I Told Them Not To Say "Welfare" Again

But did they listen?

Nooooo.

So now they've gone and done it.

Say "Welfare" Again!

Former President Bill Clinton's 2012 DNC Speech in 21 words:

Say "Welfare" again! 

Say "Welfare" again! 

I dare you!

I double dare you, motherfucker!

Say "Welfare" one more God-damned time!*

*(H/T to reader "CN" for the inspiration!)

Death of the Anti-Gonzo

The Washington Post's write-up is as good as any:

David Broder, 81, dies; set 'gold standard' for political journalism

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2011; 12:39 AM

David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday at Capital Hospice in Arlington of complications from diabetes.

Mr. Broder was often called the dean of the Washington press corps - a nickname he earned in his late 30s in part for the clarity of his political analysis and the influence he wielded as a perceptive thinker on political trends in his books, articles and television appearances.
...

Mr. Broder had a "relentlessly centrist" philosophy about politics, the political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker magazine. Mr. Broder brooked little tolerance toward what he termed, in describing the action of 1960s militant antiwar activists, "confrontation politics, with its constant threat of violence and repression."
...

While there were many, many things David Broder loved -- centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation -- one thing he really hated was hippies.

Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies.

He especially hated those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially "balance out" the clear and horrifying fact that Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower that he had known as a barefoot lad growing up in the swampland of Chicago Heights was devolving into a billionaire-industrialist-funded mob of fundies, racists, imbeciles and sociopaths.

In fact, this fetish became so obsessive that, in the end, it became the great, tragic irony of David Broder's professional life. Because at last he simply could not bear to part with his fantasies about what he wished America to be and face the brutal realities of what America was actually becoming, David Broder -- this "Dean of the Washington press corps" -- totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes.

It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years.

And he completely fucking blew it.

But more than anything else, he super-duper-especially hated it when those dang, dirty, disrespectful, imaginary hippies moved into that nice White House at the center his little town and fucked everything up with. From Taylor Marsh:

...David Broder represented commentary that is the worst of insider Washington D.C. thinking and an elitism, a leading member of Sally Quinn’s clan, which meant he was an original member of the Clinton hater club and helped churn the anti-Clinton fervor with gusto.
Sally Quinn’s infamous “In Washington, That Letdown Feeling” captured the insider feelings about the Pres. Clinton after the Lewinsky affair broke:

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
[...] “The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

Nothing annoyed the Washington elite more than the hicks from the sticks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. After Ronald Reagan, the Arkansans were see as interlopers. To understand Washington that’s where you have to begin.
Broder turned Pres. Clinton’s moral failings inside out and made it all about them, the D.C. community who considered Washington a small town.
...

If Hunter Thompson's coverage of politics in 1972 was (according to George McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz) "the least factual, but the most accurate" of all the correspondents, the award for being "the most factual, but the least accurate" correspondent of his generation must go to David Broder.

The eponymous Father of High Broderism (from the Urban Dictionary)

The worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. The main goal is the establishment of a permanent ruling class of Washington insiders, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. The establishment of an aristocratic class in America.

and its staunchest Fidei Defensor (from Rick Perlstein)

...
Richard Nixon ran the most secretive presidential campaign in national history—even making reporters sit in rooms far from the crowds and watch his events on closed-circuit TV. George McGovern made Nixon's secretiveness a major focus of his campaign—begging Nixon every day to debate him. And yet somehow Broder recollects a situation of equivalence. I think it shows how his mind works—and why our political press corps is so badly broken.

David Broder sired and suckled an entire generation of well-heeled, well-connected, establishmentarian insider merchants of Beltway Common Wisdom who have made a massively profitable cottage industry out of displacing honest reportage in favor of passing around empty "process" stories, vapid D.C. gossip tricked out in somber political rhetoric and the status and style updates of Very Serious People like Tennessee Williams' proverbial "dirty postcard".

