Are you a punkass Neocon?

Or a "Neo" Con?

Looong-assed day today. An all-out run from what my former father-in-law used to call oh-dark-thirty until whateverthehell ungodly hour it is now, so I'm running on the promise of fumes.

Still, is one ever too wiped-out not to draw a few, well-deserved welts across the Moderate's fat backside?

So a quick post & then off to bednights, and another marathon tomorrow.

To wit...

...a Moderate Republican now faces this decision: he must reconcile the fact that his party Impeached the previous President for trivia, while the President he re-elected harbors a traitor name Karl Rove in the White House, and breaks his own word about how he said he would deal with anyone involved in outing a CIA agent.

The President is a liar, and is using the good offices of the White House to shield a criminal and an enemy of the United States from justice as surely as the Vatican is using it’s power and position to shield child molesters.

The Original Sin of this Administration was lying to the American people and the world to take the last Superpower on Earth into war against an admittedly awful regime, that as it turns out, was holding onto power by it’s fingertips. A regime that was crippled and caged and no more a threat to the American People that a doddering, hobbled and drugged grizzly in a mile-deep bear pit in Alaska is a threat to suddenly leap free, commandeer a plane, land in Denver, sprint across the rest of the continent, and start mauling children in Ohio.

The President and each and every one of his Men consistently and willfully lied to get us to go to War, and since that Original Sin they have only compounded their crimes by the miserably incompetent way they have conducted the war itself. At every turn, letting ideology trump facts and common sense. At every juncture, squealing out grotesque, Premature Ejaculations (works both ways) of victory when no one can even explain what the word means.

And yet, even now, the Moderates ignore the retching stink and still wade to their chins into the six-feet-high-and-rising crapflood gushing out of the Oval Office, paw hysterically through the offal, shrieking, “With this much shit, there has GOT to be a pony!”

The war has been a disaster, it’s predicates have been shown to be lies, and The Bicycle Chief and all of his minions who trapped us into this iron maiden just whiz merrily on past knowing that you Moderates are to gutless to call him on it.

Reach into the feculent hurricane that is this Administration’s Iraq policy and pull out anything George Bush has done at random – anything at all – and it’ll be either a lie or a failure...or a hand-spun cover-up cozy of White House doublespeak that has been used to hide a lie or failure coming apart at the seams. And the leading edge of that shitstorm is Karl Rove. The poster-boy for everything that it fatally, feloniously, treasonously wrong with the Bush Administration is the very same man who stands at the President’s elbow, working his pulleys and guy-wires, spitting words into Dubya's mouth that he then faithfully regurgitates back into the microphone.

So start small, Moderates. Heroic deeds and dreams of Party Reformation are for some far-away tomorrow, and face it, when it comes to slaying dragons, you’re girlie-weak and all flab.

Do a little stretching first. Build up your courage.

Some warm-up laps.

And you can start by demanding that Bush get rid of Karl Rove.

He’s just one guy. The chubbiest, easiest target you’ll ever get. He’s the rottin’est, low-hangin’est fruit on the vine, so as a goodwill down-payment on the reparations that the Republican Party will need to pay for fucking this country up almost beyond recognition, Rove must go. He needs to be repudiated, reviled and prosecuted, but first he needs to be shown the door.

This is a no-brainer…and non-negotiable: He who stands with the Traitor Rove, stands against America.

This one’s on your dime, Moderates.

Of course you need to drain the pus of Conservative Christian Fundamentalism from your party, but that would mean risking losing some elections, and since a Moderate these days will sell out his country for the price of a tax cut, we all know you don’t have the guts to do that.

And of course you need to amputate the PNAC lunatics who still dream of global American Empire, carved it out along a swath that starts a little north of Tropic of Cancer and ends a little south of Tropic of Capricorn with M240, thermobaric weapons and the Cross, and paid for with infantrymen’s blood. But we know you’re pussies and as lethally ludicrous as the fantasy of a billion dead-or-forcibly-Democratized ay-rabs pumping a tide of cheap oil that will lift all SUVs is, you’re jusssst morally mingy enough to tag along on that ride for a few more years to see if it pays off.

However Rove is only one guy. A guy who sold out his country. And the President already said he’d kick to the curb anyone caught doing what Rove has been caught doing.

So are you that big a pussy? That you won’t even stand up against one actual traitor because he’s got an office in the West Wing?

You have to choose, Moderates, and if you don’t have the spine for even this little bit if justice, your soul is lost.

Or, to steal and abuse a snip from The Matrix…

Neo Con: What do you mean, without Rove?

The Oracle: Are you sure you want to hear this? Bush believes in Rove, Neo Con. And no one, not you, not even me can convince him otherwise. He believes it so blindly that he's going to sacrifice his country to save that little shitbag.

Neo Con: What?

The Oracle: You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Karl Fucking Rove, and in the other hand you'll have your nation, civility and the rule of law.

One of them is going to die.

Which one will be up to you.

You, Moderates, manufactured this fucking mess. You put these thugs into power, and then despite overwhelming evidence of your folly, you rewarded their criminality with re-election.

And however much 9/11 Rhohipnol he continues to RPG into your Koolaid to keep you stupid enough and pliant enough to have elected and then re-elected this bibbling idiot in the first place, you cannot ignore the fact that this miserable failure of a President was handed the biggest Blank Publisher’s Clearinghouse Novelty Check in the history of the world. And that had he even just blown it on hookers and coke, he would have inflicted vastly less long-term damage to this country than he has done.

You got everything you asked for. The whole government, from crotch to crown. Unlimited funds, no timetable, a prostrate and crippled opponent, a comic-book villain that everyone hated to begin with, a world brimming with post-9/11 sympathy for the U.S., a craven and docile press, a muzzled opposition and your glorious “mandate” –- and congratulations; you have fucked all of it – all of it -- into the cold, cold ground.

You are simply unfit to govern a great nation.

In fact, the Dominionists who run your Party really only see one problem with the way their papier mache President has run things; that there are still bare handful of non-ultra-wingnut judges who stand in the way of the Prophet Dobson and his Vizier DeLay from ruling by decree.

The only problem, according to the Dominionists who run your Party, is that the President isn’t crazy enough. That despite serial disasters at their hands that have cooked off one after another like a crate of Black Talons in a pizza oven, the only problem they see it they don’t have enough power to really set the Earth on Fire with Christ’s Radioactive Love.

Yet.

Everything the Progressives warned you would happen if you pursued this course is coming true with a vengeance.

Every justification your President proffered is now shown to be a lie. Every promise your President made is now show to have been reckless, dry-drunk idiocy.

It’s down to this, Moderates: Your Country or your Party. Your Principles or your Party.

Lincoln or Rove.

One of them is going to die.

Which one will be up to you.

The Antimagazine

Send it back to Hell!

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe declared that the future of writing to be “magazineward” and invented/perfected an entirely new genre of fiction – the short story – to fit the demands of mass markets and power presses, mags have always been good barometers of pop culture.

They have become kind of noumenal in their way; pushed by commerce, sex, market-tested color preferences and the size and heft that the consumer finds most comforting into a kind of perfectly adapted and perfectly optimal form, that lives on past the racks by the checkout counter.

Even given the literally unlimited amount of space that the digital world theoritcally afford publishers, by their names – e-“zines” – and their content (a mix of eye-snagging graphics, writing and advertising) the electronic world bows it’s head to the perfection of the form, even as it tinkers with the delivery system and content.

Now by and large, content-wise, popular magazines suck kinda hard.

They just do.

Their purpose, lest we forget, is exactly like that of commercial teevee; draw a crowd and push product, and to do that they slather the covers with the same drivel month after month: blondes, diets, who’s fucking who, how to make your lover come like a rocket, tinting tips, etc. with a few columns of actual prose tamped in between ads for vodka that’s radically different than every other vodka that has ever been because of the lasercut work on the bottle...and the sprays and unguents (a word I just don't get to use often enough) guaranteed to make your cooter smell like a pine forest after a fresh-squeezed orange juice storm.

Me, I’m a “Hilights” man; I just love finding those goddamned hidden heads in the trees! Also, on an irregular basis, Scientific American. National Geographic. Conscious Choice. Lots of things. Basically whatever grabs my eye at the bookstore, and if the internets weren’t heavy-laden with free porn, that list would be a lot longer.

When I was a younger driftglass, not as smoove and skilled and clear-complexioned as I am today, my friends and I – believe it or not – read a lot of stuff along the lines of Cosmo. Basic geek research: we wanted to generate many pant-jettisoning moments with the girls we knew but who were completely unaware of us, and since they weren’t on the verge of just blurting out the Big Answers to how to get them enthusiastically behind the whole pant-jettisoning campaign, we did what geeks do.

We sought out the OEM info, the user manual and technical specs.

Cosmo was about as close as we ever got.

Actually Cosmo is still kind of fun, whereas the mag Moses is holding aloft in the pic and about the smash into a million bad adjectives is the Work of the Devil Himself.

For example, today between things I scared up a copy of the April 2005 Cosmo, which tells me important, exciting datum, such as:

...There is an Ultimate Sexual Pleasure that can be taught in 10 seconds (you'd think this would have come up before.)

...How to tell he adores you (not "if": Cosmo is a very declarative-sentence kinda mag.)

...Your Burning Sex Questions -- Answered (apparently there are combustible consequences if you fuck up the Ultimate Sexual Pleasure thingie, so no wonder it never came up before. I wonder what it could be? Like, what, freebasing cooter?)

...Sex Treats for HIM. (Yay!)

A health alert. And AMAZING people skills most women aren't taught. Again you have to wonder what would make a “people skill” AMAZING. I’m guessing it has something to do with being able to set fires with your mind...which would be pretty fucking amazing...AND which might relate to the Burning Sex Questions! Cosmo, you are a creature of so many mysteries.

