Bush 'nad-polisher gets the memo.

What, you didn’t get the memo?

It was simple. Three lines.

“Dear Fellow Co-conspirators,
Whatever you do, remember:



Don’t Mention The War.”


A little snip from BoBo's column, but it isn’t the column so much that interests me.

It’s the context.

August 10, 2005
All Cultures Are Not Equal
By DAVID BROOKS

Let's say you are an 18-year-old kid with a really big brain. You're trying to figure out which field of study you should devote your life to, so you can understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come.

(Hint it’s not NYT Quisling journalism: that’s for “Conservative” middle-aged fumbling word –fondler with who ironically still nurses at the teat of Big Evil Guv by being making a handsome living as one of its biggest apologists.)

This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally wonderful. There are a certain number of close-minded thugs, especially on university campuses, who accuse anybody who asks intelligent questions about groups and enduring traits of being racist or sexist.
...

Ok, I'm a little interested in the column itself and, oh my, where to begin?

When you see a paunchy bottom-dweller like BoBo actually losing a girly slap-fight with the strawmen that he himself just pulled out of his Bad BoBo Place...it’s kind of inspiring.

Yes there are a few, tiny groups here and there on campuses who are silly enough to believe things like this. There is another, much larger group that thinks that all groups are equally worthy of study; a point-of-view that might have served us well in the last several years if we had had actual experts on Muslim and Arab culture helping shape policy instead of the eternally vacationing President Drinky O’Literate who apparently learned everything he knows about Middle Eastern history and politics watching reruns of “Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy”.

And there is a many-orders-of-magnitude larger group of loyal GOP rank-and-filers (you remember; the people who actually run the country) who want to just obliterate anyone who pisses us of in the name of Republican Jesus.

So it is when this pudding-soft man strains to form a carapace around his weak drivelings long enough to stand on his hind legs and stink up the pages of the NYT by hammering away at America’s REAL enemies -- “close-minded thugs, especially on university campuses” – that Our Mr. Brooks really outdoes himself.

The collared-and-neutered dogboy for the Party of Randall Terry and Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Tom DeLay – that flies to electoral victory on the wings of a million bigots and Christopaths -- boldly sniffs right on past the monumental horror staring him right in his pie face...

...and musters the colossal nerve to point fingers anywhere but in the mirror.

It is in this moment, that the column crosses that BoBo-Brain threshold, and moves from being merely inept to actively despicable.

But none of this helps explain a crucial feature of our time: while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation.
...

Forty-million Americans move every year, and they generally move in with people like themselves, so as the late James Chapin used to say, every place becomes more like itself. Crunchy places like Boulder attract crunchy types and become crunchier.

Conservative places like suburban Georgia attract conservatives and become more so.
...

In the political world, Democrats and Republicans seem to live on different planets.

We call our planet “Reality”. Perhaps you’ve read about us?

Meanwhile, if you look around the world you see how often events are driven by groups that reject the globalized culture. Islamic extremists reject the modern cultures of Europe, and have created a hyperaggressive fantasy version of traditional Islamic purity. In a much different and less violent way, some American Jews have moved to Hebron and become hyper-Zionists.
...

As we scrupulously avoid mentioning the “Fundamentalist extremists [that] reject the modern culture of America” who practice “a hyperaggressive fantasy version of traditional Christian purity” who hold his leash and tell him when to sit up and beg, and when to roll over and play dead.

In the last several weeks, BoBo has fearlessly tackled such hot topics as his vision of a New of American Life sprung fully-formed from the head of Dwight Eisenhower, “…The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel.”

(A sentiment which manages to be simultaneously insulting, tooth-rottingly saccharine and, considering the war the NeoCons have made on the working class, and the fact that their #1 Spokesmodel is an unrepentant junkie and their bench so crowded with dry drunks that some of them have to stand, massively hypocritical.)

Before that, three almost-embarrassingly stalkerish mash notes about Supreme Court Nominations (Along the breathless, bodice-clutching line of: "He's Here! My Mystery Date! Will he be a hunky conservative with no paper trail...or a dud!”)

And the summery joys of baseball (Little League) done better and to death by everyone from George Will to Stephen Jay Gould to, presumably, Euripedes.