And the glue that holds the whole ugly, toxic scam together is the relentless, reflexive, completely-dishonest buffering of any and all Republican crimes, treasons, hypocrisies and obscenities...of any kind...in any context...in any venue...on any given day of the week...with the Broderite mantra of "...but the Liberals": a habit so ingrained b y now in the Villager Hive Mind that the Center-Right Shill Factory known as Politico could not help but go out of its way to take a gratuitous swipe at the dirty fucking hippies in the middle of their eulogy to Mr. Broder (emphasis mine):

Broder, who grew up in Chicago and was a graduate of the University of Chicago, revered the political process and admired those he saw as rational voices focused on achieving results. That sometimes opened him up to criticism from ideologues on the left, who saw him as the epitome of conventional, inside-the-Beltway wisdom. But he also earned respect from prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle, many of whom released statements soon after news of his death was announced Wednesday.

Sorry, Politico, but however much of a legend his hard, on-the-ground, sandal-leather reporting on what the Average Roman thought about the first Punic War ("Hiero II of Syracuse shoulda listened to his general onna ground!") may be, David Broder's lasting legacy is ultimately a tragic one.

For against the tide of imaginary of dirty hippies who were forever plotting to mess up his lawn, and in the name of an idolatrous worship of the God of Fake Objectivity, the Dean of the Washington press corps' most enduring contribution to his profession has been as the Patient Zero of a lethal strain of syphilitic Villager Centrism which may be more responsible than any other single factor in all-but wiping out anything resembling honest national political journalism in America.

And that is the definition of tragedy.

UPDATE: Welcome Vanity Fair readers and many thanks to the matchless James "The Enforcer" Wolcott for pointing you in my direction.

Twelve Years Ago Today

when the Congressional power dynamics were reversed, the GOP was focused like a laser on using its Sacred Nonspecific Calendar Interval Christian Holiday Lame Duck session to the single issue they considered more important than anything else in the world.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton.

For no reason other than they just fucking hated him.

Of course now many of the the same media hacks and politicians who dined out in parasitic splendor on ginned-up scandals and fake outrage against the "Sociopath"-in-Chief who "trashed" their happy little inbred Byzantium on the Potomac now bury whole decades of their own past under a thick layer of Villager, history-nullifying nostalgia goo and fawn over the statesmanlike sagacity and triangulatory genius of the same man they had only recently been trying to bum rush into impeachment, prison and political oblivion.

But some of us rubes out here in the hinterlands do not forget. And rude, unschooled fuckers that we are, we keep forgetting our places and bringing up the inconvenient histories of our betters over and over again.

Here, for example, is what some of the Heroes of the Party of Personal Responsibility were saying exactly 12 years ago..

This from a December 17, 1998 airing of the News Hour on PBS

First, excerpts from a lively little chat between Mark Shields and Paul Gigot on the insistence by Wahabi Republicans that the frivolous and irresponsible impeachment of one William Jefferson Clinton proceed despite military action in Iraq.

Remember that at this time we were being warned, daily, that the Hussein was incredibly dangerous and volatile.

It began with a lot of procedural information about how long debate and rebuttal would proceed, etc. And then (with emphasis added)…

…
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Paul, assess for us on both sides the risks and the benefits in going ahead with this tomorrow while the bombing is going on.

PAUL GIGOT: Well, the benefits for the Republicans are that they get it over with. They believe they have the votes, and they can put this behind them, and a lot of their members, frankly, want to get it done. The leadership, I think, also fears that if it's delayed into next week, as Lee Hamilton suggested, just wait till Monday, there will be another objection on Monday. Why not do it after Christmas, and then why not after New Year's, so let's get it done. ...

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But there are some risks, aren't there?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, there is some that the Democrats are going to talk about process; they're going to talk about shackling the commander-in-chief. So this takes away from what the Republicans would like the debate to be about, which is the behavior of the president, and that's the advantage the Democrats have in this, which is they can change the subject and try to undermine this as a strictly partisan exercise pointing to the Senate down the road.

