When it turns out

your Great Patriotic War of conquest and occupation has absolutely no practical, attainable, comprehensible, justifiable -- or even explicable -- objectives...

No ending...

No goal...

No hills to take...

No line to hold...

No hedgerows to breach...

No beaches to storm...

No Empire to crush...


No villains left to hang...

No wall to smash...


No treaty to sign...


No commitment to a dénouement that says when we progress from here to there, we are done...

...then by tragic default you can end up with no other metric than the tallying of the dead to measure success.

This from the AP.

U.S. raids Baghdad slum; 26 Iraqis die

By HAMID AHMED, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 19 minutes ago

American soldiers rolled into Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum on Saturday in search of Iranian-linked militants and as many as 26 Iraqis were killed in what a U.S. officer described as "an intense firefight."

But residents, police and hospital officials said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily accused U.S. forces of firing blindly on the innocent. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for the assault into a district where he has barred U.S. operations in the past.

Separately, two American solders were charged with the premeditated murder of three Iraqis, the U.S. military said Saturday. And in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles north of the capital, police said a suicide bomber blew himself up near a crowd of police recruits, killing at least 23 people and wounding 17.

A U.S. soldier was killed Friday and three wounded when a sophisticated, armor-piercing bomb hit their combat patrol in southern Baghdad, the military announced a day later.

The U.S. military said it conducted two pre-dawn raids in Sadr City, killing 26 "terrorists" who attacked U.S. troops with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. But Iraqi officials said all the dead were civilians.

An American military spokesman insisted all of those killed were combatants. "Everyone who got shot was shooting at U.S. troops at the time," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver. "It was an intense firefight."

U.S. troops detained 17 men suspected of helping Iranian terror networks fund operations in Iraq, a military statement said. There were no U.S. casualties.

Witnesses said U.S. forces rolled into their neighborhood before dawn and opened fire without warning.

"At about 4 a.m., a big American convoy with tanks came and began to open fire on houses — bombing them," said Basheer Ahmed, who lives in Sadr City's Habibiya district. "What did we do? We didn't even retaliate — there was no resistance."

According to Iraqi officials, the dead included three members of one family — a father, mother and son. Several women and children, along with two policemen, were among the wounded, they said.

The assault brought quick criticism from al-Maliki. "The Iraqi government totally rejects U.S. military operations ... conducted without a pre-approval from the Iraqi military command," al-Maliki said in a statement released by his office. "Anyone who breaches the military command orders will face investigation."

Sadr City is the Iraqi capital's largest Shiite neighborhood — home to some 2.5 million people. It is also the base of operations for the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The fighters are blamed for much of the sectarian killing in Baghdad.
…

And when you are reduced to using bodycounts to tabulate proximity to Victory in Iraq -- and when your Dear Leader demands Total Victory before you may leave Iraq -- the more bodies you count, the better you must be doing.

Until, inevitably, anyone who runs must be a VC Al-Qaeda...


And anyone who stands still must be a well-disciplined VC Al-Qaeda.

Rip Van Broder Awakes

Rubs his sleepy eyes.

Leaps to his uncertain feet.

And the Dean of the Beltway Buffoons…

…denounces the lack of autogyro service to the Prussian consulate in Siam (h/t "The Simpsons")

…is appalled by all of the suffragettes running around showing all of that skin. Even in the newsroom! And the mouths on some of them!

…is saddened by the collapse of the Hanseatic League, but has a very good feeling about this “League of Nations.”

…is glad that fortified wines, demon rum, and all other liqueurs and spirituous beverages have finally been outlawed,. Not that he himself doesn’t enjoy the occasional Beefeater Negroni with the boys after a hard day nudging sentences together, but everyone knows the rabble grows lazy, idle and impious when allowed to indulge in such things. He ably reports that speculations about such “prohibition” leading to a rise in organized gangsterism are greatly exaggerated. After all, haven’t eugenicists proven that, like the Negroid and Mongoloid races, the criminal classes are unintelligent, and therefore incapable of gathering together for common purpose?

…is horrified that when he hits the “Return” key on the electro-typographic device his publishers want him to use, it just fucking sits there. But at least is does have a lovely drink holder for his Beefeater Negroni.

..and is shocked that little Dicky Cheney -- that barefoot bureaucrat with cheeks of tan. With thy turned-up pantaloons, and thy merry whistled tunes – has turned out to be an egg-sucking brownshirt with the conscience of a raptor and soul of a Hun!

Who all of the 32 Contiguous United States could ever have anticipated such a thing!

(h/t TPM)

From the WaPo

Cheney Unbound
By David S. Broder
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A25

Years ago Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, told me of a lesson he had learned as a young man on the White House staff: It is always useful for the president to have at least one aide who has had a successful career already, who does not need the job, and who therefore can offer candid advice. When he was governor of Tennessee, Alexander made sure he had such a person on his staff.

Later, when presidential candidate George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney as his running mate, I applauded the choice, thinking that Cheney would fill the role Alexander had outlined. Boy, was I wrong.

The role model for Alexander was Bryce Harlow, the diminutive, modest and universally trusted White House player in the Eisenhower and Nixon years. Cheney, as described in a breathtakingly detailed series in The Post this week by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, is something else.

What they discovered, in a year of work that reveals more about the inner workings of this White House than any previous reporting, is a vice president who used the broad authority given him by a complaisant chief executive to bend the decision-making process to his own ends and purposes, often overriding Cabinet officers and other executive branch officials along the way.
…
Secrecy was one of his tools and weapons, and his lawyers -- Scooter Libby first and now David Addington -- frustrated other policymakers by their willingness to shape or reshape the law to suit Cheney's arguments.

It is easy to see why former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who had been recommended for the job by Cheney, complained afterward that "there is no policy process," because the decision-making was often short-circuited by the vice president's private access to the Oval Office.

O'Neill was not alone in feeling that way. The secretary of state, the national security adviser and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board also discovered to their surprise that Cheney had gone behind their backs to get his way with the president.

What Gellman and Becker have described is a decision-making process in which Bush has allowed Cheney to play a bureaucratic role inside the White House that Cheney never permitted anyone to employ when he was guarding the door as Gerald Ford's chief of staff.

He could exercise this power only with the compliance of the president and only because he often could bypass the procedures he had put in place in the Ford administration, procedures meant to protect the president's interests. He used his intelligence and his grasp on the levers of power -- and most of all he used secrecy -- to outflank and outwit others and thereby shape the Bush administration's agenda.
…

And then, it being all too much for him, Rip Van Broder rolled over and went fitfully back to the Land of Nixon, Nehru and Nod.

But then again, what do you expect.

I mean this is a man who slept right through his chance to be a

Coffee Achiever!

Why so angry, Piggy?

Because these fuckers want to kill me, Ralph.

This from the Sun Times got me to thinking about things.

Teens caught in bullies' Web

June 28, 2007
BY ART GOLAB AND BARRETT NEWELL Staff Reporters

It's a lot easier than tripping someone in the school hallway or shoving them on the playground. Nowadays, all it takes to be a bully is a keyboard, computer and Internet hookup, according to a new study.

Nearly one in three teenagers who use the Internet say they have been harassed online, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The harassment ranged from e-mailed threats of violence and mere name-calling to the spreading of nasty rumors and posting of embarrassing pictures.

"In some cases what we heard was that adolescent cruelty had simply moved from the school yard, the locker room, the bathroom wall and the phone onto the Internet," study author Amanda Lenhart wrote.

It's happened to Joe Carlos, 19, of Chicago.

"I was talking to a friend [online, on MySpace] and her boyfriend had her password to her MySpace account" and eavesdropped on the exchange, Carlos said.

So the boyfriend e-mailed him a message from the girl's account, stating: "Stop talking to my girlfriend or I'll kick your ass," Carlos said.

Online bullying is even more attractive to bullies because they can do it secretly. "It's easier to have muscles online," said Carlos, a Northern Illinois University student.

And bullying on the Net can cause even more damage than old-style bullying.

Teen girls targeted more

"I think there's a greater potential for emotional harm from cyberbullying because it occurs 24-7 and the audience is much wider," said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Oregon-based Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use.

"Online communications tend to be even more vicious and uncontrolled, and it's all occurring outside the view of adults," said Willard, author of the book Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats.

