Sure it's nice.

But where does the stripper go?


So I looked up this morning and noticed that it was this blog’s second birthday.

Holy crap. Two years of sassmouth.

So, first, in honor of entering the Terrible Twos, let me just say that this site will now feature a LOT more “No, no, no, no, no, I don’t wanna, no, no, no, no, I don’t wanna, no, fuck you, no, no, waaaah!, no, no, no, go away, shut up, no, waaagh!” posts.

And as a concession to the post-Flintstones-pre-Jetsons modern era we live in, I will try to Atrios those posts down to a lean, aerodynamic, no-fat, no-cal, no-sugar, no-sodium, no-caffine, no-verb, main-course-in-pill-form, three-syllable link to Digby :-) Because I know from watching the teevee that’s what all the kids want these days, what with their loud rock and roll music and Xboxes and secret Mickey Mouse Club sex rave parties.

I also understand from what we at castle driftglass hear on the wireless

that the concept of the Compleat Sentence And Paragraph Lone Blogger site is as laughably anachronistic as nine Gumby and Pokey Cartoons and as dead as three Dillingers, but as I am a creature of habit, an occasional adjective might slip through, so bear with me.

Second, I promise to continue artfully sprinkling in spelling errors, puntuational-perversions and spontaneous tense-shifts in ways that appear to the untrained eye to be completely random but are actually a massively complex letter-transposition encoding project that will eventually aggregate into of my epic poem on the tragedy of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty.

Third, I checked the astrology bit in my morning paper for my blog’s sign to see how its day would be.

At first I thought it was a Nesbitt…

Mrs O: There's not a zodiacal sign called Nesbitt...

Mrs Trepidatious: All right, Derry and Toms.

Mrs O: Aquarius, Scorpio, Virgo, Derry and Toms. April 29th to March 22nd. Even dates only.

Mrs Trepidatious: Well what does it presage?

Mrs O: You have green, scaly skin, and a soft yellow underbelly with a series of fin-like ridges running down your spine and tail. Although lizardlike in shape, you can grow anything up to thirty feet in length with huge teeth that can bite off great rocks and trees. You inhabit arid sub-tropical zones and wear spectacles.

Mrs Trepidatious: It's very good about the spectacles.

Mrs O: It's amazing.

Lastly, here is the graphic I borrowed for Post Number One.


Because I still like it.

And now, off to a long day’s labors.

Because phrases like “"Treaty that no Panamanian ever signed” and “Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama” aren’t just going to rhyme themselves.

Tom Waits Friday.

Special Immaculate Confection Bullgod Edition.


And also to be filed under an early addition to

Blog Against Theocracy.
(Logo courtesy of Tengrain)

Because none other than Rabid Wormwood Afterbirth Bill Donohue Hisself has declared that a Chocolate Jesus is worse than eleven Hitlers!

This via HuffPo:

Storm in US over chocolate Jesus

A New York gallery has angered a US Catholic group with its decision to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ.

The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled "My Sweet Lord", depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever".

The sculpture, by artist Cosimo Cavallaro, will be displayed from Monday at Manhattan's Lab Gallery.

The Catholic League, which describes itself as the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organisation, also criticised the timing of the exhibition.

"The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate," Mr Donohue said.

He called for a boycott of the gallery and the hotel which houses it.

'Overwhelming response'

The gallery's creative director, Matt Semler, said the gallery was considering its options in the wake of angry e-mails and telephone calls.

"We're obviously surprised by the overwhelming response and offence people have taken," he said. "We are certainly in the process of trying to figure out what we're going to do next."

Mr Semler said the timing of the exhibition was coincidental.

Mr Cavallaro, the Canadian-born artist, is known for using food ingredients in his art, on one occasion painting a hotel room in mozzarella cheese.

He used 200 pounds (90 kg) of chocolate to make the sculpture which, unusually, depicts Jesus without a loincloth.

Fuck you, Donohue: your sister sews socks that smell.

Thought #1: How much you wanna bet that if this had been a White Chocolate Jebus Wearing Dockers, rabid Wormwood Afterbirth Bill Donohue would never have said a fucking word?

But a Confectioner's Christ with a Dark Chocolate Wang swingin' in the breeze?

Worse than twelve Hitlers.

Thought #2: Someone please make sure the YouTube above gets emailed to Donohue and the rest of his League of Extra-Degenerate Gentile Men. Say, every four minutes between now and the Rapture, or until his rotting soul explodes.

Whichever comes first.

Come Join Us -- Part 1 of 2

It’s soooo beautiful here.


A grim anniversary compels me to come off the blocks a little early for next weekend’s

Blog Against Theocracy.
(Logo courtesy of Tengrain)

Ten years ago – on March 27, 1997 -- 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide by swallowing a mixture of magical thinking, vodka, Phenobarbital, bad sci-fi and apple sauce.

A few weeks later, Harlan Ellison weighted in with this now-famous Newsweek commentary on the cult, their beliefs and their predictable ending.

Now, ten years later, Mr. Joshuah Bearman has written a long and sympathetic piece on the Cult and Rio DiAngelo -- the sole survivor of the day the Gaters finally chose to play out the final act of their game of Blind Man’s Follow The Leader.

Right off the cliff and into oblivion.

As Mr. Bearman strives to pose and frame Mr. DiAngelo’s story in the gentlest, and most favorable light possible, he simultaneously struggles in a way that is positively Boderian to avoid judging exactly that which most desperately cries out for a verdict.

It is not the article I would have written. Shit, Ellison’s article is the one I woulda written if I had those kind of chops.

The Gaters offed themselves during the sunny days of the Clinton Era, when it was deeply disturbing to learn that 39 people had gotten themselves so…ensorcelled…by a stupid idea that they talked themselves into personal extinction over it.

