Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

A Very Chertoff Sunday.


Shortest Sunday:

On Fox: Chertoff, Chertoff, bo-birtoff

Face The Nation: Banana-fana fo-firtoff

This Week: Fe-fi-mo-mirtoff.

Meet the Press: Chertoff!

Oh, and this stuff:

On Fox: Jennifer Griffin on the Lebanese Border, and Peter Hoekstra bemoaning the loss of political innocence…

Short Hoekstra-Wallace minuets: Leaks are bad…except when it’s Rove outing a CIA agent. New York times bad. Dissent is disloyal. Questions are dangerous. That sorta thing.

Hoekstra: Chris, there are folks in the United States want to take away the tools we need to stop the terr’ists!

Chris Wallace: But, uh, Chairman Petey, uh, the intel in this case was, uh, gotten with a FISA warrant.

Hoekstra: Shut up!

Hoekstra: We need to get back to bipartisanship.

Wallace: Bi? Partisan? Ship? Is that some kind of French pansexual ocean-going vessel?

Hoekstra: Bipartisanship. You know, capitulation. When Dems bent over and took it up the south forty and said “Thank you” when we used their hair for Handi Wipes. When we “kicked their teeth out, and then punch them in the stomach for mumbling”. Good times. Good times.

Then Ned Lamont, radiating Senatoriality,

Wallace: Cheney said you hate ‘Murrica. And Dubya's "Democrat With Benefits", Holy Joe, said your victory gives comfort and encouragement to the Al Qaeda-types. Why do you want to surrender to terrorists? Why do you want to take the tools that law enforcement needs away, strip Americans naked, set our National Balls on fire and run us through the slaughter line?

Lamont: It’s not a question about taking the tools away. It’s a question of making the Preznit follow the fucking law.

Wallace: What happens to all the Iraqis who trusted us? What happens to the sectarian violence What happens if there is a bloodbath?

Lamont: There is a bloodbath. Right now. What are you, four? Are you a child? Jeez, how about you watch something other than “American Dad” and Fox News before you try asking intelligent adults questions.

And now, the lightening round! Because nothing shouts “Fox News” louder than one-word answers to loaded questions.

Dungkeeper: He who would cross the Bridge of Death “Fair and Balanced” must answer me these questions three ere the other side he see.

Lamontelot: Ask me your questions, dungkeeper.

What is your name?
What is your Quest?
Is Joe Lieberman really a Republican?

On This Week: Russ Feingold.

Russ: Step away from the Senate, Lieberman.

Russ: It would be overdoing it to strip Joe of his committee assignments.

George: You wuuuv, John McCain, don’t you.

Russ: Yeah. I like me some McCain.

Actual quotes:

Lieberman (on video): “If we just pick up as Ned Lamont wants us to do and get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England, and it will strengthen them and they will strike us again.”


Stephanopoulos: “Senator Lieberman thinks that your approach will strengthen the terrorists and it’s a victory for terrorists. What’s your response?”

Feingold: “Well, I like Joe Lieberman, but I support Ned Lamont. Because Joe is showing with that regrettable statement that he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it. The fact is that we were attacked on 9/11 by Al Qaeda and its affiliates and its sympathizers, not by Saddam Hussein. And unfortunately Senator Lieberman has supported the Bush Administration’s disastrous strategic approach of getting us stuck in Iraq instead of focusing on those who attacked us. I mean, look at the places that have been attacked: India, Morocco, Turkey, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Somalia, Spain, Great Britain. What does this have to do with Iraq? And Senator Lieberman is stuck on that point. Ned Lamont and I believe that we should refocus on those who attacked us on 9/11 and not simply try to cover our tracks because this was such a very poor decision in terms of the overall battle against the terrorists who attacked us.

driftglass: I like me some Feingold.


George Will: John Kerry was right. He said that this was primarily a police issue. It is.

