Ooooooh, Shiny!

The beautiful sword
Creates a mesmerizing logic
That the desperate find hard to resist.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 2 of 3

Down These Mean Blogs Edition

Because first and foremost, a blog is, duh, a “web log”, I used the occasion of the eve of the 3rd Blogiversary of my little pie wagon here to take a stroll down memory lane.

Down into the deep weeds of spam-choked early-posts to see what my first few Sunday Morning Coming Downses looked like to me is 2005.

There I found The Usual Suspects:

Friedman and BoBo both off the leash in a Sunday Morning, and not a Krugman or an Ivens or even a Dowd to be seen on any of the Major Networks. Just the lazy, Bizarro Norm Peterson and Cliffy Claven of the New York Times.

I found the “Everybody is Wrong” meme in full flower here:

“Bob Schieffer: “Is there some kind of compromise that is being worked on...”

Bob don’t get it, and I'll get to that in a longer piece on what I’ll call the “Tyranny of Artificial Bisection” at a future date.”

And here:

On ABC: George Allen versus “Kapo” Joe Lieberman. Nothing like a Fair-n-Balanced debate between Republican Senator Imbecile and and Republican Senator Palpatine.

Lieberman: “The problem is extremists on both sides...”

“The moderates in both parties...” can re-form a middle and blah blah blah.

Allen: “I was listening to Joe, who I normally agree with most of the time...”

And here:

Juan Williams on Fox: “Extremists on both sides...”

There was John McCain (Republican Senator from Teeveeland) flip-flopping madly over matters of personal rectitude:

And as regards Dear Old Tom DeLay and his reeking-so-bad-it-makes-Baby-Jesus-cry scandals, McCain opines further, "I'll take him at his word" and "I'm not is a position to comment on DeLay."

So...Big John, how exactly did you vote on the Clinton Impeachment again? I believe part of what you said went something like...this,

”Although I may admit to failures in my private life, I have at all times, and to the best of my ability, kept faith with every oath I have ever sworn to this country. I have known some men who kept that faith at the cost of their lives. I cannot--not in deference to public opinion, or for political considerations, or for the sake of comity and friendship--I cannot agree to expect less from the President.”

(From Bill Shakespeare who was, most definitely, not making the rounds this Sunday Morning:

He was my friend, faithful and just to me;
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.)

To my absolute lack of surprise, three years ago the transformation of McCain from Bush Roadkill into George Walker Bush’s long-lost political goodwife was well underway as well;

And then McCain has a hearty laugh about how effectively Bush ass-raped him in 2000.

Hehehe! Lookit the funny draft dodgy creep who ran a fixed-bayonet attack right at genuine war heroes. Impugning their service at war and in POW camps, slandering their good names, during the period when Der Bush was apparently too knee-walking drunk to bother to show up for the cushy job his rich daddy poached for him. Letting some poorer, smarter, low-born thrall go off to the jungles and suck up bullets.

There was the discovering that, man, after three-years, I can haz repeated myself sometimes :-)

Man! Bush-dick must taste like Belgian Chocolate! So yummy, that you just can't get it out of your mouth!

Oh the shame.

There were Conservatives lying about why they refused to do oversight:

Roberts explains that, well, we're very busy, y'know. Very, very busy. Got confirmations. Judges. Social Security. Doing our taxes. Cleaning out the gutters. Buncha stuff. But don’t you worry, America: we'll get ‘round to it eventually, one of these fine days.

And, yes, these are the same people that all but shut the government down to impeach Bill Clinton over some consensual fellation.

Iraq was waiting dfor me back there, dressed up in Bobo Brooks' retina-frying pink tie:

On to BoBo who sez (conflating Afghanistan, Iraq, the eternal War on All Evil Everywhere, America's bold new experiment in Evangelical Empire building and torture in that sassy, intellectually dishonest way he does) we’re in danger of getting paralyzed by the stupid things we do. He pooh-poohs atrocities as par for the course. As silly things that happen in every war. Comparing to WWII, and that was a “Good War”, and bad things happened there too, and we should all STFU about these so-called “atrocities”.

When BoBo decides to be spit Bush’s dick out of his mouth and be anything but a dishonest stooge for the Right, somebody give me a call.

You fucking vonce. When we went to war with Germany, our actions didn't scream that we were REALLY making war on the entire Christian World.

When we went to war with the Axis, we didn’t decide that invading Russia was the Number One Priority, and that Berlin and Rome and Tokyo could be jobbed out to locals before the job was half-done.

When we went to war with Hitler, our leaders didn’t shrug off actually defeating Hiter as irrelevant, and that letting Der Fuhrer prance around the Alps unmolested was OK.

Oh, and your 1,346 day time limit on getting to pretend that Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in any way remotely resembles WWII just ran out last Thursday...but thanks for playing our game!

And as I read through those older posts made by a younger me and wondered what this post today would say, I realized that I’d been thinking and writing about something like today's piece for a very long, sad time.

Thinking about how broken it all is.

Shattered, really. Not clean fractures that can be splinted up and healed. Not a dinged chassis or cracked cylinders, but everything. Everything having to do with the way our media delivers information to us is irreparably contaminated. This is a fact to be faced because we have to get past the idea that we can “fix” our media, because its cannot be fixed in any conventional sense.

Looking back across the last three years I was struck by the profound…airlessness and bloodlessness of the entire Mouse Circus enterprise. The sense that there are great, costly engines of commerce and telecommunications being brought online every week to execute in minute detail a complex ritual that has no bearing on the good of the nation or the lives of its citizens whatsoever.

And in a democracy, if the Machineries of Media are not serving the commonweal in any meaningful way, then what in the fuck are they doing?

Because while it is perfectly true that we are literally dying for want of a place to talk about the vital issues of the day, what we see in the media are not "Issue" programs and they never will be.

