is consistent with the projections of climate models.”

I met this latest burning Q-tip flung into the eyes of Newton by tubby firebrand Pantsload with mild disheartenment not because of its yawny, checking-my-watch-to-see-if-its-dead-from-boredom-too predictability or deliberately fatheaded disingenuousness.

And not because, from the first paragraph of the original article, Goldberg unhesitatingly ransacks the last the Rovian crumbs from the bottom of Don Karleone’s Majyk Cheetoh’s Bag (Gore is a “scaremonger” whose move makes ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ seem like "Toy Story 2”. And it is only a bellwether of the deluge of “environmental scare books” to come that threaten to freak poor, honest citizens into following commie-pinko-crypto-fascist-treehugging scientists and their dimwitted Liberal stooges in the Main Stream Press on a “witch-hunt” as part of “some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars”) to brace up his dead, dishonest prose.

No, I was just a jot saddened to see -- human to human -- that Jonah could not take even a moment's comfort -- cold, onanistic, Oedipal, or otherwise -- in the fact that Evil Science might have found a cure for the chronic condition affecting so many on the Right.

That he who should be doing a full-on Electic Slide of a happy dance right now upon learning the one of the most chronic problems affecting the whole of Wingnutylvania has been found to be solvable is not happy at all.

And it’s east too! In many cases it can be cured by simply avoiding “the three Cs”.

Corruption, Chronic lying and demon lover Cocaine?

Nope.

Choler, Corpulence and Cupidity?

Nuh-uh.

Crying wolf, Coulter and Crapulence?

Sorry, Arlene, but on that note were gonna flip all the cards over and say:

“Caffeine, Carbonation, and Citrus.”

Read on...

Diet Changes Could Curb Bedwetting
04.23.06, 12:00 AM ET
SUNDAY, April 23 (HealthDay News) -- Nearly 30 percent of U.S. school-aged children regularly wet the bed, but some simple changes in what they eat and drink can help solve the problem, experts say.

Dr. Kirk Pinto, pediatric urologist at Baylor All Saints Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, said that the three Cs -- caffeine, carbonation, and citrus -- should be avoided by children who are having trouble with bedwetting. While there are medications to treat bedwetting, simple diet changes can help the majority of children.

"For bladder problems, anything that is an irritant is bad. Caffeine is number one, and it's the most common thing that these kids get from all the soda they drink," Pinto said in a prepared statement.

Chocolate is another source of caffeine, and citrus fruits and their juices can also be irritants, the expert said.

"You want to get those things out of their diets. Go back to milk and water -- reasonable amounts of both -- and generally you can get the child to feel better," Pinto said.

Red dye is another irritant. Parents should read the labels of foods and drinks and, if they contain red dye, keep them away from their children.

Praise be to Science (though Allah be the Wiser).

At last, Jonah can toddle off to a hard four hours toiling in the Dear Leader’s vineyards, pudgy chin outthrust and marmot eyes fixed on a boundless horizon of limitless tax cuts and war, secure in the knowledge that he will no longer be forced to suffer the fate of Michael Landon’s urine-haunted hero/alter-ego -- John Curtis – in his semi-autobiographical Number One Opus, “The Loneliest Runner”.

No more suffering at the hands of the Dowager Lucienne, hanging out his dirty linen like Mrs. Howell trying to signal a plane.

No more racing back home at the end of each long day’s labor pounding ever larger, squarer and more patently ridiculous pegs into ever narrowing and roundering holes to face his own banners of shame popping in the breeze.

No more doomed to his own, endless Age of Percales.

So how sad that given this miraculous manumission from his embarrassing emissions piled like a cherry on top of all his other unmerited advantages, he’s still such a mendacious fop and vicious little screwhead.

Sunday Mornin' Coming Down – Part I

Your fast, unbalanced and possibly entirely fictional account of the events of the day.

Fox…has nothing to say that I want to listen to today.

If you watch Fox for anything other that entertainment and reconnaissance value you should know that your puppy has just run out into heavy traffic and you should get up right now and sprint after him.

Blindly.


On This Week...John Kerry.

No one gives up their right and responsibility to tell the truth. No enemy will profit Americans telling the truth if we have people and policies to respond the them honestly.

Kerry giving it another run? Maybe. But now he says he is spending his time traveling cross-country for Dems candidates.

He’s a stuffed shirt and has the charisma of a beet, but he does light up when he talks about what he loves. Same thing with Gore. Smart, competent and stiff as collar-stays.

Dems gotta take a lesson here. Passion sells, but you cannot send Mohammed to the mountain, and build strategies around making public men animate themselves around issues that don’t move their souls.

Let a man like Gore be a sonorous prophet…about energy and the environment and education. Let someone like Kerry sing paeans…to foreign policy and veterans affairs. And then just let them vote right and pack competent people around the other twenty issues that make the Party stand up and dance.

And quit pushing them to be the Party’s Passa Passa Girl.


Quit demanding that they dance against the beat.