Cosmo also reassures me that, if anything, I actually speak with too little inflection.

Alas at that moment I was forced to drop the magazine and move along so, like Tantalus forever stranded with his wishes just beyond his fingertip, I shall perhaps never know the Eight Sure Fire Ways to Drive Her Barkingly Orgasmic, as imparted by the climaxologists who undoubtedly labor in the state-of-the-art genitalaboratories of House Cosmo...forever searching for new, fleshy secrets that a billion years of evolution and 100 generations of assiduous sensualists might have missed.

Sorta like the Tide guys: always room at the sweet end of the Bell Curve for the New and Improved.

Sadly, this now leaves me on my own, armed only the simple, homespun pleasuring tools and techniques a mere single lifetime of hedonism, native research and a naughty imagination have bequeathed to me.

But see? Isn’t Cosmo kinda...fun? Or can be made into some fun with a little mental origami.

“Lucky” is different. “Lucky” isn’t fun.

I had twenty minutes on a treadmill this afternoon and picked it up just to see what was in it.

There is nothing in it. Nothing. No thing.

You know that bit cautioning against looking too long into the Abyss, lest the Abyss look back into you?

Well turns out the Abyss has a magazine called “Lucky.”

I read through the whole thing cover to cover and back, and it was nothing but ads.

It was amazing; I even lingered a bit over the sinister, subliminal artistry of an ad for a carcinoma delivery system simply because the Federally-mandated CO and Cancer warnings imbedded in the two-page-tobacco-porn-centerfold piece contained more actual content that any other square inch anywhere.

I’d cite quotes from it...but there were no quotes; just glowing, catalogue blurbs for flignits and doojobbers that YOU Mr. and Mrs. America simply cannot live without.

It was...dizzying. But then again, maybe that was the treadmill's doing.

I’ve picked out good articles or funny articles or interesting articles from inside just about every magazine I can remember. I even read some decent short fiction in an in-flight magazine once (Poe would've been delighted.) But who in their right minds would plunk down hard coin to buy a mag that is literally NOTHING but advertising from start to finish.

(FYI: If you want to get an early start believing that we should just write off a certain percentage of our species entirely, consider that "Lucky Magazine" has won awards for its circulation which was reported to be at 810,000 as of Spring 2003.)

With this magazine I think I may have caught a glimpse of a doomed subspecies beginning its death-spiral.

A mutant, like the saber-toothed tiger, whose chief weapon overgrows its place to such an absurd degree that it becomes life-threatening.

Like Christopath Republicanism.

Or like some rare breed of rodent that only mates with cousins and only eats its own feet until it bleeds out, I don’t care how fast it fucks and reproduces, you just know that they’re not long for this world.

Such a magazine is “Lucky.” XXX-Hard-Core porn for the Conspicuously Consumptive. A beast that exists solely to flog products of every shape and description to the obscenely idle, the dead-mule stupid and the wastrel rich.

Every bauble you could imagine.

Every useless trinket you could think of.

Every conceivable service.

Well, every good and service but one.

Nowhere in this profligate wasteland of words and picture did I find a single ad for the United States Armed Forces.

Word has it that the longtime Army ad agency -- Leo Burnett – re-upped with the military to the tune of a $350 million dollar contract, provided they do not use the word “Iraq” anywhere in their ad copy. And yet with all of that firepower they can’t find a few bucks to salt a half-page, “Army Of One” buy anywhere in poor “Lucky” magazine with its 818,000 well-off, well-fed and nothing-better-to-do-than-read-this-swill subscribers.

Cigs, yes. Booze, yes. Service to country, no.

We’ll I guess they know better than anyone what their demographic’ll go for, and what it won’t.

He Will Frag No More Forever.

And You Could Be Next!

No, sorry; I think not. Dead I shall surely be, but, I think, shot though the heart at the age of 102 by a jealous lover that finds me in the arms of another women. I can see that. I can feature than. But going out as one of the witless Bandwidth of Brothers, pasty, sticky-eyed and coffee-breathed?

I'll pass.

File this under: Another compulsive, digitally-masturbating lab-rat hits the “Stimulate” button until he dies.

Or what happen when ROTFLMAOTID goes horribly wrong. Again.

From the Los Angeles Times via the Chi Tribune...

COLUMN ONE
Gamers Rack Up Losses
In ultrawired South Korea, some people don't know when to leave the cyber cafe. For one obsessed man, the fantasy was fatal.
By Barbara Demick
Times Staff Writer

August 29, 2005

TAEGU, South Korea — By day, Lee Seung Seop was a skinny guy with glasses who wore a gray polyester uniform in his job as a repairman of industrial boilers.

But after work let out at 6 p.m., he would take off his uniform and head to a nearby Internet cafe. There, the 28-year-old would enter a far more enticing virtual world populated by saber-toothed dragons and purple-haired women in metallic bodices.

…
One night, after a 50-hour binge playing an online game called "World of Warcraft," Lee collapsed and fell off his chair. He died a few hours later.

…
But by dint of their status in cyberspace, South Koreans may be providing the rest of the world with a scary glimpse of the future.

…
"He seemed like a very normal and ordinary guy," said Park Chul Jin, the office manager. "There was nothing odd about him except that he was a game addict. We all knew about it. He couldn't stop himself."

Park fired Lee about six weeks before his death after repeated warnings about being late for work. Around the same time, Lee split up with a girlfriend, a fellow gamer, co-workers say.

The last weeks of Lee's life were spent largely in an Internet cafe. The PC bangs, as they're called here, are homes away from home for many South Koreans. The cafes typically charge just $1 an hour and are open round-the-clock.

…
"He just fell off his chair. His eyes were open, he was conscious, but we could tell right away that it was serious," said Kim Jin U, who was there at the time.

A police investigation attributed the fatality to excessive game playing. But gamers say Lee's behavior wasn't very different from that of countless other young men.

"If you could die from playing too many games, I'd have been dead long ago," Kim said. "I just can't believe it."

…
NCSoft Corp., South Korea's largest game developer, has put warnings in its popular "Lineage" and "Lineage II" games alerting players that after an hour online, they ought to take a break for the sake of their health.

"We want a decent, healthy gaming culture. Of course, you can't force people not to play games, just like you can't force them not to smoke," said an NCSoft spokeswoman, Min Ji Seon.

…
"I don't want to become an addict," said his friend, Song Ji Woo. "I want to be a lawyer."

You can’t force them not to play…says the spokeswoman for the company. Fuck you. If you’re going to run an opium den, the least you can do is hire a guy with bad teeth to poke the patrons with a pointed stick every day of so to make sure they're still breathing, and force them to take periodic pee and sammich breaks.

Still, this guy pissed away his woman and his livelihood while his friends shrugged and said they all knew he was a junkie...over a game.

He died for nothing.

That's what galls me. Quite literally for nothing. For flecks of color, and there is no digital Valhalla for those that give that last full measure of devotion for fucking pixel glory.

When you beef it so ridiculously that this could be your obit --

Godboss trained Lee Seung Seop across the gamescape, terminally debuffed him and then kicked him forever from the most persistent world there is.

He will be laid to rest along with his railgun, BFG, rocket launcher, crossbow and assorted loyal mules in a simple ceremony attended by his guild clan.

Present also will be assorted griefers, which doesn’t mean what you think it means.

-- it’s just fucking stupid.

No other word for it.

Stupid from every angle.

Stupid all the way around the block and back again.

Kicking Out Their Crutches - Part II

There is a tiny chamber of my heart that I reserve to feel some scrap of sympathy for the Moderate Republican army that is now painted into such a tight, little corner of Camp Quagmire. Were it not for the fact that it was my country they were marching into the abyss and my Constitution they were cutting into naked, blindfolded, genuine A.C. Delco car-battery-genitaled Gitmo Paper Dolls...I could almost pity the dumbasses in a detached kind of way.

Like watching the Dutch Tulip Economy implode from the safe distance of a history book, we now see the upper limits of how high and far into the future George Bush can throw a baldfaced lie before it hits the ground.

Turns out, it’s less than one year, and his arm is getting orders of magnitude weaker every day.

His Presidency has failed. Not the limited ignominy of being a one-term flop like his father, but is shaping up to be an Epic Failure. One for the ages. One that is already making Republicans look back on the Nixon Era as a Golden Age.

(I mean, can you imagine Nixon, at the height of Vietnam, white-shirted and black-tied, dress-socks and shiny shoes, pants cuffs turned up a trifle, scotch in one hand...bicycling all the way to hell and gone at Camp David and tossing out Little League first pitches...week after week after week?)

What leader – ever, in the history of the world – has decided to stake out five weeks in the middle of a disaster of a war that he started to laze around the fishin’ hole with Condi and Spanky and the rest of the Our Neocon Gang for a longer vacay that the average American can manage cumulatively over three years. And then decide to stay on paid cocktail hour...obstinately.

Loafing off in the middle of a war as a matter of....principle.

Jesus. No wonder the College Republicans gobble his dick like watermelon shooters. What could be more purely GOP that BBQ-ing ‘round the pool in the Most Exclusive, Secret-Service-Protected, Gated-Community in Christendom while the world goes up in flames?

But for those of us who aren’t besotted, inbred monarchists, at some point aren’t we obligated – as Maureen Dowd points out – to begin to notice that the President isn’t just utterly wrong anymore, but has actually lost his fucking mind? That the propeller on his Yale Beanie is spinning counter-clockwise even though he’s in the Northern Hemisphere? That he no longer even exchanges Christmas cards with reality?

And skimming along in the bottom quartile of the electorate – no longer invited even by proxy to the Party at the End of the Republic -- we find the Moderate Republicans, now begin to painfully embrace every truth were calling treason a few, short months ago. Almost pissing themselves in terror that they backed the wrong horse with the rent money, and the nag they bet it all on is not only not coming in Win, Place or Show...but has gone rabid-mad and is hunkered down on the clubhouse turn, smoking crack and kicking its jockey’s organs out onto the track one at a time.

