Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound...” edition.

If your idea of eternal damnation is watching the watching the same, lame junior varsity debating team banging the same, stupid arguments together forever...then welcome to Hell.

The usually non-vomit-inducing “Face the Nation” was the worst of the lot yesterday, with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich) building his Party's rhetorical fortress on the following foundation:

"We're going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11. We're now going to rip that wound wide open, and it's going to stay open for, what - two, three, four years, as we go through the circus of a trial in New York City?"

Hoekstra's concern-troll distress over "going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11" would seem a lot less, oh, liar-ish had the political party to which he proudly belongs not spent virtually every fucking day of the last eight years making an entire multi-level marketing industry out of ruthlessly mining the "wound" of 9/11; using every propaganda tool in Karl Rove's toolbox to flay and scald and salt the "wound" from the worst national security failure in America history into a bottomless cornucopia of politically exploitable rage and fear.

A campaign of terror which reached a peak of depravity at the 2004 Republican National Fear-Fest

which the GOP held in heart of New York City...

...and their Fear-Fest Redux in 2008, which was carefully scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 and reaching its depraved apotheosis with in a three-minute 9/11 "snuff film" which Keith Olbermann eloquently deconstructs here.



Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy effortlessly demolished the idiocy (video available at C&L here) --

"I think that Eric Holder, our Attorney General, is right; I think the president is right in holding the trials of these murderers in New York City. What we're saying to the world is, the United States acts out of strength, not out of fear.
...

I was a former prosecutor. I'd like to just see them prosecuted, in the same way which we prosecuted Timothy McVeigh. We're not afraid to do that. We're the most powerful nation on Earth. We have a judicial system that is the envy of the world. Let's show the world that we can use that power."

-- but I doubt it changed any minds.

Because the pants-pissing cowards of the Party of God just love America too darn much to have any faith in its most sacred institutions or values.


On “Meet the Press”

David Gregory got Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to promise to not sock Sarah Palin in the cake-hole if they ever meet, but she also said she already has more to read than she “can say grace over” and so probably won’t read her book.

Later, serial-liar Newt Gingrich slithered back onto teevee by hiding behind school children, paired with Al Sharpton, who -- having recently shown up at the Mouse Circus as “the liberal” more than mere chance can explain -- is clearly being fitted for the “Jesse Jackson” black teevee preacher jacket.

They were joined by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and many important, impassioned sentences were uttered by the Synergy Troika -- sentences with which I completely agree.

So good on them.

However there were a couple of subjects which were not broached.

Such as the fact that Arne Duncan’s signature program -- Chicago Renaissance 2010 -- is widely seen here as a thinly veiled effort at union-busting.

CORE Charges Daley/Board of Education with Union-Busting

Calls for Overturn of the 1995 Amendatory Act and an End to Mayoral Control

CHICAGO – Quietly, with little public debate, on November 18, 2009, the Chicago Board of Education could authorize 8,130 additional charter seats, increasing charters’ current Chicago share of Chicago’s non-private schools from 7.9% to 9.8% according to Chicago Public Schools data compiled by CORE researchers. CPS proposes to open nine new charter schools in 2010 and 2011 and convert seven contract schools into charters.

Since the onset of Renaissance 2010 in 2004, Chicago Teacher Union membership has shrunk by approximately 6,000 members.

“Labor law doesn’t allow a company to close down a union plant and open up a non-union one across the street, but that’s exactly what Chicago Public Schools has done for the last six years without pause,” said Jackson Potter, CPS teacher at Little Village-Lawndale High School and CORE co-chair.

Karen Lewis, CPS teacher at King College Prep and co-chair of CORE stated that, “It is increasingly clear from mountains of research that Renaissance 2010 schools generally do not offer a better education than traditional neighborhood schools. So today we have to identify the real reason behind school reform in this city — union busting.”
...

And that a damning, June 2009 study of Arne Duncan's Chicago Public School System by the well-respected Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago (“Still Left Behind” – PDF link here) was peppered with observations like this:

"The reality is that most of Chicago s students are still left far behind. Real student performance appears to have gone up a little in Chicago elementary schools during the past few years and even those gains then dissipate in high school."

And this;

The performance of Chicago’s high schools is abysmal – with about half the students dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat over the past several years.
...

To be clear, I have no doubt that creating the next generation of competent, educated citizens is the issue on which the long term viability of the United States will be decided: if we get that right, almost everything else falls into place; if we blow it, we’re doomed.

That being said, I have to ask, in the service of that noble goal, is a skeevy, spotlight-obsessed preacher, a power-obsessed megalomaniac/lobbyist and a Secretary of Education with a very problematic resume being interviewed by a Muppet really the best we can do?


On The Rudy Giuliani Show “Fox News Sunday”

Ghouliani authoritatively

informed the Pig People that...

