A Reader Asks...

In a previous post, SO Katie said this:

... I love Andrew Sullivan. Maybe its because I'm more of a centrist than an extreme leftist ... maybe my parents didn't do good enough job brain washing me. ;-)

But I think it is great to see a conservative stand up for gay rights as Andy has done for years. I also think it is great that he is railing against the use of torture.

Was Andy dismissive of Iran Contra and Watergate?

Good points, so let's take them one by one.

First, I honestly don't know what an "extreme leftist" even looks like anymore.

When I was a kid, an "extreme leftist" might have been a loosely apt description of a member of or sympathizer with any one of a number of Marxist-inflected activist organizations, while someone on the extreme right might have looked a lot like a hippy/feminist/gay/black-loathing, gun-nut Archie Bunker-type who huddled around the radio listening to Joe Pyne because the rest of the news was secretly run by Jews and/or Commies.

Admittedly somewhat cartoonish, but you get the idea.

But now consider how violently into the wingnut infrared the political spectrum has shifted in last 30 years.

With the exception of Bernie Sanders, there is almost no one of any prominence on the Left I can think of anywhere in elected or appointed office at the federal or state level who has even a poppy seed of Teh Socialist stuck between their teeth; in a dim room after a couple of beers, most Liberals and Progressives in serious politics today would be virtually indistinguishable from the Rockefeller Republican of a generation ago.

Locally and anecdotally, I know maybe one gen-u-ine “Das Capital”-quoting Marxist. He wears a suit, owns property and cheerfully works with both unions and conservative company owners in a spirit of pragmatic equanimity; whatever he reads at night, by day he is in the getting-shit-done business and is very well-respected.

Now consider what an exponentially ever more degenerate and depraved arc the Right has been hurtling down during that same period. How many Republicans of the First Water are now anti-science bigots? Bible-thumping idiots? Wreckers? Stooges of the oligarchs?

How many of them are either racists, or are cravenly willing to pander to racists in exchange for power?

How many of them hate this country? Really, really hate the complexity of it? The diversity? The built-in checks and balances? The premeditated secularism and tolerance burned right into our motherboard?

How many of them applauded as Bill Clinton was slandered and destroyed because he was in the wrong Party? How many cheered when Newt Gingrich gave the order for Republicans to grab every microphone in the world and scream “Liberals are Traitors” in unison year after year?

How many of them sent every dime they could scrape together to Christopathic hateporn merchants like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?

How many of them creamed their Ronald Reagan Underoos at the thought of the Cheney Torture Administration flossing their ass-cracks with the United States Constitution?

Millions of them, that’s how many.

As this country was put up on blocks and stripped down to the rivets, millions of them applauded. And bellowed. And jizzed themselves blind.

Millions and millions of people who hate this country so much they’ve seceded from it in everything but name. Hate it so much they invented their own Wrathful Swine God who has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ, but everything to do with feeding their own rage and ignorance back to them tarted up in cherry-picked scripture.

Hate the unbearable Liberalism of reality itself so passionately that the billionaires who underwrite their fascism invented a whole new and ludicrously biased media which exists solely to externalize and echo back to the pig people the voices in their heads.

And then we have the Professional Centerists of our Elite Media, for whom (I wrote four years ago and through the proxy of Tom Friedman) 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.

This is the reality that ultimately tangles up my wiring when it comes to pinning on labels. Because in a world where you can get tagged as an "extreme leftist" by the Right for, say, disagreeing with Bill O'Reilly over torture…or by the GOP for believing Social Security shouldn't be gambled away in the stock market…or by the Fox News Teabaggers for believing tax rates should be put back to their Clinton Administration levels...what does any label mean anymore?

Which brings us in my long, winding way to the second point: setting the context within which I'll try to answer the “Whither Andy Sullivan” question.

Because the context here really is vital.

I agree that Andy Sullivan has written many things over the years that, if judged blind-submission-writing-contest-style, are perfectly fine, and with which I concur. The problem I have with Andy and several other chastened-by-recent-history Conservatives is that, in writing about culture and/or politics, shearing content from context is virtually impossible.

Sullivan and many others, make their daily bread writing about politics and culture.

Fine.

They are in the business of taking fierce positions and defending them aggressively.

Good.

But in the world of politics and policies, those opinions are not sofa-bound, five-finger-exercise. In the world of politics and policies, people play with live ammunition, and so however sincerely angry and articulate as these apostates are -- and I will gladly stipulate that Andy Sullivan is plenty of both -- the question people like me will keep demanding of them for the rest of their public lives is this:

“OK, well then where in the fuck have you been for the last 30 years?”

This from Wikipedia:

One of the most common charges Sullivan addresses is that he is inconsistent, that his views on certain policies (such as the desirability of invading Iraq) and people (such as George W. Bush) change considerably over time.
...

And this:

Though Sullivan was very strong in his praise of George W. Bush immediately after 9/11, he has recently called such views "stupid and premature" in retrospect. He has similarly since characterized the president as a "shallow, monstrous, weak, and petty man."[42] In response to suggestions by Sullivan that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld may have intentionally refused to support the Iraq War effort (during occupation), conservative blog Ace of Spades did a parody of Sullivan's Daily Dish site.”

Three cheers for seeing the error of one’s ways and all, but notice how virtually every one of Sullivan’s eleventh-hour epiphanies are put in harness in the service of the greatest and most dangerous Conservative Dead Ender delusion of all: that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Conservatism itself.

