Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.

Part 1 of 2

It was “Rare, One-on-One Interview” Day at the Mouse Circus.

In which, when taken all-in-all, Republican Apologists smell their own blood in the water and get ready to jump off the Bush Bandwagon should it prove necessary.

But…

But what one must understand about Big Time Politics is that it is nearly indistinguishable from Big Time Business, especially in this respect:

The Bush White House with their CEO President operates in the public sector in exactly the same way as the most parasitic of consultants operate in the private sector.

In the end, they are not invested in the health of the company with which they are temporarily under contract. Quite the contrary; they exist only to maximize their own power and profit and secure their next gig. So when that Prime Directive happens to coincide with the larger needs of the organization, they’ll Do Good.

But when the needs of the company – or the nation – are impediments to maximizing profit and power, the good of the country goes under the bus without a backwards glance, and you leave it to the Marketing team to sell chaos to the rubes as “creative destruction”.

Like the tailors of the Emperors new Clothes, every effort is focused on making sure that the terms of contract – the deliverable -- is kept forever open-ended and progress is kept forever unmeasurable.

And when things start to fall apart you hear the same hoary, bullshit excuses raised over and over again. That only the Faithful can see the garment. On the True and Loyal can see the progress we are making in Iraq. And ultimately those who will not go along with the collective delusion are those who are ultimately blamed for its eventual failure.

If only you had clapped harder…Tinkerbell would have lived!

If only you have more blind Faith…the mountain would have moved!

If only you had squinted and prayed harder…the Emperor’s New Flight Suit would be the most magnificent in all the land!

If only the Dirty Hippy Press had reported better news…we woulda won!

Always the pattern is the same:

1. The consultant/flim-flam-man gets the mark to lay down a sucker bet by promises of Endless Riches for a small “investment”.

2. Then you get the mark’s ego into the game so he starts to think of himself and the con-man as “we” and feels he must continue to pour money down the rat hole or admit that he’s a fool and a failure.

3. The game ends when the dupe runs out of blood and treasure, led to his doom by the final lie – that those who are begging him to stop gambling away his future are the “real” enemies.

In these scenario, specific timelines and deliverables are Kryptonite to the incompetent consultant, which is why the assclowns that run this rodeo have been kicking any discussion of accountability and clear metrics for success and failure down the block for friedman after friedman for four years now.

Because if you ever suspect you are being fucked, this the simple rule-of-thumb will serve you well:

To whatever extent the person trying to convince you to lay lives and fortunes on the line to back their schemes will not answer simple questions – questions like “Who?” “How long?” “How much?” “How costly?”, “What are the risks?”, “How bad can it get?” and “What exactly is the end-game?” – that is the PRECISE extent to which you are being lied to.

Or, to sum up Dubya’s Iraq policy far more succinctly, this from “Robocop” (1987):

Dick Jones:

I had a guaranteed military sale with ED. Renovation program. Spare parts for years.

Who cares if it worked or not?

On Fox News Sunday…Ted Kennedy talks in a “rare one-on-one interview.”

Wallace: But if surging 50,000 troops into Iraq will fix the problem, stabilize the orbit of the Earth, and bring the Rapture???

driftglass: We need to seriously End the Reign of the Friedmans. We have to start immediately-if-not-sooner getting Conservatives to commit as hard to the recto-side of that bargain as they demand the Liberals commit to the verso.

Specifically, Wallace, if surging 50,000 troops into the Iraqi Abattoir does not fix the problem, does not precipitate a rain of candy and unicorns and peace, you must either join the military and demand an infantry billet in Anbar Province, or you must apologize to the entire Fox News viewership and then commit honorable .38-caliber seppuku on-air.

Deal?

Kennedy: No. It wouldn’t work. We need a policy that is worthy of the valor of our troops, and this Preznit.

Wallace: Isn’t it your responsibility now to do anything necessary to stop President Bush?