Now, in the grim, twin shadows of 9/11 and Iraq, it should be all too clear to us that Big, Apocalyptic Visions in the hands of any band of zealous lunatics – whether we know them as Taliban, Neocon, Shining Path or Christopath -- is the principle, looming danger of the 21st Century.

In a world that is ideologically gas-soaked and tinder-dry, there is simply no place left for anyone who think god or aliens or the family dog is telling them to start tossing torches around.

Here are key observations from M. Bearman’s piece, intercut with my own words, and followed by the Ellison article which, ten years later, could not be more timely.

Heaven's Gate: The Sequel

Ten years after the 39 suicides, the sole survivor is back – and he has something urgent to tell us.
By JOSHUAH BEARMAN


Rio DiAngelo has a message he wants to share with the world. It’s an important message, one that begins in space. That’s where he came from, and where he will one day return, following in the footsteps of his 39 friends.

…

Rio’s friends knew what to do.

When another amateur astronomer announced on Art Bell’s conspiracy-minded radio show that he’d taken a picture of Hale-Bopp showing an elongated fuzzy brightness lurking in the tail, word quickly spread in UFO circles that there was an alien spacecraft accompanying the comet.

driftglass: Do you see the Emperor’s New Clothes too?!?

Remote-sensing practitioner Courtney Brown collected clairvoyant “data” that also suggested an extraterrestrial presence. DO’s followers went out and bought a telescope. They couldn’t see the ship themselves, but that wasn’t important.

driftglass: Why yes, I do. Aren’t they splendid?

Aren’t they magnificent?

Aren’t they just to die for?

What Mr. Bearman does not mention is this (from Wikipedia)…

In November 1996, amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek of Houston, Texas took a CCD image of the comet, which showed a fuzzy, slightly elongated object nearby. When his computer sky-viewing program did not identify the star, Shramek called the Art Bell radio program to announce that he had discovered a "Saturn-like object" following Hale-Bopp. UFO enthusiasts, such as remote viewing proponent Courtney Brown, soon concluded that there was an alien spacecraft following the comet. In fact, the object was simply an 8.5-magnitude star, SAO141894, which did not appear on Shramek's computer program because the user preferences were set incorrectly. [3] Reportedly, Shramek refused to admit to his mistake when this was pointed out to him.

Later, Art Bell even claimed to have obtained an image of the object from an anonymous astrophysicist who was about to confirm its discovery. However, astronomers Olivier Hainaut and David J. Tholen of the University of Hawaii stated that the alleged photo was an altered copy of one of their own comet images.

Details, details, details…

Mr. Bearman continues:

For years, they’d been hoping to return to the Kingdom of Heaven, which they called “Evolutionary Level Above Human,” or the “Next Level.” Day in, day out, the group — which they always said was not a cult but a “classroom for growing a soul” — had learned to transcend human existence through rigorous discipline. In preparation for the final step of leaving their human bodies, or “exiting their vehicles,” the group assembled uniforms: matching black Nikes and homemade black pants and shirts, each adorned with a custom-made triangular patch that said “HEAVEN’S GATE AWAY TEAM.”

…

Most people remember the bizarre unfolding of details surrounding the largest mass suicide in U.S. history, but few recall the sole survivor. Rio had been fitted with his departure uniform, and was prepared to “graduate with the rest of the class.” Then, one day in February, as the exit plans were coming together, Rio woke up and felt he had some unnamed thing yet to do here on Earth.

He had followed his instincts before, when he abandoned his life to join the group, and now the directive coming into his awareness was telling him to leave the mansion. Rio was confused, and had an emotional meeting with DO, who telepathically consulted the Next Level. Word came back that Rio should stay behind; that it was all part of the plan. Rio was given a camera, a computer, $1,000 for living expenses and $12.50 for train fare back to Los Angeles.

driftglass:
OK campers, this is a really important lesson. If the phrases:

“In preparation for the final step of leaving their human bodies…”

“He had followed his instincts before, when he abandoned his life to join the group…”

“…the directive coming into his awareness was telling him…”

“…who telepathically consulted the Next Level.”

are any part of your decision-making process beyond what your answers are to a random Cosmo quiz you are doing in a salon waiting room (Sexy?…Or Very Sexy?) then RUN DO NOT WALK out of whatever epistemological opium den you’ve wandered into.

No kidding. See, this is where Not Crazy People suddenly realize that the ground has opened up beneath them and, at best, nothing but the impoverishing end of another Divine Ponsi Scheme awaits them.

And at worst, there is nothing but the grave ahead.

On the other hand, here --

Three of his fellow followers, those who “dropped out” before graduation, killed themselves in subsequent weeks and months so as to not miss out on their one brief opportunity to pass through Heaven’s Gate.

-- is what Crazy People do.

…
With the 10th anniversary of the Exit coming up on March 27, Rio e-mailed our managing editor and offered to do his first interview since writing a self-published book, Beyond Human Mind: The Soul Evolution of Heaven’s Gate, an account of his experience that will “clarify the truth about the group and their amazing agenda.”

...

I called right away. I’d heard about Rio before and thought about trying to track him down. When I pointed this out to Rio the first time we met, he quickly chalked it up to cosmic significance.
…

When I’d read about Rio, I’d always assumed that he’d survived because he came to his senses and realized the flaw in Heaven’s Gate’s suicide pact. In fact, Rio remains a true believer, one for whom a divine mission has crystallized. He began our first interview by asking me to be sure to include his prepared declaration, part of which reads:

“I am alive not because I rejected anything about Heaven’s Gate.

“I am alive because I have discovered something so extraordinarily important to the world that it needs to pass on to you in its most true and accurate form from ME.”