The mistake was ours, I suppose; thinking that the Mainstream Media exists (theoretically, at the very least) to serve some public interest, but that it has fallen from a state of grace.

Hence we carp and bitch about it. Hell, I know I do. We try from narrow perch on the outermost edge of the mediaverse to salvage, critique and perfect it because we know that our civilization and our future depends on it, and we believe that what is shoveled out to us on cable, or in print, or on Sunday Morning is the misfiring of a malformed version of our Better Media Selves.

But it is not.

What we are watching instead is a form of episodic teevee fiction. What I’ll call, for lack of a better term, Political Procedurals; little Beltway dramas purring along perfectly, performing their function.

Like police procedural -- the crime in act one; the reveal in act four -- the cast never changes.

The beats and cadences of the action never changes.

Occasionally there is a Special Guest Star to liven up the metronomic predictability of it, or someone with genuine talent -- a David Mamet or a Harlan Ellison -- is brought in to write a really muscular episode, but at the end of the hour the franchise rolls on and nothing has changed.

And because it is a franchised form of genre fiction where predictability is the product, the rules of the Star Trek Universe apply:

1. Poor Ensign Whothefuck will always perish in Act One.
2. Technobabble and sneering super villains ensue.
3. And at the denouement, the Core Ensemble emerge -- unmussed and untouched – to joke and jape as the final credits roll.

Except of course in the real world, it is not some random redshirt that is doing the dying, but real human beings.

Human beings betrayed and sacrificed by monsters who are not attacking our government, but are our government.

Monsters who – off camera -- have cocktails and exchange pleasantries and carpool with leaders of the Mouse Circus.

Which is why the Broders and Bobos and Tweeties and Russerts will never change; because they will never see themselves as villains. In their eyes they are, at worst, just actors, performing their parts in a wholly artificial piece of fiction.

They have not failed the news media, because we have no news media.

What we have is the journalistic equivalent of the automated house in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”.

From Wikipedia:

This story is about a house in an apocalyptic world, and the technology that resides there, unfazed by the damages of nuclear war. The house is fully automated and sensitive to its owners and their requests and needs. Unaware of the absence of its owners, though aware of other external and internal disruptions, such as the weather and birds attempting to land on it, it continues to serve the dead family.

Throughout the story, the house makes breakfast, disposes of it uneaten, and performs various domestic tasks. Only one living thing makes an appearance in the story: the family dog, which had been slowly dying from the radiation of the nuclear war. It makes its way back to the house only to die; its corpse is then swiftly removed by the house's automated cleaning robots.

The author at one point mentions the shapes of the family's silhouettes which are permanently burned onto the side of the house (as was exemplified at Hiroshima) when they were vaporized by the nuclear explosion which wiped out all the surrounding civilization, leaving radioactive glowing debris that can be seen for miles away at night.

The Mouse Circus and its animatronic brethren on cable and in print are not news or journalism: they are players in weekly episodes of a very specific of subgenre of fiction; actors who continue continued to perform their function perfectly long after their function has become pointless and grotesque.

Now in the realm of lit’rary pilferage, if there is anything lower than a thief who steals from the weak and helpless, it the thief who filches from the dead.

Which exactly what I will do in Part Three of the behemoth, without apology or excuse, because over 60 years ago Raymond Chandler sat down at his typewriter with something to say about writing and damn if it isn't as urgent today as it was then.

End Part 2 of 3

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 3 of 3

Down These Mean Blogs Edition

Back in 1944, working for Atlantic Magazine, the immortal Raymond Chander wrote about what it takes to slug your way into a genre that was both fairly disreputable and had been ritualized and embalmed to the point of meaninglessness.

His essay is as startling and timely this Sunday morning as it was six decades ago, because while he was writing then about the detective novel, the meat and marrow of his observations and critiques fit perfectly into any analysis of the brain-dead universe of the Mouse Circus, with specific application to the art of blogging in an age being smothered by the vast, decaying corpse of the Main Stream Media.

While have snipped bits and snatches of his essay –- “The Simple Art of Murder” -- from here, I would urge anyone in search of really spectacular writing to read the whole thing twice: once for the fine way Chandler lathes his prose, and once for the lesson.

So here we go, with emphasis added by me because I just can't help myself:

“The Simple Art of Murder”

…
The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway. The detection of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who make a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the matter of advance sales.

The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

…

And so, then as now, the crap just rolls on and on…

Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about that dull.

This is very annoying to people of what is called discernment.

They do not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a few years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked "Best-Sellers of Yesteryear," and nobody goes near them but an occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and hurries away; while old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like "The Triple Petunia Murder Case", or "Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue".
…

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small quantities to rental libraries, and it is read. There are even a few optimists who buy it at the full retail price of two dollars, because it looks so fresh and new, and there is a picture of a corpse on the cover.

Which is why the most wretched piece of dreck from the colon of Fox News looks and sounds very much like the Noble Network’s premiere Sunday offerings. Because...

...this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is not terribly different from what are called the masterpieces of the art.

It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a little grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious; but it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way. There are reasons for this too, and reasons for the reasons; there always are.
…

This, the classic detective story, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

It is the story you will find almost any week in the big shiny magazines, handsomely illustrated, and paying due deference to virginal love and the right kind of luxury goods. Perhaps the tempo has become a trifle faster, and the dialogue a little more glib. There are more frozen daiquiris and stingers ordered, and fewer glasses of crusty old port; more clothes by Vogue, and décors by the House Beautiful, more chic, but not more truth.

We spend more time in Miami hotels and Cape Cod summer colonies and go not so often down by the old gray sundial in the Elizabethan garden. But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingenue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.

And precisely like the denizens of The Village...

There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about. ...But if the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen…

...or debated the genuine issues of life and death gnawing at the belly of of our democracy...

