Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

welcomes you to Mouse Circus flight 50.

Or maybe 60.

Before takeoff, please make sure all pundits are in their locked and uptight positions.

Fox News Sunday: Condi Rice, followed by (Texas Guv) Rick Perry and (Pennsylvania Guv) Edward Rendell.

The Secretary of After School Special Wisdom dispenses her homilies on Iran. Iraq. People looking at stuff. People being worried about stuff. And Iran being under Chapter Seven.

Chris Wallace: What do you want from Iran? If they were clean up their act would you live with Iran as-is?

Condi: Yeah. Well, sorta. I mean there’s a lot of stuff they should stop doing, and it’d be nice if they stopped doing it.

Condi: The Iranian people want to be like other people.

Condi: We don’t need to do a damned thing but let the commanders on the ground do what they wanna do. Well, unless one of them wants do is something the Dear Leader in his Infinite Wisdom doesn’t want to hear about

Then we’ll just sack his ass.

driftglass: Yeah, but the “ground” on which the commanders on the ground are commanding is nowhere near the same ground on which we were told we would be fighting.

Condi (On Dems reigning in the Infinite Line of Credit and Get Out of Responsibility Free Card known as the war authorization): Some would say we’re in a different war. We owe stability to Iraq. To the United States. (And then, the Academy Award for pre-emptive Godwining goes to…)

It was as if after Hitler was overthrown we just said fuck it and walked away.

driftglass: No. It's as if we had overthrown Pinochet. Because of something that, oh, say, a bunch of Mexican nationals based in Paraguay had done.

Then screwed Chile into whole other dimension of clusterfuckery so completely that the Chilean people began to flee their own homeland by the hundreds of thousands. So completely that Chilean people wanted us the hell out Right Now, and came to believe that killing the Occupiers to end the Occupation was a perfectly reasonable course of action.

But,no, we could't leave yet, because first we had to loot their country and our own treasury to rain billion-dollar no-bid/no-performance contracts on the friends of Dick Cheney. Then arrange it so that, say, Paul Wolfowitz’s Chilean gardener was elected Prime Minister.



Then, three years, hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of dead American soldiers and tens of thousand of severely wounded American soldiers, and God knows how many dead Chileans later the Grand Strategy is...more of the same plus 10%, and continuing to berate the people who tried to stop you from triggering this catastrophe in the first place.

See, that’s what it would be like.

Wallace: Malaki keeps blowing one deadline and milestone after another.

Condi: Well you know I have talked very sternly to the Beav about cleaning his room, but it’s hard! Its difficult, existential stuff! Its not easy! But I have talked to him. And Ward has talked to him too.

Wallace: But what about Putin. I mean…pooty-pooty, bo-booty. Fee fie foe booty. Pooty!

Condi: Nah. It’s all good, Chris. Pooty’s just a grouchy sassymouth sometimes, but it don’t mean nuthin’.




On This Week…: Condi Rice and former president Jimmy Carter.

Rice and Peanuts.

Rice turns in a performance here that is in every way phonographically identical to her turn on Fox. It was so staged that she actually couldn’t help grinning, squirming in her seat and false-starting her canned response to the “Iran has no rewind button on its nuclear program” a few times, so anxious was she to get her line-of-the-day out.

Jimmy Carter on getting a certain misunderstanding about his latest book out of the way:

Yes. There is one sentence in my book that I regret. That was a mistake. I write every word in my books and that one sentence seems to imply that I endorse the Palestinians committing atrocities until they get what they want. That’s ridiculous and in contravention to everything else in the book. It was a mistake and it has been corrected.

Jimmy Carter on cutting off finds for Iraq:

I would never support cutting off funds for troops in the field. I would, however, consider capping it and saying you don’t get to keep running up the tab in blood and dollars forever.


Jimmy Carter on Cheney saying that Pelosi and Murtha “validate Al Qaeda’s strategy”:

Are you shitting me? You mean there are people still out there who actually take anything Dick Cheney says seriously? He is i-n-s-a-n-e. Got that? Cheney’s batting average over the last 3-4 years on Iraq has been abysmally low. He hasn’t been right about a single fucking thing. And calling for a change in strategy in Iraq is not validating Al Qaeda.


