Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down

In which the GOP tries to reconcile their laissez-faire hippocampi and their “The Brown Hordes Are Coming!” gonads.

Resulting in a Sunday as short, mushy, bland and gray as a fistful of half-melted, tap-water cocksicles (link is decidedly not work-safe.)

Not worth your time, or mine, so let us move briskly into the poo, and then outward to lunch, mojitos, Infinity...and Beyond!


On Fox – Condi Rice discovers pastels, highlights and Sally’s Beauty Supply.

Condi explains why the Iraqis are kicking ass and moving right along, and if she were needed over there she’d be on a plane tonight, but now “Iraqis need to talk to Iraqis”.

She also tackles a certain “coon” comment specifically and race generally thusly: America still suffers from its original defect of slavery, and years of racial separation. America needs to be a little more humble about our own founding. When Americans say Iraqis should hurry up and do this or that, we should remember that even in mature democracies, forming a multiracial, multiethnic society is hard.

I agree, especially when one Party is devoted to exploiting, exacerbating and expanding hatred, bigotry and intolerance. Like, say, through some kind of “Southern Strategy” that panders to racists instead of repudiating them, because without the votes of wannabe klansmen and Christopaths to give them a margin of victory, they’d lose every election everywhere.

Kinda weird that that’s the Party you work for, eh Condi?

That without your boss pandering to a loyal army of knuckledraggers who despise you and everyone who looks like you, you’d be working hot-tubs and sugaring gas tanks at Pepperdine trying to snag a tenured gig.

Carl Levin on Gridlock in Iraq. The Iraqi leadership is farting around and relying on us to protect them. Every fucking day they lock their keys in the Democracymobile and then sit around waiting and shooting at each other and us for U.S. Tire and Towing to show up with the slim-jim.

We should be smacking them upside their heads with 2x4s demanding that they get their act together now. Instead, we hear the same excuses that we just heard [from Rice].

Quote from Cheney about what folly it is for the Dems to run on “competence”.

Short Levin reply: Bring it on, Bitches!



On CBS -- Face the Nation -- Immigration. Kennedy. Amnesty.

About what you’d expect.




On NBC -- Meet the Press -- War, War, War, Condi, and a Special Guest appearance by...Immigration.

Couldn’t watch the GOP tickertape unspool out of Condi’s mouth.

Tried to, but what new (and, by definition, newsworthy) thing does this Administration have to say anymore? At least Fox had the marketing savvy to throw on a token Dem after giving Condi the mike for 10 minutes, but Casaba-Noggin’ just gave her the better part of half an hour of unrebutted air.

So instead, this predictable musical interlude, courtesy of Marilyn Manson which I hear in my head at 100 decibels every time another Administration’s myrmidon marionettes starts jabbering lying happytalk at me:

Everything has been said before
There's nothing left to say anymore
When it's all the same
You can ask for it by name

Babble babble bitch bitch
Rebel rebel party party
Sex sex sex and don't forget the violence
Blah blah blah got your lovey-dovey sad-and-lonely
Stick your stupid slogan in:
Everybody sing along.
Babble babble bitch bitch
Rebel rebel party party
Sex sex sex and don't forget the "violence"
Blah blah blah got your lovey-dovey sad-and-lonely
Stick your stupid slogan in:
Everybody sing,
Are you motherfuckers ready
For the new shit?
Stand up and admit,
tomorrow's never coming.
This is the new shit.
Stand up and admit.
Do we get it? No.
Do we want it? Yeah.
This is the new shit,
Stand up and admit.
…
So,
Let us entertain you
Let us entertain you...
Blah blah blah blah everybody sing along.

Better now, and on to reportorial table talk featuring the 2006 elections and, hey, guess what?

Immigration!

David Broder, Liz Bumiller, Charlie Cook, John Harwood.

Liz Bumiller: Bush is trying to have it both ways.

John Harwood (WSJ): Dems have problems too.

Short GOP Iraqing Point for the next week: The Media is the Message and the Message is the Enemy. Major Media only wants to report the bad stuff.

Cook: It plays with the base. And 80 journalists have been killed there, so going to look for “good news” can get you killed. This is just another “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Broder refers us to Deborah Howell (his boss) and her column on the subject. I haven’t read it so have nothing to say about it.

Harwood: What a weak argument. Sheesh! You have journalists who can’t move around due to security. WTF is wrong with these people!

On what it sez here on the label is a “Republican Rebellion” Casaba Noggin’ quotes Broder’s column back to him – extensively – and then pipes in with, “Ouch!”

Now that's some journalisming there kids.