Willard has heard reports of students so traumatized by what has been posted about them online that "they are unwilling or unable to go to school.
…

My heart goes all the way out to these kids.

And I am reminded that, in the meat world, everyone has been bullied, which is why the inadequacy of the available vocabulary for describing bullying has always irritated me.

Because it’s like having only one word to describe every variety of fissure, from potholes to Grand Canyons.

The bully, everyone knows, is the big, looming kid. The one with the moustache in seventh grade. A little fat. A little dim.

The one who beats you up and takes your lunch money.

The one on whom you will someday nobly land a hay-maker and who will then magically respect you: Like Arthur drawing the sword form the stone, this act of strength and purity will change your life all around. Or your tormentor will wander away and find someone else after a week or a month or a semester.

Everybody knows that guy.

I’m not talking about that guy.

Because I’m not talking about being bullied. Instead I’m talking a little bit about being terrorized, and the distinction bewteen the two. Because while everyone has been bullied, not everyone has been terrorized.

And because not everyone has been terrorized, conflating the two makes discussion difficult, because if you have never been terrorized it might be hard for you to understand how kids can snap. Go mad. Implode. Explode.

“Jeez,” you might reasonably ask. “I mean, doesn’t everyone get picked on?”

No. Not this way. Because if you have been terrorized, you know have been marked. Marked forever and to the bone, and your experience is, in some very distinctive ways, forever beyond the understanding of those who were merely bullied.

Bullied means you were picked on for weeks or months; terrorized means you were painted with an indelible target and the harassment continues for years.

Bullied means, if you fight back, you can sometimes win, or at least lose with your dignity intact; terrorized means it is made intimately clear to you tat you will never, ever be allowed to win. That if it ever even looks like you’re going to win, your tormenters will just pile on more bodies and draw more blood.

And if anyone stands with you, they’ll end up in the ER too.

Bullied means there are limits; terrorized means you are a walking free-fire zone. You can be stabbed. Rammed into walls head-first. Thrown down stairwells.

Bullied means you can still dream of being cool. Of being on the inside. Of being invited to join. Terrorized means never dreaming of being cool because, being a kid, terrorized feels like forever. Being a kid, you can’t change schools or neighborhoods or families or faces. Being a kid means making up every single day knowing that terrorized waits patiently for you in the morning on the way to school. Terrorized follows you home and beats you bloody in your own back yard. Terrorized whips the crap out of you in-class. In the halls. In the bathroom.

Terrorized means the lesson is driven home with fists and tears every day that you will never be allowed to escape, and you will never be allowed to win. Terrorized means that when you dream of the best thing in the world, you dream of being far away, or grown up, or watching your tormenters die.

Bullied means Dad or Teacher or the Principal or the Priest can offer you useful advice or intercession; terrorized means you learn far too young that adults are often weak or ineffectual of liars.

Terrorized means sitting in your tie and shirt-sleeves in Sunday School, listening to sermons about the Prince of Peace and being kind and forgiving, alongside of people who will pound you into the ground like a tent spike the minute you get outside.

Terrorized means while he or she empathizes, the Teacher is very, very busy and there are so many rules, and they really can’t do a fucking thing.

Terrorized means watching the Principal pin ribbons on the some of the people who just ripped your shirt off and flushed it down the toilet.

Terrorized means discovering to your astonishment that the parents of your tormenters actually teach their little raptors to be brutal pricks and reward them when they're especially good at it.

Terrorized means learning far too early that the System will not defend you if you are an Outsider. That the Large Print Regulations and Commandments that are supposed to protect you always come with tricksy Fine Print that somehow always ends up meaning– so sorry – nothing can be done.

Terrorized means learning bruise-by-bruise that there is a world-full of secret, unwritten rules that protect the same people that the sermons and civics classes condemn.

Terrorized you suddenly discover have been force-marched into a different, alien country, and abandoned there.

And if that hasn’t happened to you, you probably don’t understand it. Because like any other experiential lesson, you have to go through it to get it, and because – if you are very lucky -- Terrorized means you develop some skills.

One such is a kind of Third Eye.

The Eye of the Outsider.

The capacity to fire hard-x-rays right on through the bullshit and see the truth of things.

Another gift the Terrorized are bequeathed -- unless we become monsters and spend the rest of our three score and ten looking for blood and revenge – is compassion and a fierce appetite for justice with a side of mercy.

A need that we can feel itching in our childhood scars, to create and sustain a way of life that protects the least of us and levels the playing fields for all of us. We are instantly drawn to other groups that have been first savaged, and then laughingly dismissed by the majority culture. Those who have also been fucked over and then are told to shut up and live with it. Who have learned the hard way that trying to redeem promises of evenhandedness and community often only invites more terrible retribution.

And lastly, if you come through the fire mostly human, you emerge with a ferocious hatred of Terrorizers of all kinds. Thugs. Liars. The kind of creeps and moral imbeciles who make their bones hating the poor, the weak, the uppity, the gay and the brown, while hiding out behind Jesus Christ. The kind of bestial degenerates who start wars, then lie about it, then hide behind dead soldiers, smirking, calling their critics weak and unpatriotic.

Subhuman rodents like Ann Coulter who’s idea of “debate” is to call a man a “fag” while giggling. To loudly suggest that this decent man is trying to make hay from his dead child, and that the world would be better off if he died in a terrorist attack.

Who responded to a very, very polite request to stop her berserk, vicious, personal attacks…with more personal attacks.

She is a raving, gibbering thing that only no longer bears even a glancing resemblance to a member of the human species (one can only speculate what species of brain-rotting ubersyphilis one can contract when you make your buck servicing the gnarled johnsons of a thousand lower demons) She (and anyone who stand with her or puts her in front of a camera without a ball gag in her mouth and the word “Lying Slunkmeat Crack Dumpster” tattooed on her forehead) has earned nothing but the loud and sustain contempt of all real Americans.

We are not amused or dismissive of such creatures. We are repulsed by them and all they stand for, because we recognize them for who and what they are. Because if you survive with your heart intact, you can smell the beast when it enters the room. Even in the dark.

And you rise up.

Or, as Hemingway put it more eloquently than any of us: ““The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

It is hard way to learn. “I curse the lesson but \bless the knowledge”, as the saying goes,

Because as a kid, being small and scrawny and living at the mercy of a phalanx mini-Coulters is an awful box to be in, and seems like a night that will never end.

And in some ways it never does.

I'm Spartacus

Redux.

From Blue Gal:

Ivory Bill Woodpecker wrote to say:

Off topic--Shakesville is down. I e-mailed Melissa and learned it's a denial-of-service attack.

If we, the sane, ever regain control of the government, we need to turn some of its resources [Carnivore, maybe?] to finding these cyber-crooks. If some of these digital storm-troopers were frog-marched out of their parents' basements on national TV, prosecuted, and convicted, I reckon the incidence of such attacks would decline steeply.

Meanwhile, could it be time for "I am Spartacus" again?

Yes.

What a fine idea. And thanks to IBW and the Blue One for taking the initiative.

Meanwhile, Shakesville is in temporary digs back at Old Shakes Towne here.

The Sekrit Plan to win in Iraq

Rename the joint.

Glenn Greenwald called it in his Salon article “Everyone we fight in Iraq is now "al-Qaida". And because Glenn deals only in gospel, ladled out in shapely, well-turned prose, it gives one pause to wonder what Dubya’s Big Plan is come the Great September Beat Down.

And, given this Administration’s long and ludicrous history of trying to retrofit reality so that it dovetails with previously told lies, how far fetched is it that Chancellor Cheney will just rename the place?

So with Iraq then renamed to Al-Qaedonia (Capital: “Over There”. Major imports: bales of American tax dollars, Halliburton employees, US troops. Major export: Republican talking points, lies, chaos, dead and injured American soldiers, conservative millionaires, refugees.) our Chancellor and his Dear Leader can resume waxing poetic about fighting the Al-Qaedenizens and Al-Qaedanites “Over There”.

Ridding the world of Islamofascism starting in its home town of the newly christened “Islamofascidelphia” and taking on the Taliban where they live; the freshly-minted supervillain metropolis of "Talibansylvania".