…they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived. And since they cannot do that, they pretend that what they do is what should be done. Which is begging the question–and the best of them know it.
…

It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with. As for literature of expression and literature of escape, this is critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
…

Right here, Chandler gets to the true heart of the problem with words that Brilliantly vivisect his own medium -- the traditional detective novel -- and ours -- the modern Punditocracy.

I think what was really gnawing at her (ed. Miss Dorothy Sayers’ in a previous reference) mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications.

It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature.

If it started out to be about real people (and she could write about them–her minor nor characters show that), they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves.

They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility. The only kind of writer who could be happy with these properties was the one who did not know what reality was. Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the "problem of logic and deduction." Yet she could not or would not give her characters their heads and let them make their own mystery. It took a much simpler and more direct mind than hers to do that.

And in the face of a desert of arid, empty “puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains”, the rebellion came.

Listen up bloggers, ‘cause here Brother Raymond is talking about Digby.

And about Gilliard.

And about you.

In the Long Week-End, which is a drastically competent...

Sorry, but I gotta pause here for a moment and just bask in the pure, joyous, laugh-inducing beauty of a phrase like "drastically competent".

Ahhhh.

Ok. Onward...

...account of English life and manners in the decade following the first World War, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge gave some attention to the detective story.
...

Its roster includes practically every important writer of detective fiction since Conan Doyle. But Graves and Hodge decided that during this whole period only one first-class writer had written detective stories at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. Traditional or not, Graves and Hodge were not fuddy-duddy connoisseurs of the second rate; they could see what went on in the world and that the detective story of their time didn’t; and they were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

How original a writer Hammett really was, it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group, the only one who achieved critical recognition, but not the only one who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway.
...

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.

They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything.

I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all.

He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

So how did this rebellion against the dull and trivial end?

It never did.

Because it never does.

Which you ought to know because, like it or not, we're all soldiers in its ranks.

And we're all in for the duration.

With all this he did not wreck the formal detective story. Nobody can; production demands a form that can be produced. Realism takes too much talent, too much knowledge, too much awareness. Hammett may have loosened it up a little here, and sharpened it a little there. Certainly all but the stupidest and most meretricious writers are more conscious of their artificiality than they used to be. And he demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not "by hypothesis" incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better. Hammett did something else, he made the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues. … There has been so much of this sort of thing that if a character in a detective story says, "Yeah," the author is automatically a Hammett imitator. And there arc still quite a few people around who say that Hammett did not write detective stories at all, merely hardboiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. These are the flustered old ladies–of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages–who like their murders

...and their fucking Sunday teevee political melodramas...

scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly graying hair.
…

But all this (and Hammett too) is for me not quite enough. The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.

It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

All this still is not quite enough.

And then Chandler, in the most famous line of the essay, reminds us all of the manner in which we should all strive -- however haltingly and imperfectly -- to make our way in this brutal, corrupt and beautiful world.

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything.

He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all.

He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Amen, Brother Raymond.

Amen.

End Part 3 of 3

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 1 of 3

The fast and dirty.

On Meet the Press CIA director Michael Hayden, New York Times' Bobo Brooks and New Republic's Peter Beinart each remind us in his own way that, among the Villagers it doesn’t matter how wrong you were, how often, or how frequently you got your block knocked off.

You just push the Flying Head back and you’re ready for Round Three!

On “Face the Nation”

That Earth Hour thingie must have been far more powerful than I ever thought it could be, because during last night, while I was not paying attention, the Iraq War apparently ended, the housing and credit crises passed over us, and gas dropped back down to mid-90s prices.

Because this morning the fact that there is a lady name “Hillary” and a black man named “Barack” running for the nomination of the Democratic Party is the only news left on the face of the Earth.

On “Fox News Sunday”

Lindsay Graham: Iraq is really Iran. And if we adopt the Clinton/Reed/Obama/Pelosi/Benedict Arnold approach to Operation Endless Clusterfuck, we might as well hand America’s nuclear launch codes over to Osama bin Laden.

Jack Reed: No, we need to proceed with a careful and orderly withdrawal from Iraq. And the idea that this is a fight between American allies and Iran is bullshit. All elements of the government – the government that we back – have ties to Iran. Shit, just a few weeks ago Ahmadinejad came to Iraq and was warmly greeted by our Iraqi Puppet President.

Lindsay Graham then angrily shook his head and wept piteously into a flowery hanky the size of a mainsail.

Graham: Liar! Liar! Everything is awesome and turned completely around and great you liar. We’re havin’ elections. The Iraqi economy is rockin’. The Surge is workin’.

Reed: Last month The Surge was “succeeding” because violence was down. Today the same people say The Surge is awesome because violence is up and rockets are slamming into the Green Zone.

Shorter Graham: Our puppet government and uniformed gangs are getting their nads kicked off by other people’s proxies and un-uniformed gangs.

Graham then repeated the word “Iran” six thousand more times, ran in circles until he got tired and then fell down crying.

And out there in the heartland, a million stubby hands clenched around a million cans of warm Pabst Blue Ribbon.

A million members of the Great Wad growled “Fucking Iran! Fucking Liberals!”

And then called for Ma to bring them more fucking pancakes.

Then someone calling themselves Phil Bredsen – allegedly Tennessee’s Democrat governor who for some reason Fox has anointed as Party Spokesman in the same way they have anointed Juan Williams and Alan Combs as the Fox House Liberals -- talks about the Democratic primary race.

“Closure.”

“Healing.”

Yawn.


On “This Week”

Ed Rendell and John Kerry.

Rendell confesses that he cannot remember what he did last Monday.

Other than that, it was McTeevee: heat-lamped junk food the sole sales point of which is always being exactly what you would thought it would be.

Sucks, and bad for you, but familiar.