How else except by building his ideological bunker under a mile-thick ablative shield of diamond-hard delusion could an openly gay man throw himself energetically into pimping for a party and movement that openly built its power base on the foundation of hating gays and working tirelessly for their extinction? How else but through the mesmerizing power of masochistic delusion does a drug libertarian spend his adult life carrying water for the Party whose corrupt leader launched the disastrous War on Drugs and declared drug abuse to be "public enemy number one in the United States” 38 years ago?

Like so many others of his kind, Sullivan maintains his career (and quite possibly his sanity) by hiding out in a meticulously-constructed fantasy-land. Bolted together out of leftovers from the Book of Genesis, it posits a righteous, sinless, pre-Fall "Real Conservatism" that apparently flickered in and out of existence like some exotic subatomic particle (two parts lepton to one part moron) sometime between 7:00 and 7:03 A.M. GMT on March 9, 1981.

Then a buncha stuff happened. For about a quarter of a century. During which time Andy Sullivan remained a staunch defender of the Wingnut Faith.

Then quite!suddenly! Sullivan noticed – OMFG! – the Movement had somehow been betrayed!

“… [c]onservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists".

By some guy named George Bush! (from the video)

“…the Bush republicans – who are not Republicans, not real Conservatives. They’re actually Leftists and Socialists when it comes to economic policy…”

But of course since Sullivan’s Real Conservatism was never anything more than a sham to begin with, Dubya wasn’t Conservatism’s aberration; he was its apotheosis. Or, as Glenn Greenwald put it here in his generally-favorable assessment of Sullivan’s writing and thinking:

…
"Conservative principles" are marketing props used by the Conservative Movement to achieve political power, not actual beliefs. Sullivan's principal argument that the Bush presidency never adhered to conservative principles is true enough, but the same can be said of the entire American conservative political movement. That is why they bred and elevated George Bush for six years, and suddenly "realized" that he was "not a conservative" only once political expediency required it.

And with his relentless failed-cult-leader twaddle that the Glorious Movement was just seven flavors of caramel-covered awesome until it was mysteriously hijacked and gutted during the middle of the Bush Administration by people who simply weren’t Reagany enough -- for all of his well-reasoned positions on issues from civil liberties to torture -- Andrew Sullivan is still spending his passion and talent proliferating a toxic delusion which should instead be sealed into lead-lined ideological sarcophagi and buried like Chernobyl.

And Then One Day You Realize

"Wait a minute. I'm a writer."

That's why you've gotta be careful and use the Three Rules of Prosephylaxis to keep the affliction from sneaking up on you:

1. Avoid sharing enclosed spaces with writers.


2. If you come into physical contact with a writer, be sure to wash your hands vigorously with soap and water.


3. If you must expose yourself to language, limit your use to various combinations of "Rock on" and "More Thread".

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The Curse of the Mole People

Over on “This Week”

George Will was running the siren on the Waaaambulance again, complaining that President Obama is going to “design our light bulbs. Design our cars. Tell us where we can build our houses”.

That this is “nagging, supervisory Liberalism at its worst”.

Forty years ago, Will would have been the guy at the bar complaining: “Who is the Gummint to tell us we should go to the Moon? Or that we should build some kind of national ‘computer machine’ network? Why if every we needed such do-dads and gimcracks, then surely American Capitalism would provide them!


But the real scream-at-your-teevee fun was over on “Fox News Sunday” where the Rock-Em-Sock-Em Douchebot Senator from Missouri -- Kit Bond -- came out lies blazin' with:

The torture that took place at Abu Gharib was the result of “rogue, criminal acts”.

Of course that is a lie, just slapped right down on the barrel head. An absolute, categorical lie. What happened at Abu Gharib was the direct result of policies concocted and approved inside Oval Office. The evidence is damning and incontrovertible.

And of course, Kit Bond knows it’s a lie. Chris Wallace knows it too, and if Chris Wallace were a journalist he might have bothered to raise an eyebrow over such a ridiculously crude and bold-faced lie.

But of course Chris Wallace is not a real journalist, any more than this guy

is a real doctor,

this guy

is the real head of security for the Dharma Initiative,

or this guy

is a real comedian.

They are performers, acting out scripted parts for money, and Wallace's role as Rupert Murdoch's Sock Puppet is to hit Democrats with the snarkiest gotcha stuff Riger Ailes can think up in the shower the night before

and feed Republican potted plants like Kit Bond straight lines as if they were real questions.

And so he did.

Wallace (to Democratic Senator Levin): In the midst of a war on terror, two shooting wars, an economic collapse, that you should be going after these people?

Wallace (Replaying Kit Bond’s own statement about the prosecution or torturers as “a stab in the back” : Senator, is that how you would view any prosecutions? As a “stab in the back”?

Bond: Fuck yeah!

Bond: Obama has “demoralized the CIA”. And his actions have “absolutely destroyed our ability to get information from terrorists”.

No follow up. No challenge to Bond’s unhinged fiction. No asking whether or not the CIA might have been a little more demoralized by the Cheney Torture Administration outing an active agent during wartime than they were being told that no one will demand they torture people anymore?

Just as penetrating as a bunker buster, isn’t he?

No, if it’s a Republican, Wallace just repeats the Approved Talking Point of the day, and lets the crazy roll on unchallenged like a mighty river.

But when it comes to the Democrat?