Then Casaba Noggin’ quotes Bumiller’s column back to her – expansively – and sez, “So who’s the reliever!”

Bumiller answers.

Then, Casaba Noggin’ sez, “John…”

Then reads some poll numbers.

Then Casaba Noggin’ quotes Cook’s column back to him – for 108 minutes, almost a filibuster – and sez, “Charlie, what do you see in the Senate?”

Cook answers.

Then Casaba Noggin’ quotes more of Cook’s column back to him – interminably – and sez, “Tough. So the Dems need an inside straight?”

Tim Russert; one of the few human beings I know of who would actually fail a fucking Turing Test.



Seriously, NBC, save yourself some Big Cake, fire Russert’s worthless carcass and go Full Ananova (no not “Anna Nova” [link so-very-much NOT work-safe.] although that would be entertaining too.) Buy a Mac, get some intern to show you how to use the “speech” function, and feed it wire-copy randomly interspersed with the word “Well?”

ABC – This week -- Immigration, and Republican Arlen Specter and Republican Tom Tancredo play "GOP Spy vs. Spy".

Only quote of note was Tancredo: “I’m not surprised that Hillary doesn’t know anything about the Bible.”

Why bother? The Republican Party is worm-eaten from crotch to crown with pin-head and bigots like this, because that’s the way they want it. A Party that invests 4/5th of its energy warming itself in the cheery glow of the rhetorical crosses it lights to keep the Mole Rat Base happy, and spends the rest of its breath denying they every meant anything by it and calling Democrats angry and unAmerican.

The Round Table…Fareed Z., George Will and Katrina Vanden Heuval.

Would anyone be surprised if I mentioned that “Immigration” was first on the table?

Fareed: American Demand brings these people here. Our economic growth rate depends directly on immigrants. These are 11 million hard-working, law-abiding. How do you deport 11 million?

Will: Morality separated from practicality is immorality.

Katrina: Immigration will rip apart the Republican Party.

Will: The backbone of our economy is not leaf-rakers, it’s MicroSoft.

Katrina/Fareed: People can work at MicroSoft because they can hire someone cheaply to stay home and take care of their kids. Dumbass.

Katrina: The David Duke, “White Supremacists” thinking has been absorbed into the Right on the subject of immigration.

And thence on to Global Warming, for which George Will unsnaps his change purse, rolls on his latex gloves and like an archivist handing the original draft of the Magna Carta, carefully lifts out his moldering “Global cooling” articles from 20 years ago.

Very Reaganesque, this faithful impression of Ronnie and how he used to haul out his lying “welfare queens with Cadillacs” clippings to “prove” that welfare recipients were a buncha lazy Negroes living off the sweat of honest, White Christians.

Frankly, Will is all gassy and dyspeptic out of simple fear that saving the Earth might cost him some dough.

Typical conservative; will run into a burning building to save a five dollar bill, but won’t spend that five bucks to save a burning planet.

Katrina beats on Will reasonably well, and he sits there, fingers steepled, steely eyes looking into a bright future where uppity womenfolk are “dealt with” Old Testament-style and are not allowed to show up on yak shows and make him look like a weird, old crank.

Kartina: The debate is over. People who won’t face the face of greenhouse changes are “global warming loonies”. The same kind of delusional dumbasses who clung to the “cigarettes don’t cause cancer” lies until the bitter end. And remember, this is an Administration that is at war with Science. That suppresses the truth. That rewrites scientific findings to fit political spin. That scrubs its own reports to [unintelligible, but I’ll betcha it was something like “make its Fundy Overlords happy.”]


On NBC – Hey, the Chris Matthews Show somehow made it past the NCAA filters…

So, OK. There’s Katty Kay, and Julio Cesar Ortiz (Matthews Discovers Immigration), Kathleen Parker and Mike Duffy.

Matthews sings “The Immigrant Song” for a few minutes, and then...

Kathleen Parker smiles her tight-little-Mary-Matalin smile and, as I impressionistically reinterpret it, explained that real ‘Murricans just hate these fucking beaners greasing up their White Planet dreams and possibly stealing their daughters with their oily, wetback charm.

That there’s this subliminal dislike (and I am not kidding, this is the example this shrike used) among us Gringos whenever you call the utility company and you get the “Para espanol…” option. What’s happening to our Great Nation, after all, when “those people” can’t be bothered to learn English and we can’t tell if they’re maybe talking about what a shrill harridan Kathleen Parker is right to her face.

And FYI, Parker is all sneer and wingnut tailings, whether on paper or teevee: the Trib carries her polluted little words and giving her the meditative time and distance of print to use for mature reflection before she spews her smiley-venom improves her not one whit.

