Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.

Part 2 of 2

In which we feel a great disturbance in the Force.

As if millions of brain cells were about to cry out in terror and then be suddenly silenced.

Oh, here’s the reason…

Punkin’ Haid Russert lays out a yummy picnic lunch for Newt Gingrich, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, as the Good Ship Meet the Press lists so far Right it capsizes and shows its huge, pasty ass and tiny unit for all the world to see.

First…Newt! An opening arpeggio of various bitches about how Dubya “proud and stubborn” but has to change. The boldly proposes a Civilian Conservation Corps to solve the problems of Iraq.

We gotta have a Bipartisan and a Bipartisan that and a Bipartisan other. This can’t be Bush’s War. This has to be and American War,

And if the Democrats decide that our strategy is Defeat, then we should get out.

(pause)

And then understand why we lost.

driftglass: The penny drops and we can see that the "Blame the Press/Blame the Liberals" exit strategy is now in full effect.

Ah, Newt. What a rancid pat of cancerous butter you are.

A chubby, vicious little coward who will rage and bluster and squeal about the various horrors of the world – several of which he unleashed – and then throw away a few idiotic, unicorn-based story pitches for bad science fiction novels as “revolutionary ideas” to cover his ass should anyone bother to ask why someone so utterly despicable and wrong is still allowed at the grown-ups table.

Russert: But what about the fact that you were wrong about everything?

Newt: No. parse, parse, parse. Hedge hedge hedge.

Russert: But every single fucking prediction we made – from sweets and flowers to oil paying for everything – was just wrong.

Newt: No. In June of ’03 “we” went off the plan. That’s when it all went bad. I wuz right!

Russert: But that’s part of planning.

Newt: No. There was a plan. There was a clear path that “we” chose not to take. Which is why I say if there isn’t a new strategy with new resources, we will fail.

driftglass: Shit, if Army recruitment was growing as fast as the Republican "It wasn't my fault!" brigade, we could surge a million fresh troops into Baghdad by New Years, and have another million in waiting, polishing brass and fixing HumVees.

Then it's on to Bobo Brooks and Tom “Cap’n Obvious” Friedman and I scream myself inside-out for someone, in the name of a Just and Merciful God, to please get me a flamethrower. Or a photon torpedo. Or a BFG. Or a railgun. Or a flint axe and a steady hand.

But no such service was forthcoming, and my cat looked at me with eyes full of pity.


Russert: Cap’n Obvious, you say give it ten months or ten years.

Cap’n Obvious: Zarkawi won. I believed the Shia were willing to work with the Sunni. Now we’re in a sectarian war. I’m for trying anything, basically. But what can we do that is self-sustaining.

driftglass: Try anything? How about a draft? How about you and Bobo dragging your drooling college Republican sycophants by their neck wattles down to the local recruiter? No? So only “anything” as long as you and yours are in no danger.


Cap’n Obvious: They want justice more than democracy. And we can’t have our kids fighting for their second choice.

Bobo: In the middle east we’re looking at maybe a nuclear weapon under every tent! The nation-states are falling apart!

Russert: Is al Malaki capable of getting this shit done?

Bobo: There is no consensus for this Administration over anything. There was once, but now nobody knows nuthin’.

We have been fighting this war just enough to lose. We are going to see the Preznit run with the Jack Keane plan. Commit tons of new resources – men, money and materiel. Significant casualties and a lot of pain. Now we’re going to try to commit just enough to win.


Cap’n Obvious: We’re seeing a civil war in Iraq. The Middle East is a freak show. Some things are true even if George Bush believes it.

Cap’n Obvious: They need to have a civil war. It’s all tribal and familial. It’s the South versus the South and there is no Abe Lincoln there.

(Looks like Cap’n Obvious gets around to reading this blog [Sweet Home Anbar Province]. A year later, but still.)

Cap’n Obvious: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what they’ll go back and fight for in their own country.

Video of the LauraBot 2000 bitching about the Evil Media lying about how awful things are.

Followed by video of Don Rummy bitching about the same thing.

Bobo (a-tremble with indignation): John Burns at our paper is a hero (Which is true, and good on Bobo for syaing it.) Reporters are risking themselves every day to tell the truth. This isn’t civil war; it’s disintegration. The idea that this is some media concoction is ridiculous.

And then – finally – a little truth and self-reflection comes zitting out of Bobo’s pie hole.

“I said that a year ago, but at some point you have to face reality.”

Well, well, well.

