Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
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... The activities often dismissed as mere diversions are actually central. Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning.
We can either rebel against this superficial drift, or like Dreyfus and Kelly, go with the flow, acknowledging that the autonomous life is impossible, not seeking totalistic theologies, but instead becoming sensitive participants in the collective whooshings that life offers.
To which the only reasonable reply can be:
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
It also reminds me why -- despite many philosophical misgivings -- I sorta miss year-end award thingies. The scrum is no fun (and losing to Digby gets boring after awhile :-) but outside of the irreplaceable "Mike's Blog Roundup", it turned out that the nomination process for those award thingies were often one of the only opportunities for the very best work of bloggers who labor outside of the charmed A-List circle to receive the kind of attention they merit.
Chris Christie Is Too Important to Care About Snow, or Cancer, or His Job
Posted Wednesday, December 29, 2010 10:05 PM | By Tom Scocca
If it's possible to fly in and out of snow-crippled New Jersey tomorrow, governor Chris Christie is due to return from his now-notorious vacation at Disney World. It is true that the governor's decision to go ahead and leave the state with a blizzard blowing in—and to stay away, even as the disruption mounted—has been bad image management. And, yes, it has provided material for his political opponents.
But mainly, it was disgraceful governing. Not everyone can be Newark mayor Cory Booker, dashing around his city with a shovel, answering the calls of snowbound citizens on Twitter. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was unimpressive this week—overmatched, sour, and arrogant. Asked today about a case where a newborn baby died while emergency responders were bogged down by unplowed streets, Bloomberg told reporters, “Delivery of an ambulance doesn’t guarantee that medical help can get to do what you need to have done.” (Never is New York's ultra-technocrat more icily rational than when he's explaining why some failure isn't actually his fault.)
Still, however badly and snidely Bloomberg may have been doing his job, at least he was doing it. Chris Christie up and bailed. The chief executive of New Jersey didn't feel like executing his duties.
"Yes, this was a big snow, but we are a northeastern state, and we get plenty of snow, including heavy hits like this," a Christie spokesperson wrote to The Hill, blaming criticism on "partisans."
That's the problem Christie cares about: where he stands on the scoreboard of the eternal campaign. Not getting the state un-paralyzed again. Calling the vacation a political misjudgment misses the point. It wasn't a mistake; it was a genuine reflection of Christie's attitude. The governor doesn't see why he has to be responsible for coordinating police, transportation, and public works in an emergency. And he certainly doesn't see why he should have to suffer alongside the people who elected him. New Jersey's problem isn't his problem. ...
M-I-C
See, dis is what I get to do.
K-E-Y
Why? Because "fuck you", dat's why.
M-O-U-S-E
Thank you, New Jersey, for making Rod Blagojevich look like a humanitarian.
In ‘Daily Show’ Role on 9/11 Bill, Echoes of Murrow
By BILL CARTER and BRIAN STELTER Published: December 26, 2010
... Though the scale of the impact of Mr. Stewart’s telecast on public policy may not measure up to the roles that Mr. Murrow and Mr. Cronkite played, Mr. Thompson said, the comparison is legitimate because the law almost surely would not have moved forward without him. “He so pithily articulated the argument that once it was made, it was really hard to do anything else,” Mr. Thompson said.
The Dec. 16 show focused on two targets. One was the Republicans who were blocking the bill; Mr. Stewart, in a clear effort to shame them for hypocrisy, accused them of belonging to “the party that turned 9/11 into a catchphrase.” The other was the broadcast networks (one of them being CBS, the former home of Mr. Murrow and Mr. Cronkite), which, he charged, had not reported on the bill for more than two months.
“Though, to be fair,” Mr. Stewart said, “it’s not every day that Beatles songs come to iTunes.” (Each of the network newscasts had covered the story of the deal between the Beatles and Apple for their music catalog.) Each network subsequently covered the progress of the bill, sometimes citing Mr. Stewart by name. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, credited Mr. Stewart with raising awareness of the Republican blockade.
Eric Ortner, a former ABC News senior producer who worked as a medic at the World Trade Center site on 9/11, expressed dismay that Mr. Stewart had been virtually alone in expressing outrage early on.
“In just nine months’ time, my skilled colleagues will be jockeying to outdo one another on 10th anniversary coverage” of the attacks, Mr. Ortner wrote in an e-mail. “It’s when the press was needed most, when sunlight truly could disinfect,” he said, that the news networks were not there. ...
Jon Stewart had to put one of his core principles out of its misery like a Downer cow (from Salon)
As Stewart persuasively argued, "We've all bought into the idea that the conflict in the country is left and right, Republicans and Democrats." Furthermore, an insidious, attention-grabbing news media "amplifies a division that I don’t think is the right fight ... [because] both sides have their way of shutting down debate."