One gets the feeling that George Will spends long evenings nervously sipping Sanka, eating graham crackers and saying, “You betcha!” at a certain Kennebunkport kitchen table (long after the estate's own Margaret Dumont has gorging herself on the scenery and has taken to her bed with a spell of her recurring Negro-allergies) while a certain, aging patrician rages impotently around the room, spilling gin and weeping over the eternal destruction of his carefully husbanded family name.


On Face the Nation. Guest host Scott Pelley.

Hey, Scott. It’s the Democratic Party. Not “Democrat”. Quit regurgitation GOP script and you’ll remind people of Stone Phillips less and less.

It’s the George and Gracie of Sunday Intel Talk -- Rep. Jane Harman, (D-Calif.) and Liar Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) who crawls out from under his Mommy’s “My doggie ate the second half of the 9/11 hearings” skirt to opine on the nature of the Dippity Doo Bomb plot.

Was he right or wrong? I have no idea.

What I do know in the last five years the GOP qua GOP has only earned the right to be bent over a sawhorse for a pee test, a body cavity search and two quarts of scopolamine administered with a equine-grade veterinary syringe before they can be trusted to accurately report on the direction of the sun passing through the sky.

They are liars, and lying is what liars do.

Pat Roberts: The British have better tools. In Britain, if you want to search, you just call a Lord and in you go.

Roberts: Our problem is out national resolve. My goodness, why can’t we keep a secret. I mean, the leaks, people! Words have consequences. If you can’t keep a secret, what kind of American are you? The troops, the furriners, the aliens from Betelgeuse all want to know why all the partisanship? Why all the politicization of these kinds of things.

I agree, and a hearty “Here! Here!” to Roberts calling for Cheney and Lieberman and Mehlman to shut the fuck up about imputing pro-terrorist implications to the outcome of a primary election in Connecticut.

Oh wait, your not talking about the thugs who run your Party jumping like horny puppies on a bomb plot to pimp for Leiberman? That’s not politicizing?

Then...Lamont!

We have lost our global credibility and respect. Those are our most potent and valuable weapons, and this Administration has pissed them away, along with our treasury and the lives of our children.

Then, Meet the Press and Chris Matthews.

Both ho-hum. Howard Dean talking straight and Ken Mehlman lying his knob-gobbler right off.

Jesus. Who even listens to Republicans anymore? Really. What sort of mushpated freak actually looks at a sniveler like Roberts or a hack like Mehlman and thinks, “Yessss! These are my boys!”

I tell ya, there is a fortune to be made rolling them around the little hamlets that hug the blue highways and having them do their funny tricks in the cage between Benny Hinn and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.

Also on Meet the Press, Lee Hamilton & Thomas Kane (9/11 Commission) have a sober, civil conversation.

For a change of pace, one of our thousands of local PBS affiliates reran this episode of “Foreign Exchange” from, I believe, December of 2005.

In which Captain Obvious predicts the year upcoming and – surprise! -- gets every single fucking thing wrong.

The first money quote?

Fareed Zakaria: Let me ask you Tom--starting off you wrote a column before the Iraq War in which you said we will be able to tell whether the War is a success by looking at the price of oil, and you said if it’s $6 a barrel, roughly speaking it’s a success; if it’s $60 it hasn’t worked. Well it’s about $69; what’s your sense?

And what is the price of oil these days?

This from the London Free Press, 08/12/06:

Light sweet crude for September delivery rose 35 cents to settle at $74.35 yesterday on the New York Mercantile Exchange -- below last Friday's settlement of $74.76 a barrel, after soaring above $77 earlier in the week.

September Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange climbed 35 cents to settle at $75.63.

But hey, I supposed if we just keep “staying the course” right off the fucking cliff for a few million more friedmans, eventually our foreign policy will learn to soar like Pegasus!

End Note:

Although chautauqua scores high in the top quartile with “Hoosier Daddy?”, the prize must go to leigh.

Yeah, it’s “Hoosier Dada”: A mash-up of the “Hoosiers” DVD cover, and Marcel Duchamp's famous, Dadaist parody of Mona Lisa. And don’t think I don’t appreciate the ass-sex references I’ve received from the harder-core Duchamp fans.

Leigh, the floor is yours.