Wallace: Senator Levin, let me present a hypothetical to you. What if the next President decides that Obama shooting drones into Pakistan is a war crime? Huh? What then, smartass!

Or what if Newt Gingrich invents a time machine and wants to go back and kill Hitler but President Obama throws him in jail because Obama’s a liberal who hates America? What about that!

Levin answers this sort of idiot gotcha nonsense far more civilly than it deserves, after which Wallace reaches deep into left field and comes back with…

Wallace (from the transcript):

OK. OK. Let me — let me bring in Senator Bond.

Is that where we're headed now, sort of what we've had in banana republics, where one administration sits there and says, "Well, I think these guys broke the law, and we're now going to take them and put them in the dock," and this will just go on from administration to administration?

Which certainly sounds like one hell of a bizarrely awkward non sequitur leading from thin air to nowhere until you do a little Googling and discover that, just like Wallace’s previous “question”, in classic, Fox News reacharound fashion, all he is doing is snowballing Bond’s own framing language from three days ago

Bond: This whole thing about punishing people in past administrations reminds me more of a Banana Republic than the United States of America.

back into Bond’s own mouth.


BOND: …There were a number of actions in the previous Democratic administration that could have been prosecuted, like Sandy Berger could have been prosecuted, could really have...

driftglass: You mean like Whitewater?

Bond: Shut up!

driftglass: You mean like giving Ken Starr a blank check to get Clinton by any means necessary?

Bond: Shut up! Shut up!

driftglass: You mean like impeaching Clinton for trivia?

Bond: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

driftglass: And how did you vote on the impeachment of William Clinton for trivia?

Bond: Lalala! I-am-not-listening-to-you.

driftglass: Guilty, right? Guilty across the board?

Bond: Fuck you! I don’t remember.

driftglass: In fact, you waxed quite eloquent on the subject before you stuck the knife in, didn’t you?

"It is precisely in good times, with the President high in the polls, that it is incumbent upon the Senate to exercise very thoroughly and carefully the responsibility under the Constitution to make the difficult decision on whether the President has committed high-crimes and misdemeanors warranting his removal from office.

"If we are to have a government of laws and not of men and not of public opinion polls, then we must judge the President on the evidence presented to us. I believe that the acts that he committed constitute high-crimes and misdemeanors warranting his conviction."

All of which might leave you wondering what sort of desperately malfunctioning waterhead could ever mistake this crudely animated partisan cartoon for "news".

Until you remember...

The Family Guy Answers the Musical Question:

What all-American agricultural product comes with jobs that are green, recession-proof and induce growth at a 3-to-1 ratio in both the snack food and porn industries?

You Owe It To Yourself

To go and read "I Didn't Choose These Ghosts, They Chose Me" by my friend Minstrel Boy over at the Group News Blog.

Now.

The Fundamental Things Still Apply

As time goes by.

Andy Sullivan writes passionately about the Cheney Torture Administration:

If I had one belief in politics, it would be that the freedoms secured by the modern West are worth fighting for. Absolutely central to those freedoms is barring the executive branch from torturing people. No power is more fatal to freedom and the rule of law than torture. It is like Tolkien's ring: no society remains free, if its rulers use it. Its power is banned because it is a solvent to the rule of law, the establishment of truth, and the limits of government. For an administration to secretly and illegally unleash this weapon - against citizens and non-citizens alike - and to demand that it not be subsequently called to account, that it be allowed to get away with it under some absurd notion that it's too divisive to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes is and was an outrage. Punishing those responsible for war crimes is not "scapegoating". You know what scapegoating is? It's throwing Lynndie England in jail for following orders given by George W. Bush, while leaving him to the luxury of a Texan suburb.

The precedent of a torturing American president must be reversed. That means it cannot be allowed to stand.
...

Nothing to be disagreed with there, right? An honorable sentiment, clearly expressed.

Except…

Except for the key, core question that is always omitted from the protestations of outrage by our apostate Conservatives friends:

Where in the world did the Cheney Torture Administration ever get the idea that it was above the law to begin with?

For that matter, where did the millions and millions of supporters of the Cheney Torture Administration ever get the idea that it was perfectly OK -- perhaps even noble -- for a Republican President to arrogate monarchical powers to himself?

Do you think maybe it was from this guy...

who saw his massive, filthy assault on the Constitution as “politics, pure and simple”? Who believed -- as millions of his Republican followers believed and still believe -- that the only problem with Watergate was that he didn’t burn the tapes?

Or do you think maybe the idea that the rule of law doesn’t apply to Republicans was primarily the legacy of these guys?


Those Heroes of Conservatism who, between them, sold weapons to terrorists, used the money from their illegal arms deals to fund an illegal war, and set the precedent for dealing with Republican traitors by issuing pardons for every fucking one of them:

…
But in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh's effort, which began in 1986. Mr. Bush's decision was announced by the White House in a printed statement after the President left for Camp David, where he will spend the Christmas holiday.

Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President's action, charging that "the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."

Mr. Walsh directed his heaviest fire at Mr. Bush over the pardon of Mr. Weinberger, whose trial would have given the prosecutor a last chance to explore the role in the affair of senior Reagan officials, including Mr. Bush's actions as Vice President.
…

Or did the notion that the Constitution is merely a political weapon that Republicans only manage to remember when they’re periodically driven out of power -- which they only ever manage to love in high, apoplectic dudgeon when they figure an angle from which they can use it to smash their way back into power -- come from this guy?


Or this guy?


Or this guy?


Or this guy?


