Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The Return of the Revenge of the Son of…where was I going with this?

Candidly, the original objective of doing these recaps has nearly evaporated.

Think Progress (or, sometimes, Crooks and Liars) have the video up, transcripts piping hot almost before dawn breaks at castle driftglass.

Then, some time later, Atrios hoists up an, uh, somewhat-less-than-labor-intensive “Wanker” posts that wormholes you back to…Think Progress.

Which is…efficient. Like remaking the Mississippi from the sprawling, meandering beast that Sam Clemens rode and wrote to glory, into a levee-straightened, Army Corps engineered freshwater superhighway.

Meh.

Two topics dominated: Iraq and the fate of

Attorney General Mango, and the GOP flaks came knives-out very hard only on the first issue, which makes me believe that Alberto ain't long for this political world.

However The Word has come down from Mount Goofy that, after Four Years, any mention of timelines, dates, or measurable of any kind is de facto “precipitous”, treasonable and aids and abets our enemies in Eurasia. No more screwing around by hinting that debate and dissent might not automatically = disloyalty.

Anything short of an eternally open-ended "Yea!" to the campaign to Completely End Badness in the Cradle of Civilization = disater and failure.

Which, in a completely unintentional sense is true. Iraq is the Neocon’s Pickett’s Charge, and the Bush Administration’s Carthage. A complete and unqualified failure of every Neocon orthodoxy at every level.

And to admit their failure in Iraq would mean to admit that Neoconservativism -- the ideological framework which created PNAC; the disease for which Iraq is merely the most violent symptom – is also a failure.

And Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and the rest of the residents of the Neocon Jonestown will see America completely hollowed out and emptied into Iraq – our treasury gone and our army destroyed – before they admit that their National Socialism Lite has been the Father of the Iraqi Disaster, and not its savior.

"This Week" - Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and John Cornyn, R-Texas; national security adviser Stephen Hadley.

Rove on video whining that Dirty Hippies wanna play politics with the US Attorney system. Which is somewhere in the philosophical neighborhood of Charlie Manson bitching that the Family got a dinged with a coupla dubious parking tickets as they were butchering their way through the Beautiful People.

Leahy: Rove is right that a lot of USAGs are appointed through a political process. It’s not that they were replaced, it is how they were replaced.

One replacement, for example, was previously disbarred. One is the thrall of Don Karleone. All the USAGs who were kicked were done so for reasons of performance.

Which was, inarguably, a lie.

But of course Republicans lie as unselfconsciously and enthusiastically as my cat licks its ass.

It is their nature.

No, what is completely freaking them out is that they thought they had finally locked in that permanent One Party Christian State where all consideration of the “rule of law” – the very rhetoric they profligately lobbed around like Democratic daisycutters during the Clinton Years -- was behind them.

The Republican Party and its Base have proven time and time and time again that they do not give a shit about this country, it people or its principles. That they really believed they had finally picked all the locks and snuffed all the guards and could at last do what they have dreamed of doing for 30 years: loot and lie and torture and conquer without hindrance and no questions asked.

Ooops.

Cornyn: The explanation was botched from the beginning. If they had just said their terms had expired, and walked it up to the Senate and done their hearings on the up-and-up, it wouldn’t have been a problem.

Leahy: No. The problem is these dung eels change their damned stories and supply new information that massively alters their previous narratives oftener than the writers on “Lost”.

Leahy: I am sick and tired of getting a briefing one day, being told that I now have the whole story, and then finding out – uuuh – not so much.

Cornyn: I want this investigation, but when the leader of the inquiry is the head of the Senate Reelection Campaign…

driftglass: Yeah, Corny. Sure. The real stink here is that one of the Senators who now gets to actually ask questions of the moral mole rats who run your Ponsi Party also raises funds for Senate campaigns.

Leahy: Odd, isn’t it, that the Republicans never had the slightest problem subpoenaing high-ranking Democrats every fucking afternoon over Christmas card lists and land deal, but try to find out why the White House is tampering with the judiciary suddenly Rove and the rest of the Gang That Couldn’t Loot Straight are leaping on desks, grabbing their petticoats and shrieking like a cathedral full of howler monkeys on very bad acid.

Cornyn: But this becomes a witch-hunt because Chuck Schumer says bad things about Republicans on his website to – horrors! – raise money. And that makes him Unclean! Unclean!

Leahy: Yeah, and I have visited the Republican websites where they raise campaign money scoring points off of me, so I don’t exactly see the fucking point this haircut from Texas is trying to make.

Cornyn: They want to cut right to getting Rove in there and turning this into a political circus.

Leahy: I am sick and tired of getting half truths on this.

Hey, speaking of half-truths Stephen Hadley was up to bat next.

Stephanopoulos: If the Dear Leader knew then what we know now about the appalling cost of this war, would he have still invaded?

Hadley: Yes. You have to remember what the situation was like four years ago.