…

How does one come to understand their messianic blessings? For DO, that journey began in a Houston psychiatric hospital in 1972. Marshall Herff Applewhite, or Herff, as the charismatic son of an itinerant Presbyterian minister was then called by his friends, had been a talented musician, well-liked teacher, choir director, and singer with the Houston Grand Opera. But those days were over. He’d left his wife and children after a tryst with a male student led to his requested resignation from a university position. Herff was adrift, torn by his sexual desires, and shaken by voices in his head.
…

driftglass:
Ding!ding!ding!ding!!

Another of the bastard children of bad religion and sexual confusion slouches towards Jerusalem to be born.

…
In the hospital, Herff met Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles, a registered nurse whose investigations into astrology and theosophy were guided by communications with a 19th-century monk named “Brother Francis.” …

Then, one summer, on the banks of the Rogue River in Oregon, among the wildflowers and sugar pines, Bonnie and Herff were struck by a “vibration like thunder,” a simultaneous disclosure that they were the two witnesses foretold in the Bible’s vision of Apocalypse.

…

Severing all ties fit their belief system, in which DO and TI had come to see themselves as extraterrestrial representatives from the Evolutionary Level Above Human. DO, they’d decided, was the very same alien spirit that had inhabited Jesus, and TI was his Heavenly Father. Updating esoteric, early Christianity by way of science fiction, their millennial paradise could be found only by renouncing terrestrial attachments and shedding one’s “container” or “vehicle” to ascend into space and live eternally with the Chief of Chiefs, or God.
…

driftglass: Why continue? It makes for a crappy narrative because you know how this story ends.

How it almost always ends.

No, what is of interest to me is how the writer framed this piece and what it reveals about one of our most dangerous cultural Achilles’ Heel.

...
This was a very frustrating conversation. I wanted to do justice to Rio’s ideas, because he really means them.

driftglass:
So does the BTK murderer.

So did the Son of Sam.

So did Zodiac.

So did Manson.

So what?

Of what relevance is the sincerity of a madman who smiles at the thought of his dead friends.

Or, as Nietzsche very succinctly put if: “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

It was difficult, though, when I realized he was literally suggesting that alien craft insert intangible essences in select human beings. So I asked a lot of detailed questions, which was equally frustrating for Rio, since many of them amounted to a challenge. “I don’t expect you to believe me,” Rio said at one point. “I wouldn’t believe me. But this works.”

“What works?”

“This system for growing a soul that DO brought back to Earth.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know. I can feel it. It’s something I experienced.”

It’s hard to argue with fundamental subjectivity. I’m guessing that Rio has not followed much of the 20th-century debate about epistemology, since the proof for Rio — the bedrock upon which rests the undeniable, immutable, universal truth of DO’s teachings — is a dream he had regularly as a kid.

…

Weird, yes, but how much weirder than other things we’ve come to accept? Like, say, partaking in the body and blood of Christ every Sunday? We all know that Jesus, one of many schismatic religious peddlers in biblical Judea, was scorned for his beliefs. When dealing with extreme behavior like collective suicide, it’s a natural response to look for an easy explanation, such as “These people are nut jobs.”
…

That they killed themselves for it seems bizarre only because it happened in San Diego, with five Jamba Juices and a Green Burrito nearby. At the turn of the previous millennium, Christian Europe was full of apocalyptic sects prepared for blood. And many medieval Christian monks castrated themselves for the sake of purity. In Diane Sawyer’s interview, she is shocked by how many children DO’s followers left behind, but our monotheistic religious tradition began when Abraham prepared to kill his own son.

End of Part 1 of 2.

Come Join Us -- Part 2 of 2

This is fiction


There are no

Interocitors


(Continuing from Part One commentary on this article by Joshuah Bearman)

driftglass: No, Mr. Bearman, our monotheistic religious tradition began with a story about Abraham being prepared to kill his own son.

Also with God flooding the planet, stomping whole cities flat and fucking with Job on a bet.

Again, so what?

Other equally entertaining stories have Prometheus, chained to a rock, getting his liver ripped out and eaten by an eagle every day for all eternity. Another has Hercules holding the entire world while Atlas goes off to take a piss and get laid.

But between all of these mythologies, fairy tales and allegories and the moldering corpses of 39 idiots in 1997 stands The Enlightenment.

That proud march out from the darkness and unreason of superstition and boogie man fear, and in the end that is the lesson here. The lesson Mr. Bearman works so very hard to steer away from.

The simple lesson that those who demand that Reason be overthrown to make room for their superior, Alien/Astrology/Telepathic/ Illuminati/Rapture/Creationist line of bullshit Are. Your. Enemies.

Doesn’t matter if they smile. Doesn’t matter if they shed pious tears. Whoever wants you lobotomized – who wants you to swap the hard won evidence of your senses, causality, scientific method and common sense for a secret, magic, translucid semaphore visible and interpretable only by special adepts who will conveniently intermediate between you and The Higher Power – does not have your best interest at heart.

In fact there is a very good chance they are trying to kill you.

Mr. Bearman continues:

When you get down to it, just how much of human history is filled with willing martyrs for heaven or some other abstract cause? Two hundred thousand Englishmen were slaughtered for queen and country at the Somme. Does that make any more sense than what happened in Rancho Santa Fe?

The answer may be that this is the wrong question, because none of it makes sense. Dying for the patrie is just as arbitrary as dying for duty or glory or Marshall Herff Applewhite.

driftglass: What an immensely flippant and disgraceful thing to believe. And how unintentionally ironic that the author – who has held himself in state of nearly spine-snapping moral contortion as he attempts to avoid “judging” a suicide cult – casts the casual and deplorable judgment that “dying for duty” and dying “…for Marshall Herff Applewhite” are equally arbitrary.

