Sunday Morning – Tuesday Edition

Part 2 of 2.

ABC's "This Week" — Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

And the Waxworks Panel nattered on.

Yawn.

CBS's "Face the Nation" — Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.


Hagel: It is wrong to put kids in the middle of a sectarian civil war.

Bob Schieffer: How many Republicans do you need to sign up for your bill to make it bi-partisan?

driftglass: One. Every fucking time the GOP leaves orbit for Planet Crazy they take Holy Joe Lieberman with them as supercargo so they can point to his turncoat ass and shout “bipartisan”. So per the GOP Rulebook, the correct answer is “One”.

Hagel: If you keep this bottled up, then it’s a problem. Are Americans so weak that we cant even discuss it. 21 American kids died over this weekend.

Hagel: It is clearly wrong to put American troops into the middle of a sectarian civil war. That is morally wrong. We owe it to the public and the troops to debate this openly and honestly.

Hagel: For example, the Republican Party, interestingly enough as the new chairman of the Republican Party said in his acceptance speech two days ago, needs to get back to what it once stood for. The party that I first voted for on top of a tank in Mekong Delta 1968 is not the party I see today."

Hagel: It is complete nonsense to say we’re undercutting the support of the troops…What are we about? We’re Article 1 of the Constitution. We are co-equal branch of government. Are we not to participate? Are we not to say anything? Are we not to register our sense of where we’re going in this country on foreign policy?


driftglass George W. Bush will go down in history as the American President who spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to kill the monster under his bed.

And the GOP will be forever damned as the Party that let him.

And speaking of Eternally Damned Conservatives,

David Brooks pooped this into the NYT last Friday, so as a little added bonus, let’s have ourseves a look-see at just the first and last bit:

We’re in bipartisan nirvana. Bills are passing through the House 356 to 71 and through the Senate 96 to 2. Nancy Pelosi is aglow, and this week President Bush will trot out a State of the Union speech so conciliatory in tone it’ll sound like Gandhi on Quaaludes.

The question is, What is all this good cheer accomplishing? It’s time to render judgments on the substance of all this legislation coursing through the Democratic Congress:
…

In conclusion, if a wonky Mr. Chips were to step back and render a judgment on the new Congress so far, he’d note that it’s not a terribly ambitious student. It hasn’t tried anything big. It has a weakness for showy symbolism and middle-class subsidies. Still, at least it hasn’t humiliated the nation the way the last Congress did, and it looks set to do some modest good.

Ah, Bobo.

Congress is an E-Ticket. A two-year ride. And yet with…let’s see…carry the seven….with slightly more than Two Fucking Percent of the term of the 110th congress expired, Bobo has chosen to “render judgments”.

Remember a few short years ago when the funny little pundit monkeys and their Administration counterparts were ripped to the tits on meth, dogma, stoopid, and bad whiskey?

The days when manwhores like Jeff Gannon was left free to trollop down the halls of the White House? When Fox News Republicans in and out of government amused themselves by publicly despoiling the graves of the Founders? Peeling the flesh from Lincoln’s bones and wearing it like a barbeque apron as they gleefully torched the Constitution and lobbied for a Monarchy of looters, liars and lunatics?

When anyone who asked any questions about why Big GOP Daddy was raping Iraq into the ground and pounding our basic rights to splinters was called a traitor and cast into the outer darkness?

IMHO, the mistake – the cardinal mistake – Liberals made in 1975 was taking their eye off the ball.

The various strains of Progressivism in America had had fifteen years that were simultaneously vital, vicious, productive and insane. The civil rights template that had been hewn out of unyielding American stone by the blood and sacrifice of so many men, women and children was being learned and unleashed by students, women and other minorities. The senseless slaughter in Vietnam had been ended by the combination of mass action, media attention and reluctantly exercised political will.

A disease-ridden abomination of a Presidency was terminated two short years after winning a landslide.

And then, as I believe Harlan Ellison once said in an essay I can’t track down, a “vast, Ford-like hum settled across the land.” Progressives splintered, or wandered away or went to sleep.

And when they woke up, Ronald Fucking Reagan was taking the oath of office, and the only “Jerry” on the national stage that was commanding any legions was Falwell.

The wound inflicted on the nation by Nixon and his mob was never properly cleaned and dressed and since then the authoritarian infection has been left to gangrenize.

And for nearly six year an even uglier, deadlier, more vicious, more proudly ignorant and Christopathically zombified mutation of the Nixon Virus has ravaged this country while Bobo and his ilk have stood aside, golf-clapping their destructive claptrap and pooh-poohing their critics.

And now that their 100-story Tower of Twaddle is falling to pieces around them, Bobo wants to scoot his NYT Lemonade Stand back out onto the curb and begin Opining Loudly About Democrats For Dollars again as if nothing had happened, while Frank Luntz works the other side of the street, desperately hawking his own line of “Bipartisan Cuisine” meals while hoping that you’ll forget to notice that up until six minutes ago he was one of the most fanatical architects of the wingnut deliberately divisive, no-holds-barred Total War on Liberals.

Sorry, Frank. Sorry, Bobo.

This time all is most emphatically not forgiven.

This time we know better than to leave you to your own devices. We have seen your true and naked faces and know that if left alone your kind will only metastasize again.

Sow the seeds of your next Fascist Renaissance. Again.

This time we salt you off the body politic like the leeches that you are.

This time we take you down root and branch.

From your corporate agendas to your Party’s racist heart, from your multibillion dollar Media Lie Factory to your wingnut welfare think tanks, from your rancid ideology to your despicable perversion of Christianity, this time there will be No Brownshirts Left Behind.