Or any of the hundreds of strutting, little demagogues who have always filled out the front benches of American Conservatism?

No, the simple truth of the matter is that Conservatism is not a movement. It is a social disease, and for most of his adult life Andy Sullivan has been one of its most enthusiastic carriers.

Sullivan lives with his mark of Wingnut Cain and maintains his career by taking shelter beneath the comforting bombast that the Cheney Torture Administration was the result of spontaneous generation. Was some kind of xenogenic accident of political birth. But of course that is a complete lie. The obscenity of the Cheney Torture Administration was not an anomaly, a sport or a freak but instead fell perfectly along an arc that American Conservatism has been following for decades.

The truth is that, the Cheney Torture Administration staged this latest bloody, Constitution-raping Republican rampage…

…clad in the philosophical glad rags Conservatives like Sullivan spent decades stitching for them…

…shod in the shoes Conservatives like Sullivan spent decades cobbling together…

…treading the boards Conservatives like Sullivan spent decades planing, varnishing and hammering into place…

…in the political theater built with blueprints Conservatives like Sullivan spent decades sketching out…

…on a foundation poured from the ideological concrete Conservatives like Sullivan provided.

That has always been the simple, unbearable truth at the heart of Conservatism that Conservatives like Sullivan will never bring themselves to face.

It's still the same, old story.

As time goes by.

The Water Is Bad

(Image from PCWorld)

The cravenness of a certain species of public official never changes, and the dynamic of their behavior when forced to choose between public health and private profit is as predictable as gravity.

Yesterday's Southtown Star brings us the story of the latest batch of Rational Economic Agents to make it into the headlines...

Class-action lawsuit filed over water

April 24, 2009
BY WILLIAM LEE, staff writer

A Crestwood resident on Thursday filed a class-action lawsuit against the village, contending that officials intentionally concealed the presence of dangerous chemicals in a municipal well for 20 years.

The lawsuit, filed by Joseph Marzano in Cook County Circuit Court, says the contaminated well water was regularly mixed with Lake Michigan in Crestwood's water supply, endangering the health of village residents. The well finally was shut off in 2007 during a statewide testing of municipal wells by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

The lawsuit names Mayor Robert Stranczek and his father, former Mayor Chester Stranczek, as defendants as well as between one and 30 unidentified defendants whom it says were complicit in the alleged scheme.

Chester Stranczek, who ran the town for 38 years until retiring in 2007, knew of the use of the well water in the drinking water supply and approved of it to save money on the more expensive lake water, according to the lawsuit.

It says the well water contained chemicals, including vinyl chloride, a highly toxic synthetic chemical linked to cancer and other health problems.

Calls to Marzano's attorneys weren't returned Thursday night.
...

And if all this sounds depressingly familiar you mght be remembering January, 2006, when we learned that Dick Cheney's Halliburton was making our soldiers in Iraq drink toilet water:

Halliburton Cited in Iraq Contamination

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer 17 minutes ago
Troops and civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq were exposed to contaminated water last year and employees for the responsible contractor, Halliburton, couldn't get their company to inform camp residents, according to interviews and internal company documents.

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, disputes the allegations about water problems at Camp Junction City, in Ramadi, even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails.

"We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated," said a July 15, 2005, memo written by William Granger, the official for Halliburton's KBR subsidiary who was in charge of water quality in Iraq and Kuwait.

"The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River," Granger wrote in one of several documents. The Associated Press obtained the documents from Senate Democrats who are holding a public inquiry into the allegations Monday.

...

And as I wrote back then:

...
I guarantee you that Dubya’s dog has never had to drink shit-laced water, and the Aquafina his daughters suck down between mojitos never smelled like ass.

Or you maybe you're thinking of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen from 127 years ago.

From "An Enemy of the People":

...
Peter Stockmann. As I said, I believe you exaggerate the matter considerably. A capable physician ought to know what measures to take--he ought to be capable of preventing injurious influences or of remedying them if they become obviously persistent.

Dr. Stockmann. Well? What more?

Peter Stockmann. The water supply for the Baths is now an established fact, and in consequence must be treated as such. But probably the Committee, at its discretion, will not be disinclined to consider the question of how far it might be
possible to introduce certain improvements consistently with a reasonable expenditure.

Dr. Stockmann. And do you suppose that I will have anything to do with such a piece of trickery as that?

Peter Stockmann. Trickery!!

Dr. Stockmann. Yes, it would be a trick--a fraud, a lie, a downright crime towards the public, towards the whole community!

Peter Stockmann. I have not, as I remarked before, been able to convince myself that there is actually any imminent danger.
...

From seatbelts to cigarettes.

From evolution to airbags.

From global climate change to the minimum wage.

From the repeal of Glass-Steagall to the water in the little town of Crestwood.

A tiny fraction of a shameful list of that goes on and on and on in a maddening rhyme scheme which never varies.

The reason that Ibsen could write a play -- over a century ago, on the other side of the world -- which would resonate so perfectly with headlines about small-town perfidy and Big Time corporate corruption is that this pattern of human behavior is as sadly calculable as the orbit of planets.

First, as long as the bubble grows and everyone is getting rich, the burghers are only too happy to have an expert lend his credibility to their enterprise:

...
Peter Stockmann. Taking one thing with another, there is an
excellent spirit of toleration in the town--an admirable
municipal spirit. And it all springs from the fact of our having
a great common interest to unite us--an interest that is in an
equally high degree the concern of every right-minded citizen

Hovstad. The Baths, yes.