All deaths, while equally final, are not created equal. The Jew who got marched into an Auschwitz shower was not morally equivalent to the Nazi hanged for war crimes. The soldier who jumps onto a grenade to save his platoon is not the moral equivalent of some double-wide-dwelling Scarface-wannabe who beefs it when his meth lab explodes.

How did that not occur to you, Mr. Bearman?

In this very, very, very long article on 39 children of the late 20th Century who were conned into stepping in front of a bus with smiles on their faces, how did it come to you that their fatal folly is somehow equivalent to standing between your fellow human beings and harm at the cost of your own life?

How do you not get the difference between a mother dying to save her child, and a mother drowning her child because the Alien Jebus Man says so?

Because to whatever extent you are incapable of comprehending that, is the extent to which you have no business putting pen to paper and opining about a god damned thing.

… He now realizes that’s been his job since DO came up with the idea of writing a screenplay in 1996.

The script incorporates the Heaven’s Gate cosmogony. Humans are bit players in a vast galactic drama, including at least one alien summit on Mars. The protagonist is a telepathic man-dog descended from the Atlanteans who has a crystal embedded in his forehead and journeys to Earth to grow a soul. Rio and OLLODY started the first version when the group lived in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, and DO decided that a screenplay would be a ticket to the masses. The first draft was several hundred pages long, and featured concept art for all the different alien races and ships. NBC, Rio said, was interested.

driftglass: But he really wants to direct.

…

We were at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Beverly Glen when Rio told me that some time soon, the Earth will shift its axis and many people will die. I had just sat down with a chocolate-covered graham cracker, and the sun was setting. Information of this kind, he said, arrives in his mind like a ticker tape, providing constant updates in thought form. “I can’t yet say when the axis will shift,” he added with his usual conviction. “But hopefully that will come soon.” When I asked if this ticker tape is coming straight from DO, he said, “I think so.”

…
but Rio’s not just a charlatan. He definitely believes in something, although it’s hard to tell what exactly that something is. In a nutshell, the message is “Buy the book.” Beyond that, I’m not exactly sure. The Next Level seems to have chosen some elliptical emissaries. Following in DO’s footsteps, Rio speaks very precisely about impossibly vague things.

…
These people were so alienated they literally believed there are aliens. If that’s what absolute tranquility requires, it’s a psychological Rubicon I’m not willing to cross. For those who did, I don’t want to judge them other than to say that there was likely another answer for them, one that didn’t entail 39 grieving families.

driftglass: And that is the mistake. That is the fatal weakness. Because just as there are too many people who are far too quick to judge others by superficialities like race, sexual orientation or degree of Dirty Hippyness, there are also too many people reflexively unwilling to judge anything at all.

Who are far too willing to shrug and say “Meh?” to every differentiation because they have been taught that everything from culottes to mass suicide is a matter of taste.

Which is a lie.

Because there are some things that demand judgment.

Things that scream up from our blood and bones “Run! Now!” And when we don’t label them clearly for what they are -- when we chloroform our most basic survival instincts and let apple juice sit side-by-side with carbolic acid in the fridge, ‘cause hey, who are we to say which is good and which is bad? -- that is the moment when we strip away the only armor we have to defend ourselves from charlatans and killers.

That is the moment we sell our species into ignorant slavery.

That is the moment when death wins.

But let’s let Unca Harlan tell it, ‘cause he tells it so damned well.

Ellison:

Everywhere, today, the question is being asked: what did the Heaven's Gate cultists have to do with science fiction. Try this for an answer: nothing.

They had everything to do with that hideous verbal crotchet "sci-fi," however. And they are light-years apart, so don't confuse them. At peril of your life.

Almost exactly one year ago, my heart tried to kill me. Before I could die, they cracked me open and did a quadruple bypass. But for a moment, I shook hands with death, and in that bonding I got a tough insight; and this I now know for certain: In those gasping last moments of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists, as they were descending into their death sleep, they were thinking Please help me; I'm going into the darkness and I need to know! Yeah, we all want to know...the answers that make sense of a world growing ever more complex, of lives that seem to be controlled by forces too big for our puny intellects, of a journey without sufficient noble purpose.

Traditionally, answers have been sought in philosophy or religion or mysticism of one kind or another. What's the sense of it all, in a bewildering universe that doesn't seem to know or care that we're here? But from those sources no fully integrated or fully satisfying answers have come.

And those answers may not be anywhere in the literary genre called science fiction, either, but one thing is for damned sure: they are not to be found in the cheapjack foolishness of "sci-fi."

The concepts that abound in fantastical literature have the magical capacity to inspire dreams that become enriching reality. Science fiction, like The Whole Earth Catalog, is only an implement, a tool of the mind's imagination. It employs the technique called extrapolation, allowing us to play the game of what-if?. A game of intellect and daring, of special dreaming and determination not to buy into all those boneheaded beliefs that always tell use we're too stupid and too inadequate to prevail. That we need some kind of mythical alien or supernatural babysitter to get us over the rough spots. Science fiction says otherwise. It is an idea-rich literature that is, at core, hopeful and progressive, that always says--with a nod to the reawakening of a competent human spirit--there will be a tomorrow. It may be troubling, and it may require us to get a lot smarter, but there will be a tomorrow for us to work at.

"Sci-fi," that hunchbacked, gimlet-eyed, slobbering village idiot of a bastardized genre, says only that logic is beyond us, understanding must be crushed underfoot, that the woods are full of monsters and aliens and conspiracies and dread and childish fear of the dark. The former is a literature that can open the sky to all the possibilities of change and chance; the latter is hysterical and as overripe as rotten fruit, that can turn all rational conjecture into a nightmare from which one escapes only by phenobarb-laced applesauce or a slug of grape Kool-aid straight up with cyanide. The former says responsibility for your life is the key; the latter assures you that you ain't got the chance of a hairball in a cyclotron.