"It's become tribal," he declared, and the major culprits aren't Tea Partying loons -- they're the CNNs and Foxes and, yes, MSNBCs of the world. "The problem with a 24-hour news cycle is it's built for a particular thing -- 9/11," he explained, noting sagely that "O.J.'s not going to kill someone every day." Meanwhile, "The real conflict is corruption vs. non-corruption, extremists vs. non-extremists."
The Maddow interview was a stunning example of the increasing greatness of Stewart, a man who, unlike every faux or ostensibly real cable news pontificator out there not named Anderson Cooper, is distinguished by his compassion-rich lack of objectivity. Other pundits may have opinions and stances galore, but few possess Stewart's fearless embrace of that oft-overlooked essential quality -- empathy. ...
He was at times maddeningly indulgent, granting reasonable doubt to George Bush for our ongoing nightmare in Iraq and Afghanistan by asking, "What is their intention? Is it to save American lives?" He questioned how helpful it is "if the place you start is 'he’s an evil man who lied to us' ... I do think he believes Sadaam was dangerous." And he told liberal America, to its intense discomfort, "You have to examine your own orthodoxy."
Jon's problem is that, for all of his formidable comedic and observational skills, he is still in an almost catatonic denial about the country in which he lives. He obviously, deeply wants us to be something more than we are. Something better than we are. A place where people with different but sincere and well-reasoned beliefs can fight hard, come together afterward to figure out a good-enough compromise, and then move on to the next thing.
You know who else wants that? Every fucking Liberal I know.
But this simply is not that country: not some feisty middle-brow Camelot with a couple of equally wacky, equally flawed and equally honorable political philosophies contending in an arena with rules and referees. Instead, this is a country where one political party is ruled by loathesome men with grotesque motives on behalf of a tiny clique of plutocrats and bulwarked by an electoral army which is kept constantly tweaked to the point of near-riot by a carefully-cultivated media cocktail of rage, ignorance, bigotry and God.
What Jon cannot face is that he will never have the country he wants -- that we all want -- by clevering and cajoling and joking and reasoning it into existence.
We've tried that for the last 30 years.
Facts bounce off these people.
Reason. Does. Not. Work.
What Jon Stewart seems unwilling to face squarely is the simple fact that this nation cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free. And that for the nation he wants-us-to-be to stand any chance of rising up out of the rubble of what-we-are, the Right as it is constituted today will have to be electorally and culturally destroyed, root and branch.
In the face of the absolute depravity of the Right and the absolute cowardice of the Villager Center, Jon Stewart showed remarkable courage by the simple act of telling the truth on teevee.
But that's the problem, Jon.
The world you want will never, ever come until you take on Capone.
I've always thought of the New York Times' Ross Douthat as just one more wingnut welfare case: another in a long, long line of Conservative fops with the right contacts who -- through God alone knows what strange confluence of gin, fate, blackmail and Conservative Affirmative Action -- one day rolled out of his day-bed at "The Weekly Standard" or "The Atlantic" and into a prime position at one of America's leading journals or newspapers.
One thing about Ross: he can type almost error-free.
Another thing: after the New York Time's Bill Kristol fiasco, the Sulzberger ATM needed a reserve wingnut. Someone to pump another fact-asphyxiating 800-word dose of rehabbed Thatcherite homilies into the body politic on those days when David Brooks was not available to get 'er done.
Another thing: David Brooks can't last forever. Eventually even his mighty piping-bag of shameless revisionism, particle-board cliches and Centrist claptrap will run dry; he will poop out his last paean to the the Golden Age of Bowling and the glorious fake America of Applebee McReagan, and toddle off to write very bad children's books, or a tenured position teaching injection molding to hamsters at one of the nation's great universities.
And so, Ross Douthat was created: a strange little rascal, constantly besotted from nipping at the same old jug of Randite hard-cider, who chirps his little second-string wingnut operettas with all the potency of His Irrelevancy Prince Charles trying very hard to command attention from within the deep shadow cast by the real monarch.
However, with his genuinely execrable column today, it appears that Mr. Douthat might be grabbing for the First Chair and the David Brooks Florescent Tie of Glory.
A Return to Normalcy
... The Republican midterm sweep delivered the coup de grâce to the liberal fantasy by dramatically foreshortening what many pundits expected to be an enduring Democratic majority. But it also dropped a lid, at least temporarily, on the conservative freakout. (It’s hard to fret that much about the supposed Kenyan-Marxist radical in the White House when anything he accomplishes has to be co-signed by John Boehner ...
This return to normalcy is good news for fans of bipartisan comity and centrism for centrism’s sake. And it might be good news for the country. In the end, some sort of bipartisanship will be required to pull America back from the fiscal precipice, and the productivity of this lame-duck December shows that cooperation between the two parties isn’t as impossible as it seemed just a few months ago.
But when it comes to the hard challenges ahead, comity won’t be enough. Real courage is required as well. And this month’s outbreak of bipartisanship was conspicuously yellow-bellied. Republicans and Democrats came together to cut taxes, raise spending, and give free health care to the first responders on 9/11. They indulged, in other words, in the kind of easy, profligate “moderation” that’s done as much damage to the country over the years as the ideologies of either left or right. ...
