Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.

Across all of the Domains of the Mouse Circus today, there was only one subject.

ZZ Pops -- Live! -- on their 2006 "Iraqi Eliminator" tour.


Wherein the Sharp Dressed Men took the stage

And forcibly changed the national conversation (Click for larger image).

Which was point of the report.

Or, if you prefer your news musically:

Clean shirts, new rules
(’cause Bush don't know where he is goin' to.)
Silk Suits vs. Big Lie,
You cannot reason with this guy.
They'll come gunnin' just as fast as they can
As Wingnut’s go all apeshit over this Get Out plan.

So although there were distinct flavors at various stations of the Sunday Morning Squalid Bar, mostly there was sober conversation about how blunt the language of the report was, how utterly fucked we are, and how to best dig out the bullets Bush has recklessly fired into the belly of Mesopotamia without killing the patient, when the only tools he as left us are a nuclear warhead, a melon baller and a silly straw.

And so there’s not a whole lot of point in differentiating between one teevee show and another other that to lift out a few themes.

For example, "the usual cowards and tub-thumpers the Right have calling you stupid surrender monkeys..."

Baker: Don’t worry. I’m sure the Left will hate it too.

Trent Lott: They have been attacked…from the Left and the Right.

Translation: Even though there is no evidence of it, the Right and Left both exactly equally hate this report.

Therefore, according to the Friedman Doctrine, we are, by definition, the Riders of the Purple Center.

Therefore our report must be, by definition, fucking brilliant.

Ah, the tactics of political rhetoric.


On Meet the Press, this exchange is an example of the aggressive counterpunching that is coming to typify the Baker/Hamilton media blitz, which is a kind of persistent and statured opposition with which the Prostrate-Media-Rubber-Stamp-Congress-and-sycophant-clad Dubya has never had to contend.

And since they speak with one voice on this, for the sake of brevity lets just call them Bakilton from here on out.

Bakilton: Of the options that are available, changing the primary mission from combat to training is the best one available. There are no good options left.

Russert (squirting fathead concern in every direction): But aren’t you putting American troops at grave risk?

Bakilton: Aren’t we doing that today?

Bakilton: Our choices are, do we stay and keep running the same failed plays out of the same failed playbook, or are we going to try something else

Bakilton: The Preznit has a significant problem in Iraq. The country has a significant problem in Iraq.

Bakilton: The people who have criticized us have notably refused to come forth with any plan of their own.

Bakilton (on the litany of blatting, Rightwing critics squealing “surrender monkey!”): Surely we are not going to make policy in Iraq based on domestic political consideration? We are not going to shape policy to satisfy a political base?


On most panels and group discussions, these were the emerging parameters for the conversation:

· The description of the Real Situation in Iraq is finally correct. And devastating.

· The description of what we cannot do in Iraq is correct.

· The “Project in Iraq has substantially failed”.

· The ISG does not lay out all the alternatives. It should have, if for no other reason than to cauterize the 101st Chairborne who are even now desperately looking for a way to divest themselves of blame for the failure of Bush’s Iraqi Debacle by saying (4-6 friedmans from now) that there had been better choices -- frabjous, amazing, miraculous choices that would've led to victory and glory -- the surrender monkeys refused to consider.

· This is a groupthink document, where consensus was a virtue. As a result, the action plan is a tepid compromise and nowhere near as clear and blunt as it needed to be.

In short, Dubya’s true nature as a peevish fraction of a man – as a mean, dimwit child, propped up by Bush Family cash and cachet, contending in the world of grown men where he is hopelessly overmatched – is now fully exposed.

His shit is now fully out in the street for all to see: weak and pathetic in the noonday sun.

As an aside, I believe that no American should be happy to see their President failing and lost, and their country in this terrible state. We should want our country to be a great, good place and feel nothing but sad and furious when it refuses to live up to its ideals. But the fact of the matter is that now we are a nation of Those Who Giddily Drove Us Off This Cliff...and Those Who Tried To Stop Them. So as we gird ourselves for the hard, awful, decades-long work of cleaning up after their debacle, it is time for the perpetrators of this catastrophe to be called to account.