The stands are empty and the race long run and lost, but still they persist – these scared-shitless Mods – believing that if they just keep clapping, the outcome will chance. These are the fuckers who flocked to the grandstands like the civilians at the beginning of the Civil War – with picnic baskets and Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes – to watch their President and his two-bit Ideology take the fight to the Bad Guys.

They were promised a video-friendly war like unto Iraq Part I. They were promised the copious hole-smoking of the evil men who attacked us four short year ago. Like the addled dopes they are, they were promised a whole lot of things that just are not and were never gonna be so.

They have tried for two years now to paint everyone as an arch traitor who has tried to point out to them that they have haven’t followed a Scipio Africanus into Carthage and history, but a cabal of mole-rats and Fiddle Gamers into a blind alley and disaster.

They have been told – for YEARS – how thoroughly and contemptibly they have been lied to. Flares were fired. Big Screaming Alarms were set off. But being the Tail Gunner Joe’s on the ol’ IQ Bell Curve, Moderate Republicans simply refused to believe what was happening as President Charles Ponzi and Vice Prez Billie Sol Estes practically cock-whipped them into bloody pulps.

Now the ones I know have grown plaintive and peevish. All the brave talk about bestriding the globe and stubbing out cigarettes on terrorist cells around the world is gone. So is any talk about WMDs, Iraq/9-11 links, imminent, etc. The Mods I know are in stubborn retreat on all fronts. Now all the talk is either desperately rationalizing why driving the country off the cliff wasn’t really their fault, or why the crash isn’t really as bad as the critics say, or just shiny conversational baubles designed to deflect their own words as they come roaring back from their own mouths last year to haunt them.

They don’t want to surrender, but in their own way I hear in them suing for peace.

Looking for terms.

I can hear it in their words, but more interestingly, see it incandescently illumination in their body language. Because the body tells.

My acquaintances can rip-and-read all the delusional, GOP-in-the-bunker-during-the-Fall happytalk they want...but the body knows and the body tells. It’s why you can beat some people at poker all night long. It’s why a woman who is self-conscious about the volume of her bee-hind might touch her skirt and smooth out a pleat and generally touch her tuchas during a conversation with a man she might find attractive. Why a painfully shy man might retire behind a beard-stroking, mirrored shades and a haze of cigarette smoke.

Their hearts is no longer with their President and his failed War. Unlike the mother on Fox News today who tragically lost a son in Iraq and just kept almost ritually incanting “9/11”, and “the people that attacked us” and “when the towers fell”, the Moderates haven’t welded themselves into the Denial Locker.

And the more the Koolaidians in their Party babble bizarrely on and on about the “truth” of things that have long been show patently to be lies, the more freely the Mods sweat right through their khakis and scramble to try to rationalize their way out of complicity in the mushrooming disaster that the Bush Administration is becoming.

Our job: kick out their crutches.

If they want to admit that their President is a Buffoon, that his chief henchman is a Traitor and that every inch of road to Iraq and Ruin has been paved with lies and looting from the start...fine. That the tent-poles that hold up the entire GOP are the Segregationists and the Christopaths...fine. But in onesies and twosies – whenever and wherever they pop up their heads and try to weasel out of their own rhetorical deadfalls – our job is to deny them succor and forgiveness until they own up to what they have done and explain their plan for getting us out of the cesspit into which they have driven us.

So what are the Moderates on my mailing list talking about these days?

Well the pall hanging over everything is Iraq. To the Moderates, Iraq is Mom getting caught fucking sheep. Although it is the firestorm that is igniting the very air we breathe -- the through-line that links virtually every major story -- among the Mods it has become The War that Dare Not Speak It’s Name.

Which is why we must talk about it.

But what else are the kids over at the Moderate table stitch-and-bitch jawing on about?

CALL: Guns.
Always with the fucking guns. I have to vote for the GOP no matter how fucknut in-sane they may be, ‘cause Liberals want to raise my taxes and take away my guns. Who will protect you mother?! Don’tcha love your mother?

RESPONSE: Like I fucking care.
Keep ‘em. Marry ‘em. Like I care about a deer hunter with a rifle, or a duck hunter with a shotgun. I care that the gangbanger down the street has better body armor and better ordnance than a combat soldier in Iraq.

You wanna play with guns? And not just jerk off on the gun range, but actually put into practice the principle behind the “Well-regulated militia” part of your favorite amendment?

Go to Iraq. Go to Iraq and get behind your President and his Excellent Adventure. They’ll give you all the guns you want and plenty to shoot at. The fight you have been lusting for your whole life isn’t at Camp Mommy’s Basement, it’s in Tikrit.

Put up or shut up, gunboy.


CALL: Impeachment didn’t count.
This one set me back on my heels because of the sheer audacity of it. My Moderate acquaintances are of the opinion that, since Clinton wasn’t actually removed from power, that it “didn’t count”.

And that we Liberals should all just get over it.

RESPONSE: BWAHAHAH!
The impeachment of Bill Clinton is something of a hobby-horse with me. Since the day the Republican coupe d'etat came up short, I have always believed that it was the greatest gift the GOP could ever have given the Democrats. They piled up such sky-skimming mountains of fierce rhetoric about Truth and Lies and Justice and why the attempt to depose Clinton wasn’t partisan; it was nothing more than the impartial wheels of Constitutional Justice grinding out the fate of the President with an even-hand.

This is where body-language really counted. Mods seem as genuinely freaked by the fact that Dems haven’t forgotten about the Seven Year War against Bill Clinton, as they are by the fact that every single thing their President PROMISED them as a condition for mindless backing Operation Endless Clusterfuck has turned out to be a lie. And for exactly the same reason:

To stick to the rhetoric of Impeachment, Moderates now have to explain their own, deafening lack of interest in the lies and treasons of the Bush White House.

To dump the rhetoric of Impeachment, Moderates would have to concede that Liberals were right (yet again!); that Impeachment was nothing but a coup staged by the Radical Republican Party for nothing more than grubby, partisan gain.

It sure seems a whole lot like those who want to wave the American Swastika as a source of “pride”, and then rewrite history to efface the terrorism conducted under that banner. Then dictate to those who were fucked over by those terrorists that they have no business being offended by the flying of the lynching flag.

That Jim Crow didn’t count. That everyone else should just get over it so that they can warm themselves at the hearth of their liars history and traitors cause.

Sorry pal. Ain’t gonna happen. Your President is a liar, and over matters of life and death and war and peace. And you’re a hypocrite if you’re not going after him with at least the same fervor you devoted to hunting down Clinton for blowjobs.

And every time you say different, expect us to beat your teeth down your throat with your own damning words.


CALL: That Damned Electoral College.
This also caught me up short because it shows just how far up their asses the Mods are willing to plant their heads. This is purely a Shiny Object Distraction; my friend was much more animated -- talking all jut-jawed pissed-off -- about the EC that about, oh, say, Iraq. I half expected him to start in on the threat to national security posed by the Dangling Participle, which, IMHO, you can’t have too many of.

But since you brought my Mother into it...

RESPONSE: Didn’t you just got through telling me why the Second Amendment is constitutionally sacrosanct? An inviolate mathom from the 18th Century? So why is it the manifest will of the Founding Fathers untouchable when you want to jerk off with your Uzi...but the electoral college is a quaint powdered-wig custom of a bygone era that needs to be retired.

Me? The E/C is a silly relic, but it does have the beneficent side-effect of forcing a candidate to campaign in places other than to Potempkin Social Security crowds full of coached and cheering seat-fillers. It forces them to go where they do not want to go, and I think that’s a very good thing. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit, except that I’d be willing to wager that a popular vote is easier to steal.


CALL: It’s not who I voted for...it’s what I voted against.
Ahhh. The protest vote defense. I wasn’t voting for the treasonous moral dwarves in the White House, I was voting against...something.

I’d’ve rather voted for McCain. I wuuuuv McCain. McCain would’ve save us.

RESPONSE: Well, basically, bullshit.Ok, first, that was 2000, and even if you were naive enough to vote for Bush out of some residual Clinton Hatred, you were also crave enough to vote for the man who ass-candled John McCain in as low and disgusting a bit of knee-cappery as these tired eyes had seen in a long, long while. Bush the AWOL coward dimwit fucked over McCain the war-hero. Period. You not only let him keep the ill-gotten gains from his thuggery, but you actually rewarded his for it in the general election.

But in 2004, McCain wasn’t running, was he? And by 2004 all the monstrous pathologies that Bush has always had festering away behind pancake makeup and a phalanx of handlers was on full display. If you supported the GOP in 2004, what were you voting against that was so important that you had to reinstall sociopaths in the White House?

As has been true of Moderates all along, they are more than happy to mooch off of others and sell out their country for a little slice of pie: they just like to do it while cowering in the shadows. Now the lights are on now. Blazing. There’s no hiding anymore. Put up or shut up.


CALL: The pedunda will swing back. And “Our Guys” will come back to power, or the Dems, or someone other than the Dominionists.

I see, so you’re relying on...physics to take care of this, rather than taking any personal responsibility for the mess you have made. Somehow, some way, by the magic of electoral thermodynamics or somesuch thing...the country will return to a state of equilibrium.

RESPONSE: Flail all you’d like. The more you struggle, the tighter the knot gets.
This is nothing more than the puling of a spoiled brat, sunk up to his chinny-chin-chin in his own broken promises and bad debt, who wants to skip out on paying his tab...while at the same time retaining his right to beat his chest and bellow that the poor, the weak and the dispossessed are really just “lazy” and “irresponsible” in full-throated righteous indignation. Whining that that no matter how much he shits things up, someone broom-pusher will come along and clean up after him, so we shouldn’t worry.