And that is the dichotomy of science fiction, as opposed to the tabloid mentality of UFO abductions, triangular-headed ETs, reinterpreted biblical apocrypha, and just plain bone stick stone gullibility. It is obscurantism and illiteracy, raised to the level of dogma. It requires that you be as ignorant today as you were yesterday, that you be no brighter than the sap who keeps playing three-card monte on a street corner with a hustler who will never cut you a break.

"Sci-fi" is what the Rancho Santa Fe sleepers bought, in that flashy but adolescent shell-game called Waitin' for the UFO. They were philosophical suckers who turned away from the genuine wonders of the real world and all its solvable mysteries, to embrace the sophomore horse-puckey of astrology and government conspiracies and recastings of Jesus as a deep-space navigator. That has nothing to do with the problem-solving and curiosity of science fiction...it has everything to do with the monster fear and dread produced by the dumbness of "sci-fi."

Stop being exploited by greedy thugs who only want to sell you movie tickets and poisonous delusions that enrich them by your stupidity and fear. Because the truth is in this: neither Heaven nor Hell, and certainly not a flying saucer, can be found in the tail of a comet.

driftglass: Think about it. Reality stretches out in all directions for billions upon billions of light years, curving ever outward into the most magnificent cathedral imaginable. Its brick and mortar writ both vastly smaller and larger than we can imagine.

Not a single human thumbprint has yet left its whorl on a single patch of dust on a single planet other than our own.

Not a single human breathe has been exhaled anywhere but inside the Terra/Luna womb.

Not a single human being of the billions who have lived and died has had a home place anywhere but here.

And yet, in the face of the invincible truth of this unrivaled adventure for which we are uniquely suited…we pull back in fear.

We tremble and cower at the edge of this ocean, hiding out in medieval dreams, terrified of the implacable Real. We turn our back to the billion galaxies and pervert the only thing that gives our species grace – our imagination – into telling us that it’s really not there, or that we can only participate in it if we gobble down a bellyful of barbituates, alcohol and sci-fi twaddle.

That since nothing can be greater than our egos, since nothing can exist outside the span of our experience, we can only fulfill our place in the Universe if we go out in a blaze of Apocalyptic glory. That the Universe is not a never-ending epic, but a mere haiku. 17 syllables that began in a Garden and will end in…Fire?

Rapture?

Ice?

God rolling over in his sleep and dreaming again?

In the tail of a passing comet?

Everyone has to work out for themselves what kind of deity – if any -- they see at work in the world. If you are a thinking person, you’ll probably spend most of you life figuring that answer out, revising it, throwing it in the wood chipper, cursing Heaven for its silence in the face of tragedy, and then taking another cut at it.

That’s how this game is played.

But you will never, ever find any answers in, as Ellison put it, “obscurantism and illiteracy”; the two valves of the dark heart of all theocracy.

Down among those who demand that you jettison your reason in favor of mysticism filtered through messianic authority you will only find con men

wearing crowns

Rouged-up beasts

posing as prophets


And death.

The Demolished Man

(Apologies to Alfred Bester)

"You say you want a revolution.
Well, you know…
We all want to change the world." -- John Lennon

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” -- Isaac Asimov

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” -- Samuel Johnson.

“The Future Perfect Tense is the last refuge of the incompetent scoundrel.” – driftglass

More and more the degenerates who currently run this country are hanging on the future like a drunk hangs on a parking meter. Playing out the final innings of their long and blood-dimmed game of Kick the Accountability Can down the road 30-50 years and then asserting that History will prove them to have been right.

Ah the Future Perfect tense; that patron saint of bad ideologies. With it, exoneration – like the cavalry in every B-Western – is always just over the horizon, riding hell for leather towards the final reel.

And if you strain your ears enough you can juuuust make out its sweet, redemptive bugle sounding the charge.

But in this case, Dubya’s Vindicating Future apparently had to slingshot around a Type B star at the heart of the Clusterfuck Nebula to get up to speed, but a fatal navigational error whipped it around so hard that its now traveling at Relativistic speeds.

And – what with Heisenburg Compensaters still years away from commercial production – the Vindicating Future is beginning to get bitchslapped around by Einstein, Dirac and Hawkings.

Vindication is getting shorter, and massier. The amount of energy necessary to propel it into the Here and Now is approaching infinity (which is why we need all of those oil reserves that all those undeserving ay-rabs now sit on.) The flow of time within the Vindication Bubble is falling out of synch with rest of us here in Newtonville (a great place to raise up your kids) and whole crops of humans will be born, grow old and die before Dubya can land it, hop off, and save Edith Keeler from the Dirty Hippies.

Or something.

Like the Arrow of Zeno’s Paradox, it never quite gets here.

Like “Tomorrow”, it’s always a day – or friedman -- away.

But since the degenerates have kicked the door open on taking Enron-style, Mark-to-Marketing to Exciting New Teleological Levels, why should they be the only ones having fun speculating about what generations unborn will be talking about as they gavotte about Dubya Square at the intersection of Cheney Way and Bremer Boulevard in downtown Baghdad.


I think what they might say is that like, say, the 1860s, the 1930s, the 1960s, the America of the early 21st was a nation in full-tilt revolution. But like the crushing of Nixon’s squalid little putch, this revolution was not primarily marked by hundreds of thousands on the Washington Mall (although they were there) or tens of thousands in soldier’s graves (we pray) so much as it was measured by how successfully the forces of genuine, traditional American Democracy rose up and revivified moribund institutions to cope with an enemy with our own perimeter.

Like an anaconda swallowing a goat, our revolution will be remembered by how we consumed and, finally, excreted the mortal threat from the Right, because the Enemy Within does not seize control of teevee stations by force or pour armor into the streets.