Dissolve and Fade to a Steven Hadley regurgitates every long-discredited GOP talking point like a pelican feeding its young. Including that we have to stay in Iraq because whether or not they were there before – which the definitely were! -- al-Qaeda is in Iraq now

Stephanopoulos: But wasn’t the whole point of this insane war to keep al-Qaeda the hell out of Iraq?

Longer Hadley:

America, FUCK YEAH!
What you going to do when we come for you now,
it’s the dream that we all share; it’s the hope for tomorrow

FUCK YEAH!

McDonalds, FUCK YEAH!
Wal-Mart, FUCK YEAH!
The Gap, FUCK YEAH!
Baseball, FUCK YEAH!
NFL, FUCK, YEAH!
Rock and roll, FUCK YEAH!
The Internet, FUCK YEAH!
Slavery, FUCK YEAH!

Oh and al-Qaeda was in Iraq!

Stephanopoulos: But they were not working with Saddam. The intel has been long confirmed.

Hadley: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

Stephanopoulos: So would Iraq people say today that they’re better off now than under Saddam?

Hadley:

Starbucks, FUCK YEAH!
Disney world, FUCK YEAH!
Porno, FUCK YEAH!
Valium, FUCK YEAH!
Reeboks, FUCK YEAH!
Fake Tits, FUCK YEAH!
Sushi, FUCK YEAH!
Taco Bell, FUCK YEAH!
Rodeos, FUCK YEAH!
Bed bath and beyond (Fuck yeah, Fuck yeah)

These hairless, smirky, mendacious little finks need to disappear.

Stephanopoulos: Not a single fucking measure on your Big Benchmark Checklist has been met.


Hadley: The problem is Arbitrary Timelines. Just give us Forever and an Infinite amount of money and cannon fodder and this thing’ll fly like Shakes the Clown on twenty gallons of Red Bull!

Hadley: Any timeline is mandating failure!

Hadley:

Liberty, FUCK YEAH!
White Slips, FUCK YEAH!
The Alamo, FUCK YEAH!
Band-aids, FUCK YEAH!
Las Vegas, FUCK YEAH!
Christmas, FUCK YEAH!
Immigrants, FUCK YEAH!
Popeye, FUCK YEAH!
Democrats, FUCK YEAH!

The Panel bumfuzzled themselves trying to figure out “Why”?

Why are they so incompetent?

Why did they do this and do it so badly?

Ok, listen up Panel, because this is Really Simple.

They never thought they’d get caught.

They thought the game was rigged forever and the local sheriff would stay bought. From Brownie to Plame to the NSA to NASA to the EPA to the management of every fucking catastrophe and catastrophette in Iraq, the message from the Very Top has been crystal clear: Rape in all to death and then piss on the corpse, boys, ‘cause Judgment Day’ll never come!

They did it because they thought it was OK.

Because no one ever taught this generation of Republicans the meaning of honor, or that being sadistic, lying imbeciles was something to be ashamed of.

They thought it was a perk of the job.



"Face the Nation" - Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.


Missed it. Mostly.




"Meet the Press" - Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa.; former Rep. Tom Andrews, D-Maine, and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas; Richard Perle, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Schumer…was good. Facts and arguments locked and loaded for werewolves like an M16 with a full silver jacket.

Boom boom boom.

Nothing new, except he clarified the differences between the committees.

Schumer (on a conflict of interest): This is much to important to be political. Ask Republican Congressman Sununu. However just to be clear, the committee I sit on will investigate only the sleazy, degenerates in the Executive Branch. Should any of their slime trails lead to the halls of Congress, that’ll be the Ethics Committees bailiwick.


Attorney General Mango was also invited to this Ring of the Mouse Circus and declined.

Then came Sestak and Andrews.

Versus DeLay and Perle.

At some point my teevee just shut down, refusing to be a party to the transmission of such sullied photons.

It was, at one level, a simple exchange.

Perle: Redeployment is surrender.

DeLay: Setting a date for withdrawal is aiding and abetting the enemy.

DeLay: Protestors on the Washington Mall aren’t patriots. They’re disloyal.

At some point don’t people who have now been USDA-certified to be malignant douchbags and who have been utterly wrong about everything longer than many sea turtles have been alive have to have their license to use declarative sentences revoked?

Sestak: Tim, I spent 34 years in the service of our country, leading men and women into battle.

There is little point is describing the surgical precisions and laser-level tones taken by Messrs Sestak and Andrews during their masterful disassembly of the various….because you have heard it all before.

Perle and DeLay are interesting to watch not for their arguments – which are ridiculous – or their McCarthyesque pronouncement – which are trifling lies – but rather for the anthropological experience of seeing two perfect specimens of utterly failed, utterly corrupted wastes of meat and skin go thought their paces, gibbering and smiling away, completely impervious to reason or conscience.