And if you need any further evidence that faggy Liberals are providing aid and comfort to the enemy, just look how close their treasure city of “Gaytopia” is to both Mosul (New Pelocity) and the Iranian border!

When that fails, 1.3 friedman units from now, Chancellor Cheney will use his magic, transfinite, triluminary, red Kryptonite, uber-factotum powers to implement his next plan: Every Al-Qaedonia male between the age of 11 and 95 will now be called “Osama bin Laden”.

And we will finally kill that bastard.

And then kill him again.

And again.

Like the Leonard Shelby character in “Memento”, we will derive our sole, deranged purpose from hunting and killing the same proxy monster over and over and over again, and feel the hot thrill of righteous vengeance every time we spill his blood.

And we will not stop until the corpses of Al-Qaedonian “bin Ladens” and dead American soldiers are stacked high enough to blot out the sun.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Blockbusting Washington.

This week, the specific taps and slides of that dance-of-phosphor-and-bullshit that is the Mouse Circus are substantially less important than the aggregate effect, against which Progressives need to continue to gird themselves.

That Both Sides are Equally and Oppositely Wrong.

Perfectly, equipoisedly wrong. About everything.

That the “extremes” on both sides are the ones that are ruining the country, and only that Magical Kingdom of the Middle – that mythic Pundit Brigadoon where friedmans and broders and brookses and russerts frolic in wallows of their own poop, rebreathe for the millionth time their own stale, beerfart lies -- can save us all.

And however factually correct Liberals may have been about every-fucking-thing, since they will not share in the pundit's yahoo delusions, Liberals are, by definition, vituperative and unserious mooks.

They have gone all-in on this same tired lie I wrote about here more than two years ago, specifically about the despicable remarks of Tom “Captain Obvious” Friedman, but which are sadly applicable to the entire Punditocracy.

...
The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!
…

Don't mistake the ferocity of the media’s fealty to this second oldest Big Lie in the GOP black bag as simple misplaced priorities or myopia. The Pundit Caste has completely adapted itself to life in this toxic, synthetic biosphere of their own creation: without it they and their hugely profitable corporate media infrastructure simply cannot survive.

So they will lie and cheat and fight for the preposterous hallucination that Both Sides Are Equally Wrong -- to continue the charade that they are the sole arbiters of what is Reasonable and Serious -- as fangs-out as a mother rat fighting for her ratlettes.

But so long as they are allowed to point the finger of blame everywhere, they being allowed to point it nowhere. And so long as they are permitted to pretend that the aggressive, raging cancers of the GOP are no more or less life-threatening that the colds and broken fingers of the Left, the cancer with rage merrily on.

Laughable on its face and unsupported by any proof whatsoever, and yet everywhere – and I mean everywhere – it is being troweled over data, history, facts and truth by a fleet of GOP spokesrodents and media killdozers.

Because now more than ever before, this Big Lie equally serves the ends of the Pundit Kakocracy (as detailed above) and the GOP Lie Machine, which desperately needs to find a way to amortize the tragic cost of their lies, failures, smirking rape of the Constitution, outright treason, unprecedented corruption, criminality, incompetence and unbroken record of unmitigated catastrophe across both Parties.

On Fox News, Trent Lott trips over the hospital corners on his Sunday Go To Meetin’ sheets backpedaling away from what he said about Hate Radio just one week ago.

Then, it was…

“Talk Radio is running America.”

Now it is

One of the mistakes we make is not defining what we’re doing better. I will support their right to say whatever they want – Right, Left or Whatever.

This was followed by rebuttals from Fat Rush and The Savage Weiner.

Now an honest man, a principled man, would have said “Consider the source. These are two of the most rancid, despicable examples of evertying that is wrong with the extreme Right.”

But of course, Trent Lott has never been either principled or honest. Instead he has chosen to be a Republican, and, as someone no-doubt reminded him some time in the last seven days, without Hate Radio and the Fundies, there would be no Republican Party.

Lott: One of the mistakes we (the Congress) make is not defining what we’re doing better. I will support their right to say whatever they want – Right, Left or Whatever.

Lott says “No” to any return to the Fairness Doctrine.

Wallace: You make it sound like the Talk Radioistas lead their listeners around by their noses.

Lott: It’s not that Talk Radio is maliciously trying to distort anything.

And then this absolute gem (accompanied with a picture) of the slunching crap that Fox fobs off on the Pig People as “reporting”.

Wallace: I heard that that Inhofe sez that he overheard Barbara Boxer say to Hillary Clinton something bad about somebody. But let’s move on…

Feinstein refers to Hate Radio as: Hyperbolic. Explosive. It people to extreme positions without information. Nobody goes into the flaws of the current system

Wallace: Would you bring back the Evil Fairness Doctrine?!?

Feinstein: I’m looking into it.

Wallace: Some would say it’s the market speaking. The market has dictated that Conservative Talk is the Winnah! Forevah!

Wallace: Why is Congress sucking ass so badly?

Feinstein: Iraq. Iraq is a disaster and Democrats overwhelmingly want us the Hell out. However people seem to not understand the rules Congress operates under. That while Preznit Drinky McPinochet believes he can release the Flying Monkeys whenever the monsters come out from under the bed, that is not an option with the Legislative Branch.

Lott: Yes, the main reason is Iraq. But in the last three years, Republican and Democrat in Congress have failed. Nobody has the trump hand.

Lott: We had a these meaningless votes on Alberto Gonzalez and some damn “card check” thing with Unions.

Feinstein: People are fed up with partisanship. It has to stop. Many of us have worked across lines.

Feinstein: Vice Preznit thinks he doesn’t have to abide by any laws. It is the height of arrogance.

No, Bar. It is the height of treason.

Why don’t you call things by their proper name?

And then Lott nattered on about the natural reluctance the Executive Branch to play nice with the Legislative Branch…which of course has nothing to do with this particular example of what an absolutely despicable monster Cheney has turned out to be.

Lott: Iraq. In war, things happen. The status quo is not acceptable, but things change and it all depends on what you mean by “substantial”.

Or what “is” is, right Trent?

Lott: The Justice department is doing just fine. This whole DOJ thing is all about scoring gotcha points. Of course these good men and woman find in hard to work in this environment where they’re pelted with partisan poo all the time.

Lott: We need to loosen up and lighten up.



On Meet the Press: Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), Pat Buchanan.

You can boil the whole discussion down to this.

Gutierrez: You cannot deport 12 million people and you cannot stop illegal immigration as long as the US economy depends on cheap labor.

Buchanan: You can stop anything if you just punish, punish, punish it hard enough.


Then a roundtable with Broderella, John Harwood, Gwen Ifill & Roger Simon.


Harwood: When your Party is shrinking, your Base has growing influence.

Broder: The Democrats have taken the position they will now do the nation’s business. And if the don’t they will take the heat for it. People are fed up with Washington bickering. With not solving problems.

Ifill: People have dug in their heels and there is no give on either side. Isn’t there any good faith left at all?

Simon: How did Immigration become a crisis? It was ginned up as a National Security issue to give Republicans something to run on, and it has lingered.

driftglass: Pay attention to what Simon Says here.

Then…Hillary! She’s so slick! Like her husband, even!

Ifill: Come with me now back to 1992. When Clinton got tagged with Slick Willy. It only infuriated us in the Press. He won. And you know why? Every politician has glib answers. What people give a shit about are the issues.

Simon: The calculation in the Clinton camp is that after eight years of Bush fuckuppery, people are hungry for strength and competence.

Broder: The stories you hear about Rudy! coming out of New York! They’ll curl your hair. Maybe someone will report on them someday.

Russert: Romney is ahead in several states, and yet he is an unprincipled empty suit. The compleat whore. Maybe someone will report on them someday.

Shorter Romney:

The Power of Christ Pomades You!
The Power of Christ Pomades You!

Broder: We know that when Fred Thompson was a congressman he started a lot of project and didn’t finish many. I doubt he has the stick-to-it-iveness to run for President. Maybe someone will report on that someday.

Simon: Fred Thompson is McCain without the pain of Iraq, campaign finance reform, etc.

Bloomberg. Blooooomberg.

Simon: Bloomberg is just about the money. You notice that nobody is asking any questions about his “warmth” or “strength” or his positions on anything. He doesn’t have anything right now but his checkbook and we’re peeing out pants over it.