Later, Lieberman came on to shame himself further, but does anyone but the Connecticut ass-voles who elected him, and the GOP Party Planners who are going to let him sit at their Grownup’s Table in Minnesota give a shit what Kapo Joe has to say about anything anymore?

On ”The Chris Matthews Show”

To get the Big Race Par-tay started over on his show, Chris Matthews shows off his astonishingly poor judgment and complete tone-deafness yet again, leading his show off by jamming Martin Luther King’s 40-year-old “Mountain top” speech given just prior to his assassination -- along with various footage the reporting done just after Dr. King’s murder – flush up against a Barack Obama speech and basically asking “Well?”

Shorter Matthews: Too bad they killed that other colored fella who talked so purdy, but hey, now you got dis guy!

End Part 1 of 3

Hey, you got your chauvinist stinktongue

in my PETA butter!

No, you got your humorless orthodoxy

in my sex-positive chocolate!


File Under: Donnybrooks you couldn't get me to touch with a 20-foot barge pole and a skin-full of tequila.

And yet, I find myself irresistibly drawn...towards....

From the NYT

The Carrot Some Vegans Deplore
By KARA JESELLA

TWO things that you can find a lot of in Portland, Ore., are vegans and strip clubs.

OK, lede writer: you now have my undivided attention.

Go on...

Johnny Diablo decided to open a business to combine both. At his Casa Diablo Gentlemen’s Club, soy protein replaces beef in the tacos and chimichangas; the dancers wear pleather, not leather. Many are vegans or vegetarians themselves.

Yes...

But Portland is also home to a lot of young feminists,

Ruh Roh.

and some are not happy with Mr. Diablo’s venture. Since he opened the strip club last month, their complaints have been “all over the Internet,” he said. “One of them came in here once. I could tell she had an attitude right when she came in. She was all hostile.”

Mr. Diablo isn’t concerned with the “feminazis,” as he calls them. As a vegan himself, he says he hasn’t worn or eaten animal products in 24 years and is worried about cruelty to animals. “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering,” he said.

Casa Diablo is just the latest example of selling veganism with a “Girls Gone Wild” aesthetic to draw the ire of vegans who complain that such tactics may get people to pay attention to animal cruelty, but for the wrong reasons. In Los Angeles, some frown at the scantily clad Vegan Vixens — a kind of animal-loving Pussycat Dolls — who perform songs like “Real Men Don’t Hunt” at fund-raisers for animal welfare groups.

And many vegans who want to publicize cruelty within the fur industry are nonetheless dismayed by the new “Ink, Not Mink” advertising campaign from peta2, the youth arm of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It features members of the Internet-based pinup group the Suicide Girls, sporting little more than tattoos and body piercings.

This isn’t the first time animal rights activists have been accused of sexism. Many vegans have long criticized PETA for using naked celebrities in its advertising campaigns and for staging stunts like naked protests.
...

Vegans.

Vegan feminists.

Vegan third-wave feminists.

Vegan third-wave feminist strippers.

Hmmm.

Vegan third-wave feminist stripper Mac users?

Vegan third-wave feminist stripper Mac-using Green Party volunteers?

Wiccan vegan third-wave feminist stripper Mac-using Green Party volunteers?

Wiccan vegan third-wave feminist stripper Mac-using Green Party volunteers for Christ!!!

I'm gonna need a bigger bumper.

Iraqalypse Now

President McCain's predicts eventual victory in Vietnam.

After taking the oath of office, President McCain used the bulk of his Inaugural Address to discuss America's eventual victory in Vietnam.

Here are a few excerpts.

(Some parts made up, some pilfered and slightly amended from this speech and subsequent commentary here)

"My friends, The Vietnam has been long and it's been hard and it's been tough, and it was mishandled for a long period of time. I spoke strongly against the Rumsfeld McNamara strategy, and I spoke strongly for this strategy that's succeeding.

"As I wrote in my memoir many years ago, I resented from the beginning how badly civilian leaders had mismanaged the war and how ineffectually senior military commanders had resisted.

"Which is why I trust in our military commanders on the ground in Saigon. It is their recommendations which should dictate when we withdraw troops, not some politician who is seeking higher office, or some dirty fucking hippy who hates America and wants an inexorable tide of Communism to sweep the globe.

"The military should run the war, my friends, as they should of course also run all aspects of society which relate to the Global War Against All Bad Things. Such as the judiciary. Our efficient and profitable worldwide chain of secret McPrison franchises. Our fleet of cheerfully-painted interrogation-mobiles that criss-cross the country. The Ministry of Information. The extremely humane and cost-effective use of nuclear deterrent against certain, intractable enemy strongholds and allies.

"We had problems with these matters early on in the War Against All Bad Things, where civilians tried to interfere, and it was obviously a very big mistake.

"We're not going to win this war overnight, my friends, and it's going to be a long haul. But in this 50th anniversary year of America's first glorious efforts to help liberate the people of Vietnam from Communist aggression, both Vice President Lieberman and myself strongly believe that the signs are very hopeful, that victory has never been closer and that the 300,000 brave Americans who have given their lives to spread Democracy to the tiny country of Vietnam have will not have been in vain."
...

"The Old Men"

By Rudyard Kipling (1902)

This is our lot if we live so long and labour unto the end –
Then we outlive the impatient years

and the much too patient friend:

And because we know we have breath in our mouth

and think we have thoughts enough in our head,

We shall assume that we are alive,

whereas we are really dead.

We shall not acknowledge that old stars fade

or stronger planets arise
(That the sere bush buds or the desert blooms or the ancient well-head dries),
Or any new compass wherewith new men adventure ‘neath new skies.

We shall lift up the ropes that constrained our youth,

to bind on our children’s hands;

We shall call to the waters below the bridges

to return and to replenish our lands;

We shall harness (Death’s own pale horses)

and scholarly plough the sands.

