GOP Clutch Cargo Cultist Sez:

“I am Gaston de Marais -- this is my family's plantation.

It has been such for 121 years.”

Ok, not verbatim, but with that line in “Apocalypse Now Redux”, we are introduced to the patriarch of the Family de Marais, a French enclave still mulishly hanging onto its rotting rubber plantation, ruminating about the virtues of colonialism, polishing its silver and observing its bourgeois forms long after their Indochina war was lost and the jungle had flanked and swallowed them.

Standing now among the ruins of his old life and world, vacillating between nostalgia and magical thinking, to read Bobo’s column – “Yes, Those Were the Days” – you would almost not know that there even was a country called Iraq.

Or that we were ensnared their, bleeding to death.

Or that the main architect of that debacle was the leader of the Neocon Koolaid Bottle Gang, our own serial liar and Traitor-In-Chief, Richard Cheney.

Or that the man across from Bobo in the pleasant memory-lunches about which he wistfully rhapsodizes is Dick Cheney’s main henchman, the “canine loyal” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

After describing Libby’s utter opacity when it came to discussing anything in the neighborhood of the facts regarding…anything, Bobo confesses:

[Yet] it was hard not to like the guy — for his intelligence, his loyalty and his meticulous attention to ethical niceties. (At lunch he wouldn’t let me pick up the tab. He’d lay a $20 bill on the table to cover his half.)

And so, like everybody who knows him, I greet his conviction with a profound sense of sadness. You can convince me that Libby is guilty, but I’ll always believe he’s a good man.

Yet that doesn’t begin to cover the sadness that this trial arouses, for the proceedings have revealed the arc of what the administration was and could have been.
…

Ah yes. What could have been. Back in the heady days of the…Industrial Revolution?

The Gilded Age?

The Enlightenment?

Into what deep recess of history does Bobo peer for a glimpse of Halcyon Past That Never Was?

2003.

2003?

Yep.

When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission.

Staff members in those days went to work wondering whether this would be the day they would die. There was a sense that any day a bomb might wipe out downtown Washington.
…
It was a time, in short, of grand goals but also of discombobulating and repressed emotion.
…

Gotta love it that a person with access to the NYT’s Strategic Adjective Reserve settles on “discombobulating” as his perfect word to summarize this Administration.

Not “Constitution-hating”. Not “lying”. Not “imperial” or “contemptuous”.

Not disaster. Not mayhem. Not looting. Not maniacal. Not blood-dimmed. Not stinking drunk incompetent. Not globe-Gitmo-ing.

“Discombobulating”.

For deep in his wee manloin, Bobo is hopelessly in love with clean-shaven, suited Authoritarianism above all things. It only a Dear Leader who can keep his 1950s suburban paradise that never was safe from the bad people, which is why he pines for the good old days…of less than four years ago.

And so how telling that in the shadow of the complete implosion of the Moderns Conservative movement -- from the rubble it has left in itrs wake -- Bobo chooses to seize on the trivial datum that Scooter dropped a $20 on the table to cover his tab, even though this is something that I’m sure a million other public sector employee in America do every day.

I’m sure he smelled all AquaVelvay with just the suggestion of Kents, just like a man should.

But that nice, well-barbered, aromatic gentlemen who yanked a double sawbuck off his Beltway Roll (and, I would wager, vouchered the whole thing back into Joe Taxpayer’s pocket by next day noon) meticulously paid for his own poached salmon and iced tea, then scraped back his chair, daubed the corners of his mouth, and went off to continue to help evil men bend the best and noblest traits of this country over a cracker barrel and rape them to bloody shreds.

But I’m sure they all had clean underpants on, and have shaved good and close for the 3:00 press briefing.

Oh isn’t it quaint now that all the unpleasantness of those days are over? And we can now can laugh and nosh like a fictional Putin and fictional Dubya staring into the shallow waters of each other’s fictional souls, and then repairing a fictional Hermitage’s secret, upstairs stabbin’ cabin to share a phalanyx of fictional Indonesian hookers and a coupla fictional speedballs.

Because what is missing from Bobo’s column is what positively screams out the loudest: namely how little Iraq affects him.

Or, more precisely, how little he will allow it – or any other massive failure of this Administration -- to affect him.

I mean, imagine if he had written that he and a luncheon date had dined on the following…

First Course
Hors D'Oeuvres
Oysters
Second Course
Consommé Olga
Cream of Barley
Third Course
Poached Salmon with Mousseline Sauce, Cucumbers
Fourth Course
Filet Mignons Lili
Saute of Chicken, Lyonnaise
Vegetable Marrow Farci
Fifth Course
Lamb, Mint Sauce
Roast Duckling, Apple Sauce
Sirloin of Beef, Chateau Potatoes
Green Pea
Creamed Carrots
Boiled Rice
Parmentier & Boiled New Potatoes
Sixth Course
Punch Romaine
Seventh Course
Roast Squab & Cress
Eighth Course
Cold Asparagus Vinaigrette
Ninth Course
Pate de Foie Gras
Celery
Tenth Course
Waldorf Pudding
Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly
Chocolate & Vanilla Eclairs
French Ice Cream

…and then sighed over how fucking admirable it was that his luncheon buddy had dropped a $20 on the table before he left...

...without lighting a single, Jounalistic Candle to illiminate the real story, that the lunch was the First Class menu on the Titanic, and his luncheon buddy was the chief coal-stoker for the lunatic who gave the order to lay on the boilers as the ship plowed into the iceberg-laden waters of the North Atlantic.

Hey, I’m sure Scooter was terribly nice.

I’m sure his creases were as sharp as the tungsten blades of Bobo’s Sharper Image nose hair epilator.

Which has shit all do to with what exactly?

Bobo tells us that:

Today, the White House culture is less intense. The staff’s relationship to the president has simmered down, from devotion to mere admiration. The president’s failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld hurt White House morale.
…

Today, the White House staff is less disciplined but more attractive. There is no party line in private conversations.

…
And you can’t help but feel that today’s White House would have been much better at handling the first stages of the war on terror. But that’s the perpetual tragedy of life: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Wisdom comes from suffering and error, and when the passions die down and observation begins.

How vomitously After School Special, this sickening idea that this White House has somehow learned some valuable lesson about tough love and now are all Scared Straight and the wiser for it.

And pause for a moment and let the implication of the sentence -- “The president’s failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld hurt White House morale?” – sink in for a moment.

I mean , are you shitting me? This is your journalistic takeaway from the horrorshow that was the reign of Big Don Rummy?

No, Bobo, the correct way to end a sentence that begins “The president’s failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld…” is “…will cost this country more in blood and treasure and reputation for the next generation than anyone can possibly calculate.”

Hell, any sentence that begins with “The president’s failure…” and doesn’t end with tears or rage at the fucksticks who praised and elected and then re-elected this nightmare in the first place is fundamentally dishonest.

No, Bobo, this world of ours and all of the gaping wounds your ilk have inflicted on it do not actually exist within your linty navel. The catastrophes over which this Administration presided were not some pre-game warm-up stretching exercise, and the tragedy of their epic failures is not that it took them so long to begin to show signs of waking from some ideological trance.

The tragedy is that these madmen and degenerates were ever allowed anywhere near the levers of power in the first place.

In other words, you bleating little shit, this

is not a fucking metaphor for anything.


This

is not a Rorschach Test.