Sunday Morning Comin’ Down Part II.

In which Rummy makes more guest appearances than Albert Brooks doing "The Simpsons".

Today it was the Don Rumsfeld solo tour, and what made it dizzying was that Rummy didn't just hop from venue to venue making the same arguments... to three decimal places it was exactly the same fucking stump speech.

It was remarkable in its own way. Sometime last night he got his clip loaded up with his Five Big Points and literally all he did was ponce from network to network, making almost exactly the same declamations over and over again, using the same inflection, and shoehorning the same market-tested phrases into the response to whatever the question happened to be.

That's "response" not "answer", because Rum Tum Tigger just categorically refused to answer a single direct, specific question with anything remotely approaching a direct answer. It even made Chris Wallace on the Fox Knocking Shoppe a little snitty, which takes some doing considering that Fox is to Neocons as...

A) Slop is to Swine.
B) Coulter-lips are to McCarthy-taint.
C) "Knock" is to Count Orlok.
D) All of the above.

Twas eerie. Unnatural. Like watching a tribble growl at a comely Vulcan.

So I might as well start with Fox: that's where Big Don first laid down the Anti-Lincoln Logs that he then spent the rest of the day lightly rearranging in front of other cameras.

We learned that we should not be paying attention to any of the previous mile-markers -- or the staggering and steadily escalating cost in lives and treasure, or the intractability of the insurgency -- but only to the political process, which is Goin' Just Super!

Wallace then asked the key question.

There were only 800, Level-One-trained Iraqi troops in September, or one battalion, which, for those keeping score at home, was a figure that proved without doubt that the Administration had been lying about that particular detail for, oh, a couple of years now. But really, for a White House this completely "tettered and barked about" with lies on every subject, at every level of detail, is anyone surprised anymore? These men who use to get so exercised over Bill Clinton's haircuts?

So there was a mere single battalion of Level One troops, and a mere 29,000 Level Two Iraqi troops as of September, and Wallace wanted to know if that number had improved.

In other words, simple arithmetic.

To which the SecDef came back with his now tired, hagged-out, Rum-Fu doubletalk and tried his most powerful Five Point Exploding Truth techniques on this most obsequious of interviewers.

And it didn't work.

Uh oh.

Wallace, in fact, kept trying to steer his liege back to the subject of specificity without breaking the skin, until Rummy finally just insisted that looking at "raw numbers" was pointless.

"Look instead into my eyes, America. Deeeeep into my eyes..."

On other words, no, there hasn't been any progress whatsoever but I'm far, far too gutless to admit that in public.

Until approximately 1.3 seconds later when the subject came to drawing down troops, at which point The Abstractioner of Defense was suddenly all about the hard numbers.

Oh in case you wanted to know, continuing the meme that there is Nothing Extraordinarily Awful Going On Here, Rummy explained that those criticizing Iraq were just like those who criticized World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He might have also mentioned Desert Storm.

Then came a citation from Churchill about not whether or not we can win the war, but being "allowed to win" the war. Cue stock footage of GOP torchlight rallies ten years from now when Jenna and Not Jenna are ranting Coulter-style about being "stabbed in the back" by the Liberals. Which is why Dear Father (now seen only in profile, in dim light, with voice-over narration) could not win the Great Patriotic War in Iraq.

And speaking of Jenna and Not Jenna...

Rummy used his Weirding Witch, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice to say to Americas who dared to call Dear Leader's unalloyed brilliance into question, "put yourself in the shoes of the soldier..." and I for one applaud his call for Jenna and Not Jenna -- AWA all of the sons and daughters of privilege who have touted this grotesque misadventure from the start -- to immediately put themselves "in the shoes of the soldier" and volunteer for infantry duty in Iraq.

Tomorrow morning. 9:00.

Bravo, Rummy! Bravo!

He also conjugated the word "precipitous" several different times today.

That's a big word, isn't it?

p-r-e-c-i-p-i-t-o-u-s.

And lest he commit another "disassembling" embarrassment in front of a billion people, perhaps the White House staff should bring the Bicycle Chief up to speed as to it's meaning. So to help out, here are two handy definitions of the root of that Very Big Word from this site:

1. Moving rapidly and heedlessly; speeding headlong.

2. Acting with or marked by excessive haste and lack of due deliberation. See synonyms at impetuous, reckless.

Too bad Rummy hadn't yet developed such a keen interest in not behaving p-r-e-c-i-p-i-t-o-u-s-l-y while he and his henchmen were trying to figure out a way to dupe us into Iraq.

Next up was Middle Ground Joe Biden, who came right out of the box saying that it would be a mistake to pull troops out immediately, but then the recessive presonality of Good Joe Biden took over and did a pretty fair job of punching Darth Agnew's throat out. Biden had his facts, rebuttals, quotes and timelines lined up and blew Cheney's Spiroesque, "No spine, no memory" rant apart like so many fat, slow-moving, pie-crust skeet.