As I have detailed before ("How to Write a David Brooks Column"), while it ridiculously, paint-by-numbers easy to crank columns like this out --
4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!
5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!
Oh boy!
6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.
-- to my recipe book I should have added the following: In addition to assembling the proper ingredients, you must be the sort of person who can look back on the real, ugly history of the last 30 years --
Now, 30 years later, what’s left of these same Conservatives have finally started to notice that their political genitalia is all lit up like a pustular Christmas Tree with oozing Newt-shaped sores, and their Shining City on a Hill has been overrun with hyper-aggressive, ethically-stunted inbred dimwit freaks who all point at the mile-high sculpture of Saint Ronald Reagan in the Shining City Mall Atrium and squeal “Daddy!”
-- and still be willing to make your daily bread slinging third-rate, poison-laced Conservative corn pone to a public you know will grow weaker and less civilized with every bite they swallow.
You have to be the sort of person who is OK with that.
And congratulations, Ross Douthat: you have arrived.
One million poinsettiae gave their lives to make every tent at the Mouse Circus burn with that mad, feverish, incarnadine glow that says, "Everyone who makes the needles on our political compasses spin is on holiday."
On one side of the midway, Christiane Amanpour dismissed the help and used the platform of “This Week” on the weekend of Jesus of Nazareth's fake birthday to talk four different ways about war, sacrifice and people trying to lift each other up out of misery and loss.
On the other side, David Gregory squandered yet another "Meet the Press" Sunday wasting America's time talking to a political fixer, after which a panel of waxwork teevee creatures rolled their dead doll eyes Heavenward, praised Reagan, and got all gooey about Centrism.
More than anything else, Peggy Noonan wants you to know that Barack Obama is a "President of the Left" who needs to "regain his mystique".
Ho Ho Ho
Week after week, year after year, the ever-hungry media maw continues to prove two things:
The gap between content supply and content demand creates an ever-growing excess media capacity that media programmers could use to talk about virtually anything at all.
Most media owners and programmers would obviously rather chew their own legs off than air anything but the same verbal packing peanuts and endlessly re-chewed Conventional Wisdom Bubble Gum from the same few inbred insiders.
Lastly, for extra low-cost, happy-fun-good-times, during the year-end retrospectives with which you will be barraged over the next week, try substituting the factually-accurate phrase "Ignorant, Rage-Drunk Republican Base" every time you hear the fantasy-bullshit-alibi phrase "Tea Party" regurgitated by some fawning pundit and notice how cartoonishly ridiculous they actually sound. As an example, you could do worse than starting with the last two minutes of ”The Chris Matthews Show”.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.
-- Mark Twain
Buy the Button, take the Ride... This mint-condition memento of the final days of the Mainstream Media is available at Blue Gal's Cafepress Store (and keep listening later in the year for an opportunity to win one). And the Podcast Donate Button button below allows listeners to throw a contribution specifically towards the podcast. Thanks for your listenership and support!
Turns out I loped on past my 3,000th post yesterday.
So I got that going for me.
Which is nice.
(Caution: There is a brief commercial that precedes this video. Such things don't bother me as I understand the need to pay for stuff, but it seems to bother the anarcho-syndicalist, property-is-theft crew, so as a courtesy I thought I'd issue a fair warning before launching a bunch of counterrevolutionary neo-kulak sensibilities all up in your checka shizzle :-)
Nothing much to add here: it just seemed that, as frequently as Haley Barbour is being verbally conjoined with the fictional Boss Hogg these day (this from Forbes sums it up.) --
Day 2 of Haley “I’m not really a Boss Hogg Old Southern Racist” Barbour Scandal Hits
-- someone needed to Photoshop him good and proper and for the Permanent Record.
Rather like anyone running for national office who bears an uncannily accurate resemblance to, say, Charles Manson might want to avoid staring psychotically into the camera while talking longingly about the benefits of a race war...Barbour was so perfectly tailor-made for the Boss Hogg comparison it seems pretty obvious that if he wanted to make the jump to the Big Job on Pennsylvania Avenue, the One Thing it sorta behooved him not to do was open his pie hole and start singing paeans to the good old days of Jim Crow and Judge Lynch.
And yet like so many of his ilk who have simply lobotomized their inconveniently despicable pasts away by steeping their souls in endless, soothing Conservative lies about a glorious, honorable, soft-focus Southern Past that Never Fucking Happened, Barbour seems to have just plain forgotten that the Disneyssippi fictions about the Life and Times of the Boy From Yazoo were 100% bullshit.
The members of the Chicago Electoral Board will meet to hear [Rahm Emanuel residency case] and most likely issue a decision at a session that will start at 9 a.m. on Thurs., Dec. 23 at 69 W. Washington St., in the Lower Level Conference Room. This is an open meeting. This is the same room at the base of the escalator where the evidentiary hearing was conducted last week. The attorneys on both sides have already requested a “Rule 20″ hearing to address the Board before the Commissioners vote.