Broder: You people are much too forgiving. Out here Among The People, the Real Murricans are so disgusted with Teh Washington that they will follow a rabid otter into the Gates of Hell as long as it's not a smelly partisan.

I know their true heart for I am one of them.

And lo, I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade,
And will tell the vituperative, uncivil bloggers to get the fuck offa my lawn!


On Face the Nation Bob Schieffer plays pickup baseball with John Harris (Politico.com), wacky neighbor Ed Koch, Sam Waterston (spokesman for Unity ’08) and Ed “Top-Shelf Whoring at Low-Low Discount Prices” Rollins

The topic was Centrism Baby!

Gotta run for the Center because of all that stinky Partisanship that reeks off the Party Bases.

Who are – surprise! – “somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue”

Because the passion of citizens trying to hold the government to account for its high crimes and blood-soaked lies is somehow equally “partisan”, equally unserious and equally upsetting as the zealotry of the fascists who are still trying take this country down into the dark.


This Week, short and to the point.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-MA member, Judiciary Committee

Kennedy: Immigration Bill rocks. Tough. Fair. An acknowledgment that the present system is terribly broken.

Kennedy: This is a National Security issue.

Kennedy: I am a legislator. I want to get things done.


And Chris Matthews continues his now-overtly-creepy obsession with Episode 122 of The Hillary Panty-Sniffing Show.

With Kathleen Parker, Elisabeth Bumiller, Richard Stengel and David Ignatius

This week’s episode; So many women love her! And not just Elite Frigid Lesbians who refuse to touch Chris Matthews’ penis with a barge pole no matter how hard he humps their leg! No, really real women lover her too.

Chris Matthews: It’s almost a Sister Soulja moment. She is playing against the Left.

driftglass: Except, of course, everybody plays against the Left. The Right does it. The Triangulators. The Centerists. Joementum. The Fundies. The Klan. That Mormon fella with the teevee preacher hair. Every pundit in the universe.

These equally and oppositely Evil Bases and yet all anyone wants to do it make their bones flogging Progressives. Goldwater took on his own Base, but he has long passed from this vale of tears, and the closest any living (or at least convincingly Animatronic) Republican candidate has come to calling out the Wingnut Right was John McCain when he called Jerry Falwell out for being an “agent of intolerance” in 2000…and who promptly let what little remained of his honor crawl up Falwell’s ass and die as soon as maverickhood became politically inconvenient.

And, I will say, in all fairness, George Bush has done a creditable job kicking his own Base in the ankle over Immigration. Of course he has pissed away every shred of his credibility in Iraq, so fat lotta good it does, but credit where credit is due.

And then, on to Bloomberg, and the mandatory Centrism mantra recited as holy writ.

Chris Matthews: Everybody hates both Parties. So isn’t it time for someone to “grab” that 1/3 in the middle and go for it?

Kathleen Parker: I saw this picture of Hillary and her crew and there was only one blonde there. I think that’s very telling.

Stengel: (About Blooooomberg.) We’re the only people excited about this.

Chris Matthews: This country is dying for someone in the Center. Someone who will appeal to the suburbs. Who will hold me and kiss my boo-boos and kick my ass and make me feel all better. Someone whose Old Spicey tee-shirts I can wear on my head as I slow-dance a broom and a bottle of rye around my empty, confused, he-man-scarce life.

Someone…someone…


Sorry, wankers. You already had the Centrist President of your dreams.

One willing to compromise all over the place.

One who was willing to eliminate welfare, pass NAFTA and bang heads with his own party.

His name was William Jefferson Clinton.

And you hunted him without mercy or limit for seven years and then impeached him.

So how about anyone who rode the "Smash Clinton at Any Price" bandwagon all those years and is now calling for politeness and sharing and inter-party trust-falls just shut the fuck up for the next twenty years, until the only thing above ground named "Newt Gingrich" is a disused waste retention pond in Cobb County, Georgia.

And the rest of us can shower off the grotty details of the Mouse Circus and talk about the theme.

The line I began with: “Blockbusting Washington.”

In case you are not familiar with this real estate term from America’s recent, shameful past, here’s Wiki to the rescue:

...
Often times, an agent or developer convinces white people to sell their houses at low prices by telling them that people of color are moving into their neighborhood, exploiting their fear of lowered property values. Often, the real estate agent then raises the price of the house again and sells it to a person of color.

It has been suggested that the term originated with the practice in Chicago where in order to accommodate the out-migration of economically successful residents to better neighborhoods outside ghettos, people were hired to create a visual presence in the restricted neighborhoods and thus, encourage residents to sell their properties and move to still more restrictive suburbs.

For example, black women were paid/encouraged to push baby carriages in exclusive white neighborhoods to encourage white residents to sell their properties on the premise property values would decline with an increase in the visible social differences that characterized neighboring ghettos.

Sometimes a developer will begin buying up properties in a neighborhood and leaving them empty to give the neighborhood a growing empty feeling to encourage hold outs to sell to him.
…

Perhaps you see the parallel.

The “Government Is The Problem” Conservatives have spend 20 years “ghettoizing” Progressive politics in America. Using every microphone and editorial page they could lay their grubby paws on to spread the same message over and over again.

Your money is being stolen by welfare cheats and Big Government socialists who want to subsidize laziness and ship your hard earned cash overseas to underwrite other Big Government socialists.

The Government is your Enemy.

The Government is a pest-hole of debauchery run by lazy Liberal thieves who want to destroy you by de-Christianizing American and turning your kids gay.

Run, run, run for the GOP or the tree-hugging faggelizers will gitcha!

Republicans and their enablers in the Corporate Media have spent 20 years trashing civility and public discourse for partisan gain.

Deliberately “Blockbusting” the federal government.

And now that it is all falling apart around them, they want to turn the toxic waste dump they have created to their own advantage one last time.

Like the old joke about the definition of “Chutzpah” (The kid who cold-bloodedly offs his parents and pleads for mercy on account of being an orphan) the GOP, the Mainstream Media and Hate Radio have worked overtime the turn the public discourse on important issues into a sewer -- have for decades mercilessly mocked any good-faith efforts by Democrats at compromise as being somehow weak and unprincipled…who have run campaign after campaign after campaign based not on issues but on a Full Metal Rove assault on the basic the patriotism and loyalty of Democrats -- and now have the fucking temerity to complain that nothing gets done because for some strange reason everyone is pissed off and nobody trusts anybody.

And the reason for their endgame is simplicity itself.

Because for all its flaws, Progressivism is the only social movement left standing that has even a ghost of a chance of restoring American greatness and goodness by rolling back the Conservative’s shameful authoritarian tide and cleaning up rubble the GOP and the Mainstream Media has left in its wake.

Which is why they unite now to push this last and most terrible lie – that the Left is somehow equally to blame for all the Right has destroyed and therefore equally unqualified to heal the nation.

And why it is our job to beat their lies right back down their throats every time they dare to take them out for a walk in public.

The Conspirators who brought you "Freedom"

Have gone and done naughty, naughty things to

"Waterloo"

A Million Hits?

Damn. I was told there'd be strippers.


So I sez to him, I sez, “No, I ordered a hickory Daiquiri, doc”…

Oh. Hi there.

Didn’t see you come in.

So it turns out this blog passed a million hits some time ago. My old counter -- abandoned for the sultrier, statuesquer, stiletto-heelier Statcounter after the first year -- got me to over 200K, and Statcounter tells me that under its regime, I’m way over 800K.

So I did the maths.

And then I went "Whoa..."

And being as how I don’t belong to any Blogger Sodality

“A social group organized to achieve particular goals.

A social group based on shared interest or voluntary participation.”

Also

“A form of the Church universal expressed in specialized, task oriented form as opposed to the Church in its local, diocesan form."

And

“A non-kin group organized for a specific purpose (economic, cultural, or other), and frequently spanning villages or towns.”

Lovely word, isn’t it?

Anyway, since I was raised feral by blogwolves in the Busse Woods Forest Preserve and don’t belong to any such a thing as that, I lack certain social graces and do not know what the folkways and traditions covering such a matter may be, only that if I break them I’m sure something dire and welt-producing will happen.