We shall lie down in the eye of the sun

for lack of a light on our way –

We shall rise up when the day is done

and chirrup, “Behold, it is day!”

We shall abide till the battle is won

ere we amble into the fray.

We shall peck out and discuss and dissect,

and evert and extrude to our mind,

The flaccid tissues of long-dead issues

offensive to God and mankind –

(Precisely like vultures over an ox

that the army left behind).

We shall make walk preposterous ghosts

of the glories we once created –

Immodestly smearing from muddled palettes

amazing pigments mismated –

And our friend will weep when we ask them with boasts

if our natural force be abated.

The Lamp of our Youth will be utterly out,

but we shall subsist on the smell of it;

And whatever we do, we shall fold our hands

and suck our gums and think well of it.

Yes, we shall be perfectly pleased with our work,

and that is the Perfectest Hell of it!

This is our lot if we live so long and listen to those who love us –
That we are shunned by the people about and shamed by the Powers above us.
Wherefore be free of your harness betimes; but, being free be assured,
That he who hath not endured to the death, from his birth he hath never endured!

Plus change,

plus il est Le Stupide

In case you were operating the heavy machinery of life drunk on cough syrup and under the assumption that there is anything new under the Sun, fire up a little Foreigner

and read this remarkable gem that blogger Hossein Derakhshan (“hoder” over hoder.com) at has disinterred from the NYT Time Closet (with a big h/t to Wampum as well.)

And you read, let the names “Mossadegh” and “Ahmadinejad” gambol around the sweet, green meadows of your imagination and braid each other’s hair until you notice how completely, terrifyingly

Plug-N-Play our enemies have become.

Here is a little snip.

From the New York Time.

From August 15th.

Of 1953. (emphasis mine)

Mossadegh plays with fire

Source: The New York Times, Editorial

August 15, 1953

The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye, on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime chamption of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

His power would seem to be complete, but he has alientated the traditional ruling classes — the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russian and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer’s apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear — and there the West has nothing to fear.

Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.
...

Go here for the rest.

And then, a scant few days after the article above hit print...

The 1953 Iranian coup d'état saw the overthrow of the democratically-elected administration of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and his cabinet from power by British and American intelligence operatives working together with elements of the Iranian army. Bribing Iranian officials, news media and others with British and American funds, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),[1] organized the covert operation aiding retired Iranian General Fazlollah Zahedi and Colonel Nassiri. The project to overthrow Iran's government was codenamed Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX).

The motivation of the coup planners is disputed. According to a report on the BBC, Britain, motivated by its desire to control Iranian oil fields, contributed to funding for the widespread bribery.
…

So we ripped the heart right out of the democratically-elected government of Iran because it didn’t suit us.

Then we installed a tyrant.

And in the process, over time, managed to so alienated the citizens of the sovereign nation of Iran, that they eventually rose up against the despot we yoked them with and threw in their lot with the vehemently anti-Western Islamic Republic

of this guy.

So the Iranians had their 1776 and threw their version of the Brits out, but piloted their revolution away from all things Western and into the arms of theocracy.

Which, in turn, so thoroughly freaked us out and threatened our growing Middle Eastern oil empire-by-proxy that we backed the hell out of this guy

as a regional counterweight.

We liked him.

Saddam saw himself as a social revolutionary and a modernizer, following the Nasser model. To the consternation of Islamic conservatives, his government gave women added freedoms and offered them high-level government and industry jobs. Saddam also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the only country in the Persian Gulf region not ruled according to traditional Islamic law (Sharia). Saddam abolished the Sharia law courts, except for personal injury claims.

We really, really liked him!

After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. Iraq and Iran entered into open warfare on September 22, 1980. The pretext for hostilities with Iran was this territorial dispute, but the war was more likely an attempt by Saddam, supported by both the United States and the Soviet Union, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansion of radical Iranian-style revolution. It was believed by many that Saddam was invading Iran to counter the potential threat of an expansionist revolutionary Islam. "With the support of moderate Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Gulf states, Saddam Hussein had become the defender of Gulf Arabs against an expansionist, fundamentalist Iran."[22].

Consequently, many viewed Iraq as 'an agent of the civilized world'[23]. The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international boarders were ignored. Instead Iraq "received economic and military support from its allies, who conveniently overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians and Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons."[24].

A butcher? Sure. A beast? Definitely. And a thug. The leader of a Stalinist-style dictatorship. A child-killer…that the United States supercharged. A monster that we armed and funded; whose bloody hand Don Rumsfeld gladly shook

when we needed a go-to guy in that tough neighborhood.

This is one, small facet of the history of that region as the people there have lived it; people who know perfectly well that their lives and government have been used and used and used again as rooks and pawns in a vast and lethal game of global superpower petro-politics.

And then (because injury gets so lonely without insult) you discover that your invaders and conquerors aren't being led by crafty Caesars or Alexanders or Napoleons.

Instead the most powerful military in history has become a plaything for morons.

Damaged halfwit Conservative pig people. A political movement of bedwetting cowards and third generation trustifarian whiners as incapable of forming new geopolitical memories

as this guy.

Which is why Cheney and Bush and McCain can stand in front of cameras and lie and lie and lie while the rest of the planet cringes in horror.

Because they are not talking to the rest of humanity. They are not even talking to that part of America that actually reads and thinks and remembers.

They are talking to The Base.

They are talking to their reliably ignorant armies, who gleefully send other people’s children to clash and die by night. The vast morally stillborn wad of conservative meat who are literally unable to comprehend that the disasters that are making them poop their Limbaughroos today are the consequences of actions their nation took in their name yesterday.

They wander ever onward, deeper and deeper into a shrieking night, led by snickering traitors who can hang onto power despite having been proven utterly, tragically wrong about everything all the time for one, simple reason: that the political base on which their Party rests is made of those people whose IQ only approaches triple-digits if one is willing to measure them in binary, and those that are skilled in exploiting them for depraved ends.