Sorry. Wrong again. And news flash: Ayn Rand just leapt from her unquiet grave to vomit in your faces over your genuinely staggering degree of intellectual dishonesty, laziness and moral cowardice. If you voted for this mess -- and one helluva mess it is, you must agree – you are responsible for it. The raging loons that run you party didn’t zoom down from the Duh-lympian Heights yesterday and seize you Party in the dead of night. No, no, no. You gave them your Party. You invite them into your Party. You tossed the Hell’s Angels the keys to the liquor cabinet, gun case and baby’s room of your Party and said, “Do whatever the fuck you want...jus’ gimmie my fucking tax cut.”

This is an apotheosis towards which the Dominionists have been working for two generations, and for 30 years you all have been getting weaker and wispier, and the Party of God members have been getting bolder and meatier.

Sorry guys; you go to war with the Falwell you’ve got, not the Falwell you’d like to have, and by doing so, you chose electoral power over principle and country.


CALL: “After Bush...who?” Again, to generally allay my fears, they raise this rhetorical question. That their bench is exhausted. After all, you think we’d elect Jeb?

RESPONSE: Are you kidding?
You elected a dry-drunk halfwit who was clearly unqualified to be President. Then he lied us into a war that is proving to be every bit the disaster you were warned it would be.

Then you re-elected him.

Please. Who the fuck are you trying to kid? If the GOP ran Secret Squirrel...or a sack of old lug nuts against Jesus Christ, you pinheads would be out in your “Old Lug-nut/Frist For a Better Tomorrow ’08” Tee Shirts” by the million, screaming yourself into serial embolisms.

Followed by a series of “Swift Crucifixion Veterans for What Is Truth?” ads, explaining how Jebus wasn’t really crucified, and might not even have been in Jerusalem during the exact time he said he was.

And those scourge marks, and his perforated side? Mere scratches...and probably self-inflicted.

I happen to agree that Bush has a special, irreproduceable hold on the GOP that will vanish from their arsenal in ’08, but please don’t expect anyone to believe that millions of your fellow Republican aren’t idiotic enough to vote for good ‘ol Lugnuts without batting an eye

CALL: Fuck everyone else.
This is really, really what Moderates are about. Cut through all of the bumper stickers and Rush-scripted bile...Moderates simply do not give a shit about anyone but themselves. Moderates care about their families, their buddies, their back yards and their bank accounts...and not one fucking thing more than that.

They look at Iraq and see a mess, but if their kid isn’t in the middle of it, they don’t care how many die. Or for what stupid reasons. They volunteered, so fuck ‘em. And since they view the world with near-perfect solipsism, they are unhampered by any sense of shared duty or empathy and stewardship.

Fuck the environment and the “tree huggers”. Fuck the poor and the weak, “lazy welfare cheats”. Fuck the past and the future. Fuck the air and the water. Fuck anyone and everyone that they are not related to by blood, and who don’t live within sight of them.

Promise to keep their SUV’s tanked up on the cheap, their guns sacrosanct and their taxes low and they will sit quietly by while thousands die. Or millions. Or billions. As long as their deaths do not inconvenience the Moderate Man, fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.

And all of the “arguments” they kick up are intended simply to draw attention away from the fact that, in a very profound way, they are failed men. Morally bankrupt, but since they cannot admit that out loud, they stick to a Party and an Ideology that will let them celebrate their flat spiritual affect as if it were actually a virtue.


RESPONSE: Finally, an honest motive.
Riding on the same bus as Christopths and Segregatonists doesn’t faze a Moderate, but since they are not creatures of principle, the minute supporting the Republican Party starts to inconvenience them, they’ll bolt.

As the Administration policy continues to sink deeper into dark waters, the pressure from Reality on the hull continues to build and cracks continue to form. They are headed in the wrong direction at full-throttle, and the Mods are starting to get scared: one big breach and they could be crushed.

If the Moderates want to stand up and fight to turn their ship around, fine; I think we should applaud that. But as long as they keep trying to pour that new, sour wine into those old, lying skins, our job is simple and clear.

Kick out their crutches, anywhere and everywhere.

Kicking Out Their Crutches - Part I

Cast Off Thy Falwells and Walk!

The perambulations forced on me by these last, and annoyingly internetlessness days of summer and the weird schedule of meetings and conferencettes into which I have been dropped have had a few salutary benefits.

First, since I had to be at a ridiculously early staff meeting this very A.M., I was (all of this was very much present-tense as of the first draft) out and about and hungry and sufficiently compos mentis to be enjoying a brunch outdoors at a restaurant close enough to the Lake to hear the shusshing of the water and where the green canopy of street doesn’t taper to a vanishing point of traffic and buildings facades but instead dead-ends in small square of the most perfect blue you can imagine.

Easy to forget as the Children of the Cell Phone mutter past, and roller-bladed women come and go (talking of Michelangelo) that Chicago is, among other things, a maritime city. Define every bit as much by river, lock, port and bridge, as by the Museums, the architecture, the bungalow belt and endemic corruption.

That there used to be taverns on the river -- in the heart of the city -- where you could dock your boat, and come in for a beer.

That one of the most expensive and least visible disasters in recent Chitown history wasn't fire or ice -- of which we've had plenty, thank you very much -- but flood. A breached wall in the old, underground rail and tunnel system filled downtown basements and subways to brackish overflowing with water. It was the same Loop we all knew -- same Marshall Fields, same Thompson Center -- but eerily deserted, and beneath, for days and days, a Metaphor ran through it.

The sky here is a brilliant blue. And, I must say, a sexy, provocative blue; not a vulgar and smutty blue.

As great strippers and fan-dancers all know, something must be left to our imagination. A solid wall of a single color is boring, as mere nakedness on stage is dull. Sheer flesh can be a yawn, but like the wise and subtle artist, the sky here has donned a white boa of clouds, cumulo-pasties and strapped itself into a pair of six-inch Cirrus heels and is slow-dancing across the dome of heaven while I shout "Oh Baby!" much to the confusion of the other brunchers.

Second, putting me out into the world at odd angles to my regular habits also put me in touch with a few of my Moderate acquaintances with enough slack in my schedule to have a bit of a State of the Union-type conversation with each. More about that in Part II, but those talks got me to thinking...

And as I was thinking, let me swear by all that is holy -- stacks of Chick Tracts and colanders full of Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Begotten Sons (with a little pesto) –- that something very odd happened.

I was making my way back from my Dawn Bureaucratic Bacchanal, parsing the conversations I had had over the last several days, trying to figure out if this was something I wanted to write about. Everything takes time and emotional energy -- sometimes quite a bit -- and both are commodities of which we all have a limited supply, and so there are opportunity costs associated with every writing decision. Which is also why, at any given time, I have a lot of prose pieces and parts up on blocks, and I’m scooting around beneath them all, tinkering.

So to get to the point, I'm zooming along looking for the right catalyst...and I speed right past the tableaux in the picture above, as-is. I didn’t touch it up or alter it in any way.

And I cruise on by, thinking, “Damn. That’d fit. That’s sum it up really well.”

And I kept right on going, along a route I would have otherwise never taken, while the perfect image dwindled in the rearview, while I debated with myself.

Idiot.

One 3-point U-turn and several pissed off drivers later, and I walked back to the spot and only then did it register with an audible BANG exactly where this particular garbage can was located.

In front of a stele bearing the name of the Biggest Pimpenest Original Republican. The Progenitor of the ones I want back in the world. The ones I want to rediscover their consciences and kick the shit out of the Christopaths who dishonor and debase the Great Emancipator with every word they speak.

On a route I never would have taken, on a day I would have probably spend doing chores and keeping close to home, looking for a place to eat and a kind of leitmotif I find a pair Crutches, in a Trash Bin, in front of Monument that say’s “Lincoln”.

It’s not exactly Our Lady of Fatima, but still kinda cool. And rare is the moment when I actually get to snap a shot of the Universe smacking me upside the head and saying: ”Hey, Dumbass. Look. Over. Here.”

Ok. I get it.

Part II in awhile.

Shame, Shame

Everybody knows your name.

Well the good folks at SBC decided my building didn't need phone or DSL service yesterday...and the good people who run the spamblocking software on my main email accounts apparently decided to tweak the product so that every-fucking-thing is now apparently regarded as a solicitation for enhancing your penile grandeur, seriously debilitating my handheld (to which I have my main accounts forwarded) as a means of contacting the outside world. So off the grid I go. And I still am as of this A.M.; typing this only because a friendly stranger saw me sleeping under the digital viaduct under the Bridge to the 21st Century and offered me some bandwidth.

He offered me a ride in his van too...to wherever I want to go.

Not to worry; I know I can trust this guy. It smells kinda funny -- like old, wet pennies -- but his van is positively festooned with "Bush/Cheney 2008" and "Jebus is Coming and you're all gonna Burn" bumper stickers so I know he's a good Christian. And I know I'll be perfectly safe because he has lots of guns and machetes and flensing knives and such hanging up in the back in case we're attacked by heathens and run out of cheeks to turn.

They make a pretty, wind-chimey sounds as we jounce along down this empty, country road.

I'm hugely pissed at SBC, and was showering and such this A.M. under a dark cloud (And if you think that's not tricky -- showering under a dark cloud -- you try it.) until I turned on the only wireless device in Castle Driftglass that is functioning -- my radio -- and heard of the hurricane and the devastation that it has left in its wake.

Followed closely by a reminder by Springer on Air America that more than two years after the invasion, millions of Iraqis are still without electricity, clean water, security, and basic sanitation.

So I put Dylan on the CD player and got over myself.

You miserable slug!

You think you can talk your way out of this? You betrayed me.



No I didn't. Honest...


I ran out of gas.

I, I had a flat tire.

I didn't have enough money for cab fare.

My tux didn't come back from the cleaners.

An old friend came in from out of town.

Someone stole my car.

There was an earthquake!

A terrible flood!

Locusts!!

IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!

(Because sometimes only the "Blue's Brothers" sums things up right.)


When you build your Party and Identity on the bedrock of inerrant ideological purity and biblical literalism, it's a simple fact of of nature that you’re gonna attract a certain, very-unpleasant sub-species of humans by the droves as sure as Bad Pharaohs that piss of Yahweh attract frogs and flies and rivers of blood. Critters, to be honest, I wouldn’t scrape off my shoe and feed to a starving otter.

So I was listening to Dexter Gordon on “Dexter Digs In” making a very persuasive case for the existence of a Just and Merciful God, and working out a response to a point raised by commenter rosebuddear -- “...been dealing with these motherfuckers (oh excuse this language I am so VERY angry) for at least that long. I have been hearing them all say the exact same thing since the 70s...........
I never did figure out why they didn't get it.” -- when I caught the following headline on Yahoo News – “Robertson Apologizes for Chavez Remarks (AP).”

A gentle silence like unto the wee hours before Christmas morning falls over Castle Driftglass as I drop what I'm doing and go chase that down. Because , I gotta admit, I got pretty excited when I read this for, if true, it would be practically the first time in living memory that any one of the American Taliban who run the GOP had ever apologized...for anything. Swaggart and Bakker jump to mind, but only because of the maudlin velocity with which they hit the pavement.

And those were because it was about sex, which means that, if true, Robertson would have broken the First Commandment of Wingnuttery: Never, ever, ever apologize for anything where you penis isn’t a co-conspirator.

Rabid mob-riling bloodlust, fervid, manic scapegoating, unalloyed racism, calls for murder in the name of God...these are the stocks-in-trade of the radical clerics of the American Taliban like Falwell and Robertson, but catch them schtupping a hooker or packing the old Salvation Stick into a Salivating Acolyte to whom the Good Reverend Doctor is not bound in G-rated Christian Marriage, and that’s when they magically find the words, “I’m Sorry”.

Of course they mean, “I am so sorry I won’t be able to dick the help anymore.”

It means, “I’m sorry the accountants have told me I have to pretend I like being married to Herve-Villechaize-in-a-Fright-Mask here (“Boss! The Rapture! The Rapture!) if I want the droolbuckets who buy my twaddle to keep forking over their cat food and medication money.”

It means, “Fuck You! I’m sorry I got caught!”

Then they pull out a few nose hairs to look pained, spray some poison out the their venom sacs via their tear ducts, go hose down with the All Forgivin' Blood ‘o The Lamb...and come back out swinging three weeks later.

But at least they form their mouths to make the words, however much they despise and repudiated it in their soul.

And the only reason any of this ridiculous, transparent clownshow ever works at all is the shambling, cripplingly-inbred failed humans in their millions who fall for the same “Pull My Finger”-grade con game over and over and over again, generation after generation, world without end, amen.

So I think to myself I may be witnessing one of those rare moments in American history when one of Asshats of Evil that hold this country hostage actually busts out of his anti-Christian chrysalis and atones for doing something that would make his Savior projectile vomit fishes and loaves into a Low Earth Orbit.

Nah, I think to myself. Because Pat Robertson is an utterly and irredeemably evil troll, I'll just bet he’ll “apologize” for being “misunderstood”.

Hey! Guess what?

Robertson Apologizes but Says He Was 'Misinterpreted'
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson issued a statement today apologizing for his televised remarks calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
"Is it right to call for assassination?" he said in the statement. "No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him."

But Mr. Robertson was far from apologetic on his television show today, instead insisting that he had been been "misinterpreted" by The Associated Press and that he had never used the word "assassination."

"I said our special forces should 'take him out.' 'Take him out' could be a number of things, including kidnapping," Mr. Robertson told his audience on the show "The 700 Club" today.

The video from Monday's telecast, easily available on the internet, shows Mr. Robertson saying of the Venezuelan president: "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop." Mr. Robertson went on at length about Mr. Chávez, suggesting that "covert operatives" could "do the job and then get it over with."

Apparently this head of a vast Christopathic Teevee Network dedicated to perverting the Christian Faith digitally and in hi-def suffer’s from Frist’s Syndrome: the repeated failure to realize that people ”tape” shit, and that those “tapes” can be played back at future dates to confirm or deny you assertions of what you “really” said.

Or maybe he was just praying that Sweet Baby Jebus would pull of some Holy De-gaussing.

So having said what he said, and then denied he said what he said, he was then forced kicking and screaming into “apologizing” for both his original treachery and his cowardly lying about his original treachery.

Murderous, two-faced and gutless...For Christ!

Man, at this point they should just pre-print that on the RNC Letterhead and get it over with.

Of course if Pat Robertson ever got it into his head to actually, seriously make amends for a lifetime of sowing hate and fear like a Typhoid Mary Mary Magdelane, the next day some 700 Club Intern would find his lifeless, naked body hanging by his belt in the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Executive Toilet with a note that says, “Please Forgive Me, Lord” pinned to his ass.

Of course it would only be a matter of minutes before someone looked at brown puddle pooled beneath the rigid idjit and said, “Hey doesn’t that feces look like...Jebus!”

And then we’re right back to the fucking races.

"Do not open until 2101".

"Offnen Sie Nicht Sich Bis 2101."
"No se abra Hasta 2101."
"Nao abra Ate 2101"
"bu xing bai bao yi 2101."

I'm not much of one for those "What are your top ten marital aids" kinda lists (Although, come to think of it, that particular one might be very interesting...) however it occurs to me that our children's children know how this all ends.

They know, in final analysis, what was transitory, what was important, and what changed the course of history. They know what forms of art and literature survived. What people look back on with awe, and what they laugh their asses off about and wonder how grandpa would have been such an absolute fucking idiot.

So what would you save and send along to them to make them understand us?

What words and pictures and music and vids and household objects would tell our children's children what living in 2005 was like to us. Not the things Future History majors will write shitty term papers about, but the things that really make us laugh and cry and roll our eyes...

You can pack whatever you want into a cylinder -- 4-feet-long with a 2-foot diameter (for those of you not spatially inclined, lets call it a very wide-mouthed coffee can that's as tall as a five-year-old) -- and launch it into a long, slow, parabolic orbit that will land back on the face of the Earth -- anywhere you'd like -- light as a feather and completely intact, on September 11, 2101.

Remember that JumpDrives full of clips and pix are a fine thing, but you can't understand a lover without kissing them deeply, babies without changing their stinky diapers, and a shot of 20-year-old scotch until you have rolled it around in your mouth and let it evaporate off your tongue.

In telling the tale of our times, the physicality of things matters as much as digital representations.

It will have been a century since the attack that changed our nation, and school-kids will only know about it from books...whatever books may look like them (of course the homeschoolers in the Republic of Jesusland will only know about if from the Newer, Gooder Tess'mint, and will have been taught that the 'Slums were actually queers and feminists lead by a cabal of Liberal Judges...)

So set the little bastards straight.

What was 2005 really like?

Will it be this?

Or mojitos and butt-dancing at Senor Frogs?

Hmmm.

For the last two generations, the military has been sold as a jobs program.

To be sure, it was always a jobs program where people might shoot at you, and set up that way largely because Republicans have always despised the idea of job training as a virtue unto itself. Despite the fact that such training pays tangible social and economic dividends many times over, Republicans just loathe the idea that anyone gets anything for “free” – even when that “free” benefit is the down payment on helping make that man or woman into a productive, property owning citizen

Seems so wefare-y.

Best make them bleed for it. Maybe die for it.

I have no particular problem with attaching a social price tag to education benefits. Sending doctors into blighted neighborhoods, or freshly-minted teachers into hard-to-hire districts if they take the Queen’s Crown seems like a pretty fair trade. And since the end-product of all such programs is the making of tax-payers, who in turn pay back into the pool of public revenue that can then be used to fund the next batch to trainees, you can legitimately call such an arrangement a wise investment.

This isn't about the philisophy of public service, but what over thirty years of marketing the military a low-risk/high-reward ticket to a diploma has meant.

The Army was where you went when you couldn’t get a sweet gig at Thrall Car. The Navy was for you when Mom said that she knows she promised, but after the divorce there just isn’t any way she can pay for college.

When bases were closed – at least here in Illinois – the argument was always economic first – the effect on the local economy – and national security a distant second.

Ideas of national service were in there somewhere, but the contract closer was always College and a Bright Career.

As long as the military was a public works j-o-b that the upper class could finance without feeling all liberal and squishy, and the wars we fought were all 100-day blitzkriegs where our devastating firepower could flatten an enemy over a long summer break, the arrangement worked fine.

And then came Iraq, and suddenly the marketing campaign that has paid big dividends for decades has come back to bite us on the ass.

Here's what put me in mind of that (emphasis added)

Military's Recruiting Troubles Extend to Affluent War Supporters
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, August 22, 2005; 8:00 AM
There was an eye-opening article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few days ago that explored the increasing difficulty the military is having recruiting young people to enlist. As has been well reported in many newspapers, including The Washington Post, the Army and Marines are having a particularly tough time meeting recruitment objectives, in part because of Americans' concern about the war in Iraq.
When you dig deeper into the reason for this phenomenon, it turns out that parents of potential soldiers and sailors are becoming one of the biggest obstacles facing military recruiters. Even top military officials acknowledge this and unveiled a new series of ads this spring targeted at "influencers" such as parents, teachers and coaches.
But the Post-Gazette raises another issue. There has been much talk about the relationship between race and ethnicity and military recruitment. But what about social and economic class? Are wealthier Americans, who are more likely to be Republicans and therefore more likely to support the war, stepping up to the plate and urging their children and others from their communities to enlist?
Unfortunately, there has been no definitive study on this subject. But it appears that the affluent are not encouraging their children and peers to join the war effort on the battlefield.
The writer of the Post-Gazette article, Jack Kelly, explored this question in his story that ran on Aug. 11. Kelly wrote of a Marine recruiter, Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, who went to an affluent suburb outside of Pittsburgh to follow up with a young man who had expressed interest in enlisting. He pulled up to a house with American flags displayed in the yard. The mother came to the door in an American flag T-shirt and openly declared her support for the troops.
But she made it clear that her support only went so far.
"Military service isn't for our son," she told Rivera. "It isn't for our kind of people."
...
So would it be logical to conclude that, if the strong economy is one of the reasons it is more difficult to recruit, the most affluent parents should be the most difficult to reach? After all, their children have more options, including college, than less affluent parents? And if that's true, isn't it somewhat ironic that the military is paying millions of dollars ultimately to influence the behavior of the parents who are among the most likely to be supportive of the war in Iraq?
"I disagree with your premise," Robbins said, arguing that the military is represented strongly across the board by people of all income levels and faces challenges in recruiting at all income levels.
...

