Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

American Idiot Edition:



Attention Fox 30 Percenters!

Please, I am begging you. Begging. Keep defending Alberto Gonzales! Keep regurgitating GOP talking points many friedmans after the facts have consigned them to the compost heap of history.

Keep displaying the kind of humming, grinding, spinning-in-circles, slo-motion swarmthink agility usually reserved for bees on a heroin nod or

$2 garage sale Electric Football players.

ABC's "This Week"—Sen. Dick Durbin, Dan Bartlett and then Tommy Thompson.

Frankly, Tommy Bartlett (Emperor, Wisconsin Dells) would’ve put on a better show

but one does what one can with what one has.


Your flipbook Tommy Thompson:

On Iraq – Preznit good.

On Abu G – Preznit’s call.

Stephanopoulos: Yeah but we’re playing President, so what would you do?

On Abu G Part II -- Wouldn’ta hired the little feller in the first place.

On Health Care – herd the uninsured into a giant group and let the insurance companies bid on them job-lot-style. Like cattle. Or slaves.

driftglass: Yeah, OK, but who will pay for it?

On Conservativism -- I am the fucking King of All Conservatives!

On why I should be Peznit -- Republicans aren’t coming up with cool, new plans for stuff. And they’re spending too much money. Like evil Liberals, they are!

We will never have a Preznit named “Tommy”.

Stephanopoulos then conducts a pitch and catch with Bartlett over Abu G virtually identical to the one over on Face the Nation. Nothing new because the facts really are very clear-cut at this point, and – like Iraq; like Katrina – as we move from candles to klieg lights to drive the shadows out of the hall, there are fewer and fewer corners in which the rats can hide.

So now as the ground on which they can wage any kind of fight evaporates beneath them, the White House falls back on their last and most absurd bastion of North Koreanality: Blind, bellowing loyalty to the Dear Leader and getting pathetically weird and tangly trying to dictate the terms of the debate.

Expect next week that Dubya will insist that all hearings must be conducted while hopping on one foot, and all questions must be in iambic pentameter.

Durbin: Last year, when this Preznit submitted his supplemental appropriation bill in February, and his pet Republican Congress did not pass it until June, you didn’t hear a fucking peep about it being too late.

Durbin: We will make sure our troops get the resources they need but it is time for a change in the way this inept Preznit is failing our country in Iraq.

Durbin: We put in 2 billion dollars to fix Walter Reed and the Preznit calls that pork. Well fuck that.


CBS' "Face the Nation"—Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; Bartlett.

And the Electric Gonzo Boogaloo just goes on, and on, and on.

Specter: We need to move very promptly to get the Justice Department back to functionality. Morale is low. People are hunting each other for food in the aisles. Now “Lying stinky pants” are harsh words, so lets just say the Justice Department is about as meltdowny as where Studio 54 was circa 1979.

Hmm.

Seems like Abu G’s Big Finale in front of Congress deserves some sort of theme song…


NBC's "Meet the Press" —Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.

Timmuh: Are we there yet?

Leahy: We’re trying to book a date to Abu G to come up and testify. He’s apparently having trouble with his Palm Pilot.

Timmuh: Are we there yet?

Leahy: Let’s see. He has a softball game next week. Touring a licorice farm the week after. Look’s like he’s free on the 5th of DraggingThisOutForever.

Timmuh: Are we there yet?

Hatch: Abu G is a very honest dumbass. Not a liar; just simpleton with a bad memory and a canine loyalty to Dubya that transcends any concept of public service. And did I mention that he’s Mexican?

Video of Senator Mark Pryor saying he was lied to on the specific point that Abu G had promised him he would never, ever appoint an AG without Congressional approval.

Timmuh: And?

Hatch: No he wasn’t lied to. Interim appointments happen all the time. And blahblahblah I am a lying wedge of shitpie blahblahblah.

Leahy: Go ahead and say April Fool’s bitch. These clowns were using that secret trap door the Republicans snuck into the Patriot Act to get their people in without having to run them past the Senate. And when we found what they were up to we voted it into the corn 94-2. So, Orrin, shut the fuck up with this “interim” ka ka.

Regarding Executive Privilege?

Leahy: Well if the Preznit was not in any way involved in this – if this was just another case of Rove butt-scootting all over the Constitution – then how does asking Karl Rove simple questions about something he never talked over with Dubya violate any concept of Executive Privilege?

Timmuh: What if Rove refuses to come out of his spider hole?

Leahy: We’ll see if that happens.

Timmuh: But what if? Are we there yet?

Leahy: We’ll see.

Timmuh: Are we there yet?

Leahy: Well, Tim, extraordinary rendition is a an ugly concept, but if we are left with no choice…


It was fun to watch Leahy pull the pin on the Orrin Hatch grenade and then watch Hatch get all red faced faux anger-drunk on the batch of ersatz bathtub outrage he brewed up. As they don’t teach you in law school but every lawyer knows, when the facts and the law go against you, pound on the table and shriek like a hyena

So Orrin started supression-firing in all directions hoping his spitting and fuming and l-y-i-n-g would obscure a simple set of facts.

It didn’t.

Then, Charlie Rangel: National Service is a great thing. Good for you. Good for me. Good for education. Good for national security. Good for the social compact.