…
MARK SHIELDS: … But there is within the Republican House caucus a strong conservative group, and I think the only way to describe many of them is they're seized and animated by a phobia about Bill Clinton. I mean - and there's no question - they do have the votes; they want to do it; they want to get it over with; they want to get him; they don't want him to have another day without being impeached. And I'll tell you where it comes down to - you can see their attitude toward the president on foreign policy. I mean, they say is a diabolically shrewd fellow - oh, my goodness, he calibrates every move. The move to go into military action didn't change a single vote in the House on impeachment. There was no way it was going to change a vote.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So you're saying the bombing hasn't made any big political difference.

MARK SHIELDS: It hasn't changed a single vote in the House on either side, and I defy anybody to tell whose vote has been changed by it.

…
PAUL GIGOT: I think they believe that if they wait until Monday, the Democrats will find a reason not to hold the debate on Monday too. And who knows what Saddam Hussein might do and what the president might do, and so if we're going to have the debate at all this Congress, let's do it now. And if the president can do his - undertake his constitutional responsibility as commander-in-chief on the eve of impeachment, then the House should be able to do its constitutional duties, while the president is pursuing his.

Listen to Bob Livingston argue that just because we had troops in harm's way in Iraq and by his reckoning had no timetable or metric to measure when or if we reach “Mission Accomplished”, that is no reason why the President should not be impeached.

…
REP. BOB LIVINGSTON, Speaker of the House-Designate: Do we just anticipate that the troops in the field will complete their business by Ramadan or by a time certain, or by Tuesday, or by Christmas Day, or by New Year's Day, or by two weeks into January? How do we assess when that mission is going to be complete? There's no way to know when the troops will have completed their mission. There's no way to know whether or not Saddam Hussein in his mindless self-absorption decides to lash out at American troops, at British troops, at Kuwait, at his neighbors anywhere in the Middle East. We can't anticipate what Saddam Hussein will do, and yet, we cannot refrain from advancing the people's business under this critical issue.

KWAME HOLMAN: Livingston reminded Democrats that when the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, the United States had troops on the ground in Vietnam.

REP. BOB LIVINGSTON: And, yet, the Democrat Congress at the time undertook the responsibility of impeaching Richard Nixon, but he resigned.

Now note here where Republican and veteran Duncan Hunter argues that it is an insult to the troops NOT to proceed with impeachment and work straight through the Christmas holidays if necessary...

KWAME HOLMAN: Republican leaders backed up their argument with the support of several of their members who are veterans of foreign wars.

REP. DUNCAN HUNTER, (R) California: You know, there's one term, I think, that is common to both this House and to our military, and that term is duty. We refer to it often, and it's clear now that our uniformed people are carrying out their duty in difficult circumstances to defend the liberties and the security of this country. They're doing that so that we can perform our duty. And our duty is to carry out the Constitution.

KWAME HOLMAN: But Minority Whip David Bonior said there was another reason Democrats were blocking the Republicans' proposed rules of debate.

REP. DAVID BONIOR, Minority Whip: And that is the inability of this side of the aisle to have the chance to offer a reasonable alternative, a censure alternative, which the majority of Americans now support. It is unfair, it is wrong, there is something about this whole process that shows a lack of judgment, a lack of proportionality, a lack of common sense…

Then there was this jumble of superpatiot doubletalk, all but one of which is from the WaPo...

Rep. Marge Roukema (R-N.J.):

And we all share in the emotional trauma getting back to our subject of this constitutional crisis in which we are ensnared. But this cup cannot pass us by, we can't avoid it, we took an oath of office, Mr. Speaker, to uphold the Constitution under our democratic system of government, separation of powers, and checks and balances.

And we must fulfill that oath and send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a trial. …


Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.):

How can we expect a Boy Scout to honor his oath if elected officials don't honor theirs? How can we expect a business executive to honor a promise when the chief executive abandons his or hers?


Rep. Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.):

How did this great nation of the 1990s come to be? It all happened Mr. Speaker, because freedom works. . . . But freedom, Mr. Speaker, freedom depends upon something. The rule of law. And that's why this solemn occasion is so important. For today we are here to defend the rule of law. According to the evidence presented by our fine Judiciary Committee, the president of the United States has committed serious transgressions.