Peter Stockmann. Exactly---our fine, new, handsome Baths. Mark my
words, Mr. Hovstad--the Baths will become the focus of our
municipal life! Not a doubt of it!

Mrs. Stockmann. That is just what Thomas says.

Peter Stockmann. Think how extraordinarily the place has
developed within the last year or two! Money has been flowing in,
and there is some life and some business doing in the town.
Houses and landed property are rising in value every day.
...

Then the expert discovers a rot at the heart of the venture, and quickly moves to call it to the attention of his "friends" -- the men of commerce -- knowing they will want to protect the public and do the right thing:

...
Dr. Stockmann. Indeed I have been busy, Katherine. But here I had
none of the necessary scientific apparatus; so I sent samples,
both of the drinking-water and of the sea-water, up to the
University, to have an accurate analysis made by a chemist.

Hovstad. And have you got that?

Dr. Stockmann (showing him the letter). Here it is! It proves the
presence of decomposing organic matter in the water--it is full
of infusoria. The water is absolutely dangerous to use, either
internally or externally.

Mrs. Stockmann. What a mercy you discovered it in time.

Dr. Stockmann. You may well say so.

Hovstad. And what do you propose to do now, Doctor?

Dr. Stockmann. To see the matter put right, naturally.

Hovstad. Can that be done?

Dr. Stockmann. It must be done. Otherwise the Baths will be
absolutely useless and wasted. But we need not anticipate that; I
have a very clear idea what we shall have to do.

...

Poor, dumb bastard:




As true 127 years ago as it is today, this is what Reaganomics and "the magic of the marketplace" look like up-close and personal.

This is why civilization requires both fact-based regulation of the natural proclivities of commerce, and a progressive government with the money and muscle to make sure those regulations are enforced.

Because when we don't -- sooner that you'd believe possible -- we end up poisoning children for profit.

...He Stuck In His Thumb

And pulled out some dumb
And said, "What a good boy am I!"

Some nice guerrilla action here from Seth over at Mindswell showing the the Republican Base -- that dirt-stupid army of swine who have been voting their entire lives to give the hog butchers ever-sharper knives -- in the wild.

Amazing how people who have never been more than 50 miles away from their double-wides in Sisterfuck, Arkansas -- who clearly have built their entire "intellectual" lives around stayed within earshot of a radio blasting Rush Limbaugh every day for 20 years -- are nonetheless utterly convinced they are privy to the secret charter and workings of ACORN, secret government military plots, secret government give-your-rights-away-to-illegal-immigrant schemes, a secret form of math wherein a tax CUT causes your taxes to go UP, a secret history wherein the entire Cheney Administration never existed, the secret innermost, thoughts of President Obama and the secret rituals of all Liberal organizations

And it would all be terribly funny if these same batshit-crazy meatsticks hadn't spent the last 25 years setting fire to our country and dancing around the flames, singing Toby Fucking Keith and calling the rest of us "traitor".

1...2...3...4...

We don't take your trash no more.

The Difference Between

Who We Strive To Be


And


What Conservatives Want To Turn Us Into


Has Never Been Clearer.

For The Price Of 3,000 Miles

Houston, We Have A Solution - watch more funny videos

of guard towers and razor wire...

Pairing up psychopaths

and weaklings



Never

Ends

Well.



And when you read a quote like this:

“The problem, Cullen concludes, was that there is almost nothing that can be done to help psychopaths. They lie. They are particularly good at it. They do not have a moral center that can be reached.”

...and can’t tell whether the subject is a school shooter or the former Vice President of the United States, then it is time to admit to ourselves that something deep in the souls of the degenerates who still slavishly venerate the Cheney Administration

is so fundamentally broken that we can no longer pretend that they are our countrymen in any sense other than by accident of geography.

Cheney Regime Dead Enders are monsters and destroyers of worlds.

Period.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down -- Part II

Things that make me wish for five minutes of terrible God-like smiting powers…

Fresh from his bravura performance as that Little Round-Headed Kid

in the Akron Carousel Dinner Theater’s staging of that least well-known of all Peanuts’ specials -- “It’s not torture when we do it, Charlie Brown” – Little Mikey Hayden started off by explaining to Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that admitting we had waterboarded prisoners had endangered us.

That even though the fact we had waterboarded prisoners was already well-known -- was, in fact, being used by al-Quaeda as a recruiting tool -- somehow the reiteration and repudiation of this form of torture by President Obama was so beyond the pale that it makes us all orders of magnitude less safe.

Hayden asks how we'll all like it when the CIA has to clear its techniques with “the ACLU” and the “NYT Editorial Board”. Huh! Huh!

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: we don’t torture; we use “use techniques”.

Hayden really is the giggly, bloodless bureaucrat/butcher from Central Casting; alternately boasting that he himself banned that awful, awful technique of waterboarding...and then turning right around and allowed as how waterboarding wasn’t really torture, and may or may not even “shock conscience”, because that all "depended on the circumstances".

Of course, being that this was Fox News, the question that never got asked was this:

What has turning America into a torture nation done to our soul, our democracy and the foundational moral authority upon which our global leadership depends?

Because, being Fox News, any questions of “morality” that don’t serve to advance the Republican agenda simply never come up.

But what really made me wish a mighty wish for temporary smiting powers, was one minute later, when Hayden was asked about Hugo Chavez and answered thusly and without a hint of irony:

"I’d watch for behavior, not rhetoric. The behavior of Chavez over the last few years has been downright reprehensible."