Good going, Charlie.



"Fox News Sunday" —Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

Wallace: You didn’t hold hearings 14 years ago when Dob Dole said that Clinton firing all AGs was worse that six Hitlers. So doesn’t that mean that everything George Bush does from now until the end of time is all forgiven?

Biden: Yeah? So? He sacked them all when he came into office. Preznits do that. He didn’t weed out the ones who were making his political shoes pinch you silly bint.

Wallace: Senator AntiMandibular, here is a video of you in 1996 demanding that Clinton White House aides testify under oath and in public. What do you say now?

Chinless Wonder: The Preznit will make that decision. I’m just Dubya’s poor shitscraper Senator.

Picture of Mitch McConnell

Serving his Preznit

Wallace: Yeah but you were a Senator then, and you’re a Senator now. You demanded Clinton’s people be sworn and testify under the hot lights then, so do you call on this Preznit to do the same thing you called on Clinton to do?

Chinless Wonder: I call on this Preznit to…love me! Just love me!!

Man. What is it about these Sothron Boys? Last week it was Trent Lott…

Lott: Shore, that Clinton feller had his aides c’mon up t’ the Congress. Buncha tahmes. But maybe that warn’t the raht thang t’ do. Mebbe that warn’t smart. Ah mean, Ezzec’tive Privilege. Thomas Jefferson! George Warshinton! Jefferson Davis!

…and this week McConnell. Somebody shoulda warned the GOP brain wizards who decided to tie their boats to Segregationists to win elections that once the NeoConfederates sink their teeth into some despicable, lost cause, it is just not in their nature to clever up and climb down out of the Stoopid Tree.

And speaking of the lowest-hanging fruits of that tree…

The Chris Matthews Show…JokeLine, Andrea Mitchell, Andrew Sullivan, Janine Zacharia

Mitchell: What I’m hearing from inside the Moderate Center of the GOP, they don’t believe this Surge will work. They’re gonna give him until September and then bail.

(Moderate Republican Center = Chuck Hagel and the ghost of Nelson Rockefeller sparking up a doobie in Olympia Snowe’s powder room.)

Sullivan: Bush is the brittle one.

JokeLine: This six month stuff is a really unfair timeline. Counterinsurgency takes years and years to work. Maybe a hundred. Or a million. I think I read about something somewhere.

Matthews: Well WTF did you expect? A “Surge” is by definition a Short Term Thing. If you want a Long Term Thing…that’s called Escalation. Which is a word Dubya would rather tear Rove’s head off than speak aloud.

JokeLine: OK, so it was marketed wrong. But this artificial idea of Six Month got into the air? How did that happen?

Yeah, Joe? Where oh where did that whole "six months then we’ll know" meme come from?

JokeLine, Time Magazine, Sunday, Jun. 18, 2006

“This time, U.S. military sources say, the measure of success is simple: Operation Forward Together, the massive joint military effort launched last week to finally try to secure Baghdad, has to work. If Baghdad isn't stabilized, the war is lost. "I know it's the cliche of the war," an Army counterinsurgency specialist told me last week. "But we'll know in the next six months—and this time, it'll be the last next six months we get."

Mary Matalin:

The president believes, Maliki believes, the troops on the ground believe, and most Republicans believe, that security is an essential precondition for a political solution. It's just a disagreement. But we will be able to know in the next six months, although the sustained effort has to take longer than six months.

JokeLine again, December 2006 (video available)regarding a six-month timetable being necessary:

“That may well be true, but it’s wrong to say it.”

And then of course there is this guy…



for whom the Punditocracy’s favorite ouchless, throwaway yardstick –- the FU (The Friedman Unit: an eternally revolving, renewing, everlasting-gob-stoppering, magical six-month interval) -- was named.

Click here for the exhaustive and depressing provenance of the term, and the timeline of its usage:

What JokeLine means – what they all mean – is that six months is just about the upper limit of the attention span and core memory function of the halfbright dribblers who think these debased, dishonest smirklings actually know what in the hell they’re talking about.

When they say six months, they might as well be saying a trillion years or “Once upon a time…”. They count on the fact that once that clock has elapsed they’ll be long gone down the road fleecing a whole new crop of peasants, or that since the pig people have bought this lie over and over and over again already, it’s just part of the game that they will reliably buy it yet again.

Mitchell: Petraeus told them there would be real progress by August.

JokeLine takes off his shoes and socks to do the maths.

Sullivan: No Republican can run away from this war. This is a branded Republican war.

Then Matthews runs clips from “I Love Lucy” (including one with Ricky spanking her for getting in his business) and notes that Bill Clinton does a lot of things with his off time including watching teevee – including watching Lucy…

Matthews: So Joe, you’re the Number One expert on Clinton Evah! Why does he identify with Lucy.

Seriously. This was strictly an inside-voice kinda thing that had his panel saucer-eyed with "WTF?" and edging away from him, and yet Matthews actually blocked out a substantial slab 'o network air time to analyze this huge Desilu epiphany of his.

Man, when Matthew goes waaaay into the tall grass to bag the Big Creepy Stoopid, he doesn’t just stalk and kill it. He smokes it, licks the bowl, drinks the bong water and wears its pelt on his massive tater head as a perky hat.