…
Mr. Speaker, a nation of laws cannot be ruled by a person who breaks the law. Otherwise, it would be as if we had one set of rules for the leaders and another for the governed. We would have one standard for the powerful, the popular and the wealthy, and another for everyone else.

This would belie our ideal that we have equal justice under the law. That would weaken the rule of law and leave our children and grandchildren with a very poor legacy…


Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI):

The framers of the Constitution devised an elaborate system of checks and balances to ensure our liberty by making sure that no person, institution or branch of government became so powerful that a tyranny could be established in the United States of America. Impeachment is one of the checks the framers gave the Congress to prevent the executive or judicial branches from becoming corrupt or tyrannical.


Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas):

When someone is elected president, they receive the greatest gift possible from the American people, their trust. To violate that trust is to raise questions about fitness for office. My constituents often remind me that if anyone else in a position of authority -- for example, a business executive, a military officer of a professional educator -- had acted as the evidence indicates the president did, their career would be over. The rules under which President Nixon would have been tried for impeachment had he not resigned contain this statement: "The office of the president is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."


Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.):

Many have asked why we are even here in these impeachment proceedings. They have asked why we can't just rebuke the president and move on. That's a reasonable question. And I certainly understand the emotions behind that question. I want to move on. Every member of this committee wants to move on. We all agree with that.

But the critical question is this: Do we move on under the Constitution, or do we move on by turning aside from the Constitution? Do we move on in faithfulness to our own oath to support and defend the Constitution, or do we go outside the Constitution because it seems more convenient and expedient?

...

Why are we here? We are here because we have a system of government based on the rule of law, a system of government in which no one -- no one -- is above the law. We are here because we have a constitution.

A constitution is often a most inconvenient thing. A constitution limits us when we would not be limited. It compels us to act when we would not act. But our Constitution, as all of us in this room acknowledge, is the heart and soul of the American experiment. …

…
We would all be spared embarrassment, indignity and discomfort. But there would be a high cost if we followed that course of action. Something would be lost. Respect for the law would be subverted, and the foundation of our Constitution would be eroded.
…


Rep. Bob Ingliss (R-S.C.):

I think is important to point out here is that we have a constitutional obligation, a constitutional obligation to act. And there are lots of folks who would counsel, Listen, let's just move along. It's sort of the Clinton so-what defense. So what? I committed perjury. So what? I broke the law. Let's just move along. I believe we've got a constitutional obligation to act.


Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.):

Mr. Chairman, this is a somber occasion. I am here because it is my constitutional duty, as it is the constitutional duty of every member of this committee, to follow the truth wherever it may lead. Our Founding Fathers established this nation on a fundamental yet at the time untested idea that a nation should be governed not by the whims of any man but by the rule of law. Implicit in that idea is the principle that no one is above the law, including the chief executive
…

Mr. Chairman, we must ask ourselves what our failure to uphold the rule of law will say to the nation, and most especially to our children, who must trust us to leave them a civilized nation where justice is respected.


Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.):

You know, there are people out all across America every day that help define the nation's character, and they exercise common-sense virtues, whether it's honesty, integrity, promise-keeping, loyalty, respect, accountability, they pursue excellence, they exercise self-discipline. There is honor in a hard day's work. There's duty to country. Those are things that we take very seriously.

So those are things that the founders also took seriously. Yet every time I reflect upon the wisdom of the founding fathers, I think their wisdom was truly amazing. They pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to escape the tyranny of a king. They understood the nature of the human heart struggles between good and evil.

So the founders created a system of checks and balances and accountability. …


Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.):

In the next few days I will cast some of the most important votes of my career. Some believe these votes could result in a backlash and have serious political repercussions. They may be right. But I will leave the analysis to others. My preeminent concern is that the Constitution be followed and that all Americans, regardless of their position in society, receive equal and unbiased treatment in our courts of law. The fate of no president, no political party, and no member of Congress merits a slow unraveling of the fabric of our constitutional structure. As John Adams said, we are a nation of laws, not of men.

