Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"The Unitards of Command" Edition

On “This Week”

The panel was dismal.

Dan Senor – footfaced former Bush advisor -- cautioning that we dare not waiver from the sheer wonderfulness of Bush policies.

Katrina vanden Heuvel trying hard to be earnest in the company of people who view caring about anything but money and access as the height of hick and stoopid.

Cokie Roberts explaining, smirking, and eye-rolling at every suggestion that the words of the Villagers (“But in Iraq, Americans want to Win!”) are anything but received wisdom beamed in directly by from the advanced life forms of the Beltway Galaxy.

George Will sighing at the sheer ridiculousness of where his life has taken him.




Howard Dean was on "Face the Nation"

And I missed it.



On "Meet the Press" another hundred miles of primary horse race highway rolled past and I couldn’t tell you one thing about it that caught my eye.

The one thing that did jump off the screen?

This by Andrew Young (From the MTP transcript here)

Let, let me--I, I, I love Condoleezza Rice, I think she's doing a great job.

Really, Ambassador?

A great job…at doing what?

Being the worst National Security Advisor in history? Being a Soviet Studies professor Peter Principled along with her patron to the point where she gets to fool disastrously around with live ammunition in a tinder-box Middle East? Signing on to be Dubya’s work-wife and then helping him drive the country into the sea?

Or being the affable Black Lady in the Republican White House?

Just getting in the door is not good enough anymore, Ambassador.

Not by a damn sight.


On "Fox News Sunday" first came John McCain; then John Kerry.

Wallace: Won’t being John McCain The Maverick be different that being John McCain, Greatest President Ever?

McCain: Not to worry; I only get angry when bad people do bad things.

Wallace: What about you foreign policy experience?

McCain: Mrwauuuugh! I never said 100 years that way!

Wallace: Uhhhh…OK…but that wasn’t exactly my question.

McCain: (Yelling into a colander left over from the taping of “Cookin’ with Cavuto!”) When I said 100 years I didn’t mean, like, 100 years.

Wallace: Um, that’s not a microphone, Senator.

McCain: And when I said the government doesn’t exist to bail people out, I meant except for good people.

Wallace: So exactly what is your plan?

McCain: I’m for limited government. Except when I’m not. Government should do stuff when stuff needs doing, but not too much stuff, because that would be bad.

Wallace: What about the situation in Iraq? It certainly looks like our Puppet Government and the militias we’re paying off got their asses kicked by the militias we’re not paying off?

McCain: Iraq is awesome. Trans-awesome!

Wallace: But a thousand of the Iraqi troops we spent billions of taxpayer dollars and the last eight weeks … 8 weeks … 16 weeks … 24 weeks … six months weeks … year … year and a half … two years … two years and eight weeks … two years and a half years … three years… four years … four years and a half years half a decade training turned around and deserted?

McCain: Yeah but a lot more didn’t desert! Why don’t you media elites ever talk about the Iraqi troops that don’t desert? The cars that don’t explode?

Wallace: But things are not going quite as well as we’d all hoped, right?

McCain: No doubt we’re paying a huge price for four years of mismanagement of Iraq. During which time I vigorously worked for the re-election of the Clusterfucker-in-Chief. But I did fight long and hard against the four years of mismanagement of Iraq

Except, of course, when I didn’t. (h/t The Democratic Party)

McCain: "And I believe that the success will be fairly easy." [CNN, Larry King Live, 9/24/02]

2007: Russert: "Go back, Senator, to 2002 - the administration saying we'd be greeted as liberators." [MSNBC, 1/10/2007]

2003: McCain: "There's no doubt in my mind that once these people are gone that we will be welcomed as liberators." [MSNBC, Hardball, 3/24/03]

McCain: "I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time." [CNN Late Edition, 9/29/02]

Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years."
McCain: "Make it a hundred… That would be fine with me, I hope it would be fine with you." [McCain Town hall in Derry, NH, 1/3/08]

2002: "We're not going get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad" [CNN Late Edition, 9/29/02]

2003: "It doesn't take a large number of people to cause difficulties in house to house fighting we've just seeing right now in southern Iraq." [MSNBC, 3/24/03]

"We have not told the American people how touch and difficult this task would be… they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach." [CNN, 8/22/2006]

As usual, Frank Rich at the NYT accomplishes more in a few paragraphs than a million dollars of Mouse Circus teevee time can buy

Tet Happened, and No One Cared

…
Everything else Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shiite Iran and Sunni Qaeda. The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.

So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din. They’ve also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol’ Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the “surge is success” propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” five years ago. The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.

For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one-fifth of what it was in January 2007.
…

Then on we went to John Kerry.

Kerry: John McCain has been wrong about everything. McCain has adopted the Bush policies right down the line.

Wallace: But you loved John McCain in 2004!

