Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.

Must be showing reruns, because all morning people were showing Dick Cheney and Condi Rice abdicating any responsibility for the invasion of Iraq and throwing George Tenant under a caravan of buses. Again.

Thanks to local programming changes, everything went aired at once.

On Fox News: Condoleezza Rice. Plus Howard Dean.

Dean did fine, but Condi...

Condi: “Long War”. And we’re doin’ great!

Wallace: Any failures?

Condi: Probably, but can’t really think of any.

Wallace: None?

Condi: History will judge. Far, far, future history. After the sun bloats up to fill the Solar System to the orbit of Venus, then we'll sort this all out.

Wallace: In Afghanistan, didn't you spend the last three years telling us that we have wiped out the Taliban?

Condi: Sorta.

Wallace: Why didn’t we finish the job in Afghanistan?

Condi: Well, Chris, it wasn’t possible to “finish the job”. We have made enormous progress in Afghanistan.

Wallace: But they were wiped out? Gone? WTF?

Condi: The Taliban won’t succeed. The Taliban is taking a beating.

Wallace: But the head of British Forces said, “The fighting is extraordinarily intense.” Worse than Iraq. Isn’t it a failure that we allowed them to regroup?

Of course not! Sing with me, Chris.

"Na na na na na na na na Leader!
...na na na na na na na na Batman
...I mean Leader..."

Wallace: In October 2002 Bush said there were definite, close ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. In March or 2003, you said Condi said “A very strong link” between al Qaeda and Iraq. Didn’t you all lie?

Condi: No, it was the CIA that failed, not us. There were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. George Tenant failed us. Tenant, Tenant, Tenant. Terror, Terror, Terror.

Wallace: Fuck you, bint! This is not a “now” report – this was a report form 2002. Did you know about it? Did you read it?

Condi: I, uh, don’t, uh, remember seeing it. But….Saddam Saddam Saddam. Evil, Chris. He was evil.

Message: What does it matter if we lied or not? Fucked up or not? Tricked us into war or not? I mean, "Na na na na na na na na Leader!”



On "Face the Nation": Condi dances her Fox News 3x5 cards across town and runs the same ramadoolah there.


On “Meet the Press” : Vice President Dick Cheney lies.

For one solid hour.

I feel unclean.

Cheney, distilled:

Everyone is wrong but me.

Everyone has their facts wrong but me.

Afghanistan is going great.

Iraq is a success.

We were greeted as liberators.

There were links between al Qaeda and Iraq. There were! There were! There were!

George Tenant is the reason why we invaded. Whatever went wrong it’s Slam Dunk’s fault and his alone.

Even if the CIA had told us that there were no WMDs, we still would have invaded.

The 60% of Americans who believe Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism are idiots.

If we had it all to do over again, we would do it exactly the same way.

Timmuh: It appears there was a deliberate attempt by this Administration to link the events of 9/11 and Iraq in the minds of the American people and mislead this country into war.

Timmuh: In 2001, you said, “Saddam was ‘bottled up’” and not a threat. You said Saddam had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11.

Cheney: Tenant, Tenant, Tenant. Terror, Terror, Terror.

In other words, nothing new to see here. A decrepit, old degenerate who spent an hour of the Lord’s Day lying, smirking and shifting blame for his grotesque menagerie of lies and failures.

Well, almost nothing new.

There were two bits of breaking news.

First, here in Realityland, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan and the poppy crop is up 60%. In Realityland this is unbelievabley bad news, but in Cheneyville it is simply unbelieved.

So Cheney pooh-poohs the idea that anything dire or unexpected is happening in Afghanistan, he gives us all a brief lesson in the Dick Cheney Guide to History when he shrugs off the heroin problem in Afghanistan, saying there has been “heroin being grown for centuries”.

Really?

This from Wikipedia:

“…
Felix Hoffmann, of Bayer in Elberfeld, Germany created heroin as a medicine 11 days after inventing aspirin. Afraid of the possible side effects of aspirin, Bayer registered heroin (probably from heroisch, German for heroic, chosen because in field studies people using the medicine felt "heroic") as a trademark.

“From 1898 through to 1910 it was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Bayer marketed heroin as a "cure" for morphine addiction before it was discovered that heroin is converted to morphine in the liver. All opiates are converted by the human liver into the identical molecule with varying degrees of concentration in the blood stream. The company felt somewhat embarrassed by this new finding and it became a historical blunder for Bayer [1]. As with aspirin, Bayer lost some of its trademark rights to heroin following World War I.”

…
History
“The origins of the present international illegal heroin trade can be traced back to laws passed in many countries in the early 1900s that closely regulated the production and sale of opium and its derivatives including heroin. At first, heroin flowed from countries where it was still legal into countries where it was no longer legal. By the mid-1920s, heroin production had been made illegal in many parts of the world. An illegal trade developed at that time between heroin labs in China (mostly in Shanghai and Tientsin) and other nations. The weakness of government in China and conditions of civil war enabled heroin production to take root there. Chinese triad gangs eventually came to play a major role in the heroin trade.
…”

See, in Cheneyville, the Lord Mayor is a liar -- pure and unstepped upon -- which is why his approval rating is now nearing single digits (and I think we know which single digit the public is flourishing to make their feelings known.)

In Cheneyville, the Lord Mayor is allowed to pull factually wrong shit out of thin air to support whatever bull he is spouting at that exact moment.

That's the first thing.

Second, as Cheney distractedly sneered his way through feigning concern for the Americans he has gotten wantonly and needlessly killed, if I heard this right (and I admit to fortify myself for an hour of watching Monty Burns rape the truth on national teevee I have had to take, uh, measures that might have impaired my senses slightly) I do believe he said:

“I spend time with the families [of the wounded], Tim. It’s the toughest thing a President has to do.”

So what we have always suspected is now official: It’s President Cheney, motherfucker.

So Cheney, in sum…



“This Week…” -- is embargoed until further notice.

“This Week…” is a whelpling of the Spinners of Right Wing Lies at ABC/Disney. “This Week…” is not welcome on the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus Rundown.

Which irks me because the roundtable featured the delectable Ms. Katrina vanden Heuvel, along with somewhat-less-than-delectable George Will, Fareed Zakaria and Martha Raddatz.

However, Jesus’ General has this brilliant summary

of ABC’s work product.


On the “Chris Matthews Show” – Richard Engel, Katty Kay, Gloria Borger, Tucker Carlson.

Carlson: Sure over the long run – 50 years – Iraq will be seen as an epic disaster of Bush’s making. But the short term Bush will capitalize on this politically.

Katty: Bush is still trying to mislead the American people. Trying to conflate Iraq and terrorism. Again. Trying to say the real problem in Iraq are AQ insurgents. Again. And that just isn’t true!

Carlson: Can I say a good word for dictatorships? This evangelical exporting of democracy has failed…

Matthews: Now is the time on Matthew’s when we dance!

And Carlson jumps up and dances.

Dance, monkey, dance.

Weeping Jesus.

What is there left to say but,

"Na na na na na na na na Leader!”