Our nation has survived the failings of its leaders before, but it cannot survive exceptions to the rule of law in our system of equal justice for all….


Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.):

I suggest impeachment is like beauty: apparently in the eye of the beholder. But I hold a different view. And it's not a vengeful one, it's not vindictive, and it's not craven. It's just a concern for the Constitution and a high respect for the rule of law. ... as a lawyer and a legislator for most of my very long life, I have a particular reverence for our legal system. It protects the innocent, it punishes the guilty, it defends the powerless, it guards freedom, it summons the noblest instincts of the human spirit.

The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door. It challenges abuse of authority. It's a shame "Darkness at Noon" is forgotten, or "The Gulag Archipelago," but there is such a thing lurking out in the world called abuse of authority, and the rule of law is what protects you from it…

And, of course, what would any Roll of GOP Dishonor be without Republican-Citizen-Hero-and-Convicted-Felon-Number-One, Tom DeLay, weighing in via the “Bluegrass Report”

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.):

I believe that this nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law. Sometimes hard, sometimes unpleasant, this path relies on truth, justice and the rigorous application of the principle that no man is above the law.

Now, the other road is the path of least resistance. This is where we start making exceptions to our laws based on poll numbers and spin control. This is when we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us, when we ignore the facts in order to cover up the truth.

Shall we follow the rule of law and do our constitutional duty no matter unpleasant, or shall we follow the path of least resistance, close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking, forgive and forget, move on and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system? No man is above the law, and no man is below the law. That's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country.

Of course, to those on the Right for whom history began on January 20, 2008

this is all incomprehensible gibberish.

Never happened.

Lalalala!

Didn't matter.

Or it was all just a joke! Can't you take a fucking joke!?

Twelve years later with power in D.C. is once again reversing poles, the Democrats are spending their waning days of agenda-control and their last few ingots of political capital fighting and winning a historic battle for civil rights, and fighting and losing other battles for core-principle causes the GOP holds far, far too dear to permit to be compromised. Causes like:

• Denying health care to 9/11 first responders;
• Committing national fiscal suicide at the behest of their billionaire puppet-masters;
• Denying access to the same American Dream John Boehner can't think about without blubbering to the deserving children of illegal immigrants, and;
• Shooting craps with global thermonuclear peace for partisan political gain.

Of course, in a civilized country run by grownups, none of these issues (and almost none of the hundreds of bills that passed the House and were killed in the Senate) would be in any way controversial and would have been passed by acclamation long ago.

But we do not live in a civilized country.

And as long as the Fox/Republican Party remains a force in American politics, we never will.

"Like a Virgin" Video Redux

"Because he had a 'D' after his name..."

Just when I despaired of having something cool to post today, I find that reader Ben Riddle has taken it upon himself to turn the text of my 09/11/08 "Like a Virgin" post into a narrated, two-part, pre-election special video.

Above was Part I: The Public Record

Here is Part II: Like a Virgin


Take a bow, Ben; nicely done.

Oh, and Conservatives, if you every wondered why the Left finds you loathsome beyond redemption and thinks your ridiculous Teabagger Movement is at once hilarious, tragic and obscene, this is why.

Driftglass and Blue Gal's Friday Podcast

In a closed society where everybody's guilty,
the only crime is getting caught.
In a world of thieves,
the only final sin is stupidity.

-- Hunter S. Thompson

Like A Virgin

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42

Once upon a time, there was a President named Bill Clinton, who was, by most historical standards, a typical Centrist Republican, although by a fluke of geography and circumstances he ran for public office with a "(D)" after his name.

Under his Administration, many Conservative ideas which had long gathered dust on the shelf -- ideas such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, debt reduction, a strict “Pay as You Go” fiscal regime, jobs-jobs-jobs, budget surpluses, NAFTA, GATT, official bans on gay marriage, etc. -- were finally realized.

