Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down

There a picture...in the picture!

This time around, Fox, Matthews and everyone else.

Why?

Because “everyone else” were having somewhat sober discussions on matters of war and peace and corruption, which is all to the good.

And because the bastards run them simultaneously, like three trains on parallel tracks.

And because zipping around the horn – from ABC, to CBS to NBC – gave me a very eerie sensation when taken in the aggregate, that was entirely different from anything I’d have soaked up seeing one or another.

On Fox ...

Wallace’s Condi Paean. Slow, fat pitches and bad refereeing. Is this the Sunday Puppet Fest, or the AL playoffs?

Followed by Dick Durbin, and Chris Wallace want’s to know “Well, what’s the Democratic Plan? Huh! Huh! Huh!”

The Democratic Plan is to hold this Administration accountable.

Wallace is incredulous. But but but...they told you what they’re doing. They have one whole battalion of Iraqis who can fight without training wheels. And several more that won’t run away as long as the are American troops standing behind them with fixed bayonets. Y’know, standing up armies and elections and all kindsa stuff like that?!

Of course the political mile-markers they told us would turn things around and numbers they swore were “real” this week bear no resemblance whatsoever to what they told us last week,

or the story they spun the week before,
or the week before that,
or the week before that,
or the week before that,
or the week before that,
or the week before that,
or the week before that...

Gee, Chris. Maybe “accountability” has something to do with asking simple, direct questions about the serial lying and fuckups that this Administration has been kiting like bad checks for three years now, and that loyal reichmedia apologists like you just keep right on cashing.

Wallace goes change-up on the Judy Miller NOC-NOC-"Who's There?"-"Flame"-"Flame who?", septic-tank-explosion and demands to know if “we” (Meaning, one must assume, law-abiding, non-traitors-and-criminals) aren’t now just criminalizing good, old-fashioned politics.

Durbin: When you talk about “criminalization” of politics, just look. Tom DeLay. Bill Frist. Jack Abramoff. Tim Flanigan. You know, actual crimes being investigated?

You know, that that fetid pattern of corruption that runs right through the GOP like blood poisoning?

Oops.

Then swinging on a slider, high and outside, Durbin opines that the President fucked up by dropping Harreit Meirs' religion into the mix.

Wallace leaps up on his tiny, shiny hooves: “Hypocrite! Hypocrite! You talked to John Roberts about religion!”

Uh, actually that was a private conversation, Chris. Private, and reported inaccurately.

Wallace: Nothing is private in Washington.

Really? Well I guess since everyone knows everything, that's why we don’t need any actual “reporters” anymore?

Wallace’s, “Oh, snap!” brand of bitchy-gotcha-dudgeon-journalism would be incrementally less nauseating if it hadn’t followed immediately on the heels of his Meir’s-mash-note, tongue-laving of Condi Rice’s bikini-area.

Later on Fox...The Meirs Mess.

Looks like the White House has sobered up and decided to actually defend their nominee, with something other than the Gideon Bible Dubya found in one of the Lincoln Bedroom bedside tables.

Then Brit Hume does the Hume thing. Republican Senators, he sez, running for re-election need the Right. The support of the Tru-Right (the ranting Proles For Jesus) is very important to their re-election bids, and pointy-headed intellectuals like Bill Kristol not so much.

Thanks, Oh Humid One, for making explicit what was always clear-but-desperately denied by the Falwell Party. To wit, the Christopaths do indeed run the GOP wholly and outright and they tolerate dandies and fops and domino-masqued smarty-pants like Kristol only because of the polysyllabic-pig-perfume they bring to the party.

But if they mince out of line even a little, into the woodchipper they go.

And double-plus thanks for conspicuously omitting any mention whatsoever that GOP Senators should act out of conscience, or principle or in the best interests of the country. For being as subtle as a mob enforcer in reminding the GOP Senate that that James Dobson owns their political giblets and they’d be well advised to shut the fuck up and do what their Master commands if they know what’s good for them.

