Sunday Mornin' Coming Down

Does anyone know
Where the love of God goes
When wankers turn the minutes to hours?

Around 200 million miles from here, deep within the asteroid belt, there is a silence as bottomless as can be found anywhere. A shattered wheel of dead stones mutely moaning as the pressure of distant sunlight faintly licks over them. A convergence of photons, vacuum, physics and freefall that, over the course of millions of years, shepherd the chips of a failed planet into a kind of uniformity.

An inaudible chorus of bone-conduction clicking as one pebble taps another, each describing its fated course through cold space.

Why do I mention this?

Because this morning the sepulchral quiet of the Belt was like unto the roar you’d find sticking your head inside a jet engine compared to this morning’s silence across the whole of the Mouse Circus that accompanied the absolute embargo on any mention of Steven Colbert’s 15-round, cockpunching tour de force of every Beltway sacred bovine gonad last night.

Holy Christ. Watching the Whores of Pennsylvania Avenue, and their retainers and lackeys in the MSM being fed, nipples first, through the Colbert Woodchipper it felt – for a moment – like a free country again.

Where people walk right up to trolls and monsters, bold as brass, and call them by their True Names.

It was – for that interval – a vision of a world, not without peril or enemies, but without fear.

It was also painfully funny (link here thanks to the faboo Crooks & Liars) in the purest, Swiftean sense of that word, and anything the Bobble Heads were going to do was going to disappoint, so lets get it on.

(UPDATE:

To give the C&L Servers a rest, here are the links to YouTube's Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Steven Colbert's Armed and Truthy beatdown.)

On Fox (the local franchise) Walter Jacobson retired today.

He went out classy, his very last guest being his old WBBM-TV news running buddy – Bill Kurtis (“I’m….Bill K----hurtis”). If you don’t know Kurtis, he’s does his business over A&E, and has become the self-parodying voice of the fatuous anchor in such fine uses of celluloid as “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”

Jacobson was a scold and an irritant who tried to straddle the infotainment line and be two parts journo to one part Geraldo.

He often got the mixture wildly wrong.

In recent years, as he moved onto the Fox platform, he has become more and more a reflexively calcified conservative idiot.

Which is a pity.

On Regular Fox...an unsightly display of Fox-on-Fox Frottage.

It’s the 10 year anniversary of this embarrassment; long past time to reclassify it from “painful ass rash” to “chronic genital infection”.

Colin Powell gets cited (via a British teevee interview) as having told Rummy to use more troops and that Rummy belw him off.

Wow. I was unaware that such huge advances were being made in spine-regrowth technology as are now daily on exhibit among this Administration’s League of Expatriated Generals.

Josh Bolten, intro-ed by the only footage of Bush from the Correspondents Dinner, says -- actually says --this is a chance for the White House to “get its mojo back.”

Yeah, Baby!

The Big Strategy is to put the Preznit in the field and to be more accessible to the press. Like here! Portrait of Josh playing 84” softball pitch-and-catch with Chris Wallace.

Hey, (you might fairly ask) what about energy prices?

Bolten: “We came in with a recession on the doorstep. 9/11. Corporate corruption. The worst disaster in American history.”

Notice how he immediately clicks on the Smudge Icon and quietly smears the “We came in with...”, “Blame Clinton/It ain’t our fault” tool right over everything that’s happened since the Gang that Couldn’t Loot Straight rolled into town.

Over half a decade ago years ago.

Wallace: Some say the best way to improve relations with the press is to end the televising of the “posturing” of the WH press corps.

Yes, “some” do say that. Douchebags, mostly. Here’s the footage.

Bolten: Rove remains an important voice in the White House. Rove remains not only an indispensable political serial rapist strategist, but he has one of the most “brilliant policy minds”. Aalways cheerful, positive and optimistic.

Yup. That's Don Karleone.

Just keep him supplied with bunnies and puppies and fresh drill bits and claw hammers and he’s as happy as the Ripper, dosed to the gills on Viagra, on a foggy night.

(I lose interest as a mini-blitz of spams arrived between 9:15 and 9:19. And I snag their IP addresses. Maybe some Big Fun there one day soon.)


Bolten tells us that taxes are, in fact, even more progressive than ever before. Even more fair to the po' and more burdensome to the rich, because the top 10% of income earners now pay 66% of the tax burden. Used to be 64%.

Bolten uses around 100K as the cutoff point.

Here’s your daily driftglass “Watching the Defectives” rule-of-thumb: when a White House flak starts slinging percentages around, they are lying. Only question is how.

Hey, apparently the Preznit actually welcomes internal disagreement. Who knew? Bolten sez Dubya prizes people who come in and tell him new stuff. There’s no penalty for disagreeing, but he’s every inch the model of the modern CEO. Once the Decider Speaks, our job is to shut up and salute.

Which is completely appropriate. Problem is, The Dauphin thinks everyone needs to shut up and salute when the Decider announces that 2+2 = a billion.

Citizens.

The press.

The membership of the Mathematical Association of America.

The American Statistical Association.

Reality.

Everyone.

Then we get a quick peek of what sounds a lot like the new Chief's e-Harmony dating profile.