Instead they move briskly in the shadows, always, always moving to roll power ever upwards into the fewest possible hands. Always moving relentlessly to create greater zones of opacity around the Imperial Few. Feverishly exploiting every opportunity to weaken democratic institutions. Proudly ripping out the wiring of checks and balances and accountability and carrying it aloft -- along with their contempt for the law, for justice and for civil liberties -- like a trophy.

Democracy requires light and fresh air, but the machinery of democracy also requires zones of concealment. There are numerous, legitimate areas where public disclosure of, for example, military secrets or covert methods and sources would cause massive damage to the nation.

We allow for privileged communications for those matters, as well as for interactions between attorneys and clients, journalists and sources.

At each step along the way into the abyss we are solemnly told that our very lives depend on handing more and more unchecked power over to the Party of Small Gummit.

At each step along the road to Hell we are told that is terribly dangerous – even treasonous – to demand accountability from the Leaders of the Party of Personal Responsibility.

And then along came the Patriot Act to massively expand what can be done in the dark.

But as night falls we notice in that all those swords the smirking fascists are wielding are all pointed inward. Pointed at us. Because the Modern Conservative is a creature most at home in a murky, twilight despotism. A beast which thrives best in hate and shadow. They are democracy’s retrovirus, and it is exactly these indispensable nodes of secrecy that Conservatives have worked tirelessly to invade, infect and pervert.

The quick litmus test for telling friend from foe -- for whiffing out the spoor of the Enemy -- is His ceaseless, escalating demands for ever more secrecy. Ever less accountability. You will know Him by the blinds he sets, by the way He tirelessly pits the landscape of democracy with new sunless, extra-Constitutional grottos where His eggs can be laid and kindred can breed and prosper.

You will know Him because you have been warned about his coming since childhood.

You know Him by his stink, because every characteristic our Founders warned us to guard against as the harbinger of tyranny is now clear and present all around us: Not tastefully rouged and swaddled away like genital warts on Lady Liberty’s bikini area, but on proud, raging display as GOP foundational values.

You will know Him because each time he erects a new baffle to screen His crimes, He tells us that the lives of our children are in danger if we don’t let him steal a little more of our freedom.

You will know Him because each and every time anyone dares to execrcise the single most fundamental right of every citizen in a democracy -- calling some facet of His swaggering, brownshirt imbecility into question -- we hear magpie shrieks of “Traitor” from his squirmy minions.

And now that is ending, and the revolution is at hand.

Not tomorrow. Not someday. Today. Right here.

And it starts so humbly.

With an election and a trial.

Imagine that?

Somewhere, Frank Capra must be laughing his ass off. 50 years from now the histories will say that the beginning of the end of America’s latest fling with fascism began with those most cornball, Rockwellian of democratic traditions: an election and a trial.

The indictment and trial of Scooter Libby showed how the First Amendment had been invaded and ransacked by its enemies.

First, just by how the trial was effectively embargoed and dismissed by the MSM, we could all see just how deeply unAmerican wingnut propagandists like Fox News had been allowed to get. We could all see clearly exactly how the MSM has destroyed “journalism” as a Fourth Estate and made “journalism” into a safe-house for Fifth Columnists.

Second, we could seen how the White House traded access for favorable treatment, (and along a parallel track, made a science of slapping a Press Badge on any Gannon with a keyboard and an ass for rent,) and created an entire myrmidon army of liars and leakees who could be relied on to catapult the propaganda. How they were able to shop their lies around through formerly reputable media outlets, and then turn right around and cite their own leaked stories as evidence of the credibility of their positions.

And then, in the most perverse turn of all, try to bury their lies and crimes behind the protections of the First Amendment. A maneuver that shall ever more be known as The Judith Goat.

The election – which took place, oh, about five minutes ago – has already yielded results.

Like the shameful Walter Reed scandal, it seems no matter where inside Dear Leader’s cavernous Imperial Honeypot the Congress now throws a light they find rot and mold and rats and Republican cronies -- grown fat and slow on no-bid contracts and six years of GOP Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell "Congressional oversight" -- scuttling through the filth they have created. Scampering over the misery of soldiers and citizens and into deeper corners.

The GOP’s double-secret Imperial Edict that let the Dear Leader wiretap Americans without a warrant? We were told, “Trust us. We would never abuse our new, secret, unchecked powers.”

We were told, “We need this secret unchecked power to keep you safe.”

We were told, “Any investigation of our use of our secret unchecked power will put lives at risk!”

And what did we find?

That this White House had abused its secret unchecked power hundreds -- Perhaps thousands? Perhaps hundreds of thousands? Who knows?-- of times.

Of course they did. Lying is what liars do.

In the dark of night, the GOP slipped in a special provision to allow the President to secretly sack US Attorneys General and appoint new ones with no Congressional oversight. But that was OK, because Abu Gonzales swore – passionately and under oath -- that:

“… I feel a special obligation, maybe an additional burden coming from the White House to reassure the career people at the department, and to reassure the American people that that I'm not going to politicize the Department of Justice.”

And

“…
Senator, what you're asking the counsel to do is to interject himself and direct the Department of Justice, who is supposed to be free of any kind of political influence in reaching a legal interpretation of the law passed by Congress.”

And

“I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons, or if it would in any way jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation."

And yet that is exactly what this White House did – premeditatedly and with malice – because lying is what liars do.

And when the people have finally had enough and, through their votes, voices and elected representatives, demand answers, this President -- the man whose first oath is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution – tells the people to just fuck right off.

50 years from now, once the millstone of history has ground out all memory of Anna Nicole Smith and Wild Hogs, 2007 will be remembered as the year the gloves came quietly off.

The year the Congress finally began to methodically deprive the malevolent cult that runs the GOP of safe places to hide their treachery, and secure high ground from which to shriek their lies.