And so the more things change, the more they remain Teh Stoopid.

Paying The Dane-Geld

Your tax dollars at work.

From the "Everything Old and Stupid is New and Brilliant Again" department, CNN reports that the practice of bribing bad guys not to kill us might actually not be the Best Policy Decision Evah:

Surge or splurge in Iraq?

By Jamie McIntyre and Laurie Ure
CNN Washington Bureau

(CNN) -- On the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, with nearly 4,000 American lives lost, is Iraq really on a path to peace?

Three factors are often cited in explaining the improvement in security: the U.S. troop surge, the political "awakening" of the Iraqi people, and the cease fire ordered by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

But some say a controversial fourth dynamic is at play as well -- cash, being doled out by the barrelful.

It's a truth many hold to be self-evident that more American troops translate into less Iraqi violence. As President Bush said in January's State of the Union speech, "Some may deny the surge is working, but among the terrorists there is no doubt."

But some military experts do have doubts, arguing there's actually a mightier force at work -- hundreds of millions in cash given to Iraqis, for everything from picking up garbage to taking up arms against al Qaeda. VideoWatch Bush discuss the troop surge »

Retired Army Col. Doug Macgregor, a longtime critic of top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus, said it's a "cash-for-peace" scheme that is bound to backfire.

"Normally when you begin paying off your enemy on the scale that we are, it is seen by your enemy as well as others as a tacit admission of failure, not of success," Macgregor said.

It's hard to pin down exactly how many millions are going to former insurgents to switch sides, but Macgregor argues the result is artificial progress.

"What we've done is we've also flooded the Sunni-Arab insurgents with cash to create a temporary cease-fire to reduce the numbers of U.S. casualties," he said.

…

So that happens when the money dries up?

Critics, Macgregor among them, predict a quick return to civil war.

"We have to understand that this expedient policy of paying your enemy is very dangerous. It's fragile, and eventually, hatred of the foreign occupier overwhelms greed," he said.

Where oh where have we heard this somber warning before?

Actually about a century ago, via Rudyard Kipling.

Here's a snip from "The Dane-Geld"

…
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
…

Remember when this was a war that was going to pay for itself?

A Magic Super War, in support of which the Greatest Act of Patriotism you the American Prole could perform was to keep buying as much crap as possible.

Which wasn’t going to require your tax dollars to win, could be fought ouchlessly over a long weekend by our mechanized 21st Century military, and was going to spread a love of America and Democracy in an unstoppable tide from the Jordan River to the Ural Mountains.

Instead we now air-lift in palette trucks of your hard-earned and rapidly devaluing money so this Administration can pay what we still quaintly refer to in Chicago as “protection” to local warlords, and bribe factions to not slaughter each other and us long enough to declare the Surge an Unmitigated Success and get McCain/Lieberman elected to George Bush’s Third term.

And wouldn't it be ironic if the blowback from our rapidly imploding debt-driven monetary system turns out to be that our Iraqi gunsels start refusing to take American dollars and we had to start doling our our bribes in Euros?

Of course eventually, no matter how thick you slather this debacle in Happy Wingnut Horse-shit, you run out of cash, fresh troops, and public patience.

But you will never, ever, ever get rid of the Dane.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“The Cold Equations” Edition.

(If you have never read it, here is a pretty concise a plot synopsis of the famous science fiction story:

"In the story, a space pilot is delivering medical supplies to a colony, when he discovers a stowaway. Unfortunately, every pound on the space ship will cause the ship to burn more fuel and the stowaway's weight -- if she were left on the ship -- would cause the ship to crash.

"With no ship available to come to the rescue, no excess weight to toss off and lives at stake, it becomes painfully clear that only one thing can happen.

"Mathematically, there is no way she can stay on the ship.")

In which Media Personalities explain that, despite the merciless trajectory of each of these falling objects, if only we would all just clap extra loud and wish extra hard…

…Iraq will turn out super ooper duper.

…the economy will magically cease its current position of flabby sissy puppy and return to its rightful, mighty status as

“Macho Business Donkey Wrestler”.

…and Hillary Clinton will defeat mere math to win the Democratic nomination.



But first, on Chicago Fox News Sunday, Jack Conaty carries local wingnut water by assuring us that the 2008 elections are going to be very, very close.

That Democrats dare not leave Iraq “precipitously”.

And that St. John McCain had a fabulous week, spent overseas and looking “Presidential”.

Conaty declined to mention that by “Presidential” he meant

“Reagan Administration Drooling Through Year-Seven”-Presidential


Then a Special Report on “computers” and a place called the “blog-o-sphere” which is emphatically not a device for diving under the waters of the oceans

to observe sea life, but instead some form of non-network-news-based coconut wireless.

Or something.

So they put on a man named Steve Rose.

He’s a “blogger”.

“Blogger”: There’s no getting around it; blogs are here to stay. The Internets are the major source of stuff

Fox News guy: No No No. It is difficult for these “internet” sites to make money, which means they’re illegitimate right? I mean, can you transition your audience to some kind of crazy, hippy, twaddle where the hippies don’t even get paid.

“Blogger”: Well people are used to getting Fox for free just by turning on the teevee…

Fox News guy: You don’t get Fox for free. You have to pay for commercials. And people gotta get paid to go out and mindlessly transcribe whatever the White House says report. Also we take a little piece of your soul every time you watch.

Fox News guy: The problem with the internet is…

“Blogger”: There are…

Fox News guy: How will this balance out in terms of our First Amendment rights?

“Blogger”: I think it’s a good thing. No monopoly on the part of big media is a good…

Fox News guy: The bathysphere is pretty heavily divided between Right and Left, isn’t it? When a few years ago people were just excited that they could post something. And download porn of course.