Two moral corpses walking among the living, still raving out the same lies they have told for years. Lies that have caused the death and suffering of untold hundreds of thousand. Lies each now told as onelongjammedtogetheronrushingsentence. Each lie now just noise; a feverish, talismanic incantations – ritually enacted these days like Stations of the Neocon Cross, rather than spoken.

As if their old power to simply shut down reason and truth by bellowing “Traitor!” at anyone who looks at ‘em cross-eyed were still a hot and lively weapon in their clammy hands.

But those days are gone, and these true Enemies Within are now seen for what they are, naked and toothless in the noonday sun.

Because now, at last, the specific gravity of the sheer dead weight of the layer upon layer upon layer of bloodsoaked lies on which this Administration stands – centrifuged by time and events and simple facts -- has at least temporarily stratified the political world into divisions as distinct as the Permian-Triassic boundary.

On one side, Good and Light…

On the other, DeLay and Perle. Two slabs of ambulatory cultural cancer that are about as wholly, unsalvageably vile as creatures get who don’t literally burst into flames in direct sunlight or need to bathe in the blood of virgins to stay perky.

As I said, at one level, a simple exchange.

It was, at another level, quite remarkable. Like watched Ebola virus squirm and breed, and then storm and destroy healthy tissue under a microscope. Perle – who radiates the aura of something fangy and hairy and partially undigested that Dick Cheney had to have chiseled out of colon with a steam hammer -- belongs in perp-orange in a glass cage at the Hague.

DeLay, who belongs in non-remunerated Federal custody, continues to serve as a valuable, Poster Child-reminder that there are still millions of our fellow citizens who, every two years, yank themselves out of their sister’s bung long enough to jump fireman-style into their overalls and shitkickers and slouch off to the polls to vote straight fascist ticket.

Perhaps “Ta piss off the naygers”. Perhaps “Ta show them fags whose country this is!” Perhaps because, if they don’t, sweet baby Jebus will fuss and cry and cross them off the Champaign Room list in Heaven.

Their specific motives are irrelevant. They are simply Bad Americans – democracy’s failed men -- and they need to be loudly reminded at every opportunity that they are – personally and specifically -- what is wrong with this country.

Which was, in the end, exactly what Messrs Sestak and Andrews accomplished.

"Fox News Sunday" - Former U.S. Attorneys Bud Cummins of Arkansas and David Iglesias of New Mexico; Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and John Kerry, D-Mass.

Alberto Apologizes!

Followed by vid of Alberto swearing before Congress – repeatedly – that he would never, ever fire a USAG for political reasons.

Followed by a tiny torrent of information clearly showing that he did just that.

Iglesias: I wasn’t even on any hit list until a certain Congressperson made those two very inappropriate phonecalls.

Iglesias: Prosecutors can’t prosecute on rumor and innuendo. I looked into the two cases of voter fraud I was asked to investigate and didn’t find enough evidence to pursue a case.

driftglass: Which – under that Administration that revels in torture, black prisons and warrentless wiretapping, etc – rates him as unqualified.

Wallace: These are political jobs…

Iglesias: That they slandered me and the rest of us. They should have just said that we had fallen out of political favor and asked us to leave. No problem. Instead they had to punk out and make up a reason that we were doing our jobs poorly. Then they got caught because that reason was a lie.

Wallace: We asked Alberto to come over and nuzzle our taints, but he declined, and so on to Arlen Specter.

Specter: I’m reserving judgment. This is one of two, very serious issues that we are investigating. The FBI peeping up Liberty’s skirt, and Ally G. lying all over himself

Wallace: Do you think the Preznit abused that back door in the Patriot Act that lets him double-secret hire and fire anybody he wants without any oversight or approval.

Specter: That little bitty, bit in the Patriot Act was completely unnoticed by everyone until the Bad Thing happened. The Diane Feinstein moved to yank it out – because it’s bad! Bad! – and I supported that.

Kerry comes on:

Wallace: Clinton did it!! I mean aren’t these all grubby little political pig fights anyway?

Kerry: The word “political” doesn’t mean you’re a whore. It means that you will be appointed by the party in power, but that appointment and your actions must follow the highest judicial standards.

Wallace: Surge! The Surge is doin’ great! How about you traitors lettin’ the Surge be the Surge!

Kerry: You in the media – specifically you on the Republican side – keep calling the Democratic plan as a complete, total and precipitous withdrawal. That is bullshit. We’re calling for a redeployment year from now. Diplomacy. Training. Containment. Going after al-Qaeda in the region. And at that point we’ll have been in Iraq for Six God Damned Years. How in the fuck is that “precipitous”?

Kerry was fine and Botoxed as smooth as the surface of Macy’s mannequin but, frankly, no Democrat should ever go on Fox again. Our democracy has more than one enemy, and Fox is the global HQ for Liberty’s own, home-grown antagonist.

My, how times have changed.

F’instance, I for one remember a long ago Age of Republican Heroes when the GOP loved

their little Mango!