So I had to fall back on consulting that crappy Dissonant-Level Bloggers Manual -- “The Collected Saying of Judge Roy Blog and the Law West of the dKos” – which, as I'm sure you know all know by now, Liberal Central Command issues to all Lefty bloggers (along with a hefty check from George Soros) once you make it past the one-year mark.

Well the manual seems to have been translated from the original Czech by a Korean technical writer while his hot German girlfriend talked dirty in his ear, but here, in daring violation of the Protocols of the Elders of Huffington, I will publicly reveal the Secret Rules governing the Procedures for the Millionth Hit:

In opportunity its millionth concussion, Ordinance certifies the attachment of it, remind it go down to crack rooms and it pretends stationed, nature surprises itself in a party, which from hit COUNT Monsieurs small letters of receivable from customer her (such pleasant work in one lace and for each office have really emandbeduerfnis these small make to hold Homo sapien details of the ceremony of workplace that living together to it lead inevitably) in the Obstruktion under some threadcake arid of Walgreens with side a Spam umbilicus, (if whether forgot in, it that will play connected in a speed), or into some threadcake this terrific of iversion of the rums of this baker's shop of compression of the Block of an author vertigem induzido immediately, that deeply you not to rub know attached two adjectives per week. which it induces and the characteristic will make, speech them autumn in small quantity it is inconvenient to be like that and it is profound and it spreads out.

Which, being a kind of helpless suitor of Lady Lingua’s affections, I got myself good and Rosetta-stoned and painstakingly reverse engineered into this more user-friendly version:

On the occasion of your one millionth hit, The Rules decree that you post it, celebrate it, go down to the break room and pretend to be surprised at the Hitcount Party the tiny ladies from Accounts Receivable have put together (they do such nice work on a shoestring, and every office really does need someone to handle the small, vital, human details of workplace ritual such ecosystems makes inevitable), choke down some dry Walgreens threadcake with a side of spam (if they forgot and had to throw it together in a hurry), or some of that terrific rum upsidedown threadcake from that Swedish bakery (if they like you enough to have planned sufficiently ahead), make a sweaty, uncomfortable little speech and thence fall into the grasp of a vertigo-induced writer’s block so profound you won’t be able to rub two adjectives together for weeks.

So I have done my million, eaten my cake (The Accounts Receivable ladies went top-shelf and got a most excellent assortment of stollen from Dinkel's. Got me all misty-eyed, it did) and made my sweaty little speech. And have given myself a long, quiet, contemplative "ohmmm" of a moment to ride and enjoy and be genuinely awestruck and grateful at the cool strangeness that, even excluding hitching a ride on the occasional “hot lesbian three-way sombrero dance” Google search, and even factoring in the periodic visits from non-carbon-based life forms, so many, many people have found their way down that long WPA cobblestone road far off the main highway and over the footbridge to castle driftglass and my Little Shop of Humors.

And finally I must be off into the heart of the city in search of the beast that is searching for me. Because having had more than a little experience with the phenomenon, I know that somewhere out there, a 1,000 pounds of smelly, gristly writer’s-block is waiting to land on my chest with both feet, and whisper “Who do you think you are? Don’t you realize there is no future for the lone blogger? Don’t you realize no one wants to read anything longer than three sentences? Don’t you realize how many other, better writers there are? Don’t you realize how many people are watching?” in my ear.

He is an old acquaintance of mine, and like Frank Miller in “High Noon”,

I know he’s a’comin’.

And the sooner me and him square off and have it out, the better.

To succeed, The Plot needed

The Mastermind



The willing

Pilot


The dog-loyal team

of

dedicated,

True-Believing

Hijackers


The demolition

experts.



The radical mullahs

to bless their atrocities


The propaganda arm

to spread the poison at the speed of light



The mob

to roar and squeal on cue



And of course…





The Target.

Half an Oaf

Is still an Oaf

It is in some perverse way reassuring to know that you know the entire Conservative playbook. After all, it only has four cardinal points, and if you know where you are standing and which way you're facing, you will never be surprise.

Because in Manichean, “My Way or the Highway”, “Compromise is Treason” Wingnut World, America can exist in four and only four possible states:


Stage One -- Liberals in Power:

Peace and prosperity. A burgeoning Middle Class. Tolerance running rampant. The rights of working men and women taken as the necessary bulwarks of a stable society and not luxuries to be frittered away whenever Corporate Master needs more profit. Social problems are grappled with – sometimes well and sometimes poorly -- using available data and compassion, and not a burning cross and Bronze-age superstition. Women vote. Brown people vote. Chicks make out with chicks without being stoned as witches. Children run right up to bigots and Broders, call them fucknozzles, and then laugh at them.

In other words, Conservative Hell on Earth.

That’s when the knives come out. The midnight torches are lit. And God is once again hijacked and put in the service of degenerate freaks like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell.

Stage Two -- Wingnuts Ascendant/ Liberals Receding:

Liberals get lazy or stupid with power, or get hamstrung by an ideal of tolerance into believing that all views should by tolerated; even the views of fascists. And although Wingnuts are divided about 50/50 between those that want nothing to do with their fellow citizens, and those that want a full-on feudal state, their mutual hatred of a tolerant, progressive America drives them into each other’s arms.

Fascist financiers throw millions at the Wingnut movement for their own dark motives. The Dobsons and Falwells and Limbaughs are allowed to rise to a crescendo that drowns out every voice of caution and reason.

As the world suffocates under a million screaming, self-righteous, Jebus-powered rhetoric decibels of Jeremiad against All Liberals for being Commies or egg-heads or atheists of Jews or feminists or brown or whatever, all excesses in service of the Glorious Christopath Revolution become permitted: Christmas card lists because cause for Wingnut Congressional Hearings and blowjobs become grounds for impeachment.

Stage Three -- Wingnuts in Power:

Republicans sweep the Most Staggeringly Hypocritical category at the Academy Awards as their million decibels of screaming, Jebus-powered righteousness falls instantly and utterly silent.

Because they never meant a single word of it.

Suddenly the Righteous Wingnut Congress loses interest in the oversight they had spend years demanding at any price and for any infraction.

Suddenly no flagrant criminality, no avalanche of bald-faced lies, no abuse of basic Constitutional rights is even glanced at cursorily. When there are hearings and Wingnut paymasters are involved, Wingnut Congressmen do not allow them to be put under oath.

Where once a little consensual Democratic fellatio triggered a full-on Constitutional Crisis, Republican Lies, War Crimes and Treason now openly frolic in the halls of the White House. The Wingnut Congress yawns and smirks and “Heil Five”s each other.

And no one lifts a fucking finger.

Stage Four -- Liberals Ascendant/ Wingnuts Receding:

Having seized power, Conservatives actually try to govern: If it weren’t for the slime trail of debt, death and destruction they always leave in their wake, I would give that notion a loud ”Bwahahaha!”

Because when your philosophy of governance is “Seize power, hold it long enough to loot the place, then burn the rubble” things are bound to go horribly, horribly wrong (See “Four Trillion Dollar Deficit, A”, “Great Depression, The”, “Vietnam -- Part II”, “Scandal Iran/Contra, The” “Gate, Water”, “Clusterfuck, Iraq”)

People suddenly remember that, however nice their hair or glib their line or comfortingly Deliverance their accent, Conservative are essentially hateful fucks who consort with scum, and Conservativism is essentially an ideology they cobbled up to let themselves think it was OK – maybe even patriotic and Christian – to be hateful, scum-consorting fucknozzles.

Wingnut who had left no moral sewer unspelunked in their mad scramble for a One Party State, now almost-hysterically try to share the blame for their failure. The Great Haters of Comprise are now only too desperately eager to split the tab…on their catastrophes.

Which brings us to Bobo’s column today.

Bobo has been maundering on like the Concern Troll from Jupiter these last many weeks. As Iraq, the Bush Administration, and everything else on which he has staked his ideological life have completely imploded, Bobo has suddenly found politics uninteresting. Suddenly discovered the joys of absenting himself from noticing the bloody, ugly world entirely of his Party’s making.

Instead he has wandering away into the deep, abstract and forgiving forests of brain architecture and early childhood development (“It’s not my fault I’m a Conservative hack!” you can almost hear him cry. “I was decanted badly in the crèche!”)