And for all of his good work on behalf of their ideology, Conservatives spent eight, long years treating Bill Clinton -- a Southern, White, Christian man -- as if he were a case of flesh eating nuclear syphilis.

Because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name.

And because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name, according to the leading voices in the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement, Bill Clinton was, in no particular order, Hitler, a Socialist, a rapist, a warmonger, a serial murderer, and a drug dealer, whose Presidency was somehow vaguely illegitimate.

And counterpointing the 24/7 slime campaign, there were those endless, endless hearings. Whitewater. Travel office. Christmas Card lists. Lincoln bedroom. Etc ad nauseum.

Or don’t you remember?

He was “Not my President!” (Ollie North: War criminal, terrorist arms dealer, GOP Senate Candidate [1994] and FoxNews Contributor.)

He was warned “not to set foot in my state.” (Jesse Helms: Professional Bigot, Confederate Senator, 1820-2003)

His picture was used for target practice by G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate felon, would-be assassin, radio personality and Republican hero.

From "The American Prospect":

...it's worth remembering just how virulent the opposition to Clinton's presidency was. Republicans began plotting to impeach Clinton long before anyone had ever heard the name "Lewinsky," and many on the right simply refused to accept that he legitimately occupied the office he held. Then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, when talking to Democrats, used to refer to Clinton as "your president."

It was a warped, hysterical campaign funded by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Richard Mellon Scaife

and propagated by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Rupert Murdoch who made sure the lies were jack-hammered into the headlines day after day, year after year.

And judging by its objectives, it was also a very successful campaign: it legitimized and metastasized Hate Radio; killed the credibility of the "objective" media once and for all; made the overt mass-slander of political opposition by the Right acceptable; moved radicals, militia nuts, bigots, Creationists and Limbaugh zombies to the center of the Republican Party; accelerated the exodus of reasonable moderates the hell out of the Republican Party; destroyed the possibility of public discourse; and kicked the door open to the use of Congressional hearings as instruments of political vendetta.

But as successful as it was, it was also an incredibly high-risk strategy, because of a thing called the "public record".

The public record meant that each and every time a Republican stood up to, say, slam the Democrat Commander-in-Chief during a time of war (from The Poor Man Institute:)

“You can support the troops but not the president”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“President…is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”

-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

“American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”

-Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W. Bush

“I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning…I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”

-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

“Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years”

-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?”

-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

“This is President Clinton’s war, and when he falls flat on his face, that’s his problem.”

-Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

“Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly.”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

they left a documentary trail wide and bright enough to be visible from space.

Or from the next election cycle.

The public record meant that every frivolous Republican witch hunt and every syllable of hate and demagoguery gleefully poured out through public megaphones and megachurch pulpits to malign and demonize the Left could potentially represent a thick bar on the cage of any future Republican president's imperial ambitions.

Because, after all, should the tables ever turn -- should there ever be a Republican President whose election really was suspect, or who really did lie to the American public and flagrantly abuse his office, and did it in ways that cost the nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives -- after spending eight years establishing a public record in such clear and unambiguous language what the Hell could the Right possibly say?

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky.

Eight years ago, this is what we all saw.

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of "Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!" hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper's nest from which they could cynically escalate --

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

-- their war on the Left.

Or don't you remember the day the Right robbed the graves of all those who perished on 9/11 to turn this


into their all-purpose

"Get Out of the 90s Free" card?

And the thing is, it worked.

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.

But they forgot that tempus just keeps fugiting along. And as time passed, the Right got so accustomed to butt-scooting their depravity all over the public square and never being called on it they simply stopped noticing that they were amassing a whole new post-9/11 public record so despicable and overflowing with Conservative atrocities that it positively dwarfed their antics during the Clinton Years.

And that brutal, meth-addict level of dependence on never being brought to book for anything they say or do left the Right completely unprepared for the one thing their leaders promised would never happen again.

Losing.

And losing has driven them a special kind of crazy; that screaming-incoherently-and-lashing-out-in-every-direction kind of cold-turkey junkie withdrawal crazy.