Probably didn't help that Big Dick was dressed as The Penguin when he delivered his latest Fearemiad (driftglass TM) either.

Brit Hume was out, possibly at Dr. Dark's Winter Pandemonium Carnival where, rumor has it, he is the Puppy Jai Alai team captain, so Paul Gigot settled himself into the Dark Throne to slather the proceedings with a more cherubic brand of gall. Much beoaning then ensued as he, Kristol and Wallace eye-blinked "The Stoopid One has Fucked Us All" back and forth to each other in GOP codex.

Later on, when Juan Williams tried to explain that Outing a Spy is Bad, Bill Kristol dismissed Traitorgate as mere gossip and trivia and nonsense. He may have actually waved a dainty kerchief when he said it and made faint truckling noises deep in his throat. I don't know. I was yelling very loud so I may have missed something.

I mean, I supposed when you're a Republican, and you have submitted to your Party's mandatory conscience-ectomy, everything becomes tactical. Death, lies, treason, ruin, debt...all just variables to be factored into an equation to calculate the means to politically advantageous ends. Which begs the question, if you have no conscience or ethical foundation to begin with -- if you dismiss everything no matter how tragic or destructive as "just polices" -- from exactly what moral high ground do you get the fucking nerve to criticize anyone else?

About anything?

On Face the Nation, Senator Dodd noted that Rummy had made something like 14 appearances on Sunday Morning talk shows, but had not yet deigned to put in an appearance on Dodd's oversight committee, despite the fact that he had been invited by the chairman. Firmly and repeatedly.

Rummy appeared -- on maybe it was just a holographic apparition replicating of his Fox performance. Not a dime's worth of difference between the two.

George Will was also dressed in his dour-rags, sad that there was no "domestic echo of this war." No sacrifice. No sense of centrality to our lives. He's right, and damned well knows the cure for such ennui could begin in earnest tomorrow with Jenna at Not Jenna reporting to boot camp and urging other of their caste to follow suit. And with the President announcing a war tax to help pay for, among other things, the body armor that our troops still do not have in sufficient quantity.

But he also must know that will never happen: Elitist Republicans don''t "do" sacrifice, and they are only brave with the blood of other people's children.

Fareed Zakaria noted that Rummy was a "potted plant on this show." And he was right. In case I wasn't clear, Rummy's tour today was a disaster. Unmitigated. And as Fareed further noted, Rumsfeld took absolutely no responsibility for anything.

Martha Radditz went even further, all-but-mocking the Preznit's comments that he deferred to the "sober judgment" of the commanders on the ground. Calling sub-vocally for someone to Please For God's Sake Explain to The Stoopid Man Running The Country that the military obeys civilian authority. That his job is to set policy, and theirs is to execute it, and not the other way around.

And that "Win, goddamn-it!" is a wish and not a policy.

It was, in other words, just another day of the same lies, slime and the arrant cowardice of hiding behind the military that has become de rigeur for these creatures.

Rummy was everywhere, tracking his shit across every network, and triggering the same disgusted blowback, except on the Chris Matthews Show, which featured Maureen Dowd (looking very, uh, good), Kathleen Parker, David Brooks and Howard Feinman,

And my, my, my weren't the clattering sound of the nails of certain Neocon Rats clearly audible clicking on the deckplates, scampering like hell for the life rafts as the rapidly sinking USS Dubya breaks deep and begins taking on serious water (hat-tip to Gordon Lightfoot.)

Brooks, saying that the "stay the course" nonsense was essentially ...political nonsense.

Parker saying that Bush is a "terrible communicator" who offers nothing but "stale platitudes" that no one believes anymore.

Yikes! While the cat's safely away in Asia, how the mice do slip out of their shock collars, get drunk on whatever they can pry out of the green room minibar and talk a lot of smack about what pussies felines are?!

This was strikingly (and, I would be willing to bet, deliberately) contrasted by a piece on what a Hunka Hunka Burnin' Justice Pat Fitzgerald is (and Ye of Little Faith were wondering how this was all going to get tied back to where Part One of this opus began a million words ago: Fitzmas. Don't worry; it's quite true I often take a scenic route, but I usually have a rough map in my head and with a little celestial navigation I almost always get where I mean to go. Eventually.) and another segment about what a quietly noble man Bill Clinton has become, but the program had ended thematically a few minutes earlier when MoDo pegged a beautiful fastball on the intelligence suppression efforts of the White House.

Specifically taking them to the woodshed not for the Nuclear Lie, or the AQ Link Lie, but for aggressively burying every scrap of evidence that the fall of Iraq would be followed by a violent insurgency.

Matthews: Deliberately?

MoDo: Yeah. Because they wanted to go to war.

Which I think sums up this tragic clusterfuck perfectly.