Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Pets and Pirates

Edition


In which no one proposes the obvious solution to pirates and North Korea: Hire the former to blockade the latter and let the magic of the marketplace solve this problem.


On “Meet the Press”

We learn that Obama’s strategy of being candid with the Muslim world is either Good or Crazy.

That our bribe-the-Sunnis-to-stop-shooting-at-us program is running low on cash.

That half of Afghanistan is unstable (the other half is apparently uninhabited.)

That the cost of the Iraq war has now surpassed that of Vietnam.

Oh, and Centrism is such an awesome thing that maybe the Democrats should embrace it and keep chasing the Right deeper into the Limbaugh Crackhouse if they want to yadda yadda yadda,

On “Fox News Sunday”

Republican Tom Coburn, (Oklahoma) squares off with I-Can’t-Believe-Its-Not-A-Republican Evan Bayh (Indiana) to see who can say “socialist” first.

Coburn: Market forces will save us all!

Bayh: Market forces haven’t worked in 30 years.

Pirates?

Coburn

Wallace: But aren’t there any link between pirates and…

…and…

…and…

….terrorists?!?

(The desperate attempt by the Right to link Somali pirates to Osama bin Laden has been going strong all weekend. The latest attempt comes from one Stephen Radmaker – a third-tier Bush Administration foreign service flunky -- on “The News Hour” who explained that, because criminals can make big money pirating…and because al-Qaeda wants money…which they will use to buy space lasers or something…that the “Terry and the Pirates” moment of the coast of Kenya was, in fact, a precursor to a massive, sinister takeover of the Somali pirate industry by terrorists.

(And that [see if any of this sounds vaguely familiar] even though there is no evidence whatsoever that any of this is true, and all reliable American intel says there is no al-Qaeda presence of any kind in the neighborhood, we should nonetheless take this currently-nonexistent-but-possible-in-some-wildly-improbable-alternate-future-history terrorist threat Very Seriously.

(At which point the Obama Administration rep who was sitting across from Mr. Radmaker rolling his eye showed almost heroic restraint by not leaning across the table and punching this simpering Cheney finger-puppet in the throat.)

Bayh, lost my attention when he pronounced “nuclear” as new-kew-ler, and then it was off to Fox business hoop-earring, air-quotes-slinging hotties.


Who let us know that Psychology affects Spending, the economy will continue to fall, real wages aren’t rising, and people can’t use their homes as ATM machines anymore.

Also Fox sez “Beware the double-bottom!”

I always do.


On “This Week” Rick Warren apparently didn’t do his Bible-stretches, overpreached himself, pulled a groin muscle and had to cancel at the last minute, leaving it to Stephanopoulos to vamp about pirates for 20 minutes before Newt Gingrich was rolled out to play his favorite game:

Six Degrees of Armageddon.

See, no matter how many times Gloria Borger goes on “The Chris Matthews Show” and yaps on and on that he is, he is, a-yup, a-yup, he really is…Newt is not a man of Big Ideas.

He is deeply bigoted, egomaniacal troll, infamous for making his political bones scorching the Earth by continuously lobbing fire-bomb rhetoric like this in every direction (from just before the 1994 mid-term election:)

I think that the mother [Susan Smith] killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things." Gingrich concluded, "The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days."

and sowing hate in the stony fields of American politics like dragon's teeth to breed a crop of rabid Republican automata, trained to think, speak, act, react and hate at the tops of their lungs just like him.

Now -- fallen from power, and manacled to both a toxic, shameful personal history and an ideology that is now widely believed to be responsible for nearly destroying America -- what Newt has left is a vocabulary twice as large as the mouthbreathers over which he rules and which he freights with dire Diluvian adjectives…all in the service of clawing his way back into history hawking the same, old, tired, utterly failed Republican dogmas of tax cuts for the rich, tarted up with a few goofball, fringe ideas so he can fob himself off as a “futurist” and visionary.

But of course the toweringness of Newt’s “vision” is an optical illusion: a consommés of peevish, hateful screeds which look large and thoughtful only in juxtaposition to the rest of the dregs and tea-bagging intellectual dwarfs left in his party.

Newt is only ever really comfortable talking about the End of the World -- which over the years he has predicted would be brought about by everything from flag burning to Bill Clinton’s penis -- because only in a state of imminent anarchy does his disgraced Neocon, bomb-them-all, ‘Triumph of the Will” playbook stand any chance of being received with any reaction but laughter.

Which is why every issue – no matter how trivial -- is put through the Gingrich’s Ragnarok-O-Matic. For Newt, there is no problem so piffling or glitch so passé that – if it is being done within a hundred yards of a Democrat – is not the breaking of the seventh seal of the Book of Revelations.