Kennedy: I was opposed to the war. Two years ago I laid out a plan to fix this problem. We as Democrats will support our troops, but we leave the options

Wallace: But in Vietnam…

Kennedy: If the Preznit’s policy is to dump 50,000 more troops in there, there will be opposition. We’re going to do our jobs. Reminds me of the Fulbright hearings during Vietnam.

Wallace: Do we have any moral obligation to the Iraqis who risked their lives to support us?

Kennedy: Yes. Of course we do. The president has failed our friends there completely. We have taken 202 Iraqis into the United States, while there are tens of thousands of Iraqis who are at risk every day for working with us. Hell, we took 100,000 after the first Gulf War, and we won that one.

Wallace: But Harry Ried supports a 50K surge.

Kennedy: We’ll I like Harry, but that’s not my position.

Wallace: You have the MOST Liberal voting record in Congress. During your 44 years in Congress, have you changed you views of government?

Kennedy: I believe our programs change, but our values do not. I will never stop trying to get universal health care. Hope. Opportunity. Progress. Now how it gets done is open to negotiation.

Wallace: You said in 1995 Welfare Reform would suck ass, but everything better now. Hasn’t Welfare reform worked? The stats my intern prepped for me say everything is going great.

Kennedy: Fuck you.

Wallace: But these numbers…

Kennedy: Fuck you. You’re wrong. I fucking well know these numbers. We have 36 million Americans going to bed hungry every night, and 12 million are children.

Kennedy then hoses Wallace down with a high-pressure stream of facts and figures.

Wallace: But Senator, nobody wants to go back long lines, bad gummint and dependency!!

driftglass: yeah, because of course in the Fox Universe, those are the only to choices available; a Hobbesian. world of economic Darwinism with no safety net at all, or something that resembles the Soviet Union circa 1978.

Kennedy: Fuck you. No one is talking about that. We’re talking about the simple fact that if you want the poor to work and sustain themselves you have to support them. With job training. With health care. With child care. With transportation.

Kennedy: Fuck you. We can peel off 12-15 billion dollars from the obscene profit that is made on Student Loans right now and plow that right back into college money for middle class Americans.

Kennedy: Prescription drugs…

Kennedy: If you go to an HMO you are 18% healthier than if you are not.

driftglass: Never, ever fuck with Kennedy on health care, labor or education. He has been in the trenches on these issues -- authoring reports, holding hearing, testing, measuring, starting over, doing the heavy reading and bestriding this part of the legislative world -- since before Chris Wallace was a pock-faced teenager jerking off to “The Fountainhead”.


Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer joins the "Rare, exclusive interview" Club for Men with Colin Powell

Powell: The “baton pass” must begin to take place sometime before the middle of next year. Unless we plan to stay forever.

Powell: But there is no military solution to Iraq.

Powell: We need to press Iraq on the political piece. Give ‘em more stuff. Train ‘em to be more “effective and competent”. And then “in the months ahead”, press them on stepping up and taking over.

Again, we hear from every Republican this Post Mortem CPR policy of continuing to do the things we know won’t work – pounding on the patient’s chest long after the body has started to decompose -- and hoping that by continuing to refer to the rotting body at our feet as a “patient” and not a “corpse” we will miraculously get different results.

So…put Powell down for more of the same, for one friedman.



On This Week with George Stephanopoulos…with a “special exclusive interview” with Harry Reid. Followed by Jack Keane and Joe Sestak.

Reid: Our #1 issue will be the war, ethics reform, and culture of corruption.

Jack Keane: We’ll need – for Anbar and Bagdad -- 30-50,000 troops for a year. And some of those for another six months.

So… stay the course for three friedmans.

Joe Sestak: we are on a road to nowhere in Iraq. Throwing more troops at it will not work.

Stephanopoulos: But…but…won’t there be more violence.

Sestak: Duh. We dropped the egg. Now it’s broken. Time to cut our losses.

Keane: The Iraqi forces are not capable of fighting for themselves. We have over-relied on political solutions to the problems in Iraq. We never had a real, counterinsurgency-based military strategy. Never applied it.


Shorter Roundtable: Obama Mania. And Week Three of "Still nobody has the nads to ask George Will about being a big, stinkin’ liar."