When In Danger Or In Doubt...

...sprint like hell for the Both Sides redoubt.  

Watch closely as Ross Cardinal Douthat recycles the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz "Team B" ruse as a meaty thumb on the scale justify his Both Sides Do It drivel :

Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.

Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda... 

Those devilishly sinister Liberals strike again!

Somehow managing to be radical...yet indirect.

Repressive...yet subtle to the point of invisibility.

Steering movement of sweeping power and cruel intentions...with no leaders or chains of command or any other form or visible coordination.  

Which, if you are unfamiliar, are some of the hallmarks of every other imaginary bogeyman that clowns like Douthat have conjured out of thin air to justify their despicable opinions.  

In the 1980's it was the decrepit and dying Soviet Union that the neocons fitted out with brand new seven league boots, invisible super-weapons and inhumanly implacable purpose in order to rise to power.  This is from Thom Hartmann’s piece “Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit — And Power” (Global Policy Forum / Common Dreams), published December 7, 2004.

Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.

But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.

Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating.

With the fall of the USSR, the Neocons of the 1990s were stuck trying to make Bill Clinton into the Greatest Threat The Republic Has Ever Faced.  If you remember those days, you remember that lord knows they tried their best and spent a fortune on it, but in retrospect pretty much everyone who went big on the Impeachment of Bill Clinton ended up looking like a raving idiot.  

And having spent so much time and money on something so petty and trivial, as the Bush Administration took power, the neoconservatives found themselves with a seemingly insoluble political problem.  As I wrote back in 2009:

...

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...

In the 2000's, Saddam Hussein provided these same Merchants of Fear with the all-purpose bogeyman against whom all real Murricans were required to stand united.  Because, and I quote:

“The area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

That was Donald Rumsfeld on ABC News' "This Week" on March 30, 2003.

And when it all blew up in his face, Rumsfeld did what all Conservatives do when their lies collapse.  He just fucking lied about it.

And so, once again, as the Right found itself without an imaginary external threat sufficient to bind the MAGA morons to their Dear Leader, they invented all those terrifying immigrant caravans which always seemed to appear right around election time, and disappear after the election was over.

Mexico.  Wall.  Rapists.  Taking your jobs.  Stealing your heath care.  It was in all the papers.  

But once the engines of Republican fascism start to gear up for another round of outrageous lies, censorship and brute repression, more lies are needed.  Gotta keep the squishes and wobblers on side, using the same, reliable Big Lie that Conservatives always retreat to once things start to get insane and bloody.

The Both Sides Do It lie.  

And that's where mopes like Douthat come in handy.  Because Douthat doesn't need to pretend that the repressive fascism that his party is rolling out doesn't exist.  He just has to pretend that the Left is just as bad.  And to do it, all he has to do is as a few bricks to the mighty ziggurat of lies, slander and poisonous conspiracy-mongering about the Left which the Right has spent the last 50 years building, and which is now in full bloom all around us every day.   

And Douthat does this by using his New York Times real estate just like Rummy used his appearance on ABC News' "This Week" 22 years ago.

By declaring that knows where the invisible Liberal Repression WMD's are.

They're in the area around Harvard and MSNBC and east, west, south and north somewhat.

I Am The Liberal Media

Is 'Peak Douthat' Behind Us or Ahead?

Ha!  Fooled ya!

There is no 'Peak Douthat'.

Burn The Lifeboats

Today In Both Sides Do It: Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and the Worst Deuce Fan Fiction Ever

Mr. David Brooks may have taken a paid "book leave" from The New York Times for a quarter of the year off to pick up an extra paycheck on side, tooling around the country lecturing Americans on humility and Both Siderism --

New York Times columnist, author and public broadcasting commentator David Brooks is in Missoula to kick off the University of Montana's President's Lecture series. The conservative pundit spoke about Donald Trump and humility with Sally Mauk before the lecture.

"To me, humility is not thinking lowly of yourself," Brooks says. "My favorite definition is, 'it's radical self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness."

-- but he still cares deeply about the care and feeding of his elite Beltway audience.  Specifically, he cafes very much that they no be left going cold turkey for lack of regular doses of his brand of  "gliding above it all, casting blame equally in all directions except, of course, at his elite Beltway audience" journalism.

And so he left the keys to his Shitty Shitty Bang Bang vehicle with Bret Stephens --

I’m on book leave for a couple more weeks. I’m glad Bret isn’t. https://t.co/gKOouCERR8

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) September 27, 2018

-- who wrung out an entire column --

This Revolution, Too, Will Eat Its ChildrenWhat this frenzied national inquest means for our civic culture.

-- on the horrors of living in the post-Kavanaugh world --

In the post-Kavanaugh world, however, we have new editorial standards. The Gawker standards.

-- without once mentioning that, long before Republicans decided to ram the Kavanaugh nomination through come hell or high dudgeon, they had already turned up the music, clapped their hands over our mouths and dragged the county against its will into the post-Merrick Garland world.