And so, for example, according to Newt, New York only ever existed in two states: a pre-Giuliani state of barbarism,

and a post-Giuliani golden age of Civilization.

Because Ghouliani had The Iron Will necessary to make sure that any transgressions – no matter how tiny – came with immediate and crushing consequences.

Except, of course, if you were, say, Giuliani’s BFF and degenerate thug of a Police Commissioner,

Bernard Kerik, who featherbedded himself very nicely at taxpayer expense in Iraq…

"He [Army Lt. Colonel in charge of Kirkuk reconstruction] was afraid that the new Kirkuk police force, which the battalion he commanded had already set up, would have to be scrapped when Bernard Kerik - the colorful former New York police chief - finally got around to announcing his national plan. Instead, Kerik spent his time in Baghdad going on raids with South African mercenaries while his house in New Jersey underwent renovation. He went home after just three months, leaving almost nothing behind, while the Lt. Colonel spent almost a year in Kirkuk."

Whose infamous post-9/11 antics (via The Rude One) --

Goddamn, that must've been some hot fucking: Bernard Kerik, Police Commissioner of New York City, and Judith Regan, whore of bookdom, balling like crazed weasels in that $6000 a month condo in lower Manahttan, the fin-de-siecle glow of the still burning rubble of the twin towers turning one of the bedrooms a tawdry red. Aw, shit, how goddamn sizzling it must've been, with the odor of burnt corpses and free-floating asbestos in the air, nothing compared to the musk of Kerik's balls tea-bagged in Regan's mouth, Kerik's bare ass pressed against the window that faced the Pit where his officers scoured the ruins for body parts they could send off in a baggie so some family could have something to bury. Maybe Kerik came, ejaculating all over Regan's tits, just as some cop or firefighter picked up a tooth. And the best part? That the married Kerik was also cheating on his mistress, a corrections officer. Man, you can't make that shit up.

-- nearly didn’t catch up with him in time to cost him an ultra-sweet gig as head of the Bush NKVD Homeland Security.

And who is currently on trail for a Whitman’s Sampler of theft and perfidy.

Bernard Kerik's fate in the hands of three juries, judge says

BY Abby Luby
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Monday, March 23rd 2009, 11:41 PM

Disgraced ex-NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik is going to have to take his chances with three juries.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Robinson chopped up an indictment Monday accusing Kerik of corruption, tax evasion and perjury into three separate cases.

Defense lawyer Barry Berke applauded the judge's decision, asserting that it bolstered Kerik's chances to be "vindicated" in all three trials.

The judge scheduled Oct. 13 for Kerik's trial on corruption charges.

Kerik is accused of leveraging his job as New York City's top cop to get $165,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment from a mob-linked contractor needing his help to land city work. If convicted, Kerik faces up to 20 years in prison.
…

But that cesspit of bone-deep, High Republican Corruption and Depravity has no place in Newt’s political calculus, so instead, the ugly, grotty reality of 25 years of Republican catastrophe and treason all goes down the memory hole to be instantly forgotten by the rank and file and replaced with Newt the Big Idea Man and his Six Degrees of Armageddon insistence that

1. New York muggings somehow =
2. Somali Pirates, which somehow =
3. North Korea missiles, which somehow =
4. Iranian nukes…

…because there is no place on Earth where there are any consequences for anything!

So, what do you think of Newt’s assessment, Old School Conservative George Will?: Pirates are a fucking nuisance. Nothing more.

Newt: No! They are a harbinger of the collapse of Western Civilization around our ears because the fucking Liberals don’t have the will to bomb all problems and all evildoers – whether they are muggers or pirates or Kim Jung Il -- off the face of the Earth.

Stephanopoulos: Well some of those al-Qaeda leaders who were blown to hell last week with US drones might disagree with you.


Later, on the subject of cuts to the Defense budget:

Krugman: I love it that the same Republicans who were bitching that no government spending ever created any jobs are now bitching that cutting the defense budget (of course, they’re only cutting growth on a budget that has gone up 90% since 2000) will…cost people their jobs.

An d lastly, on the subject of the President’s dog (Ignoring mere words and reading the though bubbles):

George Will: I can’t believe we report on this shit.

George Stephanopoulos: I can’t believe we talk about this shit.

Ruth Marcus: I can’t believe we talk about this shit.

Tapper: I can’t believe I get paid to talk about this shit.

Krugman: I can’t believe we talk about this shit.

Gingrich: Obama’s dog will doom us all to a 10,000 year Dark Age!