The year when the collapse of the Bush Presidency hit its critical mass and became irreversible. When the final late-winter figleafs dried up and blew away forcing the cowardly GOP Base into the light.

Forcing them to confess to the world that the reason they love their Party, the Leader, their Fox and their Rush beyond all reason is simply that they despise our democratic ideals, our Constitution and our magnificent dream of the tolerant and magnanimous nation we may someday grow into.

What's sweeter

Than watching peevish little wingnut James Inhofe (R. Oklahoma…for shame, for shame.) take a richly deserved and long overdue public whuppin’?

Watching him get beat up by a girl.

‘Cause I wanna!

George “The Decider” Wallace standing in front of the door to the Foster Auditorium because, like George “The Decider” Bush, Wallace had:

1. A massive, corrupt and morally degenerate empire to defend.

2. An open and truly Imperial contempt for the rule of law and the rights of others.

3. A large Base of squealing pig people who would loudly support any crazy-ass shit he did. In fact the more barbaric, disgraceful and un-American he acted, the louder they cheered.

This via HuffPo

White House offers to let Congress interview aides on firings; Democrats call it 'meaningless'

LAURIE KELLMAN | AP | March 20, 2007 05:00 PM EST

WASHINGTON — The White House pushed back Tuesday against Democrats demanding answers on the firings of federal prosecutors, refusing to allow President Bush's top aides to testify publicly and under oath about their roles in the dismissals.

Bush gave his embattled attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, a boost during an early morning call to his longtime friend and planned to end the day with a public statement in support of him.

Several Democrats, including presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barrack Obama, Joe Biden and John Edwards, have called for Gonzales' resignation. So have a handful of Republican lawmakers.

The Senate, meanwhile, voted to strip Gonzales of his authority to fill U.S. attorney vacancies without Senate confirmation. Democrats contend the Justice Department and White House purged eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were leading political corruption investigations, after a change in the Patriot Act gave Gonzales the new authority.

"What happened in this case sends a signal really through intimidation by purge: 'Don't quarrel with us any longer,'" said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a former U.S. attorney who spent much of Monday evening paging through 3,000 documents released by the Justice Department.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies _ but only on the president's terms: in private, "without the need for an oath" and without a transcript.

…

The White House offered to arrange interviews with Rove, Miers, deputy White House counsel William Kelley and J. Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political director Sara Taylor, who works for Rove.

"Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas," Fielding said in his letter.
…

Fuck you.

Nixon tried exactly this shit with the Watergate tapes. Hanging onto them like grim death, and issuing his own, redacted, abridged “Archie and Jughead” version of the transcripts. Trying to dictate terms like a pasha, while swearing that he was being more than fair.

However if six years of Republican rule has taught the non-lobotomized citizens of this country anything it is this: Unless you put them under oath with a jail term pointed right at their heads, Republicans will look you straight in eye and lie and lie and lie.

Without conscience.

Without remorse.

Without hesitation.

Without breaking a sweat.

And they will lie about anything.

A lie, a broken law, an illegal war, a government staffed with hacks and imbeciles, a lost city or two…all just means to their ultimate end of a perfect, government-free Corporate feudal state. That is their Godhead, and in the pursuit of that ideal all things – all villainies, all slaughter, all vivisections of American values and law – are permitted.

Just like his little behind-closed-doors-not-under-oath-with-no-transcript- while-sitting-on-Unca-Dick’s-lap “talk” to Congress about his complete failure on 9/11, Bush is doing nothing less than standing in the nation's schoolhouse door and baring his blood-tinged fangs at the citizens and Constitution of the United States.

Sorry, Boss Hogg, but your GOP already set the bar for how aggressively Presidential Administrations are to be treated whenever there is the slightest whiff of anything untoward -- no matter how trivial. Your crimes are a millions miles higher than anything that went on during the Age of the Big Dog and yet, by Clinton-era standards, you’re gotten nothing but the kid-glove, mint-on-the-pillow, happy-ending treatment.

So now your sleazy sycophants get to suck on it.

Administration officials can, of course, choose to do what they have done for the last six years; flagrantly defy the law and the will of the American people in furtherance of their own corrupt and criminal schemes.

Of course, if they choose do so in this instance, the 101st Airborne should be sent in to pry their snouts out of the Koolaid Troughs long enough to drag them by their wattles for a hot squat in front of Congress.

Sure the tear gas might be showy,

But sometimes a little theater is justice’s best handmaiden.

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!

West Wing Story – Act 3

In which a Bush Regime Dead Ender tries to weasel, beg, whine and threaten his out of the subpoenas that will soon be falling like April showers over the GOP Treachery Machine.


Senator Leahy

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Dear kindly Senator Leahy,
You gotta understand,
It's just our fuckin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are pundits,
Our fathers all are Johns.
Golly Moses, of course we're Neocons!

Dead Ender Chorus:

Gee, Senator Leahy, we're very distraught;
We were promised in 2000 that we’d never get caught.
We ain't mere delinquents,
We're hardcore traitors.
Deep down inside us we are whores!

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

We are whores!

Dead Ender Chorus:

We are whores, we are whores,
We are top-shelf whores!
Even the least of us are utter whores!

The Ghost of Spiro Agnew:

That's a touchin' good story.

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Lemme tell it to the world!

The Ghost of Spiro Agnew:

Just tell it to the judge.

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
Your “activism” sucks.
We’ll have to get you fired,
And replaced by loyal fucks.
I was supposed to be untouchable,
But somehow I was served.
Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so unnerved!

Judge:

Right!

Senator Leahy, you're really a square;
This thug don't need a judge, he needs a spin-doctor’s care!
His raging psychosis can never be healed.
And so the news must be concealed!

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Be concealed!