He didn’t quite say, “We know where your kids go to school, and it’d sure be a pity if anything happened to them” but it certainly would have been entirely in keeping with Hume’s basic, beastial temperament.

Ah, how rewarding to see the seething rift between the Imperial Kristols and the Thugocracy Humes boil out into the sun. To see the “Chinese wall” between these equally contemptible, anti-American dogmas burn down and watch rabid weasels tussle with rabid swine now that the Rove Police are busy keeping Boss Man out of prison.

Bwahahaha!

It was all Fun, Fun, Fun ‘til their Daddy took the Turdblossom away...

On Face The Nation...Biden and Hagle (Henceforth to be known as “Bagel!”), sittin’ in a tree.

Are we losing?

Lightening summary: Elections are good. Shit is still bad. December election are coming that will reprise all the problems that the Iraqimericans took off the table in order to hold an election yesterday without the whole country going up like a crate of bottle rockets in a microwave.

Biden fears civil war, widening into a regional war. Twas ever thus. Shall ever be thus.

On Meet The Press... Rice reruns her Fox script. The bad guys are...bad.

Crook’s and Liars has a longer, better take on it with depth-linking to Think Progress, and here’s the short of it:

Think Progress: This morning on NBC's Meet the Press, Condoleezza Rice explains why we invaded Iraq:

"The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach...

Condi Rice said nothing that backs up President Bush's "last resort" war. This is a war of choice in keeping with PNAC's view of the middle east.

And of course Timmuh let that one bob lazily past like the last float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and refused to touch it. Hey Tim: The Secretary of State just said that the Preznit’s Casus Belli for going into Iraq was a lie. If you ever grow up and become a Real Reporter you will find little things like that will cause your Spider Sense to tingle like they’re a-crawl with radioactive genital crabs.

Carl Levin came and went, talking of the government.

On This Week... Judy, Judy, Judy!

Robert Bennett – Judy Miller’s Lawyer (Yes, he is Bill Bennett’s brother).

You know, interviewing someone’s attorney during an ongoing investigation is never going to be fruitful. Although it was fun to see him try to parse his language to describe Scooter Libby’s letter as anything other that an effort to club Judy like a harp seal into going along with his alibi.

Joseph diGenova was there, as was Richard Beinvenista (Watergate guy). Richard B. raises the point of – criminal or not -- the “casual discussion” of confidential information. The sign of a second administration’s sense of entitlement.

Later on This Week – Joe Klein. Fareed Zakaria. George Will.

Fareed raises -- clearly and succinctly -- the most important point as to what is really happening in Iraq: that the Constitution on which everything hinges was so hollowed-out before this election as to be meaningless. The hard stuff was all tabled. Every time an important milestone swims into view and it looks Very Bad, we just excise the difficult bits and postpone them until some other day.

And then that day comes, and the same thing happens again. All Preamble, no Constitution.

The Big Three in the Aggregate:

So here we are, conning among the Three Traditional Networks, and back and forth mostly between two topics.

First, an endemic, criminal conspiracy by a berserk, paranoid and out-of-control White House bent on destroying anyone who raises any questions about their behavior whatsoever.

Second, a quag-war that the Administration keeps telling us in Chipper, Cheery tones is going Great. We’re right on schedule. Everything five-by-five. Even as the sharp ribs of their Ministry of Truth-style approach to war-marketing are now plainly showing through their thin skin. Even as every promise they have ever made has turned out to be a lie. Ever as what little we are allowed to see on teevee throws their grotesque behavior into glaring relief.

What it says to me is this: Our very own Post-Modern-Watergate is now permanently and inextricably, linked with out very own Post-Modern-Vietnam. That the GOP’s Watergate playbook keeps fucking up their Vietnam talking points, and vice versa.

On Chris Matthews – A Return to Mayberry!

A high school production to be sure, where people might need to play a couple of roles apiece.