Kerry: “Nomination John McCain” of 2008 is a very different person than “Senator John McCain” in 2004. In 2004, Senator McCain still though that tax cuts for billionaires was a bad idea and that Iraq sucked ass. Nomination John McCain loves tax cuts for billionaires and wants to be in Iraq forever.

Wallace: Howard Dean called John McCain a “blatant opportunist. Isn’t that single comment exactly the same as Republicans mounting a multi-million dollar campaign to hire professional liars to Swift Boat to you into extinction? And so don’t you now have to denounce Howard Dean?

Of course it didn’t flow quite as river-smooth as that. After administers a loving, hot-oil and eucalyptus body rub to Grandpa McCain, Wallace came straight out of the gate pissy and affronted than anyone could possibly have anything unhappy to say about the Candidate from FoxNews.

So every one of Kerry’s responses (which were rather good) was disrupted by Wallace hissing out “Excuse me sir. Excuse me!” And “If I may sir!”

FoxNews is to News as Bull Connor was to Law enforcement, and anyone who actually watches this swill to stay “informed” is not someone who should be allowed anywhere near the sharp objects, heavy machinery, toasters, explody things, polling places or the human reproductive cycle.

Wallace: Do you think that John McCain is a blatant opportunist for loving America? Huh? For suffering in a North Vietnamese POW camp for your sins? Sir? For being a fucking hero?

Kerry: Bolt your pie-hole you squirmy little whore, or I’ll climb through this teevee machine and pimp slap you so hard that whatever is left of Mike Wallace’s nads will burst into flames like antique papier-mâché raisins.


On "The Chris Matthews Show"

Andre Sullivan: This is about entitlement. If he (Obama) can survive them – and there are two people running on that side; Bill and Hillary – then he can survive anything.

Katty Kay: It's almost like they feel that Obama had jumped the line. That he should have waited his turn.

Gloria Borger: Hillary is running as the incumbent.

Gloria Borger: This is about putting some luster back on the Clinton Presidency.

Matthews: Is this like a mulligan? A do-over?…

Sully: It’s about the Clinton Brand. He (Bill Clinton) believes he saved the Party. It’s his Party, and if Obama wins then the Clintons start to fade into history, not as the Saviors of the Party, but as marginally effective centrist Democrats

driftglass: I’ll say it out loud because they won’t -- A huge part of the Clinton run for the White House has to do with the shame of scandal and, yes, impeachment.

Years of “what might have been” were systematically bled out of the Clinton Administration by a bestial Republican Party that was willing to smash the country if that’s what it took to depose the Hated Liberals…pulling in harness with the secretiveness, appetites and missteps of Clinton himself.

It should never have happened, but it did, and now the Clintonites find themselves in an election that is about, believe it or not, their version of redemption as much as it is about anything else.

Redemption.

It is largely unspoken – only alluded to or hinted at -- but in addition to working out any number of other cultural/psychological issues on a Giant Stage (which, to be clear, every Administration and political movement does), Clinton believers really do feel they need to redeem the Lost Clinton Years.

To undo this:


When the promise of the Comeback Kid and the Third Way got blown out of orbit and hurled into the outer darkness.

And however good or ready or not Obama may be, he is ultimately beside the point; a persistent, maddening distraction.

McCain is ultimately beside the point too.

Because to certain Clinton loyalists there is no one -- and I mean literally no one on Earth -- who can redeem the Lost Clinton Years and all that was unfinished, or got sold out, or left rotting on the vine, but Hillary.

No one can purge and purify the faithful, can transmute the shame and fury millions feel at betting so much on such a flawed man, standing beside him only to find, in the end, that he lied to his loved ones and supporters, except Hillary.

No one can pen the final volume of the Clinton Resurrection Trilogy and give the Right a big, fat, gristley helping of “Fuck You; We Won” as the Very, Very Last Word on the Clinton Era but Hillary as she re-enters the White House in glory...

With Bill following along as First Lad...

A chastened ten paces behind her.

And Obama?

Obama fucks this all up.

Obama was supposed to be strictly sidekick material. Someone to play Hadji the "street urchin fakir"

to Hillary’s “Johnny Quest”.

Someone who might get their own tepid spin-off of -- “The Clinton Saga: A New Generation” -- once the main actors are damn good and ready to exit the stage.


Certain members of Camp Clinton -- for reasons I do understand and with which I sympathize -- feel that it will all have been for nothing unless someone makes good on all of the dreams and promises that vanished into grainy photos on the back of America’s political milk carton during the Age of Starr, the Age of Newt, the Age of Monica and the Age of Dubya.

And since it is impossible for anyone but Hillary to fully exorcise those demons, it follows that it is unacceptable for anyone but the Clintons to wear the

Unitards of Command

Ably assisted, of course (as it was the magnificently unscarred Days of Old) by a cast of wacky regulars like James “Matalin” Carville as

Maya the Shape-Shifter