Dead Ender Chorus:

Be concealed, be concealed,
Behind the Fox News shield.
News of it must be concealed!

Judge:

In the opinion on this court, this man ain’t right on account he’s Conservative.

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Hey, I'm ain’t right on account I'm hard Right.

Judge:

So take him to a Rightwing Evangelist.

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

My father is a Klansman,
My ma's a raging bitch
My grandpa's backed the Nazis,
My grandma married rich
My sister is a dykie
My brother dodged the War
That's why I’m GOP right to the core!

Rightwing Evangelist:

Yes!

Senator Leahy, you're really a prig.
This boy don't need a Dobson, he needs a sweet White House gig.
Conservatives bred him without any love
In other words a perfect little Rove!

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

I'm a Karl!

Dead Ender Chorus:

We are Karls, we are Karls,
We’re all fucking Karls.
All bile and back-stabbing and snarls!

Rightwing Evangelist:

In my opinion, this loaf of pickled malevolence don't need to have any more Jebus than he’s already got. Republican treachery is purely a Liberal invention!

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Hey, I got a Liberal invention!

Rightwing Evangelist:

So take him to Hate Radio!

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

Dear kindly Wingnut DJ,
al-Qaeda’s underneath your bed!
Liberals won’t let me fight ‘em
They subpoena me instead.
They’re all a buncha Commies,
They’re also burning flags
Holy Trotsky! That's why I'm anti-fags!

Wingnut DJ:

Senator Leahy, you Liberal louse.
This boy don't need a mike, he needs a term in the House.
Sure deep down inside him there is no there there;
But damn it, he’s got Presidential Hair!

Bush Regime Dead Ender:

I look the part!

Dead Ender Chorus:

We look the part, look the part!
Yes we look the part,
And the Base is really none too smart!

Because…

Dubya, he's crazy.
Dubya, he drinks.
Dubya, he's lazy.
Dubya, he stinks.
Dubya, he's psycho.
Dubya, he's a fool.

Which doesn’t matter when the Base are inbred tools!

So, Senator Leahy,
We're down on all fours,
What’s it gonna takes to let us walk out those doors?
Or Senator Leahy,
How ‘bout a nice aide?
C’mon, Senator Leahy,
Let’s trade!

West Wing Story - Act 2

As the Dirty Hippies begin to cut into their turf, a rumble becomes inevitable.

So the Pets call a War Council.

Broder: Against the Snarks we need every man we got.

Jokeline: Friedman don't belong any more.

Punkin Haid: Cut it, "Liberal" boy. I an’ Friedman started the Pets.

Jokeline: Well, he acts like he don't wanna belong.

Cokie: Who wouldn't wanna belong to the Pets!

Jokeline: Friedman ain't been with us for over a friedman.

Bobo: What about the day we stomped the crap outta Iraq?

Kristol Hume Persuasion: Which we couldn't have done without Friedman.

O’Reilly: He saved my ever-lovin' dick!

Punkin Haid: Right! He's always come through for us and he will now.

Punkin Haid sings:

When you're a Pet,
You're a Pet all the way
From your first cocktail weenie
To your last lyin' day.

When you're a Pet,
If the Plame hits the fan,
You got Broders around,
You're a family man!

You're never too wrong,
The Beltway’s always wooin'!
You're one of the throng:
Just write down what they're spewin',
(And no interlocutin’!)

Then you are set
With a capital P,
Which you'll never forget
Till they cart you away.
When you're a Pet,
You stay a Pet!

Punkin Haid: I know Friedman like I know me. I guarantee you can count him in.

Jokeline: In, out, let's get crackin'.

O'Reilly: Where you gonna find the leader of the Dirty Hippies?!

Bobo: On the Intertubes tonight. Or any night. Hell, I crank out half a page of watery poo twice a week and it feels like a shit a 600 pound steel-wool bunny. But these bloggers? They just read and write and read and write. And they use all kinda big words.

Cokie: But the Intertubes is First Amendment territory. They...they...can talk back!

Jokeline: I'm gonna make nice there! I'm only gonna challenge ‘em.

Bobo: Great, Daddy-O! I can fluff that out to three, four columns...

Broder: So everybody talk real purdy.

ALL (sing)
Oh, when the Pets fall in at the Intertube dance,
We'll be the sweetest press gang in our old man pants!
And when the stoopids dig us with our Pet black lies,
They'll flip for our 50’s heptalk and our waxworks eyes!

Broder: Hey. Cool. Purdy. Easy. Meet Friedman and me at ten. And walk non- vituperatively!

Jokeline: We always walk non-vituperatively! Unless we’re screaming our asses off about how sassmouthy the Dirty Hippies are!

Cokie: We're Pets!

Bobo: The greatest!

Broder and Cokie (sing):

When you're a Pet,
You're the top whore in town,
You're the gold plated offal
Not just a Botoxed old clown!

Bobo, Jokeline, Punkin Haid:

When you're a Pet,
You're the top-dollar shrill:
Little poo, you're a Brooks;
Little Brooks, you're George Will!

ALL

The Pets are in fear,
Our street cred is a’reekin’!
The Blogs’ll steer clear
'Cause ev'ry Dirty Hippy a lousy chicken!

Here come the Pets
Us Octogenarian bats.
We bleat like spayed sheep
And we write like trained rats!

Here come the Pets:
Real world, step way back!
When Russert and Matthews,
And Hume host our pack!

We're drawin' the line,
So keep your “fuck you’s” hidden!
We're hangin' a sign,
Says " vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left forbidden"
And we ain't kiddin'!

Here come the Pets,
Yeah! And this is our thang.
To bend over and grab ‘em:
We’re Conservative ‘tang!
We take their whole!
Ever!
Cheney!
Lovin'!
Wang!

Yeah!