From the Los Angeles Times

Dancing Against the Beat
Grenada's elders condemn the suggestive Passa Passa. They say it is vulgar and exploits girls, many of whose parents work abroad.
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

April 10, 2006

GOUYAVE, Grenada — The girl in the flounced white micro-mini and green glitter tube top writhes to the dancehall beat throbbing through the Q-West nightclub. She drunkenly gyrates in a motion that sends her skirt riding up high enough to show her panties, if she were wearing any.

Throughout the club, sporadically lighted by the flash of a camera or strobe light, barely clad girls dance themselves into a frenzy of carnal excess.

At the crossroads of obscurity and nowhere, this rustic seaport scented by nutmeg, diesel and decomposing fish seems an unlikely venue for the most controversial new dance craze in the Caribbean. But anyone who makes the journey here on a Friday night — actually, Saturday morning — is likely to get an eye-opening glimpse of Passa Passa and an idea why parents, clergy, government and cultural guardians are trying to exorcise the Jamaican import from the island.

Grenadian elders have condemned Passa Passa, performed to the fast, rhythmic percussions of the reggae style known as dancehall, charging that its strip-tease eroticism exploits directionless island girls. In this nation where many parents have gone abroad to find work, they say, the young women lack moral guideposts, leaving them susceptible to attention-getting stunts.

"It's vulgarish. People strip and grab at their bodies," said Carl Charmaine, a father of five, including three teenage daughters. "This is not good for Grenada."

…

Because when you get right down to brass tacks, either of these men would have made fine Presidents.

Then came Ahnuld.

I can’t watch Ahnuld.

On…Face the Nation.

Pat Buchanan says he respects Bush’s need to stand by Rumsfeld. The issue was civilian control of the military. But that he also agrees with the generals to a tee. We did everything wrong. Shit, we should never have gone in in the first place.

Fundamentally, the Preznit and his coalition have profoundly different opinions on things.

Buchanan essentially offers Dubya the same advice that Craig Shirley offers in Saturday’s WaPo (hat tip to commentor mac)

How the GOP Lost Its Way

By Craig Shirley
Saturday, April 22, 2006; A21
The immigration reform debate has highlighted a long-standing fissure in the GOP between the elitist Rockefeller business wing and the party's conservative populist base. Whether the two groups can continue to coexist and preserve the Republican majority is increasingly doubtful as conservatives begin to consider -- and in some cases cheer -- the possibility that the GOP may lose control of Congress this fall.
…

There is nothing new about this division. It is a 40-year-old fight that has its roots in the cultural, economic, regional and ideological differences between the two camps. Still, most conservatives felt that after the victory of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Revolution of 1994 their point was made and the country-clubbers would know their place. They were wrong. The Rockefeller wing is now attempting to reassert its control over the party and is openly hostile toward the Reagan populists who created the Republican majority in the first place.

Major Republicans have taken to attacking others within their own party as unsophisticated nativists. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie warned populists to cease and desist from promoting "border enforcement first" legislation. "Anti-immigration rhetoric is a political siren song, and Republicans must resist its lure," he said. And in a recent editorial, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party."

Conservatives see this kind of rhetoric as inflammatory, anti-intellectual and offensive. Far from being driven by xenophobia and intolerance, conservative populists are motivated by a profound respect for the rule of law and by a patriotic regard for America's sovereignty and national security.
…
The Republican Party is now unraveling. ... On top of all the scandals, it has just come to light that the RNC paid millions in legal bills to defend operative James Tobin, who was convicted with associates in an illegal phone-jamming scheme aimed at preventing New Hampshire Democrats from voting. In doing so, the GOP appears to sanction and institutionalize corruption within the party.

The elites in the GOP have never understood conservatives or Reagan; they've found both to be a bit tacky. They have always found the populists' commitment to values unsettling. To them, adherence to conservative principles was always less important than wealth and power.

Unfortunately, the GOP has lost its motivating ideals. The revolution of 1994 has been killed not by zeal but by a loss of faith in its own principles. The tragedy is not that we are faced with another fight for the soul of the Republican Party but that we have missed an opportunity to bring a new generation of Americans over to our point of view.
…

Bwahaha!

You know, the irony is that there’s a reasonable middle ground to be found on Immigration. And trade. And Education.

On a lot of things.

But the Randall Terry Right does not believe in the reasonable middle of anything.

Sorry, bitch: This is the Party of the Southern Strategy and now you get to suck on that Fudgesicle all the way down.

The Party rose to power fueled by hatespeech and bombthrowing. On the indiscriminate flaming rage of Talk Radio. On calling anyone who believes other than they do a traitor.

Any woman who doesn’t want to be a brood mare and the perfect Christian Purpose Driven Wife is a feminazi.

Anyone who believes in Science and doesn’t want to see the planet milked dry and left for dead is a treehugger.

This is the Party led by sociopaths who really, truly, actually believe hurricanes are dispatched by Yahweh to punish the ungodly and 9/11 was the fault of queers, feminists and the ACLU.

This is the Party that only wins because of is its grotesque and carefully cultivated alliance of Armageddonists and bigots.

And after five years of lies, arrogance, treachery and murderous incompetence on a scale unique in American history, there is no one left outside the asylum that believes a single fucking word that Dubya says anymore.