Really? Why? What makes Chavez’s behavior “downright reprehensible”?

Did he perhaps…torture people? Or did he merely “technique” them?

And doesn’t this kooky theory that countries actually pay attention to the behavior of other countries and should respond to each other according to behavior and not just rhetoric completely negate everything you just said about how the United State should expect the rest of the world to react to the fact that the Bush Administration tortured people -- in one case, waterboarding a prisoner 183 times in one month -- and then lied about it?

Later, Wallace showed some heavily edited and out-of-context video of President Obama’s world tour and asked the pouty, boo-boo-faced Lindsay Graham how he felt about Barack Obama going around the world “apologizing for America”.

You know, over here in the Grown-up World, telling the people that you shit on that you regret it and you’re not going to do that any more isn’t exactly disclosing state secrets, and isn’t weak. In fact, manning up, admitting one’s errors, and apologizing when you are in the wrong is one of the most basic lessons that responsible parents teach their children.

Except, apparently, for Republican children who are taught might makes right, and that only pussies own up to their mistakes.

Then Wallace excitedly read today's Party Line:

Next up, the “grass roots tea party” has “some wondering” if this is “the start of a movement”

Followed by several commercials for penis creams and adult diapers, and then back to Fox News’ Weekend-Long AstroTurf Earl Gray Circle Jerk.

Back on “This Week” it seemed that George Will pecksniffishly explaining to the rest of the Panel that “[Torture] comes from a theory of government called the unitary theory of executive power” was the tipping point.

After that, everybody took a stick to the bow-tied piñata:

Donaldson: Where in the Constitution is this found, George?

Will: I’m just saying here are intelligent people who believe….

Cokie Roberts: First amendment? The Congress?

Will: It is not a theory I agree with, or you agree with, but there are intelligent people…

Donaldson: “If the president does it is not illegal.” Thank you Richard Nixon.

Will: Yes but these are intelligent people…

Yes, George, they are intelligent people, but "intelligent" is not a proxy for "decent" (this has always been a massive blind spot for Will.)

They are intelligent, despicably evil people who sat behind their little desks and eagerly combed through every semi-colon and footnote of every legal decision since Hammurabi desperately trying to cobble together a theory of government where a Supreme Leader rules by fiat and all thing -- torture, warrentless wiretapping, secret prisons, suspension of habeas corpus, outing secret agents – are permitted to his regime.

Frantically trying to origami the United States Constitution into a charter for exactly the kind of monarchy that the Constitution was created to overthrow.

Which is, of course, contemptible.

But what really elevates this into the realm of the Théâtre du Grand Guignol is that not a single person on the panel thought to mention that every inch of this plot to gut the Constitution from crotch to crown was engineered by the very same Party that raises millions of dollars in political contributions every year by prodding the Pig People into going reliably ballistic over those Evil Activist Judges: those black-robed Liberal turncoats who keep insisting that cops can’t taser suspects to death for looking at them funny or kick down your door for no fucking reason.

That the people who tried to ram the theory that George W. Bush was the de facto King of America with virtually unchecked and unlimited power down our throats were the very same people who – ten, short years ago – were screaming IMPEACH! every time another rumor about Bill Clinton getting a hummer on the side appeared in "The American Spectator".

What a pity we don't have a national media that notices little discrepancies like these anymore.

Well, OK, to be fair there is at least one American journalist that sees truth unvarnished with eyes unclouded. (h/t watertiger)

"Following the Republican Party of late has been a movingly depressing experience, sort of like watching Old Yeller die — if Old Yeller were a worm-infested feral bitch who spent the past eight years biting children at bus stops and shitting in neighborhood swimming pools."

-- Matt Tiabbi of "Rolling Stone"

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

An Embarrassment of Riches Embarrassment of Rich Idiots.

Just a quick shot and a beer as I have to run off, but Oh My Lord, did John “Rusty Weepenheim” Boehner -- the Leader of the Republican Congressional Monkey House -- really respond to a question “This Week” about global climate change by saying (rough transcript):

George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide. ”

Yes. Yes he did.

A partial list of other things The Boner also failed to mention are not carcinogenic?

Taking an axe to the head.
Defenestration from the top of the St. Louis arch.
Being hit by a meteor the size of Texas.
Falling into a car crusher.
An RPG up the poop cute.
Licking a nuke as it goes off.
Torture.
Arsenic ice cream with a medical waste compote.
Wearing a long scarf while driving an open roadster.
Airplanes crashing into office buildings.
Launching a space shuttle in freezing weather.
Guillotining.
Crucifixion.
Giving the tailpipe on a running Delta 88 an extended blowjob in a locked garage.
Pirates.

It’s a long list.

Then some tiny emergency switch clearly went off in The Boner's big, sweaty, orange gourd as it slooooowly dawned on him that using his “indoor wingnut crazy” voice in front of the cameras wasn’t such a good idea.

So he went to Plan B: Vacillating like a college Republican suddenly surrounded by Army recruiters, he allowed as how the question of whether or not global warming exists was open to discussion, but that all the Dirty Fucking Hippy ideas about how to keep the Earth from melting would probably cost money.

George Stephanopoulos: Well, then what is the fucking answer?

Boner: I think everyone in America is looking for the answer to that question.

driftglass: Yes, but not everyone in America is the leader of one of our two major political parties, which exist precisely to grapple with and come up with solutions to exactly these sorts of problems, are they?