You know, if I were disposed to impute complex, Machiavellian schemes to President Obama's former Chief-of-Staff, I would probably mention that in a media landscape where the political headlines are constantly full of what is essentially this news-neutral, process story, not only does Team Rahm get its candidates name repeated a dozen times a day in the press for free, but for as long as the story runs it also all but drowns out every other policy question and every other candidate's carefully timed and calibrated messaging strategy.
Good thing I'm not that sort of person.
After the hearing, we here are all expecting history to unfold as destiny has dictated.
Chicago, you will be mine, like my dog, or my horse, or my falcon, or my favorite neck-stabbin' pencil except that I shall love you more - and trust you less.
Over on the Island of Misfit Conservatives, the holiday intern they left in charge is filling up column inches by excitedly speculating on how many whiny Right-wing twats can dance on the head of a pin.
The Right's Sledgehammers
20 Dec 2010 08:30 pm
Conor Friedersdorf
When Internet radio host D.R. Tucker alerted me to an interview he recorded with Jonah Goldberg a couple weeks back, I had no idea it would contain one of the more revealing accounts of what the National Review Editor-At-Large really thinks about the conservative movement's bomb thrower talk radio types. (Transcript of relevant segment here.) I'd always imagined that he and I would be utterly at odds on that subject. As it turns out our assessments overlap.
The initial example discussed in the segment is Mark Levin. To my surprise, Goldberg noted that the nationally syndicated talk radio host has said "awful things" at his expense, pointed out that he's "constantly ripping into" Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard, and expressed bafflement at his "minor war on National Review." It's rare and gratifying for a prominent voice in movement conservatism to acknowledge that Levin's rhetoric is baffling and that he serially launches unfair attacks.
Does he therefore hurt conservatism? Goldberg doesn't think so...
Isn't Goldberg's answer interesting? His mind immediately goes to the David Frum critique of talk radio: that the overheated rhetoric of its blowhard hosts turn off independents. Its arguably true about Rush Limbaugh, whose high profile makes him unique. But whatever you think of the Frum thesis, there are two distinct arguments about how talk radio hurts conservatism that Goldberg never seems to consider.
For those of you keeping score at home...
...Jonah Goldberg is the wingnut whose Clinton-hunting mommy launched his career, and whose most notable contributions to Western civilization are a series of bad ideas and Simpson's jokes called "National Review Online", and a book called "Liberal Fascism". For his labors, Mr. Goldberg is paid obscene sums of money.
...Mark Levin is a cackling lunatic with a voice like a rabid, tuneless-bagpipe-playing weasel being sucked into jet engine who nonetheless plies his very lucrative trade sitting in front of a microphone and telling lies on hundreds of Conservative talk radio stations across America. He also co-wrote "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America" with his good friend Rush Limbaugh.
...David Frum is a former George Bush speechwriter who hung onto Neoconservatism's ass like a limpet until the increasingly violent oscillations of the Party of God flicked him off like a wee turd, shortly after which he found a nice hammock and steady work doing exactly what he had been doing before, but with "Centrist" sprinkles.
..."The Weekly Standard" is a Neocon Safe House run by a blood-drunk sociopath named William Kristol. Mr. Kristol's crimes against democracy have grown too numerous to mention (as are the inexplicably large number of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th chances to contribute to America's most famous newspapers and journals this staggeringly awful writer keeps being handed. Y'know, it's almost like there is some sort of Club...) "The Weekly Standard" has most recently disgraced itself with its glowing, revisionist, Disneyfication of "Yazoo City, MI" in order to advance the predicedntial fortunes of Mr. Haley Barbour.
In other words the interplay among these giants of the Right that so fascinates Mr. Friedersdorf amounts to absolutely nothing more than a screaming match in a DT ward over whether getting piss drunk on fortified wine or piss drunk on drug-store vodka is more respectable.
So let me explain this very, very simply:
All Modern Conservative theory springs from the corrupt fountainhead of St. Ronald Reagan's pronouncement that "Government is the problem".
All Modern Conservative tactics spring from the corrupt fountainhead of Richard Nixon's win-at-any-cost Southern Strategy.
Everything that has happened on the Right in the last 30 years comes down to nothing more than the destructive antics of the ever-more degenerate and horrific political mutations caused by the factory-farm inbreeding of these two corrupt ideas over and over and over again.
And the idea that these clowns on the Right are now fighting in the rubble of the ruin they made over which of them is the bigger dick would actually be hilarious if they hadn't fucked up my country so badly in the process.
BY CHERYL V. JACKSON cjackson@suntimes.com Dec 17, 2010
Five mayoral candidates seeking to make the grade with Chicago teachers discussed education leadership and funding Thursday night.