And yet the NYTs loyal Conservative Apparatchik cannot remain forever on walkabout far, far away from the central issues of our times, transcribing the ideas of others and musing “Hmmm” safely distant from the war in Iraq; his paymasters need him to eventually begin to weave up a reason why The Surge is a great idea, or why the Bush Administration's infecting of every single level of government with Team Rove bone cancer was really a good thing.

Or at least why Liberals are worse.

Of course, stuck with a Stage Four Emergency, The Pastel Avenger can’t very well continue directly hawking the Conservative Snake Oil that made the Dubya Administration possible to begin with. Now that most of the country would rather have rats chew out their eyes, crawl down their throats and die in their lungs than have George Bush continue as President for another minute, Bobo has to get a little more subtle and creative.

Run into his own end-zone and punt.

See if you can spot the card he palms here in these tiny snips from his column “A New Global Blueprint”, transcribed from the paper with the aid of some ancient Oban.

Bobo begins…

“A few weeks ago, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia brought together some big thinkers to discuss the future of American foreign policy, and guess what? They couldn’t agree.

They couldn’t agree on whether China would replace the U.S. as the world’s leading power. They couldn’t agree on whether Islamic extremism would be central or peripheral in the years ahead. They couldn’t agree on the significance of America’s unpopularity.

But there were two competing papers that illuminated most of the issues roiling to and fro. The first was by John Ikenberry of Princeton. He argued that the U.S. will not face one big threat in the coming decades.
…”

You see what we’re havin' here? How the table is set?

From his lofty perch at the NYT, Bobo is letting us in on a Very Serious Conversation about Foreign Policy.

A conversation that is divided between two, Equally Serious positions, journalismed fresh to your plate from the wilds of Virginia courtesy of David Brooks.

Who is doing nothing more here than looking on as sober and serious as a tennis judge.

So John Ikenberry is one half of this Serious Conversation.

And who is the other half?

I’m glad you asked.

“Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment argues that this sort of global system would be workable if the great powers shared common political principles. But Russia, China and the U.S., among others, do not have common understandings or interests, so it will only lead to paralysis.”

Robert Kagan?

You mean this Robert Kagan?

Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958, Athens) is an American neoconservative scholar and political commentator. He graduated from Yale University in 1980. He later earned a Masters from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a PhD from American University in Washington, DC. He is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, PNAC Letter sent to US President Bill Clinton. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Robert's brother Frederick and father Donald are also prominent American neoconservatives, and also affiliated with the PNAC.

The same Robert Fucking Kagan who co-authored this letter in the Weekly Standard with "Bloody" Billy Kristol? (emphasis added)

Iraq One Year Later
By Robert Kagan, Robert Kagan, William Kristol
Publisher: Carnegie
Weekly Standard, March 22, 2004

Originally published in the Weekly Standard, March 22, 2004

A YEAR HAS PASSED since the invasion of Iraq, and while no sensible person would claim that Iraqis are safely and irrevocably on a course to liberal democracy, the honest and rather remarkable truth is that they have made enormous strides in that direction. The signing on March 8 of the Iraqi interim constitution--containing the strongest guarantees of individual, minority, and women's rights and liberties to be found anywhere in the Arab world--is the most obvious success. But there are other measures of progress, as well. Electricity and oil production in Iraq have returned to prewar levels. The capture of Saddam Hussein has damaged the Baathist-led insurgency, although jihadists continue to launch horrific attacks on Iraqi civilians. But by most accounts those vicious attacks have spurred more Iraqis to get more involved in building a better Iraq. We may have turned a corner in terms of security.

What's more, there are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.
...

The Robert Kagan who concluded that letter with this stern coda in favor of stifling anyone who dissented from the PNAC/Chene/Bush/Robert Kagan view of Iraq?

Real and important progress has been made in this momentous, and at times trying, year. There should be no debating the need to persevere.
--Robert Kagan and William Kristol

The same Robert Fucking Kagan who flatly asserted in the Washington Post that fateful year of 2003 that…

"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty”

That Robert Kagan?

Yeah. That Robert Kagan.

Bobo brings his column home by exactly aligning it with the spirit of the larger Wingnut Retrenchment Project one hears everywhere these days. Their aggressive campaign to salvage their now-completely discredited dogmas by claiming either that everyone else is half-wrong too (After six, straight years of GOP rule, it is somehow “Washington” that is to blame for our nation's woes), or their most disgraced and repudiated ideologues are still, somehow, magically, half-right, as in this toxic little gem of a paragraph which which Bobo – ever the Reasonable Mediator -- begins to wrap up:

...For what it’s worth, I’d say Ikenberry underestimates the power of nationalism. There’s little evidence that different nations with their contradictory moral cultures can really cooperate, except in utter crisis. But I’d also say Kagan underplays postnational threats. More than in the 19th century, security threats come in the form of global guerrillas, loose nukes and disintegrating nations.
…

See? In Boboland, everyone’s a winner! And everyone is a equally wrong, and the Emperor of PNAC gets to be Bobo-feted (yes, I meant to do that) as some brilliant-if-slightly-flawed thinker instead of the rapacious beast he actually is.

So am I suggesting that I am a foreign policy wizard?

No.

What I am is an informed citizen who knows that, in all complex endeavors, there is a line which stretches from master, to expert,

through maven,

past hobbyist and gifted amateur,

makes a left through enthusiast,

goes over the river and through the woods to passer-by,

right on by the Completely Unaware

and then off the cliff of Intractably Dead Fucking Wrong About Everything.

And from here we draw two simple lessons:

First, no matter how deep your vocabulary pantry goes, or how many degrees you have on your wall or in your immediate family, when you have been as bloody and monstrously wrong about every fucking thing as Bob Kagan, you have to go to the back of that line.


And, second, when you devote an entire column to quietly gut-rehab the foreign policy reputation of “Bloody” Bill Kristol’s PNAC “Iraq Or Bust” reacharound buddy ...an entire column to imputing to Robert Kagan the authority to speak for half of the Serious Public Thinking on the subjects of likely threats to American interests in the 21st century, the rise of foreign empires, the supposed tension between nationalism and other, global-ordering “isms”, and all the other goodies that are cooking in the kitchettes of America’s premier think tanks, and none of the following words, phrases or acronyms are mentioned even once:

Iraq.
Iran.
PNAC/Project for a New American Century.
Neocon
WMD
Surge.

then you are simply lying by omission.

As if Bobo were Seriously and Objectively reporting on the whether or not Vampirism is a more likely threat to the villagers than Lycanthropy, and leaning heavily for half of the debate on the hematological expertise of Dr. V. Tepes…

….without bothering to mention that his expert also goes by the nicknames Graf Orlok, Count Dracula and Vlad The Impaler

In Vital Accessory News

No more Sea Hag.

Older is the new black.

File under: Talkin’ ‘bout my g-g-gerontology.

One cannot help but notice that of the billions of things one might choose to write about this sultry weekend, Alessandra Stanley –Lady Writer at the NYT -- and Jennifer Frey – Lady Writer at the Washington Post -- have written essentially identical articles,

NYT: “In the Prime of Their Time”

WaPo: “The 40 Factor”

featuring the same topic,

NYT:

Botox and plastic surgery allow actresses to look younger. Television is permitting them to act their age.

Older stars who once had to resign themselves to playing frustrated spinsters or docile moms are suddenly flaunting their ripened sex appeal on television. Its not “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” anymore. This season marks the summer of hot cougar love.
...

WaPo:

Kyra Sedgwick breezes into an Upper West Side coffee shop, straight off an appearance on "Live With Regis & Kelly," and you're fully aware of two things: She's both movie-star beautiful (oh, those waves and waves of gorgeous blond hair), and she's beautifully deaf to the Hollywood conventional wisdom that says roles start drying up for women once they hit 40.
...

and even focused in on the same actress.

NYT:

...
Kyra Sedgwick returns this week for her third season as Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson, the sexy and single-minded detective on “The Closer.” At the moment Brenda is dating someone close to her own age. But the success of that TNT series has emboldened other networks to showcase 40-plus female protagonists who like to date young.
...

WaPo (repeating):

Kyra Sedgwick breezes into an Upper West Side coffee shop, straight off an appearance on "Live With Regis & Kelly,"...

