Sunday Mornin' Coming Down – Part II

Back on…Face the Nation.


Cokie Roberts opines that the “important” visit was in Seattle. Microsoft. Starbucks. Boeing. The next important stop was Saudi Arabia. The obligatory stop by a poor relations shanty in this whirlwind tour was the visit to White House.

Sheesh.

It was George Will. Sam Donaldson. Cokie Roberts. A bas relief of dead dogs playing poker carved in old, gray butter.

Will reached into his Meaningless Statistic change purse to dispel rumors of Chinese dominance and spends 45 valuable seconds nattering on about how, 235 years ago, the Yellow Hoards outnumbered us 100-to-1 and now its just 4-to-1.

Pointless. Contextless. But I'm happy someone showed Will where the "function" button is in Excel, and that he's having so much fun moving numbers around.

On Press The Meet…Ted Kennedy and we’re all Murtha now, baby!

Kennedy lays it down. Our presence has inflamed the insurgency. The only way out of Iraq is to get out of Iraq.

The people that are cutting and running are this Administration. Cutting and running from the Truth. From the facts. From reason.

Calls his vote against the war, “The Best Vote I Cast in the United States Senate.”

He heard the same “Great Bloodbath” arguments at the end of Vietnam. The time has come to get out.

Russert keeps asking the same question: But what if it fails? What of there’s a Civil War? What if the terrorists come swooping in? Huh? Huh?

The right answer would have been to come across the table at Punkin’ Haid with a broken bottle and ask, “Yes, Timmy, what about that? What exactly are the right answers to that question? What exactly are those yummy-yummy good scenarios that the Republicans have left us?”


On Iran.

Kennedy: Rattling the nuclear saber is counterproductive.

Russert: But what if your military advisors came to you and said that there was no alternative except using tactical nukes?

And what if Jesus came and said that your two children were both tied to the undercarriages of trucks carrying nitroglycerine, one with the brake lines cut plunging down a mountain over shattered highway…and one a hundred miles in the opposite direction being driven by a suicidal drunk through a park where his ex-wife is a ranger?

Huh? What then Mr. Smartypants!

OK, time to get something straight and lay a term eternally to rest.

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. A. Tactical. Nuclear. Weapon.

Period.

Tossing any nuke around – even a pony nuke, even underground – has monstrous, strategic consequences.

On Bin Laden.

Russert: Why can’t we capture him?

Kennedy: Shit, Tim. Bigger question is, why did we let him go? Why did we abandon the hunt for him?

On Immigration.

Kennedy: If the Preznit would be willing to take on the Right Wing of his own Party, we might be able to fix this thing.

Russert: But some in your Party think you are too quick to compromise.

Russert: Falwell. Whuzzup with him and McCain?

The Senator from Massachusetts was given a chance to wallop a big fat one clean over the Green Monster at Fenway. And he didn’t take it. He hedged on Falwell, hedged on McCain. Talked around the whole “Agent of Intolerance” matter.

Now Kennedy is a legislator and this is how legislators have to operate, but when handed a ball-peen hammer and Falwell’s spongy skull, it is the duty of every person who loves liberty to step up and swing.

Kinda like the sword in the stone.

Kennedy lights up on Education. Chinese are graduation 600K engineers every year. India, 350K. We’re graduting 75K, half of whom are foreign born.

This Administration is soooo fucking cavalier about education. Well, about everything, but the topic is education.

When we passed the G.I. Bill, the Treasury figured that it created $7 in new wealth for every $1 invested. Education is the key to growth.

Damn right. This is an investment in our nation’s future, and it’s worth spending a little money on it. Maybe if we weren’t pissing away hundreds of billions in Iraq. Maybe roll back all of those giveaways to billionaires.

Russert: What about $3.00/gal gasoline?

Kennedy: The “Big Issue” of this election will be the gross incompetence of this Administration on every issue.

Russert lobs up a 44-year-old quote from Teddy when he was 12 years old about Democratic corruption in MA. And then pounces. So when Dems do it, its OK?!!

Kennedy: Fuck you, Russert. When it’s a few cutpurses, then it’s a problem with individuals. When the whole political infrastructure is powered by corruption, then it’s the Party and its culture.

The Panel… Broder, Brownstein, Blankley, Myers.

Broder: (Cracking open another tired, fortune cookie of self-evident wisdom) It’s the government’s job to protect secrets, but it's ours to try to uncover them.

Brownstein: (On Slot Jockey Bigot Big Bill Bennett’s comments that Journalists are Traitors). This Administration will leak like month-old-diapers when it suits them.

OK, that was me punching up the tepid prose a trifle.

Me: What you mean is that the GOP will leak half-truths to juice up the pig people and tamp down the opposition and then get their Underoos in a twist when someone dares to tell the whole truth to counterhex their lies.

Tony Blankley: Aughhhh! Get the fuck back to the McLaughlin Group you bull tumor.

Dee Dee Myers: Classified information has been leaked, always. Government workers sign a document promising not to release info. If a government worker wants to talk for what he or she thinks if the good of the country, that’s on them.

Brownstein: One important question is whether or not the public is better off knowing things like NSA etc.

Russert: Staff changes at the WH?

Brownstein: Are they looking at fundamental changes or not? Not. The source of Rove’s power is his relationship with Dubya. That’s not going to change.

Me: Obviously not. This Administration doesn’t have “policy” in any sense on that word. They have tactics for kneecapping people and grabbing more power…for the purpose of kneecapping people and grabbing more power. They all the “vision” of a platoon of pickpockets working a rodeo. All they see of this beautiful world are wallets and asses, and all "strategy" is focused on separating one from the other.

Rove will simply move from crafting failed policies designed to throw old women under buses...to just thowing old women under buses.

Dee Dee Myers: The relationship between this Administration and the Press is so contentious. This Admin is not interested in a better relationship with the press.

Broder: The problem is not Scotty. The problem is George Bush, who feels no need to keep the public informed on anything.

Brownstein: There is a shift in the way that media gets done. Increasingly you see “politicians” running to the partisan Press.

Me: Fuck you.

Here, for example, is a picture of the White House Press Corps

ferreting out a story.

What you mean is that the GOP has created a purely partisan alternate media because the whole of GOP “policy” is a Long War Against Reality Including ‘Rithmatic.

What you mean is that the GOP "media" consists of telling stupid people what they want to hear in a way that accrues to the benefit of rich people and the leaders of the Conservative Evangelical Jihad.

What you mean is that the GOP invented a Pravada Press to help it lie to the public, and the MSM has chased them down the rabbit hole and as a result has grown steadily weaker and more pussified.

There is no “Lefty” equivalent to what the Right has done to the Free Press so quit pretending that this is a bipartisan disease.