About anything.

And the advice he is being offered by Buchanan and Shirley and (one would presume) by The Riechitect himself -- Don Karleone -- is to mine the base even harder. Jam down even deeper into the Wingnut Snuggle Sack.

Please, Mr. President, listen to them. Pleasepleaseplease fire up the Swiftboats and roll out the Presidential Back-hoe and try to dig out a subbasement that is somehow beneath the basement apartment of Jerry Falwell’s outhouse that you already occupy.

Careful though. If the GOP goes any lower, you could find yourself popping out in Canton.

And speaking of China…

End Part I

Sunday Mornin' Coming Down – Part II

Back on…Face the Nation.


Cokie Roberts opines that the “important” visit was in Seattle. Microsoft. Starbucks. Boeing. The next important stop was Saudi Arabia. The obligatory stop by a poor relations shanty in this whirlwind tour was the visit to White House.

Sheesh.

It was George Will. Sam Donaldson. Cokie Roberts. A bas relief of dead dogs playing poker carved in old, gray butter.

Will reached into his Meaningless Statistic change purse to dispel rumors of Chinese dominance and spends 45 valuable seconds nattering on about how, 235 years ago, the Yellow Hoards outnumbered us 100-to-1 and now its just 4-to-1.

Pointless. Contextless. But I'm happy someone showed Will where the "function" button is in Excel, and that he's having so much fun moving numbers around.

On Press The Meet…Ted Kennedy and we’re all Murtha now, baby!

Kennedy lays it down. Our presence has inflamed the insurgency. The only way out of Iraq is to get out of Iraq.

The people that are cutting and running are this Administration. Cutting and running from the Truth. From the facts. From reason.

Calls his vote against the war, “The Best Vote I Cast in the United States Senate.”

He heard the same “Great Bloodbath” arguments at the end of Vietnam. The time has come to get out.

Russert keeps asking the same question: But what if it fails? What of there’s a Civil War? What if the terrorists come swooping in? Huh? Huh?

The right answer would have been to come across the table at Punkin’ Haid with a broken bottle and ask, “Yes, Timmy, what about that? What exactly are the right answers to that question? What exactly are those yummy-yummy good scenarios that the Republicans have left us?”


On Iran.

Kennedy: Rattling the nuclear saber is counterproductive.

Russert: But what if your military advisors came to you and said that there was no alternative except using tactical nukes?

And what if Jesus came and said that your two children were both tied to the undercarriages of trucks carrying nitroglycerine, one with the brake lines cut plunging down a mountain over shattered highway…and one a hundred miles in the opposite direction being driven by a suicidal drunk through a park where his ex-wife is a ranger?

Huh? What then Mr. Smartypants!

OK, time to get something straight and lay a term eternally to rest.

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. A. Tactical. Nuclear. Weapon.

Period.

Tossing any nuke around – even a pony nuke, even underground – has monstrous, strategic consequences.

On Bin Laden.

Russert: Why can’t we capture him?

Kennedy: Shit, Tim. Bigger question is, why did we let him go? Why did we abandon the hunt for him?

On Immigration.

Kennedy: If the Preznit would be willing to take on the Right Wing of his own Party, we might be able to fix this thing.

Russert: But some in your Party think you are too quick to compromise.

Russert: Falwell. Whuzzup with him and McCain?

The Senator from Massachusetts was given a chance to wallop a big fat one clean over the Green Monster at Fenway. And he didn’t take it. He hedged on Falwell, hedged on McCain. Talked around the whole “Agent of Intolerance” matter.

Now Kennedy is a legislator and this is how legislators have to operate, but when handed a ball-peen hammer and Falwell’s spongy skull, it is the duty of every person who loves liberty to step up and swing.

Kinda like the sword in the stone.

Kennedy lights up on Education. Chinese are graduation 600K engineers every year. India, 350K. We’re graduting 75K, half of whom are foreign born.

This Administration is soooo fucking cavalier about education. Well, about everything, but the topic is education.

When we passed the G.I. Bill, the Treasury figured that it created $7 in new wealth for every $1 invested. Education is the key to growth.

Damn right. This is an investment in our nation’s future, and it’s worth spending a little money on it. Maybe if we weren’t pissing away hundreds of billions in Iraq. Maybe roll back all of those giveaways to billionaires.

Russert: What about $3.00/gal gasoline?

Kennedy: The “Big Issue” of this election will be the gross incompetence of this Administration on every issue.

Russert lobs up a 44-year-old quote from Teddy when he was 12 years old about Democratic corruption in MA. And then pounces. So when Dems do it, its OK?!!

Kennedy: Fuck you, Russert. When it’s a few cutpurses, then it’s a problem with individuals. When the whole political infrastructure is powered by corruption, then it’s the Party and its culture.

The Panel… Broder, Brownstein, Blankley, Myers.

Broder: (Cracking open another tired, fortune cookie of self-evident wisdom) It’s the government’s job to protect secrets, but it's ours to try to uncover them.

Brownstein: (On Slot Jockey Bigot Big Bill Bennett’s comments that Journalists are Traitors). This Administration will leak like month-old-diapers when it suits them.