The wealthier you become, apparently, the more likely you are to vote Republican. ...
Those making more than $100,000 made up only 18 percent of the electorate, which explains why Bush won by a narrow 2.5 percentage points in the general election.
...
By looking at long-term trends, it seems logical that some of those most likely to support Bush and his Iraq policy are also those least likely to encourage their children to go into the military at wartime. And it raises questions, such as, if you are among those most likely to support the war, shouldn't you be among those most likely to encourage your child to serve in the military? Shouldn't your socioeconomic group be the most receptive to the recruiters' call? And would there be a recruitment problem at all if the affluent put their money where their mouth is?
...
Among the more recent studies was one done last year by Robert Cushing, a retired professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He tracked those who died in Iraq by geography and found that whites from small, mostly poor, rural areas made up a disproportionately large percentage of the casualties in Iraq.
...
Today's affluent merely see themselves as having more options and are not as enticed by financial incentives, such as money for college, Segal said.
...
Journalists can get themselves in trouble by drawing simplistic conclusions based on less-than-exhaustive research, and we won't do so here. But we can at least raise the question of whether the rich are more likely to support the war because their loved ones are less likely to die in it.

This is the difference – the tragic difference – between the nature and tradition of a thing, and the marketing campaign to sell a thing.

Whatever those realities are, military has been packaged as the WalMart of the upward social mobility for years; it's where you go where you can’t go anywhere else.

And when you focus only on how the marketing campaign has been directed at the poor you forget the blowback you get from that campaign. That the very reasons it’s so effective with its target demographic – that it’s Affordable, Welcoming and Convenient – become the product’s worst liabilities – Cheap, Vulgar, and full of those kinds of people from the wrong side of town -- when seen through the eyes of those at the other end of the income scale.

Thirty years of selling WalMilitary as a blue-collar job-outlet-of-last-resort can’t be reversed and remarketed to the affluent with a hurry-up-quick rebranding campaign that trots out quaint ideas of service and sacrifice.

Because Jenna and Not-Jenna don’t “do” service and sacrifice.

That's not how George and Laura raised them.

Jenna and Not-Jenna don’t shop WalMart.

Radio Host Burnishes Resume.

Presumably regrets not also calling for breaking witches on the wheel.

‘Cause baby, we got’s us a mandate.

Did you all forget the infinite line of credit every conservative believes they opened up when the fucknozzle “Moderates” handed them the keys to the country in exchange for a modest tax cut?

To a Modern Conservative, a mandate – even a pilfered mandate – is not a call to unite and preside. To a Modern Conservative, a mandate is just a limitless “Get Out Of Jail Free” card for treason and plunder.

(Except if you’re name is Chavez. In which case, Jesus' Number One I/M Buddy Evangelist tells us that you're just sniper fodder.)

A mandate to a Modern Conservative is nothing more that a license to kill. It’s a chance the drag the whole nation along on an drunken international joy-ride that they can charge off on someone else's credit card. And if people die, well fuck ‘em. My Daddy’s a Mandate so what’re you gonna do about it.

That it never even occurs to these cocksuckers that there are some things you just don’t do simply because they’re wrong is nauseating.

That these people then take to the pulpit to lecture the rest of the Earth on morality is quite a bit beyond nauseating.

Here’s the article.

Radio Host Fired After Anti-Islam Remarks

By Associated Press

August 22, 2005, 9:40 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- Conservative radio host Michael Graham was fired Monday by a Washington station after he refused to apologize for calling Islam "a terrorist organization."

WMAL-AM had suspended Graham after his July 25 broadcast drew protests from the Council on American-Islam Relations. Graham, who had a daily three-hour talk on WMAL, had said, "We are at war with a terrorist organization named Islam," according to CAIR.

On his Web site Monday, Graham said WMAL had asked him to retract his comments about Islam and deliver an on-air apology. "I refused," he said. "And for that refusal, I was fired."
...

Graham blamed the Muslim group for his firing. "As a fan of talk radio, I find it absolutely outrageous that pressure from a special interest group like CAIR can result in the abandonment of free speech and open discourse on a talk radio show," he said.

If I were Michael Graham (and I give thanks every day that my mother didn’t drink paint thinner while she was pregnant with me, thus sparing me that fate) I wouldn’t worry about a damn thing.

Keep it low and lazy, dog, because your future is set; what he needs to do now is hit the Bahamas for a few weeks before the rainy season kicks into high gear, relax – take a cousin or two for some sweet Island luvin’ – and wait for the offers to pour in.

I mean, what does tiny fraction of a man have to worry about?

This is Bush country.

In Bush country, we give multimillion dollar radio contracts to racists and fascists and just-plain lunatic because, let’s face it, to misquote H.L Menkin, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligent of Republican Voters.

After all what dire consequences were visited on Brit Hume when he lied on the air about Social Security?

When Tom DeLay called for the annexation of all the Holy Lands by Israel...because that’s a precondition for Armageddon, was he hounded from office? Or when he announced on the steps of the Congress that condoms and Evolution are what put all of those children shot to pieces at Columbine into early graves, was he shunned by human society like the loathsome shitbox that he is?

When Jerry Falwell spoke to his teeming masses of monkeydumb knucklescrappers and told them that 9/11 was brought on by feminist and queers...out of which town was he run on a rail? And who paid for the feathers and the tar?

When Rick Santorum opens his dog-licky-place and says, well, anything, where are the angry mobs of sturdy peasants with pitchforks and torches who will drive him into the sea and destroy the unholy laboratory in which he was spawned.

When Dick Durbin pointed out – correctly – that to read what happened in Gitmo to Muslim men at the hands of American GI’s, one would be hard pressed to distinguish that treatment from some of the treatment had been meted out by Nazis or the Khmer Rouge, he was speaking the simple truth...and he was incinerated for it by the Right.

How dare he!

Since that time, any number of Senators from the Christopath People’s Revolutionary Party have slung around the term “Nazi” awfully loosely, and the silence on the Right has been deafening.

As is their silence when James Dobson referred to stem cell research as tantamount to Nazi medical experiments.

As is their silence when Rush Limbaugh uses “femnazi” as punctuation.

Why do you think bile-diesel-powered Republican Fucknut Leprechaun Pat Robertson was so very comfortable calling for the political assassination of the head of a sovereign nation? Why isn’t he worried that the handsome living and political power-broker career he has built up over a lifetime might be jeopardized by saying these despicable things?

Because Pat Roberson’s entire career is build on saying loathsome and despicable things.

This article points to a few of the highlights:

“In May, he argued that the threat to the United States from activist judges was "probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."

In 2003, Mr. Robertson said "maybe we need a very small nuke thrown" at State Department headquarters "to shake things up."

In 1998, he warned that hurricanes and other natural disasters would sweep down on Orlando, Fla., because homosexuals were flocking to Disney World there on special "gay days." And he has often denounced the United Nations as a first step toward a dangerous "one world government."

The article also points out "The 700 Club" has an audience of about one million people, according to Mr. Robertson's Web site.”

Wanna guess how those one million people vote?

The reason that malevolent men like Pat Roberston and Mark Graham have nothing to fear from spouting off such radical, incendiary claptrap is that the Republicans Party encourages and rewards its raving loons. Lavishly. If the GOP still had a spine to stand with or a soul to save, the Real Conservatives would have repudiated and pitched out a douchbag like Robertson long, long ago. But as the same article points out;

Mr. Robertson unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. He has often used his television program and the political advocacy group he founded, the Christian Coalition, to drum up support for Mr. Bush.

There is no spine anymore. No soul. Just an uneasy alliance of halfwits, bigots and pussy “Moderates” too scare to face the truth and too gutless to leave – run by despot billionaires and Christopaths, each pursuing their own dark designs. And because it has to say something just for show when one of their leading fund-raisers and vote-getters busts out yet again, sounding indistinguishable from a Taliban cleric pronouncing a fatwah, the Administration manages this withering “rebuke” from Don Rumsfeld".:

...
Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed Mr. Robertson's call for Mr. Chávez's assassination, saying to reporters: "Certainly it's against the law. Our department doesn't do that type of thing." He added, "Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time."

Ouch. I doubt Pat will ever play the piano again with after a savage wrist-slapping like that!

The article also points out that “some of Mr. Robertson's conservative Christian allies distanced themselves from his comments.”

However the big hitters

“...remained silent, with leaders at the Traditional Values Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition saying through spokesmen that they were too busy to comment.
A spokeswoman for Pat Robertson said today that he is not giving interviews and had no further comment.
...

Let's be crystal clear about this: Roberson is not a mutation or a fluke.

Roberston IS the RepubliKlan Party (just trying the phrase out to see if I like it.) and the political world completely dominated by him and his ilk is also populated with a handful of Moderates who sincerely want to reform their party. Who acknowledge the problem, but believe it can be fixed.