Mr. Stephens also somehow forget that, just a couple of months ago, this was hiw very own sweeping Delphic pronouncements about how Democrats should behave.  

Just Confirm Kavanaugh

...

I refer to the decision of Senate Democrats to wage a tooth-and-nail battle to oppose Kavanaugh, an effort that is likely doomed to fail and equally likely to hurt Democratic chances in the fall. Who knew Chuck Schumer was so content with his job as as Senate minority leader?

Let’s count the ways in which the Democrats aren’t helping themselves...

For now, however, the first question Democrats ought to ask themselves is whether they really have political capital to waste on a losing battle...

Fierce opposition to Kavanaugh hurts Democrats...

Liberals always cry wolf...

But we haven't forgotten, Mr. Stephens.  We will never forget.

And then, before we can catch our breath, here comes this week's homily from Mr. Stephens' fellow New York Times employee -- Ross Cardinal Douthat -- who hilariously leads off with what may be the -- 

-- Worst. Deuce. Fan. Fiction. Ever.

An Age Divided by Sex

The Kavanaugh nightmare shows how the competing moralisms of conservatism and feminism are tearing us apart.

The Year of Our Lord 1982...

The ’70s were officially over, but their spirit still lived on...

The shadow of AIDS hadn’t yet fallen on the sexual revolution, the era’s teen movies offered unapologetic raunch...

Most contemporary discourse about the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s imagines a consistent “left” that created those revolutions and a consistent “right” that opposed them.

it was a world where a social revolution had ripped through American culture and radically de-moralized society, tearing down the old structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality, replacing them with libertinism. With "if it feels good, do it" and the Playboy philosophy. With “Fear of Flying” for women and “Risky Business” and “Porky’s” for the boys...

Then comes the obligatory Bill Clinton name-check as required by the NYT Conservative Style Book

..in the age of Bill Clinton...

Then, because he is the product of a privileged suburban life of Hamden Hall Country Day School and Harvard University (after which he was decanted directly into an editorship at The Atlantic and a column at The New York Times) and does not have the slightest fucking idea what the 70s or the 80s or urban life in American were actually like, Mr. Douthat shifts from the stilted language of the Wikipedia book-report (The Sexual Revolution: A Land of Contrasts) to a vocabulary with which he is much more comfortable:

To put this disagreement in terms familiar from 1980s movies...

yeah.  That happened.

And then, as you must have guessed by now, Mr. Douthat ties the whole, pompous, banjaxed mess up with a big Both Siderist bow --

Thus the puritanism of conservatism would be more admirable...

The puritanism of feminism, meanwhile, would be more realistic...

Instead of such a tempering of both worldviews, though, we seem to be headed in the opposite direction — toward a world where the parties are polarized by gender and the two moralistic programs, feminist and conservative...

-- and calls it a good day's work.

Funny old world.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Whither Conservatism?

Serious Conservative Junior League Person of the Year (1998), Ross "Chunky Bobo" Douthat woke up yesterday to find that some fiend had stolen that pillowcase full of emergency backup True Conservatism he keeps under his bed and replaced it with ten pounds of shit.

Thing is, if he had bothered to check the freshness date on his bag of emergency backup True Conservatism he would have noticed that it has been full of shit since the 1980s.  But like Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, Mr. Douthat does not think about thinks that he does not think about.

And so...

The Defeat of True Conservatism

...

Now, after knocking Ted Cruz out of the race with a sweeping win in Indiana, Trump has beaten a second theory of where the G.O.P. needs to go from here: a theory you might call True Conservatism.

...

But it turned out that Republican voters didn’t want True Conservatism any more than they wanted Bushism 2.0. Maybe they would have wanted it from a candidate with more charisma and charm and less dogged unlikability. But the entire Trump phenomenon suggests otherwise, and Trump as the presumptive nominee is basically a long proof against the True Conservative theory of the Republican Party.

Trump proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past. No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough of them to make Cruz the nominee.

Trump proved that many evangelical voters, supposedly the heart of a True Conservative coalition, are actually not really values voters or religious conservatives after all...

Trump proved that many of the party’s moderates and establishmentarians hate the thought of a True Conservative nominee even more than they fear handing the nomination to a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control...

Finally, Trump proved that many professional True Conservatives, many of the same people who flayed RINOs and demanded purity throughout the Obama era, were actually just playing a convenient part. From Fox News’ 10 p.m. hour to talk radio to the ranks of lesser pundits, a long list of people who should have been all-in for Cruz on ideological grounds either flirted with Trump, affected neutrality or threw down their cloaks for the Donald to stomp over to the nomination. Cruz thought he would have a movement behind him, but part of that movement was actually a racket...

So True Conservatism was never more than a public signifier -- just another a club tie or flag pin -- representing a fairy tale which virtually no one on the Right actually believed and whose purveyors were never more than con men running a long and profitable scam.

In other words -- in the words that Mr. Douthat dares not frame his mouth to utter -- the Left has been right about the Right all along.  