Shorter Fox News guy – The Internets used to be ruled by Matt Drudge and Clinton-hating and we liked it. Now it's full of liberals. This makes us sad.

“Blogger”: The MSM is moving into the blogs, but they’re old and stoopid.

Fox News guy: They're not the same! You don’t have actual fact-checking. There is no Roger Ailes editor making sure you’re on RNC-Message Fair and Balanced!

“Blogger”: The MSM has made its share of huge, huge fuck ups on the major issues of our day.

Fox News guy: I’m not saying that we haven’t made our mistakes, but you dirty fucking hippies have no mechanism for correcting errors.

“Blogger”: In some ways it is immediately self-correcting. And there are, in fact, sites which are edited in the ancient sense. Like Politico. Or the New Republic. Or Kink.com.

Fox News guy: Without that link to the traditional news organization it is very hard to make zee munnies! And munnies = truthiness.

Fox News guy: Is MSM doing a better job of embracing blogs? Can they do it?

“Blogger”: They’re trying, but they’re fucking up a lot.


Then John Lawrence – Fox Web Producer -- takes us through the Teh Fox Interwebs!

His explanation of the billions Fox spent on logo development and placement was too exciting for mere words.

On “Face the Nation”

Lindsay Graham explains that we will have eventual victory in Iraq. The Surge is an unqualified success. A president Obama or Clinton would be a complete disaster. As you know I opposed the Rumsfeld approach.

How long?

No answer.

Jack Reed: This wasn’t Rumsfeld’s war. This was Bush, Cheney and McCain's fucking war. And while we – Lindsay and I – have to slip into Iraq, Ahmadinejad csn roll in by car wearing a sports coat.

Doesn't smell like victory to me.

The Graham construct is simple: If we withdraw – ever – then al-Qaeda wins.

Even though, in the next breath, he says that Iraqis all hate al-Qaeda and want them gone. That they have been smashed and on the run.

Shorter Graham: Spitters are Quitters! (Gratuitous, funny and Very Not Work Safe)





On “Meet the Press”

Punkin Haid plays Bosley to two of financial teevee’s Bernanke’s Angels

Once upon a time there were two little girls who went to B-School…

where they learned to dance pretty for the camera.

Shorter Pretty Economist Dancing Ladies: Rich people are nervous about the economy.

Rich People!

Ruh Row.

Oh, and the situation at Bear Stearns is a tragedy.

Tra-juh-dee.

No.

Darfur is a tragedy.

Iraq is a tragedy.

Bear Stearns is this:


Then, an Exciting Journalist Roundtable! With Journalists!

Jon Meacham, Peggy Noonan, Eugene Robinson & Chuck Todd.

Magic Dolphin Lady: Obama’s Speech might be awesome. Or it might not be.

John Meacham: Now we know it Barack Obama tries to walk across Lake Michigan, he’ll sink.

Beardy O’Musington: You know “the media” loves them some John McCain, and the irony is that if Obama or Clinton had made the same “I can’t tell the difference between Sunni and Shia in a war among Sunni and Shia” fuck up – even once, much less day after day after day – “the media” would have smashed them in to little pieces.

Shorter Beardy: John McCain’s dick tastes to us like fine, Belgian chocolate dipped in happy Jebus love. We’re all gearing up to lie down under his chariot wheels just like we bent over and grabbed ‘em for Dubya and Iraq.

Powerwhoring; Who we are, not just what we do.

On “Fox News Sunday”

Wallace: Let’s start with the latest flap between Clinton and Obama.

Richardson: Too much negativity. McCain is running around lining up support and Democrats are pooping in each other pockets.

Rendell: Hillary isn’t ahead here because of Reverend Wright. She’s ahead because of the affection and trust the people of Pennsylvania.

James Carville quote on Richardson being a Judas because he dared side against The Clintons.

Richardson: There is this sense of entitlement on the part of the Clinton’s to the White House.

Wallace: Yeah, but the Teh Maths. Isn’t it now impossible for Hillary to win?

Rendell: Sure.

Wallace: Sure? WTF? Really? She can’t win?

Rendell: Uh, well, it’d be very difficult. But look Chris…Yadda Yadda Yadda.

Then on to the Economy:

Glenn Hubbard – Conservative – predicts that everything’s gonna be fine.
Lawrence Summers – Not Conservative – thinks not so much.

Wallace: Regarding Bear Sterns. Did we pass some kind of threshold when is comes to Evil Gummit Intervention? The Evil Federales becoming the lender of last resort?

Summers: Up until the last three weeks, the entire “regulation” debate has been this Administration organizing summits to figure out how much more we can deregulate everything.

Wallace: As a Democrats, don’t you believe now that we have had to intervene to save the douchebags at Bear Stears that we should just close shop and become Socialists!

Wallace: Now that the Evil Gummint has intervened to save bloated, risk-junkie capitalists, isn’t it time to help out, y’know, college students and home owners?

Hubbard: Nooooooo!

Hubbard: Sure we should do some stuff to keep the proles, quiet. But we should be vewy, vewy careful about establishing some kind of Evil Gummit Program that would permanently help Little People. We need the poor and economically helpless to provide low-wage/slave-wage services for the captains of industry.

Shorter Wingnut Economics: We need a permanent, hopeless, terrified underclass because my wizened plutocrat penis isn’t going to suck itself!

On “This Week”

Sens. Schumer and Kyl on the economy and Sen. Hagel on the future of the GOP.

Watched it for two minutes of Hagel.

Didn’t care.


On ”The Chris Matthews Show”

Matthews: Is what Reverend Wright said going to sink the Obama campaign? Hey, let’s ask Conservative Radio…

WTF?

Does Microsoft Vista suck?

Hey, let's ask MacWorld…

Matthews: Don’t the Clinton people wish this had all happened weeks ago?