Cap’n Obvious: I wanted this to succeed as much as anyone. What history will damn “these people” for is that while they thought it was important, they also thought it would be easy.

driftglass: And what history will damn you for is that you have given these men cover fire. You and Bobo lent these people your invaluable column inches in the New York Times. And now that it is all going up in smoke exactly as you had been warned it would, now it’s not “our struggle”. Now it is magically “those people”.

Cap’n Obvious: Democrats are starved for someone to vote for with excitement. They are tired of a divided nation. Deliberately divided…by Karl Rove.

Cap’n Obvious: People are sick of seeing douchebags like Dick Cheney telling the world that Rummy is the Greatest SecDef in the History of Mankind! Because that means either George Bush is a fool – for firing the greatest military thinker of our time during the middle of a war -- or Dick Cheney is a liar.

driftglass: I choose “C”. “All of the above.” Also you’re an idiot.

Seen in extended conversation – seen for more than 30 seconds at a time or more than 1-2 carefully edited columns a week – it is so fucking clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.

That you are a cliché-spouting imbecile who has made a fat living selling fortune cookie droppings and Magic Eight Ball insights to rich idiots. Which is a time-honored way of cadging a buck as long as it’s only invisible suits and transparent ties you’re hawking to the Emperor.

But now people are dying and the country is facing a very grim future thanks in no small part to your trademarked line of armchair homilies and simpleton sermonettes.

So, please, just Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Now.

Cap’n Obvious: Dick Cheney thinks we’re all walking around with “I’m Stoopid” signs on our backs.

People are tired of being lied to by Iraq. Sick of Laura Bush telling us that everything is going well, just misreported, when they fucking well know that’s not true.

driftglass: Cap’n, for longer than I can remember, your Mommy has been stenciling “I’m Stoopid” into your neocon underoos and pinning your “I’m Stoopid” mittens to your sleeves so you won’t lose them.

Then down the block you went for an Iraqi Happy Meal (“Stoopid-size it please!”)

Your very name has become synonymous with the fatally rosy, delusional, Stoopid faith that if we just wait six more months (One friedman unit) maybe things'll get better.

And then if things aren’t magically improved...we’ll let the slaughter continue for another yet FU and see what happens.

So since Cheney knows that millions of people listen to you and gobble up the twaddle you’ve been shoveling year after bloody year, why exactly wouldn’t he think people like that are stupid enough to believe, well, anything?


Bobo: The tension will be, when Republicans decide that they can no longer support Bush is when things get interesting. When they say “Mr. President, we cannot let you destroy the Party.” – and when he pushes back – that’s when thing will get interesting.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

So you say that you can now see clearly that the War is going completely down the shitter?

That we never should have gone on the first place?

You see now you’re being lied to – boldly, giddily, shrilly, heedlessly, incessantly, smirkingly by the our elected leaders about matters of life and death -- while the truth is sitting RIGHT THERE?

You're sick of trying to find some way to broker a middle way forward in political universe where any middle ground – any idea that compromise can be an honorable necessity – has been rendered uninhabitable and deliberately land-mined to impassibility by Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and a legion of other Modern Conservatives who always chose Party over Country?

Being told that dissent is disloyalty, ignorance is strength, and the real problem is the Dirty Hippy Press?

Well, “Welcome to Liberalville, bitches!”

Welcome to what life has been like on the Left side of the world for the last thirty years.

And seeing as you two asshats have been primary disease vectors of this plague, how about you both take a shut-the-fuck-up sabbatical from opining for, say, the next 15 years or so?



On the Chris Matthews Show, Bobo Brooks collects two paychecks today on Matthew’s very Special Obama Edition of his “Hillary Panty-Sniffing Half Hour”

Howard Fineman: Obama is the “White Bill Clinton”. He’s New!Fresh!Young!

Jennifer Senior: Obama is the “Aaron Sorkin fantasy candidate”. Smart. Dexterous. Could probably quote scripture if he had to.

Bobo (running his same line as above): There are two tendencies in the country. People look at Washington and want New. They look at the world and want Experience. Obama is impressive. He is a “normal guy”.

Michelle Norris: He is comfortable with his…He isn’t from the South. He doesn’t have that “civil rights baggage”.

Fineman: He’s not tied to any one constituency. He’s “got the brains” to come at issues thoughtfully.

Oprah Loves Barack!

Jennifer Senior: He’s the “Black RFK.” Whites love to congratulate themselves for their broadmindedness. They can point to Obama and say “See, I’m a tolerant man.”

Regarding experience…

Fineman: Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have given experience a bad name.

Jennifer Senior: People are hungry for sophisticated diplomacy.

Shorter panel: That Obama fella. He sure is well-spoken. So smart. So mannered and polite.

You know, [wink] one of the good ones.[/wink]