Because now all Bush has left to backstop him against having his face rubbed in this final, historic failure heaped on top of his lifetime of failures is the mad-dog, “Field of Dreams” Conservatives (I forget who coined that term. It wasn’t me.) Those who still fanatically insist that if you Conquer It, They Will Democratize.

Those who will attack any proposal that doesn’t involve showering Iraq with nukes, imaginary additional troops, and other species of Gryphons and Unicorns as back-stabbing treachery. Who adamantly believe that if we just carpet-bombing the region more vague, faith-based phrases like “strength” and “muscularity” and “resolve” and various other pundit-masturbatory-nouns, things will magically turn right around.

And they do it because not one of them wants to admit that it has been their policies, their Party, their President, their Media, their Persistent Vegetative Punditocracy which have methodically destroyed every other viable alternative. Because their strategy of playing chicken, and doubling the bet on every single fucking losing hand until we're cornered and broke is not an accident.

It is the Karl Rove School of Dickheaded Brinksmanship that preaches the solution to any problem is to keep upping the stakes, burning bridges and mashing down the accelerator.

Iraq is, among many other tragic things, the blowback that comes from infusing Rove/Gingrich/Limbaugh/Falwell, all-out berserker GOP politics into foreign affairs.

From letting every other tool but the strident, divisive Universal Hammer rot into rust. A tool which worked great when gutting honorable men or stabbing heroes in the back to get cowards and criminals elected, but now it has seeped so deeply into the Party DNA that they literally don’t know how to do act any other way, and so they actually come to believe they could somehow Swiftboat Iraq.

Could Swiftboat Reality itself.

So now Iraq is lost, and the Right fucking well knows it. Even without the purifying fire of hearings and subpoenas, the country is quickly concluding that this stinking albatross is the Conservative’s fault.

This was their war. Their President. Their failure.

But since admitting to any error violates the Right’s Fundamentalist Prime Directive – “Always wrong but never in doubt” -- now the second Iraqi War begins.

Operation Enduring Alibi: The epic struggle to magically reallocate the blame for the blood on their hands and lies in their mouths to the dirty hippies.

So get ready, because it will be very ugly.

How ugly?

Well, in this snip from her column today, Disco Andy Coulter gives us an inkling of what the Wingnut Talking Points in that battle will be (Find it yourself; this site does not link to orc-spawn.)

Dems prepare 'Operation Surrender'

“The "bipartisan" Iraq panel has recommended that Iran and Syria can help stabilize Iraq. You know, the way Germany and Russia helped stabilize Poland in 1939.
Now that Democrats have won the House, they can concentrate on losing the war.

Despite all the phony conservative Democrats who got elected as gun-totin' hawks, the Democrats will uniformly vote to dismantle every aspect of the war on terrorism.

The Democrat base is at a fever pitch with visions of storm troopers listening to their phone calls and ruthlessly torturing innocent accountants at Guantanamo, where the average inmate has his own lawyer, his own prayer rug and is wondering what to do about that extra weight -- known as the "Gitmo 20" -- he's put on since being captured.

...”

Lovely.

So whither Dubya?

Well in his Gravitas Armory, he has one Gray Headed Cold Warrior left who he could still delude himself into believing can sumo wrestle with Bakilton, and the 71% of America-hating Americans who think his handling of Iraq has been a clusterfuck for the ages

One Evil Old Man who he may still think can save him from the fate that history has prepared for him (Namely standing chin-deep in outhouse shit staring up at James Buchanan’s ass.)

So based this Administration’s M.O. since before Day One, were I a betting man I’d wager that we are about to see Vice Emperor Creosote

come roaring out of the Cheneybunker to chastise weak-kneed Nancies who don’t think endless, pointless carnage is the apex of foreign policy brilliance, go on Fox to swat a few Brit Hume softballs about how the Left is to blame for the problems he and his swine junta created, and generally put a bit of the stick about.