...delay on Afghanistan is being done because of politics.

...terrorist trials in New York are being done to please Obama’s foreign masters.

...the motives behind the shootings at Fort Hood are cut and dried, but we’re not allowed to call it the “war on terrorism” anymore.

Chris Wallace muses that "there are obvious downsides to having a trial" and then asks, "So what’s the upside?"

Pause for a moment to consider that the chief anchor of one of Americas most widely watched "news" network doesn’t understand the “upside” of democracy. Can't summon to mind the “upside” of due process.

Wallace: What if one of these guys gets off? It could happen...

For wingnuts, the world is always the second reel of "Dirty Harry".


Later, the poison fruit of Dick Cheney's loins bats her massive fake eyelashes and coyly deflects a question about the Wasilla Grifter's qualification to be President by opining that the hardest job a President Sarah Palin would have would be undoing all of the damage done by the Kenyan Usurper.

Juan Williams makes his little, whining, "house liberal" noises and collects his paycheck, after which everyone jerks off in horror that the President of the United States' gesture of respect towards the Emperor of Japan.

Well, take heart, wingnuts; it was only a first date.

As opposed to, say,


an arranged marriage.



"The Rudy Show" continued on “This Week” , followed by a panel discussion featuring George Will, Bob Woodward, Gwen Ifill, David Corn, and of course,

David Fucking Brooks.

DFB on Sarah Palin:

"The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host"

Corn: She’s a joke…and she may destroy the Republican Party. There is this huge gap between the GOP base -- who love of the Wasilla Grifter -- and not-crazy-Americans, who want her off the fucking stage already.

Will: If conservatives of a sort are looking for a populist they have Mike Huckabee.

DFB: Awesome populism is OK. Reagan? Awesome! Small town luvin'? Awesome! Hay-scented homoerotic Conservative man-crushes and certain, ooey-gooey editorial-page mash notes throbbingly inspired therefrom? Mentos Super Awesome! But hostility towards intellectualism in general? Not awesome at all.

OK, quick history lesson.

Nixon was a monster.

Republicans elected him twice.

Reagan was a radical who was good on camera. He and his people set off bombs inside the American economy that have been blowing the pylons out from under our country for a generation. He traded weapons to terrorists. Outsourced the conduct of a blatantly illegal, secret war to a traitor/convicted felon/FoxNews regular named Ollie North.

Republicans elected him twice.

George W. Bush was vicious, dimwitted moral imbecile whose contempt for the Constitution made Nixon look like Thurgood Marshall, and who destroyed everything he touched and visited more long-term catastrophe on this country during any one year of his reign than Reagan managed in eight.

Republicans elected him twice.

All of this was made possible because the GOP has spent the last 40 years aggressively recruiting people who think these

were the good old days.

Angry, fearful bigots who have been feeding off of the rancid Confederate leftovers of white entitlement, victimhood and Bible-sanctioned hatred of "big gummint" ever since Lincoln took their slaves away.

The Pig People have been the margin of Republican victory since 1968. They have been growing stronger and more vocal every year; seizing more power every year; destroying the Party of Lincoln a little more every year; driving more non-crazy Conservatives screaming into the streets every year.

Now the Pig People have their own anti-Christian religion, and Sarah Palin is their Madonna.

They have their own anti-factual "News", and Sarah Palin is their Talk-Show-Host-in-Chief.

They have their own anti-literate publishing houses, and Sarah Palin is their own, private Bestselling Author.

They have their own anti-intellectual ideology, and Sarah Palin is their Philosopher Queen.

And they have their own anti-American political Party, and Sarah Palin is its heir presumptive.

As David Fucking Brooks fucking well knows, is was his party and his movement who -- despite ample warning that what they were doing would lead to disaster -- spent the last 40 years methodically weaponizing the hatred and fear of the Pig People.

So now that it has all gone to shit, pardon me for laughing as Bobo continues to frantically pretend that the Mutant Atomic Monsters his Party's despicable Southern Strategy unleashed and that are stomping the Party of Lincoln to rubble right before his eyes

are really just a joke.

Finally, on ”The Chris Matthews Show”, Peggy Noonan tanks up her Punditmobile on high-test rocket fuel and boldly predicts that if Barack Obama succeeds in Afghanistan…he’ll be praised.

And if not, then he won't.


And having surveyed the Mouse Circus landscape once again, I can only look over the ramparts of the castle the the coming darkness, sip a couple of fingers of single malt and warm myself with the knowledge that the men who froze at Valley Forge did so blissful ignorant of the fact that they were sacrificing all they had for a future of Noonans, Bobos, Ghoulianis, Sharptons, Gingrichs and Fox News.


UPDATE: Welcome Daily Kos visitors.