OK, that was me punching up the tepid prose a trifle.

Me: What you mean is that the GOP will leak half-truths to juice up the pig people and tamp down the opposition and then get their Underoos in a twist when someone dares to tell the whole truth to counterhex their lies.

Tony Blankley: Aughhhh! Get the fuck back to the McLaughlin Group you bull tumor.

Dee Dee Myers: Classified information has been leaked, always. Government workers sign a document promising not to release info. If a government worker wants to talk for what he or she thinks if the good of the country, that’s on them.

Brownstein: One important question is whether or not the public is better off knowing things like NSA etc.

Russert: Staff changes at the WH?

Brownstein: Are they looking at fundamental changes or not? Not. The source of Rove’s power is his relationship with Dubya. That’s not going to change.

Me: Obviously not. This Administration doesn’t have “policy” in any sense on that word. They have tactics for kneecapping people and grabbing more power…for the purpose of kneecapping people and grabbing more power. They all the “vision” of a platoon of pickpockets working a rodeo. All they see of this beautiful world are wallets and asses, and all "strategy" is focused on separating one from the other.

Rove will simply move from crafting failed policies designed to throw old women under buses...to just thowing old women under buses.

Dee Dee Myers: The relationship between this Administration and the Press is so contentious. This Admin is not interested in a better relationship with the press.

Broder: The problem is not Scotty. The problem is George Bush, who feels no need to keep the public informed on anything.

Brownstein: There is a shift in the way that media gets done. Increasingly you see “politicians” running to the partisan Press.

Me: Fuck you.

Here, for example, is a picture of the White House Press Corps

ferreting out a story.

What you mean is that the GOP has created a purely partisan alternate media because the whole of GOP “policy” is a Long War Against Reality Including ‘Rithmatic.

What you mean is that the GOP "media" consists of telling stupid people what they want to hear in a way that accrues to the benefit of rich people and the leaders of the Conservative Evangelical Jihad.

What you mean is that the GOP invented a Pravada Press to help it lie to the public, and the MSM has chased them down the rabbit hole and as a result has grown steadily weaker and more pussified.

There is no “Lefty” equivalent to what the Right has done to the Free Press so quit pretending that this is a bipartisan disease.

"I hear the Voices"

They tell me that Iran has The Bomb.

That Rummy is a Genius.

That Babylon must pay and pay. And bleed and bleed.

That we must dash the skulls of their babies against the rocks.

Just look at that picture of what happened to my hand when I showed a particle of doubt! Just for a second!

The Voices warned that if I broke faith with them this would happen. And that my words would come out all drunk-sounding. And lo, weren’t the Voices exactly right?

That I can’t pronounce “Nookuler”?

Or the name of some Spanish prime minister?

Or "subliminable".

Or “Abu Gerrub”.

And that my hand would melt. Maybe you can’t see it melting, but you’re not The Decider.

I’m The Decider.

I mean, how else do you explain me losing my grip falling off my bike. Falling off a Segue. Falling down in the office. Sounding all crazy during my debate with Kerry.

It takes all my mind and faith and focus to bring my hand back when the doubt sneaks in and I start to think maybe I might have made a mistake.

Gotta watch it all the time. All the time. The Higher Father demands no less.

He say’s so in His Book.

Just take a look here…

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for words of song,
and our tormentors, for mirth:
"Sing to us from the songs of Zion!"

How could we sing the song of the Lord on an alien land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill,

May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

Remember, O LORD, against the sons of Edom
the day of Jerusalem's fall, those who said:
"Tear it down! Tear it down to its foundation!"

O daughter of Babylon that will be devastated:
Fortunate is the man who repays you what you have done to us;

Fortunate is the man who will seize and dash
your little ones against the rock!

Waking or sleeping, gotta know that The Decider is solid and whole and can jump straight outta bed to go sign that important Terri Schiavo Bill, or make the missiles fly if that’s what the Voices need me to do.

I’m not reckless about out. I think people don’t realize that I’m reeeeeal careful. I’m completely calm and clear about the hand situation. In fact, monitoring the hand situation is so important that I’ve had Josh Bolton on the job right along. He keeps an eye out to make sure my hands stay rock-hard and real when the Deciding comes.

Just take a look here…

His wall collection of Bush photos, typical throughout the White House complex, is unique. The pictures focus exclusively on Bush's hands at key moments in his presidency. Not a single photo of Bush's face can be found.

I used to be scared when my hand would get tingly or squishy or that one time when I disagreed with Dick and it just oozed right off my wrist and puddled up on the floor. But now I see that it’s a blessing. A quick check on whether I’m on the right track.

Polls, facts, science, what the masses think, the opinions of foreigners, or what it says on the teevee screens or the internets...all of them are terrorist weapons sent by the Evil One to attack my mind. Distractions sent by the Prince of Lies to try to shake me from my faith.

But I will not be shaken.

All I need to do is to take a look at my right hand, maybe bang it on a desk or a podium, and if it’s solid, then so is my faith.

When you don't question the Voices, things work out.

