Sunday Morning Comin’ Down Part I.

The Year of Grieving Dangerously.

At the Sunday Mouse Circus this week a few, carefully rueful Republicans were allowed out of their kraals to walk abroad in the lands of the Sun and speak in somber tones about what saddened them…

Lindsay Graham, por ejemplo, gave a long and painful laundry list in the Conspicuously Passive Voice about all that has gone wrong with Iraq, and David Brooks waxed sorrowful about, among other things, the plight of New Orleans.

And it came out...weird.

As if they were narrating some alternate-reality PBS documentary about a pathetic, third-world planet that had been fucked into the planetary mantle by a junta of blood-drunk simians.

Assumed eerily, abstracted, Voice Over Narration tones while objectively reporting from the demesnes of Ming the Merciless on galactic Far Rockaway…

…instead of what they are: the all-too-terrestrial collaborators with our Pennsylvania Avenue-housed enemies, with their arms bloody up to their rotator cuffs.

That’s what I mean by “Grieving Dangerously”.

Because in case you hadn't noticed, BoBo, it is your President who is the Primum Mobile behind the events for which you daub your eyes and blow your nose and moan piteously.

Your Administration.

Your Party.

Your Standard Bearers.

Always your kind gets right up to the foul line of actually speaking the truth to power…and always you quickly pivot away away, because for a modern Republican, meek obedience to the White House Peacock Throne will always trump conscience and the good of the country. As long as the Emperor is a Republican, that is.

Always.

It really is quite a chilling bit of doublethinkful prestidigitation that the GOP spokespods were using to try and slip Stoopid Pills into our drinks: trying to pass themelves off as both weepy graveside mourners ("Oh, isn’t it just AWFUL about how Iraq was fucked up, and isn’t it just a crying-fucking-shame about NOLA") while keeping their dues fully paid up on their livery licenses as wheelmen to the two-bit gunsels who committed those crimes in the first place.

As if we would not notice their culpability, and the sad fact that there is and will never be a Republican Eugene McCarthy. A man of splendid virtue and moral authority who will get right up in the grill of his own President when his President is ruinously wrong during a time of war when the stakes are high. Who explains that he must do what he does precisely because the stakes are so high, and the consequences so grave.

Or a Republican Richard Pryor for that matter: GOP “humor” tends to all run the along the sneering, “Now let’s curb-stomp the queers” Limbaugh lines, and telling the truth to Power has never been possible while you make your nest in Power’s asscrack.

Just ask John McCain; the “maverick” who has once-and-for-all sold his birthright to Bush for a mess of Roveage.


On This Week, Joe Biden asked why “unity is so hard for the Dems.”

Uh…because we’re not fascists?

Oh, you were being rhetorical.

Then Other Joe also observed that a lot of Dems have no faith that the President can adapt. That this is a contest between those that believe, “…it is the bottom of the 8th and those that think it’s of the bottom of the 9th.” (more or less a citation)

All I can say is, Joey Joe-Joe Junior needs to spend a few more pfennigs on writers so that he never again gets stranded out on the digital hustings, trying to keep the rain off with such a weak-assed simile.


On Meet the Press…Senator Lindsay Graham and Madeline Albright.

Graham tells us shit that we all already know, but it was slightly amazing to hear a Republican say it aloud. That we’ve been undersold as to the cost of this war this at every turn. We planned only for the best and consistently ignored the possibility of the worst.

He observes that there is no political consensus, and wishes we could stop running ads at each other. Senator Graham first consults his notes and then says that he honestly doesn’t want to have a campaign about who is a patriot. About who is stronger or weaker.

And I have no reason to believe that he wasn’t telling the truth.

Albright: I don’t know a single Dem who wants us to lose.

Graham: Madam Secty, it goes both ways. Calling the President and Vice President a liar. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

Yeah…but…see…Bush really is a liar. And Cheney really is a liar. And the fact that the freaks on the Right would rather let the world burn than admit that naked truth as it does the Electric Slide mere inches from their noses says all there needs be said about their character.

Sorry Senator. We tried “nice”. We tried “collegial”. We tried to lower the temperature. In return we got a coordinated and deliberate campaign of hatespeech and “compromise is weakness” firebombing from Gingrich. We got Limbaugh – the “Majority Maker” – as the leader of the GOP Lie Factory making unrelenting war on civility and comity itself.

We got Impeachment.

The beating, unrepentant heart of your Party, Senator, is still Lee Atwater. And Newt Gingrich. And Gay Bashing. And racism. And Swiftboating. And Karl Rove. And all the other mutant offspring of the Southern Strategy. Without that deliberate, relentless appeal to the darkest and most bestial fears and hatreds, your Party, Senator, would not now be in power.

Not even close.

You people built this madhouse, Sentor, one brick at a time, over just such objections and warnings that the filthy tactics your Party was using to win was making it impossible to govern. And if you think for one minute that any of us feel the slightest pity for you now – at this late hour – that it's all coming home to roost exactly as you were warned it would, well, are you out of your fucking mind?

Your Party publicly derides civility and comity and cooperation as weaknesses, so why in the wide, wide world should we ever trust any of you people ever again, Senator?

Too bad, Senator. Too late and too bad.

Graham was also very eloquent on the subject of torture, but arguing that Dick Cheney is not the “Vice President of Torture”. He very ably explained why making torture a policy of out country or making exemption for laws against torture sets the worst kind of precedent.

Albright agrees. She just wishes that the President would call the VP and Sec Def into his office and say exactly what Graham was saying.

Graham says – more or less – that if, in the name of winning this war we abandon the moral authority and principles we’re championed we will have lost and made the world a poorer, darker place. And that if we get this right and keep our ethical standards above reproach, we can go to the world and say we’re cleaning this mess up, now you help.

All good points, Senator. It’s truly a shame that you belong to a Party that doesn’t believe a single fucking word of it. And sorry, Senator: Cheney is damned well the VP of torture and he’s damned well proud of it.


Continued in Part II...