Jimmy Carter on the current crop of Democratic candidates:

I don’t get involved in the backing or endorsing candidate business. However, if Al Gore got into the race I would back him. His most passionate issue is global warming, and he could do infinitely more on behalf of that issues as the incumbent in the White House that he could making a movie.

But I’ve badgered him enough on the subject. He’s all but told me to STFU.




On Face the Nation Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Edwards.

Ahnuld talks about Centrism. He is in his “post-partisan” phase.

Ahnuld: Because it is aboud de serving da people and not dah Pahty. And zo force.

Ahnuld: And now vee verk togeddah. Vee give bird to dah ideas togeddah.

Ahnuld: And all of zose dings.

Bob Schieffer: Rush Limbaugh might say that all you have done is “gone Liberal”.

Ahnuld: I vood say dat ve verk vor dah people.

Ahnuld: You do not ave to give up you principles. Bud you ave to gompromise. Is not my vay or highvay.

Ahnuld: I made a mistake.

Ahnuld: Ven it come to Dah Voor, we need to elevate dah discuzzin.

Ahnuld: We should do everything ve can do to be Victorious. Bud a timeline is abzolutely impordant.

Bwahahahaha!

To survive in Cali politics, the Terminator has discovered his Inner McGovern.


Then on to John Edwards...

Edwards: What I would do as President? First confess that we don’t know what will happen when we leave Iraq. We just don’t.

Then draw down 40K – 50K troops. Redeploy more later. Some to Kuwait. Some to Afghanistan. Keep the navy in the neighborhood.

And then plan for containment, in case things spiral out of control.

Schieffer: Can you – or anyone – be elected President by saying “I don’t know what is going to happen in Iraq”?

Edwards: Well it’s the truth. And it’s important for the next President to be honest with the American people. To reestablish the trust that Dubya has wiped his ass with and then flushed down the shitter.

And to reestablish the trust with the rest of the world.

Because raw power alone is not enough to make you a world leader. We need moral authority. We need to do things that are beyond our own narrow, short-term interest.

Will you raise taxes to pay for health care?

Edwards: The tax cuts to rich people that George Bush implemented will have to go away.

Edwards: The whole Obama/Clinton thing is just silly. At all the house parties I went to in new Hampshire, the only people who asked about Hillary v. Barack were reporters. Everyone else – real people – wanted to talk about real issues like health care.



On Meet the Press.

Carl Levin being sensible and sensibly outraged, followed by Punkin Haid leading an off-off-off-Broadway production of the Battlestar Galactica Outtake Reel Players parsing trivia and sniffing panties.

Byron York is treacherous fop,

Dr. Gaius Baltar.


Dan Balz takes a run at playing

Brother Cavil. Not the best casting, but hey, we're on a frakkin' budget here.


Doris Kearns Goodwin reprises her customary Elosha role as the Interpreter of the Ancient Scrolls.


“And lo, in the Time of the Gods did Lyndon Johnson did say unto Everett Dirksen…”


And Maureen Dowd ironed her hair good n’ flat and jumped with both Manolos and a side of relish into the part of viperish journalist and Cylon Model Number Three,

D'Anna Biers.

And frankly, if the network ever threw Russert's rattletrap, Sunday Morning Prattlestar cartoon under the bus and rebuilt along these lines, perhaps the experience of watching it would finally become more engaging than a severe bout of something gastrointestinal.



Finally, Chris Matthews…proves once again that he is a lout and a clown and his show is about one mullet short of a bad garage band gone giggly drunk on PBR.

The “highlight” of his frat party was a clip of the Girl Scout barfight from “Airport!”. The comparing of same to the Democratic campaign. Followed by Matthews quipping that he wonders “which married guy they were fighting over.”

Chris Matthews: The reporter I’d most like to have a beer with.

And then another beer with. And then a big bottle of very cheap rum with his glass spiked with a double shot of the juice of the Tree of Michael Finn.

Followed by a brief call to a National Guard press gang, the exchange of signatures for signing bonuses, and a government-plated SUV disappearing over the horizon with a certain unconscious bobblehead strapped to the hood.

Followed by Matthews waking up in Tikrit dressed in used cardboard armor and an 11B MOS.

Mouse Circus flight 50 has now arrived at its destination, and we here at Sunday Mornin’ Airlines would like to welcome you to Chicago.

Please use caution retrieving your baggage from the overhead compartments as political opinions may have shifted in-flight.