All agreed for transparency in tax-increment financing (TIF), which diverts property tax dollars from designated districts to boost development in blighted areas.
But some areas not considered hard up for business have gained the designation, and when those tax dollars are diverted, other entities pick up the slack, some noted.
William “Dock” Walls suggested sunsetting TIF status in districts that are not truly blighted.
“We’re all saying the same thing,” City Clerk Miguel del Valle said at Operating Engineers Hall, 2260 S. Grove. “The question is what’s going to happen after April 5? What are we going to do to make sure that never again will a TIF be awarded to an area that’s not blighted?”
State Sen. James Meeks called on his fellow candidates to be more assertive in challenging the TIFs, a favorite of Mayor Daley. “If we all agree, we should all start saying it,” he said.
Radio show host Cliff Kelley moderated the event — sponsored by Cook County Teachers Union Local 1600, international Union of Operating Engineers Local 143, SUIE Local 73 and Access Living--where educational resources was a major concern.
“The money is there. It’s just a matter of prioritizing,” former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun said ...
Himself, Mayor Richard M. Daley, was the one who brought up the unthinkable: Bankruptcy.
Financial ruin. Fiscal discipline of the unknown kind. Sacrifice. Pain. Disgrace. Creditors lined up, fighting over whatever scraps are left. Favored contractors left holding the bag. This, Daley was suggesting, is what the spreading government financial crises could come to.
Bankruptcy, he had first suggested, might be the easiest way to fix the city's starving pension funds. But the consequences apparently dawned on him and he quickly backed off. Just pointing out, he said, what could happen if we don't face reality.
Maybe, though, his first thought was right. Bankruptcy would be a reality if Chicago, the state and its subdivisions that are stiffing their creditors for billions were private businesses. More than likely, their creditors would already have forced them into bankruptcy, and they'd be reorganizing or liquidating their assets. ...
...while its TIF accounts groan under the weight of the tax revenues with which they've been stuffed for the last 20 years.
Chicago is looking down the barrel of service cuts and layoffs worse than anything anyone has ever seen...except it's sitting on a billion dollars.
In Chicago-ese, this is Hizzoner's way of saying-without-saying that no matter how much mud gets splashed, though the Heavens may fall, if you're in The Club we've got a little sumptin set aside for you, so don't freak out and go doin nothin' stupid.
"TIF Beer," Da Mare chuckled before departing for a restful Christmas far, far away from the cares and woes of the crippled city he will be leaving behind. "Dere's plenty of it...if you know da right people."
Discussing Civil Rights Era, a Governor Is Criticized By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
WASHINGTON — In an interview that set off a new round of debate on Monday about racial attitudes and politics, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a potential Republican presidential candidate, recalled the 1960s civil rights struggle in his hometown, Yazoo City, saying, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”
In a profile published Monday in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Barbour also talked about the White Citizens’ Councils of the late 1960s, which some historians have said were organized to oppose racial integration. Mr. Barbour, a teenager and young adult during the 1960’s, said that in his town, they were a positive force, praising them as “an organization of town leaders” who refused to tolerate the racist attitudes of the Ku Klux Klan.
“In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan” would be “run out of town,” Mr. Barbour said. “If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
The comments came as Mr. Barbour, 62, is actively considering a bid for the White House, and the governor’s political opponents and some civil rights groups quickly seized on the remarks.
Media Matters, a liberal organization, sent e-mail messages to reporters Monday urging coverage of the comments. Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi N.A.A.C.P., told The Huffington Post, “It’s beyond disturbing — it’s offensive that he would take that approach to the history of this state to many African-Americans who had to suffer as a result of the policies and practices of the Citizens Council.”
He has also just been overwhelmingly re-elected to a brand-new six-year term as a senior member of the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body" by the good people of Arizona.
If lazy futures historians ever need a quick shorthand for what went fatally wrong with America, they need only consider the case of Arizona Senator John Sidney McCain III.
The bluesy holiday standard that rivals "The Gift of the Magi" for sketching a fast Christmas masterpiece out of a handful of perfect, aching details.
Charlie, I think about you Every time I pass the filling station On account of all the grease You used to wear in your hair. Still have that record -- Little Anthony and The Imperials. Someone stole my record player How do you like that?
The Ghosts of Centrism Past, Centrism Present and Centrism Yet to Come swept down on the Mouse Circus today in a solid wall of Belligerent Seriousness and Aggressively Well-Funded Beltway Common Wisdom (except, of course, for Fox, where they continue their tradition of just pointing a camera into a wingnut locked ward, and then throwing in meth-laced bunny carcasses for them to tear apart with their teeth.)
It was nothing, stuffed with nothing, with nothing sauce, served with a side of room-temperature nothing with nothing crumbles.
That for the last two years, Liberals got virtually everything we wanted, and when we didn't we got all unreasonable and pouty, which is why the Right took over the House.
So shut up and eat your tax cuts, hippie!
Me?