On taxes...

Boner: You can’t borrow and spend your way to prosperity!

Stephanopoulos: But millions of people pay nothing in taxes, and millions more pay a pittance.

Boner: No! Everybody is horribly, horribly overtaxed all the time. You can go out and explain your Socialist Manifesto to the hundreds of thousands of toe-picking imbeciles who showed up where Fox News told them to show up and rambled on in patriotically incoherent ignorance about Big Gummint and Hitler and Kenya and Takin’ Mah Guns and Stuff.

Heroes! Heroes, all!

Honestly, other than watching the final reel of “Flowers for Algernon” in ultrafast-motion, until today didn’t think it was possible to observe a person to become visibly more dim-witted in real time. But this dun-colored heap of moist stupid has proven me wrong.

Later, on Peggy Noonan holds forth on the subject of torture, explaining that:

Sometimes history should just keep on walkin’.

And

These are not issues that people should be “issuing papers on”.

And

Sometimes life should be mysterious.

While over on “Meet the Press” , Dick Armey -- who, for those who don't remember, didn’t drink the wingnut 1990s Kool Aid; he ran the factory -- made little, crazy oinking noises.

Eight years of ruling the world -- of getting every fucking thing they ever dreamed of -- has left American Conservatives with an eight-year legacy of reeking failure and treason hanging around their necks, and a leadership made up of laughably obsolete 90s retreads, Hate Radio scumbags, acid-blown goofs, outright lunatics and weeping, spray-tan idiots.

All of whom very likely make more in a week that you’re going to make all year.

What They Said 2

What We Heard

"I am patient with stupidity
but not with those who are proud of it."

-- Edith Sitwell

What They Said

What We Heard

In the last 25 years, no sound in American politics has thundered louder than the smirking, conspicuous, complicit silence of the meatsticks on the Right during the Age of Bush as their Dear Leader presided over a historically unprecedented string of impeachment-grade lies, treason, failure, breathtaking stupidity, corruption, catastrophe and outright theft, all wrapped up in an open, snarling contempt for the United States Constitution.

Hold On Tight

Because here comes the next wave...

From Chicago Real Estate Daily:

General Growth files for bankruptcy protection

(AP) — General Growth Properties Inc., the second-largest mall operator in the United States, filed for bankruptcy restructuring protection early Thursday after it failed to persuade a majority of its debt holders to give it more time to refinance billions of dollars in debt racked up during the housing boom.

The news sent the real estate investment trust's stock down 60 cents, or 57 percent, to 45 cents in electronic premarket trading. Its stock traded last spring as high as $44.23.

The move by the Chicago-based company had been widely anticipated since the fall, when the company warned it might have to seek bankruptcy protection if it didn't get lenders to rework its debt terms. Efforts to negotiate with its unsecured and secured creditors ultimately fell short late last month.
...

Even now, deep in the bowels of their underground think tanks, whiteboards used to plan Operation Brew Ha Ha are being hastily wiped down as our Conservative friends begin frantically working on the next generation of cutting edge prepositions and conjunctions by which the collapse of the commercial real estate market can be blamed on President Obama's raging socialism and/or President Clinton's raging penis.

Best NOM Parody To Date

(h/t Watertiger)

Because gay marriage is nothing less than an Apocalyptic tur-duck-en of nine Hitlers stuffed inside of seven Stalins, all crammed inside a Socialist time machine (built by job-stealing illegal immigrants out of desecrated American flags) that travels back to 1773 as part of MSNBC's master plan (which was organized by ACORN) to kill the Original Tea Baggers, confiscate all the colonists AK-47s, force them to join unions, and then dump fluoride into Boston Harbor.

All funded by George Soros, batter dipped in Big Gummint Atheism, and parboiled in the faggy Liberal chardonnay of the Antichrist.

Only worse.

Smearer, Smearer On The Wall

For my money, nothing sums up the sheer, Potemkin village hi-larity of yesterday's teabagging silliness than the headline of this editorial from today's Wall Street Journal:

"Republicans and the Tea Parties" by Karl Rove.

Because nothing screams Raw!Street!Rebel!Credibility more loudly than:

A fawning, pro-Bush, pro-wingnut, fact-challenged article...

Published in the Ultra Right Wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch's "Wall Street Journal"...

Written by serial Bush Administration traitor and subpoena-ignorer, Karl Rove...

About a series of corporate sponsored mini-Wingnut Gallapaloozae, underwritten by (among others) loutish misanthrope and former Republican House Majority Leader, Dick Armey...

And which exist only because of their relentless pimping by Ultra Right Wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch's "Fox News".

Killing For Money

Our national software problem.



From the billionaire illegal Ponzi schemer...

...to the billionaire legal Ponzi CEO.

From the K-Street lobbyist who pimps for monsters...

...to the energy market baron who rips off little old ladies.

From the junk bond predator...

...to the S&L looter.

And from the frightening, fictional gangster...

...to the frighteningly real authoritarian...

...each of these men share at least one common trait: they are all perfect poster boys for the idea of the “Rational Economic Agent.”

From Wikipedia:

In economics, game theory, decision theory, and artificial intelligence, a rational agent is an agent which has clear preferences, models uncertainty via expected values, and always chooses to perform the action that results in the optimal outcome for itself from among all feasible actions. Rational agents are also studied in the fields of cognitive science, ethics, and philosophy, including the philosophy of practical reason.