Maybe you can’t see it, but I can. I'm the Decider, and a hundred or two hundred years from now, my Decisions will be redeemed, because the Voices are never wrong.

And the Hand never lies.

It was like granite when I took us into Iraq.

But thinking about Iran and what I must do, it feels like steel.

Like diamonds.

Like the Hand of God.

And after dinner...

...come "The Feats of Strength".

Because Festivus is not over until the head of the family has been pinned to the ground.

There are certainly a lot of complex, CEO-face-saving reasons why Dubya can't let a man of such deplorable judgment and epic, fatal arrogance and incompetence as Donald Rumsfeld go, but at bottom it's because Dubya is what his father was accused of being, but never really was.

A wimp.

A vicious weakling, living off the borrowed macho of others and kept safe from the consequences of his of recklessness and cupidity by his phalanx of nannies.

Every man around the President is a hireling that serves the House of Bush in a specific manner, and the man Dubya nicknamed “Rumstud” is no different.

Rumsfeld is the custodian of Bush's manhood, and Bush can no more fire him than he can saw off his own Iraqiwhacker

What happens

When you mix the real Beach Boys with the fake Beachheaders?

Take one article from the NYT and one set of lyrics from Brian Wilson called “In My Room”.

Mix. Pour into casserole dish and cook for two hours at 300.

Serves millions.

"Manly Men Answer Call of the Wild”
By ALEXANDRA WOLFE
Amherst, Va.

There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to…

We've just been overrun!" Reggie Bennett, a burly 41-year-old in full-body camouflage, shouted to the four young men behind him on a sunny day in the middle of March. "Our plane is down. We're going to our hole-up site!" One by one they followed his signal to move forward, crouching behind trees, carefully navigating through the brush, quickening their pace as they heard threats screamed behind them:

In my room, in my room...

"I see you, G.I.! You think you crafty, G.I., but I gonna put you in a cage so you can't get out!" They paused in a dried-up creek bed, Mr. Bennett bringing up the rear. "Keep quiet. There are land mines, B-52's and burnt craters all around us," he warned. "This is what a war zone looks — "

In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears...

He was interrupted by a ringing cellphone. "You're going to my voice mail," he said, as he checked the incoming number. "I'm evading now!" But Mr. Bennett wasn't getting cellphone reception midbattle in Falluja. He was teaching his signature Hidden Pursuit escape and evasion class to college seniors who had forgone the wet T-shirt contests and beer bongs of Cancún, Mexico, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for the chance to dodge simulated gunshots and cannon explosions at Mountain Shepherd Wilderness Survival School in Amherst, Va.
...

In my room, in my room...

For fees that range from a few hundred dollars for a two-day class to a few thousand for adventures that can be four weeks long, those willing can pay to be pursued by make-believe assailants, survive hypothetical plane crashes and car accidents, and hunt down guerrillas.

Do my dreaming...

Though it would seem that the desire to dress up in fatigues, cover your face with greasepaint and subsist on Meals Ready to Eat would be the result of some curiosity about or identification with the soldiers in Iraq, those who work in survival schools say the war has little to do with interest in these new classes.
and my scheming

"They want to pretend they're on 'Lost,' " said Mr. Bennett, referring to the hit drama on ABC about a group of plane crash survivors trying to hack it on a remote island. "They watch those shows and think, 'Hey, that looks pretty cool.' "
...

Lie awake and pray

"It's consumer marketing," she said. "People watch TV shows that show extreme adventure racing and extreme survival, and so schools are trying to add that twist to their programming."

Do my crying and my sighing

Huddled under gnarled tree branches in the Virginia backwoods, Mr. Bennett and company had just arrived at a temporary "hole up" location, where they could apply camouflage makeup. "First assess your medical problems — take care of massive bleeding," Mr. Bennett commanded his troops, who nodded earnestly, even though none appeared to have a scratch. "Now we restore fluids and apply camouflage."

"This is awesome!" exclaimed 23-year-old Garrett Foster, an engineering student.

Laugh at yesterday

Soon the men were rubbing green, brown and black stripes over their faces and necks, occasionally pausing so one of them could take a picture with their point-and-shoot cameras.

"This is the funnest part yet," said Justin Hightower, a 23-year-old political science major in Oklahoma, who said he signed up for the class because camping had "become boring."
...

Now it’s dark and I’m alone

This particular nightmare-come-to-life will be offered for the first time this summer by the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, a 38-year-old school in Colorado. Josh Bernstein, 35, the company's president and chief executive, said that the 72-Hour Survival Rescue Course (or the Crash Course) was created "to give an additional X factor" to his traditional offerings. "This class throws a curveball," he said of the "Lost" -like scenario in which students are picked up at an airport and then deposited in the middle of a desert or mountain crash scene.

Mr. Bernstein said his courses, which tend to be populated not by hard-core adventurers but by everyday professionals, compensate for dull lives.

But I won’t be afraid

"It's easy for white collar professionals to feel like they haven't faced their ghosts," he said in Midtown Manhattan, where he also has a home. "You want to be able to prove to yourself at some level that you have the inner mettle to get through challenges."
...

