Sunday Morning Comin’ Down -- Part 2 (of 2)

Right Hymn/Wrong Church Edition.

Today top-of-the page honors go to Bob Schieffer and George Will for two different and yet not entirely unrelated reasons, but first a little more on Rudy…

The first part of “Meet the Press” -- and I know this will shock you – was the Ritual Recitation of the Holy Poll Numbers

Russert: Respond you bastard!

Rudy: We’re ahead in some. Behind in others. Gonna work hard.

Rudy: No one has ever won all the primaries.

At least he has learned how to pronounce “Missouri” (Mizz Ur Ahh)

And then nore polls!

And still more polls!

Yay!

But eventually the conversation swung around to Iraq and Iran

Rudy: We need to be…careful…about Iran.

Timmuh: How long in Iraq?

Rudy: For as long as necessary to achieve our strategic objectives. We need to leave when they’re stable and an ally in the GWOT. The military still think there “is a chance” we can achieve that.

driftglass: What chance? One in a thousand? A million? A billion? Hasn't Cheney's despicable "1% Doctrine" been proven wrong enough by now? And by proven, I mean that if there is even a 1% chance that it's wrong, doesn't the "1% Doctrine" itself demand that we abandon the "1% Doctrine"?

Rudy: When has any country ever won a war with time-limits? If you go in and say “you have a year to do this or two years to do that”.

driftglass: Not one year, Rudy. Or two. We’re coming up on five years, Rudy. Five, and no end in sight. In a war we were promised would be successfully concluded before the 2003 Summer reruns were over. That was going to be a “cakewalk”. That was going to cost pennies.

A war which was sold on lies, funded on lies, executed on lies and continues endlessly along on lies.

And not just any old lies, but specifically on the lies of people whose corporate sponsors have profited handsomely from the Hell their avatars unleashed. On the lies of people who have personally risked nothing, and have no intention whatsoever of pledging one cent or one drop of their own, precious Lives, Fortunes or Sacred Honor on their Most Important War Evah.

Rudy: Once it becomes obvious to the military that the objective cannot be met, only then should we give up.

driftglass: Fuck you, Rudy; we’ve seen that magic trick before. Every time the military has given your lying, waterhead Preznit bad news, he has sacked the messengers and promoted the next guy in line who promised to tell him what he wanted to hear.

And based on his record and deeply bent personality, guar-an-teed that’s exactly how Supreme Leader Rudy will continue to run things.

On the other hand, Bob Schieffer -- doing his Sunday Thing over “Face the Nation” -- continues to beam in teevee from the Better Universe. That place where The Man in the High Castle is not forced to write “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” from inside a fortified bunked, pinned between a malevolent Nazi empire, and a less-murderous Imperial Japanese empire.

That place where Senator John Rockefeller and Senator Chuck Hagel can discuss national security and the CIA like grown ups under Schieffer’s light, able, interlocutory touch.

Rockefeller: One of the unfortunate things about being one of the “Gang of Four” or “Gang of Eight” who gets security briefings is that I can’t talk about any of this shit with anyone. Not my chief of staff. Not fellow senators.

Rockefeller: We have proposed investigations in the past of exactly this kind of thing. They were defeated along party or nearly-party lines.

Hagel: There is no justification for torture, or for destroying the tapes. If the objective is getting good intel, then let’s be smart about doing it. All of my experience and all of the people I have talked to say that cruel/inhumane methods just don’t work.

Hagel: So if it doesn’t work, why are we doing it? What are we saying to the world? We are authors and signatories to the Geneva Convention.

Rockefeller: I agree with Chuckles. Torture doesn’t work. You get rotten intel.

Hagel: Burning tapes, destroying evidence. I have no idea how high up in the White House this goes.

Schieffer: Word is Harriet Miers knew and told the CIA to leave the tapes the fuck alone. And they ignored her.

Hagel: This has all been rattling around the White House for years. How did the President and his stooges not know? And if Miers didn’t tell them, that is incompetence of the grossest sort.

Gross Criminality? Or gross criminal incompetence?

At the end of every fiasco in the Age of Dubya, those are always the two choices we are always left with.

Sorry, but “They Weren’t Completely Evil/ Just Really, Really Stupid” is just Not God Damned Good Enough to be the epitaph on my nation’s headstone.

And over in the Better Universe, if you didn’t bother to notice the crawl under the picture, you would be hard pressed to figure out who was in which Party because ideology takes a back seat to comity and pragmatism when the fate of the nation is at stake.

It is that place where the roar of the approaching fire doesn’t scald and terrify and drive me and thousand like me to our computers every single fucking day to sound the alarum any way we know how. Because there is no fire. Because we are governed by competent professionals who are answerable to an active and pugnacious press and an engaged and educated citizenry.

Over in the Better Universe Schieffer held a seminar on How It’s Done.

Over here in the Dubyaverse on “This Week” George Will and Sam Donaldson were pissed.

Listen to what they says here…

Donaldson: Romney’s speech was a repudiation of Kennedy, not an echo. Religion is now being jammed up our asses every fucking day in public policy. You have people invoking God for tax cuts.

Will: According to Romney, atheists, agnostics are “problematic citizens”. I swear we’re getting to the point where there’s gonna be a rebellion against this suffusion of Religion into public life.

Will: William Jennings Bryant came after William Howard Taft for being a Unitarian. America yawned and voted for Taft anyway. We have regressed in the last 100 years.

Will: 40-some percent of Republican voters are Evangelical Christians. That’s what this is about.

Will: Hucakbee said in the 1990s that he’s running for office to “take back America for Christ”.

Now here’s what Huckabee says on “Fox News Sunday” regarding Religion.