A rational agent can be anything that makes decisions, typically a person, firm, machine, or software.

Note that “rational” in this context doesn’t mean sane. It doesn’t mean loving or kind or humane.

Sociopaths like Cheney or Maddoff are, in fact, quite rational in the sense that they operate like machines; always seeking the shortest path “that results in the optimal outcome for itself.” This definition in no way excludes stealing from widows and orphans, crushing the economy, or murdering hundreds of thousands of people because those are not logical considerations, merely moral ones.

Sociopaths like Skilling or Scarface see other people as objects, and laws, norms and social taboo as either impediments, or means to reach their ends, or irrelevant.

America did not spend hundreds of millions of dollars arming and supporting this Rational Economic Agent

because he was a nice guy; we propped him up and made him rich as long as his homicidal behavior was benefiting our interests, and then killed him and his family once his homicidal behavior began to be detrimental to those interests.

But the core of him -– a cold-bloodedly rational man acting ruthlessly in his own interests – never changed.

So too our current crop of banksters.

28 years of conservative economic and social dogma created an environment where thousands of cold-bloodedly rational men acting ruthlessly in their own interests were turned completely loose.

They were told their only imperative was to make themselves rich.

By any means necessary.

The rest of us were told that unleashing these cold-bloodedly rational men who acted ruthlessly in their own interests would lead to a new age of prosperity for all. The economy would boom forever. That once the Evil New Deal was finally destroyed, all taxes eliminated, all government smashed and all social safety nets shredded…a New Capitalist Utopia would blossom on the old order’s bones and make life vastly better for everyone forever.

Unfortunately no one bothered to tell the cold-bloodedly rational men who were acting ruthlessly in their own interests that they were supposed to build companies, fuel innovation and make a 1,000 retirement and college tuition funds bloom.

And they didn’t…because they don’t give one, tiny shit about any of that.

Of course, if you’re a Debit Lord instead of a Drug Lord you don’t need to go through the mess of killing everyone that stands in your way. If you’re in the business of flinging around billions instead of bullets, you can simply keep pouring money on Congress, wingnut think tanks, and astroturf activist groups until they rig the game on your behalf.

Purchase enough Senators and Representatives, buy enough time shares in enough Presidential candidates, and eventually – with third-rate intellectuals grabbing every microphone to babble on and on about the virtues of “liberating” the markets, “creative destruction” and Ayn Rand…with Fox News trumpets blaring….and with the pig people cheering right on cue -- they’ll rewrite the rules to make your favorite flavor of usury, theft, or three-card Monte as legal as sea water.

Until, of course, it all falls down.

Until Saddam makes a cold-bloodedly rational decision that ruthlessly invading his neighbor is now in his own interest. Until the banksters make the cold-bloodedly rational decision that kiting trillion-dollar checks against toxic mortgages will make them more money than, say, investing wisely for the long term.

Because fuck the long term. Fuck wisdom.

Until, of course, we wake up one more time to find that the creatures peeing down on us from the commanding heights are not human beings at all.

These are a thousand Blakes (from “Glengarry Glen Ross”)

Blake: That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see, pal, that's who I am. And you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you -- go home and play with your kids!!

It does no good to appeal to his conscience: he has none. It does no good to talk to the him about the harm he is doing to society because fuck society.

It’s why they have such tin-ears when it came to collecting huge bonuses to help put out the globe-consuming conflagrations they’re own greed and recklessness ignited.

Fuck conflagrations.

Fuck caution.

Fuck the globe and everyone in it and GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY.

These are not people and we will bring ourselves to tears over and over again if we try to treat them as such; these are morally imbecilic automatons, endlessly calculating how to carve out the biggest slice of whatever pie is currently cooling on society’s windowsill.

So don’t go looking for such quaintly human reactions as guilt and remorse from such men; you could talk to them all day and into the night about morality, responsibility and community and all they would hear is this…


Instead understand that they are machines, and, being machines, any social good that comes from the actions of these cold-bloodedly rational creatures will always be purely incidental to the execution of their prime directive: to act ruthlessly in their own interest.

Instead understand that this is a software problem; that the only solution to living with them is to reset their parameters, and that only once we have made a marketplace where it is more profitable to spend years nurturing and strengthening a company or a community or a country or a world than it is clubbing it to death and selling its remains for scrapple can these cold-bloodedly rational men be anything but our mortal enemies.

Or, if you need your message delivered more musically...



UPDATE: Under the tempus fugit heading, the power-posting Rehctaw just passed his first bloggiversary. Go over and wish the lad well; pulling off a full year of posting without going blind or nuts is much harder than it looks!

John Doe Stumbles In On

A Fox News Teabagger High Command strategy session.

With predictable results.

Behind The Other Green Door

In this story, the blog "Mountain of Evidence" finds a proxy for much that is fatally wrong with the media in the story of the death of a porn star.
(h/t Windy Citizen)

Chicago Tribune says Dead Porn Stars are News

Porn star Marilyn Chambers has died, and foul play is not suspected. This "news" is reported by the Chicago Tribune, through its breaking news blog.

It didn't happen in Chicago, or even Illinois, or even the Midwest. There is no larger policy issue at stake. There is nothing you can or should do to avoid death in the same way she suffered it. The only reason this is in the news is that it's salacious.
...

Bingo.

Congratulations to Hello Dolly Llama

for making the leap from commenter to unshaven, bleary-eyed blogger in record time.

Welcome.

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!