And, of course, the masterful essay on the travails of a Tramp Abroad. If by “travail” we mean “crying baby”, and if by “Tramp Abroad” we mean pudgy, NeoCon waterboy squirming irritably around in First Class.

Hardly “Sullivan’s Travels” or even "Harold and Kumar".

On June 26, 2005 BoBo did tackle the subject of Karl Rove, but only insofar as he minced timidly into another fake Liberal Strawman vs. Conservative “argument”.

So let’s cut to it.

This has been a long, hot, bloody summer.

The war goes against us, and everyone damned well knows it. The BEST case scenario is that history will show that George Bush lied to the American people on a scale so vast and murderous that his Father’s presidency will be footnoted into oblivion by that of George II: Worst President Ever.

Iraq will either slip from lethal-Chinese-finger-trap/quagmire into outright Civil War, or bolt straight into the waiting arms of our worst regional enemy...or both.

Rick Santorum continues flogging his odious Chick Tract Pop-up Book (Gloria Steinem is responsible for the destruction of the American Family, Boston Liberals are to blame for the worldwide child-molesting Catholic Priest scandal, etc.), and continues to melt down whenever a journalist asks him anything like an actual question.

Bob Novak goes full Howard Beale on the air...over nothing.

Gas prices are shooting up so fast and vertically that they would have bid fair to win the X-Prize, had it not been won already.

A lone citizen is standing up to the massed liar armies of Dis down in Crawford, Texas in what is shaping up to be our own, man-facing-off-against-Tank, Tiananmen Square Moment.

The second most powerful man in the Evangelical Permanent Revolutionary Party that runs every branch of government – Tom DeLay – is not only finally being noticed as the raving, ratskulled loon that he has always been, but Indictment Bells are Breaking Up that Old Gang of His.

Oh, and turns out that Karl Rove’s a traitor.

Not in the delightfully, truth-free use of that word as applied by Freeper’s to anyone who makes direct eye-contact with Dear Leader. No, the creature that makes the Paper Mache President move and speak is an actual, betrayer-of-his-nation-at-time-of-war, Traitor.

These are just a few of the Big News Stories of the summer. Some of them huge by implication, some bellwethers of things to come and some are the stuff of Actual History, but they all blaze around us so towering and immediate and vital that to go to the trouble of conspicuously ignoring them all means something very important.

To understand the context of this phenomenon, one might want to at least skim Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ little-known, second-most popular book, “On Bush and Lying” in which she outlines the “Five Stages of Neocon Lying”:

1. Denial
2. Denial
3. Anger
4. Anger
5. Anger

Followed by Anger, Anger, Anger, Anger and then apoplectic, incoherent outrage.

Followed by a sizzling sound, and that burning-solder tang of old, greasy circuits – seated during the Reagan administration and held in place with strips of Confederate Flag Duct Tape – being flash-fried in a final, frenzied attempt to keep the truth at bay through sheer fucktard willpower.

That looks and smells a LOT like this (via Atrios)

From his Columnist’s Aerie atop the highest place in all the land, and surrounded by some of the fattest, ripest, low-hangin’-est news stories in modern history, week after week after week, BoBo digs deep into the tiny change-pocket of his talent and comes up with squalling babies, Little League baseball, and his barely sublimated desire to braid John Robert’s hair while they gossip the night away about evil College Liberals.

It is this shrieking absence -- the palpable negative space created by a total embargo on Actual News -- that provides the most crucial context for the state of the Conservative Mind.

Having run out of lies that anyone but the most profoundly fucktarded Republican could possible buy – and since they have made such Total War on Reality itself the very concept of the Truth has become their hated nemesis – they have no other choice but to lie doggo.

To just go politically and journalistically catatonic.

BoBo isn’t somehow accidentally stranded in “Denial”, or becalmed there, or new to the city and doesn’t know how to read the street signs that all point to where the Real News is. Neither is Fox. Neither is CNN.

No, BoBo is using his considerable power and position to stand on the brakes with both of his tiny hooves, stomping down as hard as he possibly can, as the tires smoke and the whole vehicle fishtails wildly, and inches squealingly forward despite his ilk's best effort to Not Mention The War...

...which has got to be incredibly hard to do while at the same time you’re keeping your eyes wide shut, and clapping and clapping and yelling, “I Believe in Tinkerbell” at the top of your lungs.