Wallace: Isn’t it true that you are exploiting Jebus for votes. Charles Krauthammer says so.

Huckabee: I love Krauthammer. I want to have his manger baby! But he’s wrong about this.

Regarding Immigration.

Huckabee: It shouldn’t take years to get a work permit to pick lettuce.

Huckabee: There are people here who are trying to feed their families. I don’t begrudge them that.

Regarding our crippled international reputation.

Huckabee: I would not give up our sovereignty or be governed by foreign opinion. But we need to act in such a way that makes others respect us. And in the last few years we have made even our friends screen their phone calls and hide in the fucking bathtub when we come around asking to play.

Regarding Torture and the CIA Tapes

Huckabee: I think it is absurd for anyone running for Preznit to say they know more about torture than John McCain. And every single military person I have talked to thinks torture doesn’t works and is a bad idea. And if those tapes were destroyed to cover someone’s ass, they need to be exposed and their ass kicked. (Ok, Huckabee said “rear-end”. Or maybe “heinie”.)

Now McCain on the same show:

McCain: It harms our credibility and moral standing on the world again. I met a high ranking Al Quaida member in Iraq and he said that what really helped him was the chaos we let loose in Iraq and Abu Gharib. And now this.

(Wallace was also peeved about the lack of Democratic candidates on his Big Sunday Farce:

Wallace: If you’re wondering why there are so few Democratic candidates on our show, we’re wondering too. We’ve invited Edwards and Obama, and they have turned us down.

Helpful driftlass translation: Edwards and Obama don’t wuv us! They won’t let us rub our open, running, sy-fascistic partisan sores on them!)

McCain: Our base is angry about Spending! And get the hell offa my lawn!

No, Senator: if your Base were really angry about Spending, then they’d be out in the streets with torches and pitchforks demand the fucking heads of the liars that are well on their way to pissing away two trillion of their tax dollars on the worst foreign policy debacle in modern American history.

No Senator: Your base is angry about .everything.

Your base believes that the way to deal with anyone who looks at us funny is “Fuck what the rest of the world thinks; we’ll just keep killing them until there are no more bad guys.”

Will, Huckabee, McCain, listen up because this is actually very simple.

Take torture for example:

If you believe you are dealing with the wild-eyed, killkillkill fanatics the specter of which Dubya is forever using to feed another square yard of the Constitution into the wood chipper…then torture won’t work.

Because fanatic die in hails of arrow with a song on their lips. They pray as they are boiled alive.

They perhaps call their tormentors over to touch the red-hot iron chair into which they have been strapped… then laugh when their torturer’s hand is burned.

A handful of religious fanatics are the kind of people who can stand off legions of crack Roman soldiers for years, and then commit mass suicide rather than be captured.

And praise their God as they are burned at the stake.

And fly planes into buildings.

So if you really believe your own rhetoric -- that “The Enemy” (which this Administration keeps conspicuously undefined but nonetheless insists) are all incomprehensibly evil, hard-wired extremists, eager to by martyred -- then torture can and will never work.

But…

But if we are dealing with more-or-less usual humans who are fighting for a lot of different-but-intelligible reasons…then torture will not work either, for exactly the reasons Hagel and McCain and Will and everyone else who knows anything about the subject repeat endlessly and fruitlessly.

Torture will not work because normal people break under torture and will tell you anything you want to hear.

We normal joes and janes will sing.

We’ll dance.

We’ll denounce God and Mommy and anybody else on your list.

We’ll make shit up.

We’ll do anything -- anything at all -- to make it stop.

And that is the real, terrifying reason Conservatives remain so bizarrely and slaveringly pro-torture in the face of overwhelming evidence that it does nothing to improve our national security.

Does nothing to help gather useful intel.

The Base is pro-torture for the simple reason that they are sadists and imbeciles; because unless somewhere some Scary Brown Person is being beaten to death with a pipe wrench in their name, they feel empty and impotent and afraid.

Like their slaveholder great-grandfathers, their Jim Crow grandfathers and John Birch daddies, their entire identity is undergirded by an ideology that says – as hateful, cowardly, ignorant and covetous of everyone and everything as they are – nonetheless they are somehow God’s Chosen.

And the only way to reconcile their weakness and powerlessness with their Chosen status is to find an Enemy and make that Enemy pay dearly for the “brokenness” of their universe.

For their political travails, they are given “Liberals” to blame.

For their ignorance, they are offered “Elites” to hate.

To paper over the massive, running sores in their ridiculous perversion of Christianity, they are handed “Evil Secularists” to despise.

For their declining fortunes and imploding standard of living? Uppity women, “affirmative action” and Messicans.

And for everything else skulking out in the long shadows of that big, terrifying place called The Rest of the World? Teh Islamofascists.

But from schoolyard bullying, to gunning down woodland creatures, to wife-beating, to queer-baiting, to cross-burning, to lynching…over the last two centuries, as laws and attitudes have slowly, painfully evolved, the 27% have gradually had both their Divine Justifications and Living Punching Bags stripped away from them.

This has left them naked and alone, with no one onto whom they can vent the existential horror of their failed lives.

Just about all they have left is the torture of Scary Muslims: and just like every other one of their idiotic beliefs, don’t expect them to give it up just because it is wrong and destructive.

With the 27%-ers, the Party of God thought they were building an impregnable electoral fortress.

Turns out instead they built themselves a dungeon.

And now, locked into its darkest cell with the pig people scurrying all around them in the dark, a few Conservatives look out between the bars at the world as it might have been.

At a Better Universe where rational discussions of Immigration, Faith or National Security could be conducted between adults without being drowned out by the squeal of the scum if the nation.

To which I can only say, welcome to Liberalville, bitches!