That they have each devoted pricey columange to the teevee-epiphany that all women over 40 are not desiccated crones.

That they have written of this revelation with the kind of whispery awe-struck wonderment usually reserved for the discovery of new planets.

And lastly, one cannot also help but notice that they are connected by the ineffable, existential duct tape that is Kevin Bacon.

(WaPo)

...
"Kev" would be actor Kevin Bacon, her husband of 19 years. For the longest time, Sedgwick refused to look at the script because committing to a one-hour series -- even one involving only 14 episodes a season -- seemed out of sync with the lifestyle she and Bacon had carved out.
…

Now I personally to come from a family positively festooned with strong, smart women. I also happen to think Ms. Sedgwick is rockin’ and that, generally, we are blessed as a nation to be in the sweet spot of the Era of a Hot, MILF Amazon Army the likes of which no previous generation of American men has ever tried to talk out of its pants.

That being said, the one-in-a-billion chances that these two writers would happen to hike through the same jungle, stumble into the same 7-11 and grab the same banana has less to do with beating impossible odds than it has to do with the following:

1. Now that “Lost” is on hiatus and Tony Soprano is finally dead, teevee writers who do not want to roll on the thousandth balding retread of the Death of the Sitcom, or the rise of the Empire of the Craptacular Reality Show, have to talk about something. And,

2. As long the Boomers and those they trail in their wake exist, the age limit at the Hotness Bar will continue to rise. Because until the last of them is planted in the ground, the Boomer will not tolerate being anything less than the latest, the sleekest and the sezziest.

In other words

I’ll stick with you baby
For a thousand years
Nothings gonna touch you
In these golden years

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Understanding Iraq.

One thing the pundits pointedly miss over and over again is this simple truth:

“Iraq = Dubya”

It is not just his legacy. Not just the major issue of 2008. Not just the gamble on which he has recklessly staked every ounce of blood, cent of treasure and scrap of reputation we have carefully husbanded over 200 years.

All of that is correct but insufficient.

Iraq Is Dubya.

It is a direct manifestation of the sodden witchbag of Fundy simplemindedness, undeserved power and boundless incompetence that constitutes his psyche. It is an extrusion into the real and bloody world of this Ultimate Trust Fund Simpleton presidency: a man-child of staggering ineptitude, flanked his entire life by flunkies and yes-men, and shielded from the consequences of his horrendous judgment by Daddy’s Money and Daddy’s Friends.

And in his sociopathic detachment from real reality, the Neocons found their Useful Idiot.

A fop and a failure that has spent his entire life muddling cause and effect. Who has now come to believe he is the Brilliantest Preznit Evah! A flippin’ Infallible Genius because for his entire life he has been permitted to conflate "Success" with "Being pried out of his every failure and catastrophe by valets and toadies and never held to account for a damned thing".

The military doesn’t matter to Dubya any more than it does to the chickenhawk Right: They “volunteered” for dangerous public service, which makes them “little people” by GOP standards; foolish and disposable bit-players in the Glorious Conservative Revolution.

Any tears shed for this war at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are the self-pitying kind. Those of a stone alky, weeping and terrified that he will, once and for all, be exiled off from his bottle.

Iraq will never have hard benchmarks because Dubya’s Beautiful Mind would implode if someone forced him to live up to a fraction of the standards he and his Party so cavalierly demand of everyone else.

Iraq will never have timelines because being held to account based on some objective measure of progress is what Dubya has spent his entire life avoiding.

Like Arbusto Energy, we will never leave Iraq as long as there are reserves of other people’s money to throw down Dubya’s rat-hole. Unlike Arbusto, this time the Crawford Dauphin is shooting drunken craps with the actual lives of real people and the fate of the entire world.

As long as he is allowed to hide behind the perverse idolatry of the Wahabi Right’s Fake Jesus, and the reanimated corpse of McCarthyite Fake Patriotism, we ain’t budging.

And as long as we ain’t budging, the only question worth asking – worth pounding home day after day after day after day a hundred different ways until the Bush Crime Family is driven from power – is this:

Do you stand with the degenerate freaks that installed and kept these monsters in office, or do you stand against them?

In other words, are you a Good American or are you a Good Republican?


On Fox News Sunday… Gen. David Petraeus

Iraq is hard.

Really hard.

Really, really hard.



Also this Sunday in virtually every ring on the Mouse Circus we hear a new word. "Respite": A magical non-pardon pardon that would let Libby skate on serving any jail should Dubya want to split the difference.



On Face the Nation…Would whoever played “Got Your Chin” with Mitch McConnell please return it?

He has finally become more Gogol short story than man, and it is creeping me out.


McConnell: We have been disappointed with the Iraqi government. But we’ll wait until September.

McConnell: The Surge is now complete. The Iraqis will have to step-up. We can’t be there forever.

Petraeus may ask for more troops. A lot more. Like a zillion. What then?

McConnell: Well I know that we were all full of “We will reshape Reality!” And “We won. You lost. Get over it!” hoo-ha for the last, oh, six years or so, but now it’s three a.m. at the GOP Kit Kat Lounge.

The floor is covered in peanut shells, blood, IOUs and Neocon vomit.

Ann Coulter is out back giving away hummers to truck drivers who promise to at least think about buying remaindered copies of her books. And you know what?

We suddenly likey the Iraq Study Group.

We likey-likey.

But didn’t the ISG also call for a draw down? That hated cutty-runny thingie that you Conservatives have told us all for years would ruin what remains of our precious bodily fluids?

McConnell: Ummmmmmm. We will wait and see. Might have to re-deploy. Forwardly deployed.

driftglass: Sorta like exactly what that notorious traitor John Murtha called for two years ago.

McConnell: We are very disappointed in the Iraqi government. We gave them their Big Shot at being Murricans and they appear to be blowing it.

OK, but then what happens? How do you respond?

McConnell: I’m not going to answer hypothetical. But we likey the Iraq Study Group. We likey-likey.

On Immigration: No Amnesty! No Chain Migration! Fight the power! Down with the Man! Up the British!

Then comes Lee Hamilton, of “Baker/Hamilton” fame and the ISG that McConnell likes so much.

Because suddenly everyone is interested in the ISG.

Hamilton: Let me remind everyone that the primary recommendation of the ISG was on training the Iraqi troops. Not a “Surge”.

Hamilton: We also said you have to solve this bitch diplomatically, economically, etc.

Hamilton: Lastly, the neighboring states have to be brought in.

Iraq, short and dirty:

The Kurds want out.
The Sunnis want back in.
The Shia want to hang on to what they now have like grim death.

Hamilton: There is no sense of inclusiveness. It his hugely disappointing and I think we have to get much tougher.

Hamilton: I look back at what is going on now, what is being suggest now, and ask “Why wasn’t this done a year ago? Six months ago?”

driftglass: Because there was a Republican Congress six months ago and a year ago. And because the Republican Party has been perfectly content to be Dubya’s gilded ottoman for the last six years.

In fact they built the last three election cycles explicitly on the principle that any dissent from the Omniscient Genius of the Dear Leader was tantamount to treason. That entertaining even the tiniest thoughts that Dubya might be even a liiiitle bit wrong gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

But because a Republican will always put Party ahead of Country, they conspicuously failed to notice what a clusterfuck their Party and their President have made out of the world...

...until his poll numbers starting hovering in the 20s and 30s month after month after month.

Now one after another they are all coming down with Sudden Adult Onset "Dubya Who?"-ism and demand to know just who in the Hell let this crazy person run the country!

Hamilton: Iraq is a whole history of setting benchmarks and milestones, the Iraqi government blowing past them, and us doing nothing.

driftglass: Again because Iraq makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless you realize that, from border to border, it is has become a manifestation of the boozy, cancerous “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” subconscious of George W. Bush.

Face the Nation: Schieffer says the obligatory Sunday Morning Pundits’s prayer while facing Media Mecca:

“It’s everybody’s fault.”

Schieffer: If both parties are forced to shift their hunt for votes to the Center…

What Center?

You mean towards that Great Wad of Americans who can’t be bothered to read a newspaper, read a book, or even watch any teevee more challenging than “Poo Flinger Island” and “Smell my Fat Spouse”?

Can’t be bothered to peel their massive asses off the sofa to vote?