In my room, in my room

Joe Cary, a 36-year-old former bond trader who lives in Los Angeles, took a class at the Tracker School last spring and is enrolled in another this fall. "I had to do it," he said. "It was just male instinct that needed to be fulfilled." What he took away from the class, he said, was "awareness." "I was a bond trader so I thought I knew about awareness; but now you're in the woods and awareness is life or death."

In my room, in my room...

But Mr. Cary said that while he now has "a confidence so I know that I'll probably be O.K. when I walk into a shady place," parts of the class made his stomach turn. "It was a little too carnal," he said. "You learn how to test whether or not you can eat roadkill. If it's fresh you pull on the hair, and if it stays in place it's good enough to eat, but if it comes out it's decayed. That was kind of like, eew."

But if the real world provided the challenges Mr. Cary says he's now ready for, would survival schools even be necessary? Probably not, said Harvey Mansfield, author of the recent book "Manliness," and a professor of government at Harvard. "When manliness has nothing positive to do it goes to experiences that are contrived."

In my room, in my room...

It's odd, [Harvey Mansfield, author of "Manliness”/professor of government at Harvard] said, that "when we need real fighters all we get is pretend fighters." Young men sign up for extreme survival courses, he said, because "they are as embarrassed about patriotism as they are about manliness, and to go into the military may seem too conventional."

In my room, in my room...

The men down in Amherst were certainly taking an unconventional approach to warfare, posing for a few last pictures as they rolled up the camouflage ponchos they had been using as shelters. "Wait, my camo's all smudged," Mr. Hightower said. "I look like a goober!" He fixed his makeup and Mr. Brush clicked a few shots before Mr. Bennett came to give them their final instructions. "Remember, stay off roads, trails and railroads," he warned. "Light is your worst enemy; stay in the shadows."
…

In my room, in my room

"I just want to scare 'em a little," he said, "make sure they're taking it seriously, but these guys have been good so I don't have to do anything to them." What if they weren't? "I would just go in there and surprise them or something, nothing dangerous."

Shit, this is what a whole lot of the people that used to sign up for the National Guard a generation ago went in for. Service to country, but also adventure, bonding, no-risk wargaming.

But that was back in Dubya's salad days, before we started shipping the Guard off to Iraq as cannon fodder.

Sure, in the end this is just guys in the woods playing fort, but in this particular here-and-now, there is something genuinely, pornographically creepy about it.

About a bunch of copier salesmen and real estate developers dressing up and playing hunted soldier while the disastrous war that I would guess many of them vehemently support(ed) grinds endlessly on, pulverizing the military and sending recruiters practically door-to-door begging for just such men as these to sign up.

So in that, Mansfield gets it all almost perfectly wrong here.

There are, in fact, thousands upon thousands of “young men” in Young Republican Bund organizations from coast to coast who wake up in a state of priapistic hyperpatriotism every day.

They lump out of bed every morning screaming themselves hoarse about their rampant love of all things invasional and Iraqi-freedomish and the general Dubyarifficness of everything Murrican, except for the 65% of the country that disagrees with them.

They cower from military service under the President they voted for, in the War they demanded, not because it’s “too conventional", but because they want other people – preferably poor and/or brown people – to go and do their fighting and dying for them.

They duck-and-run because they are cowards and hypocrites and have no intention whatsoever of risking one millimeter of their tender assflesh when they can just gargle up and spit out the armed forces like so much complimentary motel bathroom mouthwash to cover their ethical halitosis.

OTOH, they would probably excel at certain aspects of this “Snakes On a Camping Trip” game.

For example, they seem to have no trouble at “escape and evasion” when it comes to dodging responsibility for the disasters they have wrought.

And using only a bag of Cheetohs, a pile of stroke mags and back issues of “Guns and Ammo”, they seem to be able to soundlessly and seamlessly blend deadly-ninja-style into the wallpaper of their Mommy’s basement whenever the recruiter man comes around.

Joe Klein sez, "As a Liberal..."

"...let me assure you that, yes, Liberals do want to gay up your children, molest your dog and use your baby's blood to cool our ho-mo-sexual lattes so that we can dunk our biscotti without burning our pink, Liberal fingers."

This from the faboo Digby

True Romance

by digby


Via Tristram Shandy I see that TIME's in-house faux liberal is at it again, this time giving Hugh Hewitt a private lap dance instead of dancing around the pole for everyone to see:

HH: I just have never seen them on PBS. But nevertheless, Joe, what I want to talk about is reverse Turnip Days, moments where candidates were not candid, and I think it hurt them. I want to start with an episode I find odd not finding it here in Politics Lost, which is the Florida recount, and the disastrous attempt by Gore and Lieberman to throw out the ballots of the military. Was that not the sort of authentic moment where we saw the soul of the modern Democratic Party on display?


JK: I think that the Florida recount in general...well, first of all, you're right about that. I mean, too often, the default position, especially in the left wing of the Democratic Party, is to not respect the military sufficiently, and to assume that anytime the United States would use force overseas, we would be wrong
.

And people wonder why liberals are popularly perceived as being cowards.