To them I commend their attention to any one of Harlan Ellison’s brilliant essay’s on the subject, but, since I happen to be sitting here holding a fairly hard-to-find copy of his “Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed”, let me share with you just a snip of a piece called “Fear Not Your Enemies”. Harlan writes,

“I’ve had it up the here with Rev. Jerry Falwell...and all the rest of those TV clowns perverting the tenets of Judeo-Christian ethos with their non-specific mumble about moral rectitude...

They want to censor books and movies and tv and magazines to fit some ancient, worn-out idea of purity...”

This is very brief (not enough to get a real taste of the pungency of his writing) and he has similar stuff about Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich in different volumes, but I bring these sentences from this essay this to your attention only because of the year it was published.

1980.

A quarter of a century ago.

That’s at least how long these sleek, disease-bearing rodents have been gnawing away at the heart of your Party. Getting fat and taking over while the Moderates told us all not to worry.

Sorry, but after a quarter of a century of having your teeth beaten down your throats by the same monsters, time's up. You are not making a heroic stand any more, or secretly turning the tide. After 25 years you no longer qualify as anything but an abused spouse, still putting up with a thug that you have to apologize for by day and cringe in fear from by night.

And he knows you’ll never really leave, which is why he knows he owns you. Why he knows he can open up your skull with a claw hammed all he wants; you’ll always come crawling back for more.

Every year he gets stronger and more berserk, and you pick up more scars and compound fractures...and then tell yourself you’ll give him just ONE MORE chance, and I’m here to tell you that you can leave, or you can end up in the morgue, but there is no third choice anymore.

And frankly, after 25 years of pretending it’s not happening or pretending that it is ever gong to get anything but worse, I’ve got to ask you just what in the FUCK you are waiting for?

And mark my words, before the next new moon rises over this sad land, this toe-picking AM Radio gibbon will have a new, vastly better-paying job locked down at Fox or CNN...

...although he may have to put in some trigger time as Pat Roberson’s fluffer first, just to get used to the Bright Lights at the Big Show.

“This is blood for blood...”

“...and by the gallon. These are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back! There's no choice left. And I’m ready for war.” – “Marv” from Sin City.

To be filed under: Which war are we fighting?

It’s a month of tough anniversaries up at castle driftglass, which is neither here nor there except it brings freshly back to mind the hard fact that people fight all kinds of battles, for all kinds of reasons.

And sometimes they fight them over and over and over again.

Time after time, an abuser will seek out a victim, and the enabler will seek out an abuser. A certain kind of woman will sift through decent men like a sperm whale going through krill to find the bad boy who will fuck her over, leave her broke and confirm her conviction that Men are Bastards. A certain kind of man will keep driving right on past one decent woman after another to lose himself, yet again, in the high, dead desert with an ice-thing who will carve out his heart with a cuticle pusher, bearing out his personal credo that all Women are Bitches.

And they never see it. Like the unquiet spirit, stalled out in the Moebius-loop of a single instant because they died violently or drunk or steeped in sin, they’re stranded. Locked in.

Like the song says:

“You've got stuck in a moment /And you can't get out of it.”

This comes to mind because the “V”-word is in the water like chum.

Vietnam.

I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times already, and it’s a perfectly fine parallel. Vietnam...on speed.

...on meth.

...on crack.

True enough, but not enough. Necessary, but not sufficient, because Iraq is a lot of different wars to a lot of different people. Because there are a lot of different ways for a thing to be true.

Strategically, it's true enough, that Iraq is ‘Nam on terminal speed-up.

Historically, to a typical Muslim living in the Middle East, how could this not be seen the Crusades – chapter and verse. After all, we told them it was.

Iran stands on the border, watching, waiting to see if they need to swarm across the border and take what they want Korea-style, or if the Americans will deliver them a Shiite Theocracy, gift-wrapped, and without losing a single soldier.

And viewed from space, we are surely indistinguishable from Conquistadors: looting an Oil-Dorado on the other side of the planet with Jebus as our wheelman.

But I believe there is something else. Something...subcutaneous about the war in Iraq that is driving it on. The positively ignites certain people, causing them to charge belligerently – irrationally -- in a certain, specific direction.

Wars are historical events, and economic, and strategic, and tactical and philosophical.

But war always shows up brightly in the emotional spectrum, and certain wars – lost wars -- burn like the fire of a thousand suns. Some people (most notably and locally, certain Red State citizens) obsessively re-fight them over and over again, generation after generation.

Losers forever stand on the neck history, jumping up-and-down, demanding a do-over.

And when the banner the losing side fought under was hateful and repulsive, the lies and delusions that the defeated use to radically revise and prettify a murderous history and ideology into a glorious and noble “Lost Cause” also get passed down, father to son, like hemophilia.

So look at the brief and bloody history of Iraq and note that...

...it is a war began by a Southern President.
...it is a war began by rich men and fought by the poor.
...it is war sold to Americans as a Noble Cause.
...it is a war of pre-emption against a hated enemy that we were told we HAD to attack before it was too late.
...it is a war sold on the defense of our “way of life” rather than a specific, measurable, strategic objective.

And come the 2004 election -- an election was all about Iraq -- look how the nation split; right down the Mason-Dixon Line. Of course not perfectly Not exactly. The West is what it is, and there are plenty of fools in the North and Good Guys in the South, but you cannot look at the ’04 election map and NOT notice that something deep and pathological was playing itself out.

Again.

A nation split into a Southron Republican Confederacy of the Mind and a Northern Democratic Union.

A Dixiecrat GOP who detach themselves ever more from even tangential contact with reality and more and more hysterically insist the Cause is Noble (whatever the Cause has morphed into this week) and the War is Not Lost, whose followers grow more deranged and fanatical by the hour, being goaded deeper and deeper into insane denial by the daily headlines ...and arrogant Yanks, who keep rubbing the Republican’s collective nose in the fact that their President is objectively a liar and their Cause is a Disaster.

This by Faulker – my third-favorite Southern writer -- explains it better than I can (line-breaks added by me). It’s long, but it gets to the marrow of it, and the writing is like stumbling onto an overturned a jewel-box, so enjoy it:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance,

it hasn't happened yet,

it hasn't even begun yet,

it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think,

“This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....”

Strategically and historically, the debacle in Iraq obviously matches up very well to Vietnam-at-78-rpm. And with his war crimes and corrupt-goon-squad-traitor White House combo-platter, George Bush manages to combine the most detestable aspects of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

That’s how I’ll deal with it when the fall comes -- when the horror-show that has arguably been the worst Presidency in modern history unravels into the history books like the intestines spilling out of a gut-shot Clio.

Next year in irons standing before the bar of justice, or (more likely) six years from now in a Supersized version of O.J. Simpson pariah/internal-exile, Bush someday will be just another monster President we have clean up after, prosecute if possible, inoculate against, and move past.

But that’s me. That’s most people I know. But not, I think, the South.

Every day the White House dickslaps them in the face with huge, baldface lies, treasons and disrespect. Every day this White House delivers back to them their dead and mutilated children -- the price-tag for those lies and treasons -- and the Southern Republican Man smiles his dimwit, gimlet smile and goes right back and re-elects the same cocksuckers over and over again.

Ha! That’ll show them damned Yanks!

They’re running a whole different program. A whole different Operating System; one that’s had a Peculiar Poison laced and tangled into its cultural DNA for the last century and a half.

Strategically, Iraq may be Vietnam, but emotionally the Red States are smack in the middle of the American Civil War.

(Shit, in big parts of this country, isn’t every-fucking-thing a re-fighting of Gettysburg?)

For the Dixicrat GOP citizens, Bush proxies for Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee. And no matter how absurd a liar the unclouded eye sees him to be, no matter how peyote-for-breakfast-and-bad-acid-for-lunch delusional you have to be to still not see the truth, to the Red State Rebs each word that spills from his mouth is the unvarnished Gospel.

Iraq stands in as the latest iteration of the Glorious Cause, and it is literally unthinkable that the War could possibly be lost.

God is, after all, on their side, right?

They want to fight and win a Great Struggle that we nattering Northerners said was impossible...and then shove it up our asses and have 150 years of humiliation finally redeemed.

But to fail...again?

To ever have to admit that they have been chumped, again? Lost, again? Duped into a disastrous war by rich men, again? On a pack of lies, again? And having to endure the fucking Yankees laugh at them for being such fucking morons...again?

Better to die first. Better everybody die first.

Or, as Marv said, “These are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back! There's no choice left. And I’m ready for war.”

God help us all.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down…

...with a Special Guest Appearance by the Mighty Favog.

On Fox I want what Lindsey Graham’s smokin’ or chewin’ or whatever.

Lindsey lets us all know that we gotta stay in Iraq and get this right. Sure things are worse than we thought. Sure longer. Sure more expensive. Sure more dangerous (Of course when you flip any one of the big, flat rocks over you find the Republican Lies that put us in that trick bag in the first place crawling around like maggots, which – Shockingly! -- doesn’t particularly interest Senator Lindsey Graham. I guess when you’re the one dressed like a ninja, pistol in your belt, with a sack of loot slung over your shoulder, you’re not all that keen on investigating who it was that robbed the Quik-E-Mart.)

But we need to stay in there. We need to get it right in Iraq. Be patient.

And then comes the laundry list – everyone’s laundry list -- of “Dear Flying Spaghetti Monster, What I’d Like for Christmas.” We need to have a pluralist, Federalist, democratic government. A free-standing, self-defending, wealth-sharing, inclusive, chick-friendly, religiously tolerant government.

And if we don’t do that, there’ll be Hell to pay.

Shit, Lindsey; there are, what, 10? 12? 15? state governments in this here country that couldn’t pass that litmus test, which is not the point.

The point is very simple.

Figuratively, you want, “Mars, bitches!”

We have to get to Mars. We must get to Mars. We need to land Americans on Mars by this time next year. If we don’t...disaster.

Those are outcomes, Lindsey.