Oh, goodie, they’re all onto welfare, and Parker can hold forth that all of that “cheap labor isn’t cheap”, ‘cause “those people” are gobbling up billions in social services.

Think about what she is saying. That immigrants cross deserts, river and barbed wire, work peonage hours for pennies, and stay on the dodge from the law, all to somehow relax and goof off in the sheltering bower of the Food Stamps and Government Cheese that Kathleen Parker’s tax money lavishes on their lazy, brown asses.

Bastards!

So it was a lotta yadda, although the signoff was not bad: Matthews got as close as he’ll ever come to saying that Dubya’s a lying wretch who clearly, loudly and repeatedly made the deliberate connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein

Which would be progress, were in not for the fact that next week Matthews will undoubtedly be back to servicing Dubya’s lap-clown like an oil derrick.


And, as an extra bit of meat-loaf-stretcher, I thought I’d throw in this little bit of sweet-sweet, GOP magic from NeoCon Hamlet himself -- David Brooks, the Melancholy Bane -- on the News Hour (Friday, 03/24/06) as he cautiously launches the latest in Republican Talking Point Technology: The underreporting of Invisible Good News!

For a definitive refutation of this latest addition to the long, pathetic and fatal line of Republican greased-weasel lies and excuses -- that things are not really as horrifically-wrong-and-sprinting-towards-the-abyss in Iraq as it appears if you just factor in a Vast and Pellucid Ether of Undetectable Goodness -- head of over to Crooks and Liars and watch this vid of Lara Logan laying down the law.

This from the News Hour shows how the same drivel is drizzled out with daintier hands.

JIM LEHRER: David, how do you think -- what do you think about this, the connection between public opinion going against the war and what the press is doing about the covering of the war?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I guess I'd say two things. First, one doesn't want to say that things in Iraq are rosy and the media is picking out the awful things. Nonetheless, one does hear tremendous -- from almost every serviceman and woman I see over there -- this idea that we go and cover the bombings, but they see the bombings. They see the assassination, but they also see the stores, and they see the people shopping. So they see a complex picture; all we cover is the bombings.

As if, if you turned on any city on the 11:00 news, all you would see is fires, you'd think there were fires everywhere. So I do think there is a gap between the complexity of the reality of Iraq and what we see; that doesn't mean that the media is manufacturing the chaos over there. Everybody also says there's tremendous chaos over there.

…
MARK SHIELDS: I'd just say, imagine, if you would, that the Washington National Cathedral had been blown up, and that every day in the United States, which is 12 times the size of Iraq, there were 500 people found executed. Now, what do you think would dominate? Do you think the opening of the new Wal-Mart and Cankiki (ph), a junior high addition, the hospital drive would lead the news?

I mean, this is big stuff. I mean, these are people being executed every single day there, and that is natural that that's going to be covered.

…
DAVID BROOKS: Right, of course. But there's also -- I mean, I'm not denying that. But there's also a construction or a semi-construction of society which is also an important thing that's happening in Iraq, and that part's just harder to cover because it's every day, it's invisible.

I don't want to say, as some talk radio show guys do, that the media is -- it's wonderful over there, but the media, the media, the media. I don't want to go in that direction. But it's just harder to cover invisible, untelegenic, social trends.

…
JIM LEHRER: Can he communicate his way out of this?

DAVID BROOKS: No, of course not. I mean, and I've become a little upset with the media -- everybody should be upset with the media, I guess -- the decadence of turning everything to a message-handling issue.

This is like 95 percent substance, and a little bit of how Bush talks about it. And he could be talk about it -- he could be, you know, Abraham Lincoln or, I don't know, Shakespeare -- and if we see the violence and if Iraq is the way Iraq is, it doesn't matter. So, you know...

Damned funny that Bobo chooses to lambast the "media" over its "decadence of turning everything to a message-handling issue" when spin and packaging is all this Potemkin White House has ever excelled at.

And oh but BoBo does so very badly want to “go in that direction.”

Is so reeking-with-ass-sweat desperate to find some counterweight to throw on the scale to prove that his whole ideology, Party, career and self aren’t now shown irrefutably to be a pile of radioactive waste that he can be seen here in the act of literally pulling shit out of thin air.

Chalking up the lack of Good News from Iraq to fact that it is Fucking Invisible.

And with such skilled tailors as BoBo in waiting, we can bid Sunday adieu and all sit back and enjoy the unfolding spectacle of the Republican Party ordering up an entire rack of New 2006 Electoral Clothes cut from this same creamy, imaginary linen.