Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Part One of Two

The “Where’s Bunko?” edition.



No good reason to invoke Don Karleone except to note that when Rove goes off the grid for more than a few days it usually turns out he’s either about to be served some very unkind paper, or he’s off doing something unnatural with an ibex, a framing hammer, a rood made from the still-alcohol-sodden tibias of Joe McCarthy and a thousand pints of gecko blood to sate the unspeakable appetites of the dark and nameless GOP BeastGod of Clout.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell

Meh. Slim picking here, except you know the GOP is being flushed down the Lo-Flow toilet of history when you hear Mitch McConnell say:

Compromise is how the legislative process works.

On Fox News Sunday Senator Charles Schumer, Senator Lindsey Graham, followed by Sandra Day O'Connor, former Supreme Court justice, batting cleanup.

Here, Schumer and Graham talk immigration



driftglass: FYI, there are still many good jobs in many, many industries that go unfilled every year due to a lack of qualified candidates. And every year we graduate legions of kids from high schools that can’t do basic math, pass basic literacy tests, and have had no career counseling whatsoever and so are simply unqualified to fill those jobs.

Anybody else see a connection here?

Yes, some of those jobs many not be next door, or may require some extra/ongoing training, but speaking as the grandson of a man who crossed the country at the height of the Depression – well before there was anything resembling a highway system – on the promise of a decent job that would support his family, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for anyone not willing to make a fraction of that effort.

Just as I have no patience whatsoever with any bullshit from anyone – parents, teachers, administrators, politicians – about why its just too fucking hard to make sure that every child in America gets a decent education that prepares them to compete in the 21st Century.

We are in a leaky lifeboat, kids, and a fierce and competitive future is bearing down on us, and anyone who says it’s just too hard to bail water or bend an oar needs to be put over the side yesterday.

On the Department of Justice:

Schumer: Gonzo’s gotta go.

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because we’re playin’ gotcha games with the Attorney General.

Schumer: Fuck you. It’s about the rule of law.

On Iraq.

Schumer: The Republicans and the White House are slowly moving our direction.

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because we want to insure defeat in Iraq and empower the enemy!

Graham: We’ve got to win in Iraq!

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because the won’t wear Dick Cheney’s soiled underoos on their head anymore and pretend it’s a perky fez.

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because the evil Democrats won’t continue the six-year string of spineless capitulation to every DT whim of a Preznit who is at 27%,

driftglass: The Congress is at 29% because the Republicans have been running the joint into the ground at relativistic speeds for the last six years, and mewling apologists for GOP perfidy and failure like Graham are just about all they have left in their talk show speaker’s bureau..

Then on to -->

Sandra Day O’Connor: I do not remember a time when there was such a broad and widespread criticism of judges.

Wallace: But you have to know that when courts, the Supremes, rule on deeply held issues people are gonna get twitchy.

The OC: Sure. But when it goes further – when it goes so far as legislators calling for tar and feathers – it should not be allowed to cross over into threats and intimidation.

The OC: In congress there were bills of impeach judges for deciding wrong on Terri Schiavo. To punish judges for specific decisions. That’s effing crazy

The OC: In many schools, Civics classes are no longer required. You don’t inherit that knowledge through the gene pool. It is very, very important to teach children about Civics.

driftglass: This is the root of our differences with the Right. They either do not know how this country is actually supposed to be run. Or they don’t care. Or, as I suspect, they actively despise the system our Founders put in place and are desperate to see it sunk to the bottom of the ocean and replaced with a nice, tidy, White Xian Police State.

Our very own Saudi Arabia 2.0, except with Nascar, the WWF and shitty beer.

Wallace: But some would say…

The OC: Its fine to say whatever the hell you just said, but moving to punish judges who don’t decide the way you like goes way beyond what the Constitution intended.

driftglass: Notice how, during this entire exchange, neither OC nor Wallace deigned to mention that this War on the Justice System is entirely a manifestation of the Right. It has always the dream of the Tom DeLay/Newt Gingrich/James Dobson mob that they and their Dear Leader could finally, simply rule by fiat.

That after being "elected", an utterly gelded Congress, a majority Fundy and minority terrorized judiciary, and a DOJ gutted and restaffed by Dubya’s Golem would declare all statutory, constitutional and institutional limitations on the Dear Leader’s unlimited power null and void.

And the fact that they came this close to succeeding is not the most frightening aspect of this tragedy; the worst part of it all is that millions and millions of American citizens loudly cheered on this attempted evisceration of our Democracy.

There were no Democratic “Justice Sundays” featuring leading Democratic leaders standing check-by-jowl with the scum of the Conservative Christian Right all but demanding the liquidation of offending judges in the name of Jebus.

There were no Democratic officials who grabbed the microphone after judges were threatened or attacked to suggest that it was likely because they were “activists” and that’s why some sociopath tried to off them.

Because however flawed they are, Democrats would never sink that low into the filth to make that cheap political point. That lightless trench at the bottom of the rhetorical cesspit is the exclusive province of the Wingnut Reich.

And the 27% love it.

Wallace: What stands out in your memory about Ronald Reagan?

The OC: Well he was so clean. And well-spoken.



Meet the Press with Punkin’ Haid Russert. Senator Chris Dodd, Disgraced loser Newt Gingrich, Then Douglas Brinkley, Michael Deaver and Ed Meese appear as a “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” cover band..

There is no need to reprint or comment on Newt’s blather. He has always been a weasel, a thug and a liar, and is currently marketing a massive, Maginot Line of bullshit misrepresentations of history to justify this Party’s deranged and ruinous Iraq policy. insistence that American Revolution and WWII are exact parallels to Iraq.

Newt: Well what would you say if you were a Frenchy in the 18th century and the Americans were losing here, there and everywhere. Would you abandon them? Hmmm.

So in the American Revolution, America was…a foreign occupier? America was the most powerful military on Earth? That had invaded and conquered….America? And was holding it using means that made…Americans?…think it was OK to kill….Americans?…using, what, suicide horse-bombs?

WTF?

The fact that Newt has read history is unremarkable. The fact that he writes bad history and worse fiction is both icky and funny.

However the fact that he deliberately inverts, distorts and debases history to rationalize the toxic and deranged ideologies of the Neocon Right Wing – an ideology that has been consistently, arrogantly and fatally wrong about every single thing – is truly despicable and dangerous.

It give the fatheads in the 27% another man in a suit who knows a lot of impressive words someone to point to and say “See! We was too right all along about The Eyerack and the Ayrabs!” Which is why they wuuuuv him.

Newt: The way to judge how poorly our Congress is doing is by listening to the enemy. If they say that leaving Iraq is a victory for them, then we should believe every word they say!

This bids fair to be one of the most cancerous lies Newt has every foisted on the public: that we should tailor our foreign policy and sacrifice the lives of our men and women under terms set out by people who are trying to kill us.

So the way to judge how effectively we were doing in WWII was to heed the words of Lord Haw Haw? Axis Sally?

What was really going on in North Korea based on the broadcasts of Seoul City Sue?

The way we should have determined what was really going on in prewar Iraq was to listen credulously to Baghdad Bob?

Iraq never attacked us.

Iraq never was a threat to us.

And our continued presence in Iraq as a hated occupier continues hand to the Bad Guys a greater recruiting bonanza than they could have conceived of in their wildest dreams on a silver platter.

It really is not much more complicated than that, and the fact that Newt keeps getting asked uncritically to the Big Media Dance to mutilate history in order to provide cover fire for the ruin his Party has caused says more about how what utterly debased eunuchs we have in front of our nation’s cameras than I could write in a lifetime.


End Part One