You mean those Americans?

Longer/shorter Schieffer: It’s “Washington” that has failed. The two Parties are both equally Base-driven. The Extreme Liberal Base holds the Dems hostage!

You dissapoint me, Schieffer


On This Week Joe Biden’s hair and giant, bleached choppers fill me with fear.

Joe Biden: I trust General Petraeus. He’ll give us the straight poop.

On Hamas: I don’t want to Monday QB, but years back me and Dicky Lugar we wrote the Preznit about what we should do. He punked out like he always does, things fell apart, and here we are.

On Iran: They’re everywhere you want to be. Iran is waging war with us like the USSR wager war with us. By surrogate.

But what about your dear friend Joementum? And his plan for Holy Joehad against imaginary bases in Iran?

Biden: Morally there would be nothing wrong with attacking camps in Iran if they are training soldiers to kill our people.

Practically, however, if Joementum can explain exactly how we could attack Iran and not unify them when we can’t even keep the much smaller, weak Iraq from melting down…?

How he would attack Iran without uniting them behind their loony President...?

If Joementum has anything to offer beyond his usual bullshit chickenhawk platitudes, I’m all ears.

And hair.

And scary teeth.

Biden: The problem with this Administration is it conflates terrorism with...everything. There will be terrorism whether or not we’re stuck in the Iraqi civil war, and there will be an Iraqi civil war regardless of what happens in the war on Terrorism. They are not the same thing.

Biden: We are marginally safer than six years ago but not nearly enough. We are making more terrorists. This Administration has been criminally negligent.

Biden: I am more qualified to be Commander in Chief than Hillary. Not that she’s a bad person, but the next Preznit will have no margin for error.

Lindsay Graham then says some stuff.

Then comes the Panel…

David Corn: The Bush Administration really believed that speechifying about Palestinian situation was a substitute for the hard work of diplomatic.

Martha Radditz: The amazing thing is that the Iraqi Government keeps coming up with more lame-ass excuses. I boggles my fucking mind!

Corn: What are American soldiers dying for if the Iraqi Government isn’t serious about solving their own problems?

Corn: We have been talking about a “turnaround” for the last three years.

Then some talk about Rove and Subpoenas.

And then Libby and Pardons…

Corn: A handful of Rightwing freaks are really beating this shit out of Dubya.

Radditz: And Cheney bought a Giant Inflatable Rat and has set it up outside Dubya’s window in the White House Lawn.


”Management Unfair to Reliable Liars!” -- Loyal Lackeys Local 138.

Of course, Dubya is hovering at Nixonian 27-32% approval rating.

And Cheney?

Cheney is at –11%. In addition to corporeal beings, dead people, cathedral gargoyles and fictional characters are all coming out strongly against Cheney.

So when people have nothing to lose, they can get a little frisky. And starting talking about "respites".

Meet the Press. -- Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.


Russert reads other people’s headlines and then asks: “Has this Surge done any good?”

Crocker: Yes. But no. But yes. It is not a “universally negative” picture.

Shorter Crocker: Iraq – “It’s only mostly dead.”

And Anbar doing great!

Except that Anbar was not the object of the Surge.



Then E.J. Dionne, Kate O'Beirne, Byron York. and Eugene Robinson.

Happy, Snappy, Yappy and Scrappy.

Eugene Robinson: This is pure bait and switch. It's the God Damned White House that set up September as the drop dead date for Iraq in the first place. And now you have Pony Blow talking September way, way, way down. And feigning bumfuzzlement as to why anyone would think September was Some Big Deal. This tells me that Dubya has no serious intention of changing his mind about anything.

Snappy O'Beirne: September is a real deadline. The glass has to be more than half full.

Byron York: The White House is incredibly nervous about this. And the Iraqi Government give them glad-handing bullshit. The White House keeps telling them they are rilly, rilly, rilly serious this time...and the Iraqi government keeps pooping on their shoes and whistling.

Eugene RobinsonL Are the Republicans going to join with the Evil America Hating Democrats and de-fund the war? Because without cutting off the funding for this nightmare, no matter how bad it gets, Bush ain’t leaving.

E.J. Dionne: I think that if you have enough “high powered” Republicans, then that would change things.

driftglass: In September, the Ghost of Barry Goldwater will go to the White House and tell our New Nixon that he has lost.

Then Dubya will show him the door, and Cheney will call him a traitor and threaten his kids.

This White House is now 100% in the bunker. They have welded the hinges shut behind them and are now completely in the thrall of the fascist dogma, propaganda and tactics that got them into the White House in the first place. If they jettison Rove’s Josef Goebbles playbook at this eleventh hour, they have absolutely nothing left, so nothing is going to change as long as Bush/Cheney ’04 are running the show.

Russert: Harry Reid said bad things about Peter Pace to a buncha bloggers. Don’t you think that is just terrible?

E.J. Dionne: We criticize generals all the time. So what?

Process chat about The Horserace. Six month clocks. Money. Early polls. Fred Thompson’s manliness. Rudy’s slithery image south of the Manson-Nixon line.

Hell, south of Battery Park.

Russert (Showing this Time Magazine cover):


Do you think a Centrist Republican would have a chance, given that that Real Americans hate “Washington” because Republicans and Democrats are both “tacking“ to their Bases and “Washington” is the problem.

Really?

Well since Heath Care has become so mainstream that Ford backs it, and most Americans now agree that Iraq is a pan-dimensional clusterfuck, agree that Global Warming is a real problem, agree that Big Oil is selling out this country with Big Pharma running a close second, agree that no one is proposing anything like an Assault Weapons Ban in an age where you can’t find a purebred Socialist outside of the Smithsonian, etc., etc, etc…

…where exactly outside of the dingy imaginations of the Cheetohing Class-pandering Pundit Caste are the Vile Democrats pandering to the Base in some dirty, Commie way that makes them “extreme” ?

Where exactly does this Vast, Invisible army of Lefthood diverge from what most voters believe?

On The Chris Matthews Show:

Howard Fineman: Ignoring Palestine, Lebanon, etc was the de facto policy of the Bush Administration because they came in reflexively Anti-Clinton. Their malignant neglect has helped ruin the situation.

Katty: Bush has made America’s reputation . When Clinton left, the only thing that could have made a difference in the Middle East was America pushing. Now, Bush or a Bush envoy have absolutely no credibility.

Tucker Carlson: If we bring Democracy to the Middle East, then we will be less safe.

Carlson: Michelle Obama joking about her husband being sloppy is “emasculating”.

Thus confirming yet again what a pile of Jello-y spinelessness Conservative pundits really are.

Ah!!! Strong Woman! Bad! Make it go away!

Matthews: We are creating more terrorists than we can kill.

Katty Kay: People are now join jihad organizations because of Iraq


Carlson: I haven’t talked to any Bush Supporter who has thought this through. “Dubya Hates Terr’ists” is as far as they have taken it.

Carslsin doesn’t finish that thought so let me do if for him.

‘“Dubya Hates Terr’ists” is as far as they have taken it…’ because Republicans are morons.

That is their greatest strength: being completely impregnable to facts or logic or thinking-things-throughiness. These are people who elect, over and over again, people that screw them over and then laugh at them for being stupid enough to elect people who screw them over.

Over and over again.

And Carlson feigning bemused surprise that the Bush Regime Dead Enders are meatheads belies the real arithmetic of the real Iraq endgame:

1. The more our boot is on their throats, the more of them we radicalize them. Thus,

2. Giving Conservatives an endless supply of scary brown people to use to justify stomping that boot down ever harder, at home and abroad.

Iraq is a whole country full of oil-rich, infrastructure-poor, beaten-down brown people with weird, non-Jebus based religions for Conservatives to kill, because that is the real end game.

Annihilate everyone between the Jordan River and the Ukraine who will not bend a knee to our Son King and make him a tribute of their love.

Their gratitude for our good works.

And their oil.

The oldest game in the Imperial playbook; Kill ‘em all, take it all, and all while preserving our delicate Righteous White Christianism sensibilities.

But being typically gutless Republican wieners, they have to enact their blood-soaked Imperial ambitions by proxy. Being as how they are far too busy standing on their toilet seats and shrieking “Stop emasculating me!” at the tiny spider hiding behind the tube of styling gel, and all.