I'm going to wash the taste of this forgettable sludgebomb of diet vanilla nothing, content-free, Villager eyewash pudding pops out of my head by studying my latest Very NSFW Berlitz Nickname Tape:
UPDATE: Over on the radio side, I listened to Mark Green's breathtakingly awful "Both Sides Now" for about four minutes to re-verify my theory that, unsatisfied with only killing Progressive Radio once, Mr. Green has decided that what Liberals are really hungry for is Moar!Mary!Matalin!
when the Congressional power dynamics were reversed, the GOP was focused like a laser on using its Sacred Nonspecific Calendar Interval Christian Holiday Lame Duck session to the single issue they considered more important than anything else in the world.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton.
For no reason other than they just fucking hated him.
Of course now many of the the same media hacks and politicians who dined out in parasitic splendor on ginned-up scandals and fake outrage against the "Sociopath"-in-Chief who "trashed" their happy little inbred Byzantium on the Potomac now bury whole decades of their own past under a thick layer of Villager, history-nullifying nostalgia goo and fawn over the statesmanlike sagacity and triangulatory genius of the same man they had only recently been trying to bum rush into impeachment, prison and political oblivion.
But some of us rubes out here in the hinterlands do not forget. And rude, unschooled fuckers that we are, we keep forgetting our places and bringing up the inconvenient histories of our betters over and over again.
First, excerpts from a lively little chat between Mark Shields and Paul Gigot on the insistence by Wahabi Republicans that the frivolous and irresponsible impeachment of one William Jefferson Clinton proceed despite military action in Iraq.
Remember that at this time we were being warned, daily, that the Hussein was incredibly dangerous and volatile.
It began with a lot of procedural information about how long debate and rebuttal would proceed, etc. And then (with emphasis added)…
… ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Paul, assess for us on both sides the risks and the benefits in going ahead with this tomorrow while the bombing is going on.
PAUL GIGOT: Well, the benefits for the Republicans are that they get it over with. They believe they have the votes, and they can put this behind them, and a lot of their members, frankly, want to get it done. The leadership, I think, also fears that if it's delayed into next week, as Lee Hamilton suggested, just wait till Monday, there will be another objection on Monday. Why not do it after Christmas, and then why not after New Year's, so let's get it done. ...
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But there are some risks, aren't there?
PAUL GIGOT: Well, there is some that the Democrats are going to talk about process; they're going to talk about shackling the commander-in-chief. So this takes away from what the Republicans would like the debate to be about, which is the behavior of the president, and that's the advantage the Democrats have in this, which is they can change the subject and try to undermine this as a strictly partisan exercise pointing to the Senate down the road.
… MARK SHIELDS: … But there is within the Republican House caucus a strong conservative group, and I think the only way to describe many of them is they're seized and animated by a phobia about Bill Clinton. I mean - and there's no question - they do have the votes; they want to do it; they want to get it over with; they want to get him; they don't want him to have another day without being impeached. And I'll tell you where it comes down to - you can see their attitude toward the president on foreign policy. I mean, they say is a diabolically shrewd fellow - oh, my goodness, he calibrates every move. The move to go into military action didn't change a single vote in the House on impeachment. There was no way it was going to change a vote.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So you're saying the bombing hasn't made any big political difference.
MARK SHIELDS: It hasn't changed a single vote in the House on either side, and I defy anybody to tell whose vote has been changed by it.
… PAUL GIGOT: I think they believe that if they wait until Monday, the Democrats will find a reason not to hold the debate on Monday too. And who knows what Saddam Hussein might do and what the president might do, and so if we're going to have the debate at all this Congress, let's do it now. And if the president can do his - undertake his constitutional responsibility as commander-in-chief on the eve of impeachment, then the House should be able to do its constitutional duties, while the president is pursuing his.
Listen to Bob Livingston argue that just because we had troops in harm's way in Iraq and by his reckoning had no timetable or metric to measure when or if we reach “Mission Accomplished”, that is no reason why the President should not be impeached.
… REP. BOB LIVINGSTON, Speaker of the House-Designate: Do we just anticipate that the troops in the field will complete their business by Ramadan or by a time certain, or by Tuesday, or by Christmas Day, or by New Year's Day, or by two weeks into January? How do we assess when that mission is going to be complete? There's no way to know when the troops will have completed their mission. There's no way to know whether or not Saddam Hussein in his mindless self-absorption decides to lash out at American troops, at British troops, at Kuwait, at his neighbors anywhere in the Middle East. We can't anticipate what Saddam Hussein will do, and yet, we cannot refrain from advancing the people's business under this critical issue.
KWAME HOLMAN: Livingston reminded Democrats that when the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, the United States had troops on the ground in Vietnam.
REP. BOB LIVINGSTON: And, yet, the Democrat Congress at the time undertook the responsibility of impeaching Richard Nixon, but he resigned.
Now note here where Republican and veteran Duncan Hunter argues that it is an insult to the troops NOT to proceed with impeachment and work straight through the Christmas holidays if necessary...