Andy Sullivan’s there, both as Anj Taylor – the Sheriff without a Gun -- and as Aunt Bea at her most pickle-obsessed.

Matthews steps in as Barney, and Floyd.

Maureen Dowd does a yummy turn as Helen “Hottie in a One-Horse town” Crump.

I can’t figure out where to cast Cynthia Tucker, but take a wild guess who’s playing Otis the Drunk?

MoDo...Rove is always behind every Bush smear campaign, and in this case they picked someone you’re not allowed to smear.

Same old smelly Bush Whorehouse.

Chris Hitchens' rejoiner comes down to...Wilson’s a liar. Liar Liar Liar! There really was an Iraqi nuke program. They really were scouring the Plains of Niger for yellow-cakes. And looking at Otis (you'd already guessed, right?) -- listening to his bizarre assertions from the dark side of the Moon in a whole other, alternate Universe -- I gotta ask myself: Meth-mouth, or just bad British dentistry?

Cynthia Tucker: What Otis won’t own up to is the simple, observable reality that, if the White House had the facts on their side, why didn’t they just argue the facts. They didn’t because the couldn’t. Instead, they do what they always do: go ape-shit, over-the-top to personally destroy anyone who doesn’t mindlessly cheerlead their loony policies.

Ahhhh, Otis. What a complete load. A man who peels his gratin lids back from his poached-egg eyes to simulate a look of shock. Who doesn’t understand how anyone could call what was done to Joe Wilson “smearing” them. After all, the media just reported the simple truth?

Yes. The simple truth...that she was covert agent. Outed – in typical reckless and criminal Bush fashion – in order to kneecap her husband. The ends that the Administration was trying to achieve are always the same; the personal destruction of anyone who does not toe their Stalinist Party Line with perfect purity, but in this case the most efficient means to do that was to blow a spy's cover.

Which isn’t smearing: it’s actual treason. The slime began once someone decided to fight back.

And how does the Party of God continue to believe it can get away with their crimes – High and Low – and their generally outhouse-rat filthy behavior while still maintaining a Spin Profile of Bible-and-Flag-Swaddled piety?

Well let’s just say it helps to have the likes of Marshall Petain's Personal Wine Taster to hide behind.

Onward.

It is usually an unpleasant sight to see a serious, DT alky either literally or metaphorically shivering and shaking in a puddle of his own pee, muddling his facts, squishing around in the shit in his trousers.

Usually.

But I must admit in this case it was darkly funny. To see him stagger verbally to his feet in sodden fury over MoDo saying that Bush had first promised to fire “anyone who leaked” and then change his mind – Read “Lie” – and says that now he’ll only fire someone who is convicted. That perhaps if Rove is convicted, Bush will move the goalposts yet again and make the criteria actually wearing a sassy jumpsuit-and-manacles-combo while being frog-marched into the Federal pen.

That was what Otis got all squinky about, only to be corrected and spanked by Chris Matthews hisself over what Matt Cooper said and why Otis was just damned well wrong.

That’s gonna leave a mark, and one may presume that Otis won’t be the first sot to wake up and wonder where all the bruises came from. It was also disconcerting to see MoDo’s fiery tresses on the side facing Otis curl up and singe whenever he, uh, “ginned” up a “rebuttal.”

MoDo got off a sweet John Tower joke – that Papa Bush tried to get a drunk appointed by promising that he’d “only drink one glass of wine a day” – and I gotta believe that sitting next to Otis and listening to him belching off his rejoinders had something to do with her choice of Instructive Parable.

And in the end, that’s the thing about serious, untreated addicts -– wet or dry, who booze on liquor or power or dogma -- in the media or running a nation.

They become so hardcore incapable to ever admit error that even as they drive the car right off the cliff (for the fifth or sixth or twentieth time), they will peevishly and blearily argue that by plummeting they get much better gas mileage than they would by staying between the white lines.