In the few, short months since they lost, they have emptied out their entire store of raving invective and delusion.

Losing has left them insisting that that the legally elected President of the United States somehow isn't really the President. That he is a secret enemy. A Communist. A Hitler. A Muslim sleeper cell. A Chicago gangster.

Has left them swearing that "their country" has been stolen and that somewhere hidden in secret code in a 1,000 page health care bill is a plan to murder senior citizens.

To understand how deep and relentless their addiction goes, you need only consider the recent example of Mrs. Katy Abram, who leaped into microcelebrity and the wingnut pantheon a month ago with her Clown Hall rant of “I don’t want my county to become Russia!” speech.

Mrs. Katy Abram wants the world to believe that, like some pure, down-home, liberty-lovin' Sleeping Beauty, she somehow slept through 9/11.

Slept through two wars and the two trillion dollar bill they racked up.

Slept through tax cuts for the wealthy that added another few trillion to our debt.

Slept through Katrina.

Slept through Terri Schiavo.

Slept through the screams of the Constitution as the Bush Administration fed it an inch at a time through the wood chipper (the same Constitution she is now so deeply concerned about that she has somehow become, virtually overnight, an “original intent” quote-spewing expert) only to be awakened in a sudden, patriotic fury by the sound of a Black Democrat taking the oath of office.

I’m sure in Mrs. Abram’s mind – and in the tiny little minds of tens of millions of Americans just like her – she sees absolutely no contradiction between explaining that she never paid any attention to a single fucking thing prior to January of 2009....and saying that she started paying attention in 1991 "when we first went to the Gulf War" and that she has debated politics with friends at the opposite end of the political spectrum “a million times over”.

It is, in fact, a sign of the depth and effectiveness of their brainwashing that people like Mrs. Abram see no conflict between saying in one breath “I have never been interested in politics” and "I always seem to have faith in the government“ in the next.

Because during the Bush years, people like Mrs. Abram never saw their love of their Dear Leader and their fealty to his Administration as something "political". They saw it normal. As the Universe being at its proper, wingnut default setting: White, male, fundamentalist Christian, Conservative, flight-suit clad and killing scary brown people. And as long as that remained true, all was right with the world and people like Mrs. Abram were absolved by their "Don't Worry, Go Shopping" leaders of any responsibility for paying attention to anything their government was actually doing.

And once the Dear Leader's reign ended, as far as people like Mrs. Abram were concerned, the natural order of mindless obedience in exchange for a smug and blissful ignorance collapsed. "Their country" was suddenly broke and fucked up for reasons that they dared not think about too much. "Their country" was suddenly awash in dirty fucking hippies, who for some reason were no longer satisfied with being cultural punching bags. "Their country"suddenly had politicians and activists who said mean things about the Dear Leader and the Republican Party...and got away with it!

And worst of all, "their country" suddenly had a Scary Black Man living in their Dear Leader's pretty White House, probably having dirty, Muslim sex in the Dear Leader's sacred, Christian bed and putting his filthy, Kenyan hands all over "their county's" pure, white Constitution.

So, for example, when you hear the same people who fanatically supported President George W. Bush when he famously told Iraq war critics to fuck off --

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

-- now insisting, less that a year after the 2008 elections, that President Barack Obama needs to:

"...scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over."

or when you see the mobs on the Right being whipped by talk of secession or revolution or spilling the "blood of tyrants" into a nearly-pornographic frenzy, understand that what you are witnessing are the echoes of political decisions made in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Political decisions that trained the Right to believe, on a visceral level, that a sufficiently bloody and horrifying disruption to the life of the country can -- if properly exploited -- wash away their eight otherwise-unforgivable years of sin and restore "their country" to its proper, wingnut default setting.

That if the right sacrifices are made to the right Gods in just the right way, then they can be virgins again.

NOTE: Yes, I know the comment section looks squirrelly in Firefox. It's the effing template. I tried paying the HTML drywall guys in California State IOU scrip

and they walked off the job.