KWAME HOLMAN: Republican leaders backed up their argument with the support of several of their members who are veterans of foreign wars.
REP. DUNCAN HUNTER, (R) California: You know, there's one term, I think, that is common to both this House and to our military, and that term is duty. We refer to it often, and it's clear now that our uniformed people are carrying out their duty in difficult circumstances to defend the liberties and the security of this country. They're doing that so that we can perform our duty. And our duty is to carry out the Constitution.
KWAME HOLMAN: But Minority Whip David Bonior said there was another reason Democrats were blocking the Republicans' proposed rules of debate.
REP. DAVID BONIOR, Minority Whip: And that is the inability of this side of the aisle to have the chance to offer a reasonable alternative, a censure alternative, which the majority of Americans now support. It is unfair, it is wrong, there is something about this whole process that shows a lack of judgment, a lack of proportionality, a lack of common sense…
Then there was this jumble of superpatiot doubletalk, all but one of which is from the WaPo...
Rep. Marge Roukema (R-N.J.):
And we all share in the emotional trauma getting back to our subject of this constitutional crisis in which we are ensnared. But this cup cannot pass us by, we can't avoid it, we took an oath of office, Mr. Speaker, to uphold the Constitution under our democratic system of government, separation of powers, and checks and balances.
And we must fulfill that oath and send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a trial. …
Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.):
How can we expect a Boy Scout to honor his oath if elected officials don't honor theirs? How can we expect a business executive to honor a promise when the chief executive abandons his or hers?
Rep. Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.):
How did this great nation of the 1990s come to be? It all happened Mr. Speaker, because freedom works. . . . But freedom, Mr. Speaker, freedom depends upon something. The rule of law. And that's why this solemn occasion is so important. For today we are here to defend the rule of law. According to the evidence presented by our fine Judiciary Committee, the president of the United States has committed serious transgressions.
… Mr. Speaker, a nation of laws cannot be ruled by a person who breaks the law. Otherwise, it would be as if we had one set of rules for the leaders and another for the governed. We would have one standard for the powerful, the popular and the wealthy, and another for everyone else.
This would belie our ideal that we have equal justice under the law. That would weaken the rule of law and leave our children and grandchildren with a very poor legacy…
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI):
The framers of the Constitution devised an elaborate system of checks and balances to ensure our liberty by making sure that no person, institution or branch of government became so powerful that a tyranny could be established in the United States of America. Impeachment is one of the checks the framers gave the Congress to prevent the executive or judicial branches from becoming corrupt or tyrannical.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas):
When someone is elected president, they receive the greatest gift possible from the American people, their trust. To violate that trust is to raise questions about fitness for office. My constituents often remind me that if anyone else in a position of authority -- for example, a business executive, a military officer of a professional educator -- had acted as the evidence indicates the president did, their career would be over. The rules under which President Nixon would have been tried for impeachment had he not resigned contain this statement: "The office of the president is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."
Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.):
Many have asked why we are even here in these impeachment proceedings. They have asked why we can't just rebuke the president and move on. That's a reasonable question. And I certainly understand the emotions behind that question. I want to move on. Every member of this committee wants to move on. We all agree with that.
But the critical question is this: Do we move on under the Constitution, or do we move on by turning aside from the Constitution? Do we move on in faithfulness to our own oath to support and defend the Constitution, or do we go outside the Constitution because it seems more convenient and expedient?
...
Why are we here? We are here because we have a system of government based on the rule of law, a system of government in which no one -- no one -- is above the law. We are here because we have a constitution.
A constitution is often a most inconvenient thing. A constitution limits us when we would not be limited. It compels us to act when we would not act. But our Constitution, as all of us in this room acknowledge, is the heart and soul of the American experiment. …
… We would all be spared embarrassment, indignity and discomfort. But there would be a high cost if we followed that course of action. Something would be lost. Respect for the law would be subverted, and the foundation of our Constitution would be eroded. …
Rep. Bob Ingliss (R-S.C.):
I think is important to point out here is that we have a constitutional obligation, a constitutional obligation to act. And there are lots of folks who would counsel, Listen, let's just move along. It's sort of the Clinton so-what defense. So what? I committed perjury. So what? I broke the law. Let's just move along. I believe we've got a constitutional obligation to act.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.):
Mr. Chairman, this is a somber occasion. I am here because it is my constitutional duty, as it is the constitutional duty of every member of this committee, to follow the truth wherever it may lead. Our Founding Fathers established this nation on a fundamental yet at the time untested idea that a nation should be governed not by the whims of any man but by the rule of law. Implicit in that idea is the principle that no one is above the law, including the chief executive …
Mr. Chairman, we must ask ourselves what our failure to uphold the rule of law will say to the nation, and most especially to our children, who must trust us to leave them a civilized nation where justice is respected.
Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.):
You know, there are people out all across America every day that help define the nation's character, and they exercise common-sense virtues, whether it's honesty, integrity, promise-keeping, loyalty, respect, accountability, they pursue excellence, they exercise self-discipline. There is honor in a hard day's work. There's duty to country. Those are things that we take very seriously.
So those are things that the founders also took seriously. Yet every time I reflect upon the wisdom of the founding fathers, I think their wisdom was truly amazing. They pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to escape the tyranny of a king. They understood the nature of the human heart struggles between good and evil.
So the founders created a system of checks and balances and accountability. …
Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.):
In the next few days I will cast some of the most important votes of my career. Some believe these votes could result in a backlash and have serious political repercussions. They may be right. But I will leave the analysis to others. My preeminent concern is that the Constitution be followed and that all Americans, regardless of their position in society, receive equal and unbiased treatment in our courts of law. The fate of no president, no political party, and no member of Congress merits a slow unraveling of the fabric of our constitutional structure. As John Adams said, we are a nation of laws, not of men.
Our nation has survived the failings of its leaders before, but it cannot survive exceptions to the rule of law in our system of equal justice for all….
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.):
I suggest impeachment is like beauty: apparently in the eye of the beholder. But I hold a different view. And it's not a vengeful one, it's not vindictive, and it's not craven. It's just a concern for the Constitution and a high respect for the rule of law. ... as a lawyer and a legislator for most of my very long life, I have a particular reverence for our legal system. It protects the innocent, it punishes the guilty, it defends the powerless, it guards freedom, it summons the noblest instincts of the human spirit. The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door. It challenges abuse of authority. It's a shame "Darkness at Noon" is forgotten, or "The Gulag Archipelago," but there is such a thing lurking out in the world called abuse of authority, and the rule of law is what protects you from it…
And, of course, what would any Roll of GOP Dishonor be without Republican-Citizen-Hero-and-Convicted-Felon-Number-One, Tom DeLay, weighing in via the “Bluegrass Report”
Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.):
I believe that this nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law. Sometimes hard, sometimes unpleasant, this path relies on truth, justice and the rigorous application of the principle that no man is above the law.
Now, the other road is the path of least resistance. This is where we start making exceptions to our laws based on poll numbers and spin control. This is when we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us, when we ignore the facts in order to cover up the truth.
Shall we follow the rule of law and do our constitutional duty no matter unpleasant, or shall we follow the path of least resistance, close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking, forgive and forget, move on and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system? No man is above the law, and no man is below the law. That's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country.
Of course, to those on the Right for whom history began on January 20, 2008
this is all incomprehensible gibberish.
Never happened.
Lalalala!
Didn't matter.
Or it was all just a joke! Can't you take a fucking joke!?
Twelve years later with power in D.C. is once again reversing poles, the Democrats are spending their waning days of agenda-control and their last few ingots of political capital fighting and winning a historic battle for civil rights, and fighting and losing other battles for core-principle causes the GOP holds far, far too dear to permit to be compromised. Causes like:
Denying health care to 9/11 first responders;
Committing national fiscal suicide at the behest of their billionaire puppet-masters;
Denying access to the same American Dream John Boehner can't think about without blubbering to the deserving children of illegal immigrants, and;
Shooting craps with global thermonuclear peace for partisan political gain.
Of course, in a civilized country run by grownups, none of these issues (and almost none of the hundreds of bills that passed the House and were killed in the Senate) would be in any way controversial and would have been passed by acclamation long ago.
But we do not live in a civilized country.
And as long as the Fox/Republican Party remains a force in American politics, we never will.
From anonymous holds that let any Civil-War-grudge-holding flake randomly bring the government to its knees...to filibusters-by-proxy that let the minority rule by decree and ransom note...to mysterious, obscure double-magic-reverso rules which can undo all that has gone before (but only if invoked on the third Tuesday of a month when the official Senate chicken has laid an egg with a double yolk)...if the last two years has demonstrated anything, it is that America's House of Lords has failed.
Since the beginning, practically the Senate's only reason for being has been to act as a firewall against the excesses of the House, and the only weapons it really had were collegiality, compromise and an arsenal of arcane rules that punished outliers who wanted to push things along too quickly.
But Conservatism's engineered rage retrovirus -- spliced meticulously together out of racism, ignorance, fundamentalism and lies, and delivered everywhere at the speed of light via Fox News and Hate Radio -- has now done exactly what it was designed to do: kill any vestige of collegiality or compromise or reason on the Right. And now that this wingnut contagion has broken through the containment field and is running like wildfire through the halls of the Senate
the same, powerful, entangling tools which were originally designed to halt the progress of the disease have been turned into instruments for worsening its spread.
Thanks to the Republican Party, the Senate is no longer capable of performing its most basic bodily/political functions. Thanks to the Republican Party, the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body" has been reduced to a hopelessly dysfunctional sack of plague, bleeding out.
So if our fever ever breaks and we limp back to national sanity we can bring the Senate back from mothballs, but for now it is time to get rid of it.
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