Here we have alleged liberal Joe Klein being confronted by alleged human Hugh Hewitt with a comment that the Democratic Party's [black]"soul" was on display when it argued that illegal ballots cast after election day shouldn't be counted (for good reason, as it turned out.) Does Joe Klein argue that the the Republicans staged fake uprisings and attempted to get the Cuban community to rise up (among many other things) thus showing that using the Florida debacle as an illustration of the "soul" of a party wasn't really a smart thing to do? No. Does he point out that the Republican party has a funny way of showing its "soul" when it supports torture? No. Does he laugh in Hugh Hewitt's supercilious face? Of course not.

He agrees with Hewitt. Indeed, this line is his foremost Scotty McClellanesque robotic talking point lately, called into use no matter what the question about the Democrats, whether it's about "soul" or nuclear war. Is there anyone in DC who can deprogram this guy?

You just get a little bite; now go over to Digby's casa and read the whole of it.

Except you, Mr. Klein. You sit your moneymaker down for a little free advice.

In case you never noticed, whores really do not age well.

I know you believe if you just keep knobbing Wingnut lap bishops long enough, and randomly rabbit punching anything that moves that's Left of Roy Cohn, you hope to slip into a nice, dotty, éminence grise semi-retirement.

Or maybe you think, if you last long enough, the wheel may turn and your fate may differ. After all, even Nixon got a decent funeral and a eulogy by Clinton, and like Noah Cross says in "Chinatown", "...I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

In your case, never gonna happen.

See you have scary, chitenous, carney-folk hands. And frankly Joe, nobody wants those knobby little spiders crab-walking over their birthday suits looking for erogenous zones.

So that's out.

And your lies have smacked all of the torque out of your mouth. It's old and loose and slobby. No shearing force there. All the elasticity of an O-ring in a meat locker...covered in heavy pineapple syrup. Again, not what the paying customer wants when he can have his pick of frisky youngsters in Brit Hume's stables.

So unless you're planning on letting your GOP playmates skull-fuck you, you really only have one orifice left to peddle.

And lets just say it's not situated anyplace that can be easily leaned in through Hugh Hewitt's driver's side window for a little 2:00 A.M. pick-me-up...

“Button, Button”

You know Richard Matheson.

You may not know you know him, but you do. You’ve read or seen his work.

It’s unavoidable.

He, for example, wrote a fair chunk of the original “Twilight Zone” episodes. He wrote “I Am Legend”, which was brought to the screen first as “The Omega Man”, and to which pretty much every zombie/vampire-army movie ever shot owes a fat debt.

“The Shrinking Man” (they added “Incredible” to the title when they made it into a movie, because apparently a shrinking man by itself isn’t prima facie incredible enough) is his.

He did the script for Spielberg's first flick -- "Duel" -- (which, if you haven’t seen it, is “Jaws”...on land...with a big-ass truck instead of a big-ass shark.) and the script for the original teevee movie “The Night Stalker” (And, because Chris Carter knew and honored his own teevee lineage, why he created an homage to the master in the person of “Senator Matheson” on the “X-Files”.)

This list just scratches the surface. There’s a lot more, but this post isn’t my paean to Mr. Matheson. It's to put across the point that he is in the cultural groundwater. And, in this lad’s ‘umble opinion, at least one of his stories should always be included in the canon of speculative fiction that every school kid should be required to read (strapping into those "A Clockwork Orange" eyelid-spreaders if necessary), along with Jackson’s “The Lottery”, “The Flag”, Damon Knight’s "To Serve Man"...and any of a dozen wonders by Bradbury.

The specific piece by Matheson I have in mind is called “Button, Button”.

It first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1970 (See, Mom. I really was reading it for the articles.) and it's been buzzing hornet-like around in my skull very much these last many months. Enough for me to track it down again and re-read it, so I had already been mulling about it on some level when this story popped right off the page over at Media Matters.

First the article, and then I’ll serve up a little slice of the original Matheson story (not the execrable adaptation from the “New Twilight Zone”.)

See if you can divine the hellish similarity between the two, and then I double-dog-dare you to tell me that good science fiction is or has ever been “escapist” in any sense.

This from Media Matters…

Savage advocated "kill[ing] 100 million" Muslims; called alleged Duke rape victim a "drunken slut stripping whore"

Summary: On April 17, Michael Savage called for "kill[ing] 100 million" Muslims and referred to the alleged Duke rape victim as a "drunken slut stripping whore."

On April 17, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage called for "kill[ing] 100 million" Muslims and referred to the woman who alleged she was raped by members of Duke University's lacrosse team as a "drunken slut stripping whore."
On his radio show, Savage told listeners that "intelligent people, wealthy people ... are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, 'Oh, there's a billion of them.' " Savage continued: "I said, 'So, kill 100 million of them, then there'd be 900 million of them.' I mean ... would you rather us die than them?" Savage added: "Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you're going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later."
Savage also referred to the alleged Duke rape victim as "a drunken slut stripping whore accusing men of raping her when there is absolutely no evidence of such a rape other than what comes out of that filthy mouth of hers." He later asked: "What kind of system do we have that anyone can scream rape and not have to show her face?" adding, "This is all the product of the out-of-control lesbian feminist movement." Echoing previous comments he has made about the alleged rape victim, Savage said, "The Durham dirt-bag case disgusts me to my core."