Uh, yeah. I'll bet they do.

And they also wish they could perform the miracle of the BBQ cocktail weenies and the loaves to feed the press and make the media love them.

Also that Bill could unfuck a certain intern.

So what?

Matthews: Tell me what you think…might be going through Hillary’s mind…about losing.




And thus another Sunday of the zero-data circle jerking of overpaid fabulists ignoring genuine issues and blatting on about the fine points of inner-beltway horseracing -- or as Mark Twain once said, "getting drunk off the smell of someone else's cork" -- comes to a close.

Middle Eastward Ho!

(click pic for larger)

One for the art majors out there:

"The Manifest Destiny of Saint John McCain"

A journey on which he will, of course, be accompanied by his loyal Sancho Panzerkorps


The War Horse Whisperer.

(And here is the inspiration --

"American Progress" by John Gast)

The Beast that Shouted Rove

At the Heart of the World

There is no need to tell me I am stealing.

I know I’m ripping Ellison’s title off. I also know that book has been laying around like the last pork chop for seven year just begging for someone else to take it and use it this way, and after seven years under the heat lamp, fuck it, it’s mine.

I’m taking it for the simple reason that it fits today – this ugly anniversary – like black bunting fits a funeral and whiskey fits a wake.

Because behind all of the formidably, tragically chartable, graphable, timeline-able, quotable and footnotable facts stands one man.

George Walker Bush.

Iraq was, is, and ever shall be his war. The war he wanted. The war he lied us into because there was no way on Earth he was ever going to be able to lead us into it. The war he has cowered behind. The war he terrified us into continuing.

The war he has used as a club to brutally suppress dissent.

The war he has used as a box cutter to slit open our Constitution and drain away our rights.

The war he has used hammer to smash open the treasury and leave us bankrupt.

The war he has used as a .38 pressed to our skulls to extort monarchical powers from us while he rifles our pockets and gets our children killed.

The war he has used to ruin us.

The war he has used – and will go right on using to the end – to blast hole after hole after ragged hole below the waterline of our Ship of State.

The war he believes he can use as an escape pod; a luxury yacht on which he believes he will sail safely away from any responsibility for the disasters he has wrought -- as he has his entire, worthless life -- into a glorious, forgiving and well-appointed History. While behind him he leaves all of us vanishing in the rosy rear-view mirror that all despots use to console themselves after their time in the sun has passed. Leaves us all -- the United States of New Orleans -- to drown and die in bloody wake of his epic incompetence and villainy.

The short and dirty of it is that America -- for all kinds of reasons, some of them felonious -- allowed someone who was criminally unfit for the job to become President.

And he used that position of power and trust to do many, many awful and unforgivable things.

And then America -- for all kinds of reasons, some of them felonious -- allowed a man who had now been clearly shown to be demonstrably criminally unfit for the job to be re-elected President.

And while his predictions were ultimately wrong, I can think of no better sideline analysis of the “treacherous little freak” George Walker Bush cum history lesson than that provided by the late and much lamented Doctor Hunter S. Thompson after the October 2004 Presidential Debate in Florida.
(emphasis added.)

Sigh. Florida. Fucking Florida. Sigh.

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004

…
Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.
…

Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally had to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought up to date in Florida that night -- except this time the false prince turned back into a frog.

Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn't come to the phone. "The debate really cracked him up," he chuckled. "The champ loves a good ass-whuppin'. He says Bush looked so scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down."
…

Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.

That is why George W. Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc.) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in November.

The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early, and he had no response to "It's the economy, stupid."

Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous "trickle-down" theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow "trickle down" to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

Things haven't changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three presidents of the United States of America, for good or ill. The other one was a handsome, sex-crazed boy from next-door Arkansas, which has no laws against oral sex or any other deviant practice not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with farm animals.
…

*****

The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day -- especially a presidential election -- is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it.

Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the ones who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with naked strangers who want to be close to a winner.

That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in public.

Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.

"What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It's making me sick."

"That is the smell of a Loser, Senator. He came in to apply for a job, but we tossed him out immediately. Sgt. Sloat took him down to the parking lot and taught him a lesson he will never forget."

"Good work, Tex. And how are you coming with my new Enemies List? I want them all locked up. They are scum."

"We will punish them brutally. They are terrorist sympathizers, and most of them voted against you anyway. I hate those bastards."

"Thank you, Sloat. You are a faithful servant. Come over here and kneel down. I want to reward you."

That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni Vidi Vici, especially among Republicans. It's like the ancient Bedouin saying: As the camel falls to its knees, more knives are drawn.
…

[Florida 2000] was about forty-six percent, plus five points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court -- which seemed to equal fifty-one percent. Nobody really believed that, but George W. Bush moved into the White House anyway.

It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while, and it was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal biphetamine and stay awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps & his bombers & his dope-addled general staff.

They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War -- as long as you are winning -- and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new Hitler youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at night for the generals. They were fanatics.

That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are not much different today. We still love War.

George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it.
…

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.
…

The Fun-hogs are starving for anything they can laugh with, instead of at. But George Bush is not funny. Nobody except fellow members of the Petroleum Club in Houston will laugh at his silly barnyard jokes unless it's for money.

When young Bush was at Yale in the Sixties, he told the same joke over and over again for two years, according to some of his classmates. One of them still remembers it:

There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.

"It was horrible to hear him tell it," said the classmate, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. He lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his back put there by young George. "He burned this into my flesh with a red-hot poker," he said solemnly, "and I have hated him ever since. That jackass was born cruel. He burned me in the back while I was blindfolded. This scar will be with me forever."

There is nothing new or secret about that story. It ran on the front page of the Yale Daily News and caused a nasty scandal for a few weeks, but nobody was ever expelled for it. George did his first cover-up job. And he liked it.
…

Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.
…

We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.

That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.