Anyone who has ever worked for an idiot bumblefuck of a boss or had to deal with a drunk in the family (Two exciting pathologies which both converge in this White House) knows that they’re all about talking in glowing terms about the Glorious Future...while they shit up The Present and ruin beyond repair the very tools that they need to make any progress at all.

Enough blather about ends, Lindsey: What are the means? How so we get there? More of the same? More of the failed same? The ruinous same that has already cost us so dearly and continues to play straight into the hands of our worst enemies every step of the way?

Or are we building a Sekrit Clone Army that none of us know about so we can stay in Iraq for the next four years without destroying the Army?

You want Mars...and you sit out in the back yard firing arrows impotently into the sky that never get above the tree-line and you say pull harder...more arrows...aim better.

Have to stop watching Fox now: Brit Hume's dead-barracuda stare and slit-throat grimace just made my cat start twitching violently.

Why my Local News is better than your Local News:

Barack Obama on Local NBC today. “City Desk” With Dick Kay. Barack clears up what he really said about endorsing Mayor Daley which sure sounded balanced and well-reasoned and not-at-all “controversial”. Dick Kay said as much, and that much seems to have been “lost in translation”.

Lot of that going around.

Barack remembers when Dems proposed tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Remembers when Dems proposed gas taxes...and the Republicans went ape-shit.

Now gas prices are at $3/gallon...Petro companies are making unbelievable, historic, ursurious profits that would make a PayDay Loan Shark blanch, and the Republican Party is silent. The only “solution” we’re offered is, “We’ll drill our way out of it.” More silence. We have fucking tax-exemptions for SUV’s to actively encourage waste, and a silence from the Right as profound as that on the far side of the Moon .

What Senator Obama did not say was that, hey, maybe its because everyone in the Administration came out of the oil industry. That Bush used to be bottom-bunk-buddies with Saudi Prince Bandar at Children of Obscene Privilege Fat Camp every summer.

They are whores, and no penny-ante future’s market scandals for these trollops. No failed land deals.

No these kids invade whole countries and rewrite federal law to make the global looting of cash and black gold even easier for their friends and fellow PNAC board members.

As the whole of the Republican Party stands utterly, shamefully silent.

But Barack did not say those things, because he is a Statesman...and I’m just a bastard.


On Face the Nation:

Housing Bubble with Bob Reich with Cindy Sheehan is the undercard. I ran past but paused enough to confirm this: The is still One Story. Iraq. If you are not grappling with it, you’re a stooge and a Bush Media Fifth Columnist (pun intended.) But you most definitely have no business pretending you are anything other than obedient oxen, pulling in harness, going wherever the White House tells you to go.

On This Week.

Stephanpopoulis. 100,000 troops in for Four More Years.

Or, no...draw down in six months.

Or, no...”last throes”.

Or, no...maybe it’s twelve more years.

Dude...I thought YOU packed the Exit Strategy!?

Chuck Hagel v. Giggly, Dead-Eyed Haircut George Allen.

This is what this Progressive likes to see.

Oops. CBS Jumps The Fox with this commercial for The Early Show (Oh please, let Crooks & Liars have this): “Why are so many beautiful young women accused of having SEX with their students? Tomorrow...inside the Teacher Sex Scandal.”

We’ll at least we know where the fearless "All White Chick All The Time" news hounds have parked the van.

And while I don’t have TiVo, I blinked really fast and at just the right interval and saw, flashing subliminally at triple-latte-hummingbird-heart-speed, this message:

“Please for the Love of God, please stop thinking about Iraq. Stop it! Stop it! Look! Hot teachers having carnal knowledge of their students! And you don’t have to pay $19.99/month to some seedy, online porn site for it either. It’s FreeFreeFree. All you have to do is stop thinking about Iraq."

Kinda backfired with me, though. Now ever time I see a naughty teacher pic (which, let’s face it, is going to be often), I’ll automatically also think, “Man, what a tub of frothy sump juice these clowns are.”

Commercial ends.

Chuck Hagel is pissed. Really, really pissed. In a state of High Pissoff, as they say. I predict that, in his next run for office, Karl Rove will discover during the last week of the campaign that Chuck Hagel has a Black Baby...and that he was Osama Bin Laden’s Office Secret Santa from 2000-2004.

Allen speaks with pure, opium-eater, stoned-off-his-ass delusionality about what Iraqis want and how they’ll behave. How they’re react to this milestone and that initiative...all in the Declarative and Authoritative Voice of the Wizard of Oz. Which, considering that his party has been speaking with that same voice for three years now, and have been Declaratively and Authoritatively wrong in every single fucking particular, is quite entertaining.

Allen also explains that Cindy Sheehan is all “politics”. Nothing but politics.

Fuck yes! We sure as shit wouldn’t want “politics” to leech into the groundwater of the President’s unbroken string of murderous lies and unforgivable, serial clusterfucks.

Hagel calls this strategy “raggedy”

And it’s Illegal Immigration Day with Bill Richardson around the town.

Meet The Press:

Russ Feingold talking about Iraq. Love you, but sorry Russ; you are wrong. You're still speaking about the Noble Ends we hope to achieve...by firing arrows at the clouds.

How, Russ? How exactly are we going to get there? And where exactly are we going?

Good answer to the question about, “Don’t you think we own it to the troops to win?” though.

“I think we owe the troops a good policy. The troops have done their job; we haven’t done ours.”

Feingold: “We have played right into the hands of the people who attacked us on 9/11”

Trent Lott up next. Feh. Sorry Trent. I listened to your soft bigotry while you were in the Big Boy chair.

Although I must agree with this sentiment, that the Administration still needs to make the case for war “Red State Pro-Bush” people in Mississippi.

OK, now I am kinda glad I didn’t Look Away from the King of Dixieland, because then I would have missed this Phrase that Pays for this Sunday: That we are three years and nearly 2,000 dead into this bloody mess and Trent Lott is now boldly coming out strong for explaining why the fuck we are even in Iraq to the Red State Son's of the Soil.

And then turns right around and say’s, “We’ve gotta win this thing. We’ve gotta stay the course.”

And then comes the WMD’s prattle. Not any one piece of evidence sold the war to him, but the “collage” of proof. Good thing I have my spit-up bucket handy.

And, yes, Trent Lott apologized for his Pro-Segregation birthday kiss to 100-year-old-Civil-War-Bride Strom Thurmond, except the only thing Lott is sorry about is that he got caught...

...because less than two minutes later he was busted out on his shameful and cowardly behavior behind a simple, cost-free apology for the fact that his Daddy’s “lodge buddies” wore sheets and murdered Blacks under the color of law.

When fictional reporters cornered the brave former Majority Leader and senior Senator from the People’s Republic of Jesusland – hiding in a woman’s dress, speaking in a sassy falsetto (“Twent, who? I know of no such pewson as this ‘Twent’.”), trying to cut to the head of the lifeboat boarding line on the Andrea Dorea – Lott opined, “What the fuck? Apologize to Negroes for slaughtering them? So that my beloved Southron Empire could stay where Jesus intended it to stay; in the hand’s of Dirty White Boys like me? Shit! Where does it end!?”

At least that's how it transliterated in my head.

Keep talking, Trent. Keep reminding the country that fucknuts like DeLay and Santorum aren’t flukes; you all are the GOP.


Meet The Press II:

Iraq. Constitution. Sunni. Monday deadline. Where does it end?
A rather intriguing if surreal discussion on the Coming Iraqi Democracy from two guys which whom I had been unfamiliar until today.

Larry Diamond and Reuel Marc Gerecht.

Our host, David Gregory, introduced them as follows: “Middle East specialist for the CIA, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and former adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Larry Diamond.”

One line did jump right out me, though. I the face of rather stark evidence that women are about to get screwed back into the 13th Century in Iraq, Reuel Marc Gerecht opined that:

“In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled. I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy.”

So take that Soccer Mom!

So what else is Reuel Marc Gerecht, other than a man who obviously never, ever wants to get laid ever again.

Why he is, among other things, a Senior Fellow at the Project for a New American Century.

You know, the people that run Bush Foreign Policy like a Predator Drone.

And the other guy -- Larry Diamond – in addition to “advising” the CPA also happened to be Fellow at the Very Right Wing Hoover Institute. The internets reveal that there are currently eight Hoover fellows on the Defense Policy Board that advises Don Rumsfeld.

Funny how David Gregory forgot to mention that.

Krugman on ABC.

Shit. I step away for five minutes to re-align the all the paperclips in my office North-by-Northwest and miss Krugman. Damn you OCD! I miss it all except, “The war is lost. Chuck Hagel who knows war...knows that but doesn’t know how to say it.”

OK, maybe I didn’t need to sit through the whole thing, because that sums it up magnificently.

The Chris Matthew’s Pull My Finger Half Hour is being beamed in from an alternate Universe this week.

One where slab-of-tainted-meat Joe Klein and rapidly-mutating-into-the-The Mighty-Favog (from the doomed SNL Muppet Show) Bob Woodward hold forth on the shamey shaming shamefulness...of Richard Milhous Nixon and William Jefferson Clinton.

WTF?

Talking about the Presidents who lie to the American People and the Women Who Love Them or somesuch.

While the gibbering heads talk – with no small tinge of nostalgia -- of various fellatio-related sins of Bill Clinton, and how the uproar therefrom almost cost him his job, Irony and Iraq sit staring with burning eyes at them like the blood-steeped Ghost of Banquo at the Table.

Bush? Downing Street? Yellow Cake? “Imminent? Anybody? Anybody at all?

Thought not.

Over on Channel 23 they’re showing reruns of Tennessee Tuxedo. It’s the most honest five contiguous minutes I’ve heard all morning.

He and Chumley are apparently plotting to escape from Stanley Livingston’s Zoo.

Damn!

When even cartoon penguins have better exit strategies than the White House, you know you’re fucked.