Savage has also previously referred to the alleged victim as a "dirty, verminous black stripper."
…

From the April 17 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:

SAVAGE: There are too many RDDBs [red-diaper doper babies, Savage's term for people supposedly raised by Marxist parents] in high places and in the media and in the courts for us to stand up to this fanatical enemy. And so unless the RDDB is reined in somehow or taken out of power, we're going to die as a nation. I swear to God that's what people are saying to me. And these are intelligent people, wealthy people. They are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, "Oh, there's a billion of them." I said, "So, kill 100 million of them, then there'll be 900 million of them." I mean, would you rather die -- would you rather us die than them? I mean, what is it going to take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you're going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later.
[...]

And now this from “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson (emphasis added).

The package was lying by the front door—a cube-shaped carton sealed with tape, their name and address printed by hand: “Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, 217 E. Thirty-seventh Street, New York 10016.”

Norma picked it up, unlocked the door, and went into the apartment. It was just getting dark. After she put the lamb chops in the broiler, she sat down to open the package. Inside the carton was a push-button unit fastened to a small wooden box. A glass dome covered the button. Norma tried to lift it off, but it was locked in place. She turned the unit over and saw a folded piece of paper Scotch-taped to the bottom of the box. She pulled it off: “Mr. Steward will call on you at 8:00 p.m.” Norma put the button unit beside her on the couch. She reread the typed note, smiling. A few moments later, she went back into the kitchen to make the salad.

The doorbell rang at eight o’clock. “I’ll get it,” Norma called from the kitchen. Arthur was in the living room, reading. There was a small man in the hallway. He removed his hat as Norma opened the door.

“Mrs. Lewis?” he inquired politely.
“Yes?”

“I’m Mr. Steward.”

“Oh, yes.” Norma repressed a smile. She was sure now it was a sales pitch.

“May I come in?” asked Mr. Steward.

“I’m rather busy,” Norma said. “I’ll get you your watchamacallit, though.”

She started to turn.

“Don’t you want to know what it is?” Norma turned back.

Mr. Steward’s tone had been offensive. “No, I don’t think so,” she replied.

“It could prove very valuable,” he told her.

“Monetarily?”she challenged

Mr. Steward nodded. “Monetarily,” he said.

Norma frowned. She didn’t like his attitude.

“What are you trying to sell?” she asked.

“I’m not selling anything,” he answered.

Arthur came out of the living room.

“Something wrong”

Mr. Steward introduced himself.

“Oh, the –” Arthur pointed toward the living room and smiled. “What is that gadget anyway?”

“It won’t take long to explain,” replied Mr. Steward. “May I come in?”

“If you’re selling something—,” Arthur said.
He hesitated. “Well, why not?” he said.

They went into the living room and Mr. Steward sat in Norma’s chair. He reached into an inside coat pocket and withdrew a small sealed envelope.

“Inside here is a key to the bell- unit dome,” he said. He set the envelope on the chairside table. “The bell is connected to our office.”

“What’s it for?” asked Arthur.

“If you push the button,” Mr. Steward told him, “somewhere in the world someone you don’t know will die. In return for which you will receive a payment of $50,000.”

...

Let’s be clear; in America in 2006, this is not a fable. This is not a cautionary fable dressed up in science fiction nomeclature.

This is about the world, now.

The United States, now.

In 2004, when the GOP rank and file lockstepped into their polling places to re-elect liars and criminals, they pushed the button.

When they stand by and applaud reckless, useless butchery on the promise that the indiscriminate slaughter will somehow make them incrementally safer and keep their pump prices low, they push the button.

When conservatives of my acquaintence say – in all seriousness – “Fuck it. Kill ‘em all. They all hate us anyway,” they push the button.

When a drooling slab of racist slunkmeat like Michael Savage calls for wholesale homicide to the orgasmic squeals of the pig people, they stomp up and down on the button.

They push the button because they are drowning in their own fear and voting for the bastards that are holding their heads underwater. Because they are weak men. Cowardly men. Hateful men, who have lent their electoral authority to other weaklings and cowards to wholesale curbstomp brown people in their name.

Because it costs them nothing.

History gave them a chance to show the world their true faces. A chance to proceeding with the long, hard job of dealing with real enemies and real problems with care and gravity. Intelligence. Maturity. Focus.

Instead we got The Bicycle Chief and his Gang that Couldn't Loot Straight.

Twice. Fucking twice.

This was their moral acid test; one which they have failed spectacularly.

Safe in their basements, shielded by layers of greasy ass-fat and whistle-clean, fraidy-cat arsenals they will never use, kept Mommy’s-womb-safe by the gangsters and hucksters they elect and re-elect over and over and over again from having to spend a single dime or shed a single drop of blood, they have been given their heart's darkest, fondest wish: to kill brown people by remote control and have someone else pick up the tab.

Every day they push the button.

Every. Single. Day.