The GOPieta

The Villager's hueing and crying and wailing and dental-dam-gnashing over General Wesley Clark’s comments about Senator McSame (and his subsequent recommitment to his comments) has been cracking me right the hell up.

(First, of course, one must insert
The McSame Stipulation, which I have distilled and boilerplated here
to save the rest of the Left Blogosphere precious keystrokes.))

Because General Clark did the one thing that the media cannot forgive: by respectfully reading key passages from Senator McSame’s public resume and asking Right Out Loud what about those previous experiences specifically qualifies Senator McSame to be the leader of the free world, Clark lobbed a million-candle-power magnesium flare smack into the middle of the media’s dim little opium den and dared them to wake the fuck up and do their jobs.

And they just hate it when you do that.

Paul Waldman makes the same point very nicely at the Huffington Post in this column entitled “Gen. Clark and That POW Thing McCain Hates Talking About” when he observes that:

...
For years, we've watched as reporters have dropped the fact that McCain was a POW into their stories, apropos of nothing, as if it were merely part of his name... John McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam, visited a farm to discuss the dairy industry. I kid, but it seems that any criticism of McCain's character is greeted with "But he was a POW!"

When Howard Dean called McCain an "opportunist" back in April, Chris Wallace of Fox News indignantly asked Sen. John Kerry, "Do you think John McCain was an opportunist when he refused to take early release from a North Vietnamese prison camp?"

Just last week, The Washington Post's Richard Cohen wrote that though McCain has flip-flopped on immigration, taxes, and a host of other issues, it's really OK, because "we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over."
...

McSame himself, of course, never misses a chance to either “reluctantly” trot out his war record, or more conspicuously, use it as a bludgeon to terminate any conversation that he finds uncomfortable.

Here, for example, during a dialogue on Universal Health Care, notice how unhesitatingly McSame hauls the POW blowtorch out of thin air to cauterize the discussion the minute he starts to look foolish.

The goodness begins at the 1:40 mark.


Now play it again...and note the tight, “Fuck You” rictus that steals over McSame’s face like a skull-shaped eclipse.

And more importantly, zoom in and note McSame tamping down the barely controllable Herbert Lom Rage Spasm

that momentarily overpowers his right eye as he wields his POW stigmata to club Stephanopoulos into shutting up and moving on.

For seven years, the cowards, crazies and chickenhawks of the GOP have carried out their crimes and betrayals by scampering behind a series of blinds. Like insurgents caching weapons in a mosque and then crying “Infidel!” at anyone who tries to drive them out, the Republican Party set up their filthy, fascist sniper’s nest inside the death and terror of 9/11 and used the shadow of that tragedy to shield their treason from public view.

They have skulked and schemed and shredded our Constitution behind a scrim with the word “patriotism” painted on it in Red, White and Blue.

Behind “If you don’t support Bush, then you don’t support the troops”.

Behind their criminal perversions of executive privilege.

Behind oaths of secrecy. Behind journalist’s shield laws. Behind attorney/client privilege. Behind sick children. Behind veterans. Behind the “balanced” reporting on Hate Radio. Behind queer fear. Behind Sweet Baby Jebus.

But now that the maggots are pouring out of every deep and visibly infected wound they laid across the land while secreted under their various forms of “How dare you question us!” camouflage, they have effectively used up all their spider holes.

And it if for precisely this reason that, at long last, they are starting to find Senator McSame attractive: the thrilling prospect that his years as a POW will offer the GOP one, last safe-house into which they can crawl and from which they can operate their despicable enterprises in relative safety for a just little bit longer.

To any impartial observer, it certainly appears that General Wesley Clark merely asked a simple and respectful question. But to anyone even casually familiar with the incestuous complicity between the Establishment Press and the Republican Party it
is crystal clear that General Clark, in fact, committed the Vilest Heresy by daring to question one of the Villager’s most sacred Articles of Faith (more [and with video!] available at Crooks & Liars)

To wit (from the splendid mcjoan):

WWJMD?
by mcjoan
Mon May 19, 2008 at 12:25:16 PM PDT

There are barely words for this:

Georgia Republican Party chairwoman Sue Everhart said Saturday that the party's presumed presidential nominee has a lot in common with Jesus Christ.

"John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross," Everhart said as she began the second day of the state GOP convention. "He never denounced God, either."

Yes folks, John McCain was shot down and held captive for your sins. Deification. All the rage in Republican circles.

In other words, one does not ask Saint John McCain for references or to take a fucking typing test because…

McCain suffered for our sins in Vietnam.

McCain is a "Conservative".

And that is all you fucking well need to know.

Which, unsurprisingly, is exactly the strategy George W. Bush ran on in 2000.

Of course the words are quite different.

But the authoritarian music --

Bush was the guy you’d like to have a beer with.

Bush was a "Conservative".

And that was all you fucking well needed to know.

-- is pathetically familiar.