We find that Josh Bolten is not an early riser. Is “good friends” with Bo Derek (we are shown a photo of Mr. Bolten walking stiffly alongside same, looking for all the world like her tuxedo-clad caddy.)

Likes soul kissing. Foot massages. Long walks on the beach at sunset during the Rapture.

Then Bill Kristol came on, but all I could see of him was the “portion for foxes” that Hurricane Colbert left behind.



On This Week...It’s Condi!

And Iran.
Iran so far away.
Couldn’t get away.

Then Chuck Schumer talks energy. You wanna drill in Alaska? Fine. But you have to also agree to conservation legislation. Higher CAFE standards and the like. A bluff dropped on the table that won’t be called because the “White House does the bidding of Big Oil.”

Not true.

The White House doesn’t do the bidding of Big Oil: the White House IS Big Oil.

The comes the panel: George Will. Fareed Zakaria. Jay Carney. Claire Shipman.

Icky.

Zakaria: The major driver of global demand is…American drivers. The problem isn’t that gas prices are too high – they are where they were in adjusted dollars during the peak in 1981. The problem is that those jacked prices are not going into the Treasury and into long-term energy investment. They’re going into the cavernous pockets of the men who hold Dick and George’s leash.

Claire Shipman: Don’t blame Big Oil. Big Oil are just big ol’ snuggly teddy bears.

Will: Makes snuffly little noises about Liberal alarmists and Global Warming and how awful and contradictory everything everyone else says is.

Stephanopolis has enough of the "I Heart Exxon Hot Oil Wrestling Love Match" and points out that Big Oil’s fat profit comes to them having already been given massive, crazy, indefensible tax breaks.

Zakaria: The Energy Bill has been nothing but a giveaway to Big Oil.



On Face the Nation...It’s Condi! Again.

And yes kids, when pushed even slightly she unhesitatingly shows just what a lying bint she actually is.

Bob Schieffer: Seems like Powell was right that we never had enough troops on the ground.

Condi: Yes we did.

Bob Schieffer: Oh come on. Shit, woman; clearly we did not have enough troops on the ground.

Condi (clapped her hands over her ears and whirling in circles): Yes we did. Yes we did. Yes we did. Yes we did. Yes we did. It’s not our fault that the Iraqi Army disintegrated. And there was systematic looting that was obviously planned by Evil Doers!

(Funny how, at the time, Don “Hey, shit happens” Rumsfeld couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about looting. That no one was saying a single fucking word about it being “systematic” back when it was happening.

Back when it was preventable.

Back when we were told it was just a few vases being stolen from a museum.

Back when it was just the “messy” placenta of Iraq squatting and birthing a Jeffersonian Democracy in the desert sun...nothing to be concerned about..and yet somehow we managed to stack troops and tanks like cordwood around the Oil Ministry?)


Bob Schieffer: But it was the United States – it was us -- that gave the order to disband the Army?!

Condi (Now a bit nauseous from spinning so hard and throwing up a little in her mouth): OK, we gave the order, but the Iraqi Army had melted. Sure, anybody can go back and look at stuff. Anybody can get all fussy about facts and events and accountability, but we’re Republicans, Bob! We don’t believe in being picky about who eternally fucked up what, or who doomed the us how.

Unless the President is a Democrat. And what’s at stakes are Presidential penises, and where Presidential penises are being stockpiled and used.

Then it’s Katie-Bar-The-Fucking-Door!

But lies? Treason? Incompetence?

A Republican cares not for such things.

And then Condi Melted Away. Presumably back into Henry Kissinger's meth-shredded imagination from whence she obviously came.

She was replaced by eyelidless shrew, Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who was positively juicing her cotton panels over ANWAR. I swear she was slicking her seat so lavishly I thought she was going to slide into the floor and get washed down the gutter in a cataract of ANWAR-induced lubriciousness.

ANWAR. That’s her “energy policy”. Period.

Sure you should inflate your tires properly and make sure you don’t run the engine when you’re parked in the alley making out with the babysitter, but the Only Real Solution is sucking ANWAR dry.

Senator Maria Cantwell provides the sanity counterweight: We’ve got 3% of the world reserve. The whole of ANWAR would bump the world price down by maybe a penny, in ten years. Domestic security comes down to ethanol, biodiesel, conservation, new tech.

Of course we can’t drill our way out way out if this. The technology, the numbers, the projections of global supply and demand all insist that we pour our national will into developing and marketing alternative energy sources.

Oh, and tax these fuckers. Take back at least as much as Cheney handed over in free gifts from the Treasury.

Murkowski: The windfall profit tax didn’t work under the Evil Jimmy Carter.

On Meet the Press. From their online blurb: “A special program on gas prices with Sec. of Energy Samuel Bodman, American Petroleum Institute Pres. & CEO Red Cavaney, CNBC's Jim Cramer; Asst. Dem. Leader Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, & author & energy analyst Daniel Yergin.”

It was a wide-ranging and reasonably thorough discussion, so let me radically and irresponsibly oversimplify the situation thusly.

As long as a certain warp, frustrated old man...

...and his pet Dauphin body-servant are allowed to rule by decree, we are fucked.