With Ross Douthat At A Dead Chimp's Funeral

It sure was a cozy set-up.  That bundle of raw nerves, and Max, and a dead monkey upstairs and the wind wheezing through that organ once in a while.  Later on, just for comedy relief, the real guy arrived with a baby coffin.  It was all done with great dignity. He must have been a very important chimp.  The great  grandson of King Kong, maybe.

-- Joe Gillis, "Sunset Boulevard"

Today Ross "Chunky Bobo" joined David Brooks and Mikey Gerson in slogging through the various stages of grief over the passing of their very important and completely imaginary chimp.

While Mr. Brooks (NYT) is currently working his way though the Bargaining phase...

...

So maybe it’s time for governing Republicans to actually do something. Yes, I’m talking to you state legislators, or local committeepersons, or members of Congress and all your networks of donors and supporters. If MoveOn can organize, if the Tea Party can organize, if Justin Bieber can build a gigantic social media movement, why are you incapable of any collective action at all?

What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February...

..and Mr. Gerson (WaPo) is stalled out in Anger...

Trump’s nomination would rip the heart out of the Republican Party

...with a soupcon of Denial...

Liberals who claim that Trumpism is the natural outgrowth, or logical conclusion, of conservatism or Republicanism are simply wrong. Edmund Burke is not the grandfather of Nigel Farage. Lincoln is not even the distant relative of Trump.

...Mr. Douthat (NYT) has contented himself with setting up a little hammock in a shady copse of Depression

...

I would like to tell you that this is all the fault of the Republican leadership — that had they been more receptive to populist ideas in 2008 or 2012, they wouldn’t be facing a Trumpian revolt today.

...

A critique that stops with G.O.P. elites, though, might let the voting public off the hook. Because it’s also possible that Trumpism, in all its boastful, lord-of-misrule meretriciousness, is what many struggling Americans actually want...

...there to ruminate over the good old days when he was young and believed in shit...like the inerrant frontier wisdom of Sarah Plain and Crazy:

...

But in Alaska, there was a young, rising-star governor. She was pro-life, evangelical, a working mom. And her record way up north was reformist in a distinctly nonideological way: She was best known for fighting a corrupt nexus of politicians and the oil-and-gas industry, tackling crony capitalism on behalf of ordinary Alaskans.

And then, shockingly, McCain picked her as his running mate.

At which point the chattering classes went temporarily insane. Or maybe I went insane, who can say? But either way it seemed like everything I hated, a mix of sneering social liberalism, fecundophobia, anti-evangelical paranoia and class contempt, was being hurled at a candidate who seemed to fit exactly with the “Grand New Party” mold.

So I defended her. I assailed her critics. And then — well, you know what happened then...

Which means that in a certain way, Trump and Palin together on a stage is the closest American politics has come to offering the populist grand new party that Salam and I called for two presidential campaigns ago.

Except that it isn’t what we called for, because we wanted a populism with substance...

And I want baby back ribs to be heart-healthy, calorie-free and delicious.  But sometimes we don't get what we want, because what we want is ridiculous.  As ridiculous as the notion that the soulless Randites, paranoid xenophobes, gun fetishists, Dominionists and inbred bigots of Mr. Douthat's Republican Party were ever going to be on-board with a "populism with substance" designed to help the very people they had spent the last half a century learning to hate.

For a very long time, the spinners of the Myth of Reasonable Conservatism have made a fine living by relentlessly diverting and deflecting attention away from the actual, on-the-ground depravities of the real Republican Party. And for a very long time, the Myth of Reasonable Conservatism was the King Kong of political fairy tales: powerful, world-bestriding and seemingly unstoppable.  

But Reality is bigger, more patient and more ruthless than any propaganda and slowly, painfully, Reality carved the Beltway's favorite fairy tale down to it's proper proportions: a dead chimp in a tiny box surrounded by grown men who fucking well knew better, weeping and raging over the loss of their meal ticket.  

There was something else going on below: the last rites for that hairy old chimp, performed with the utmost seriousness -- as if she were laying to rest an only child.  Was her life really as empty as that?  It was all very queer, but queerer things were yet to come.

-- Joe Gillis, "Sunset Boulevard"

The Beltway's beloved imaginary chimp has died.

And we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to bust up its funeral and piss on its grave with all the hydraulic pressure we can muster.

By Cleverly Failing to Mention

That the Sequester was designed to be a doomsday weapon which no one in their right minds would trigger and that our current polycrisis is entirely the fault of Ross Douthat's Republican Party, Ross Douthat has managed to poop out an 800-word New York Times contractual obligation column in which the Sequester was actually an excellent compromise, and that our current polycrisis is entirely the fault of Both Sides, both of whom should now look to the Sequester as a template for working out another excellent compromise:

The reality, though, is that sequestration really was a genuine, almost old-fashioned sort of compromise — one that bit deeply into a lot of Republican interests and constituencies, and left the liberal ringwall around entitlements unbreached...

I don’t think recognizing this fact would solve the current impasse (ha!), but at the very least it would be a useful for both sides to see 2011 as a model (however limited and flawed) for how actual compromise can work...

Yes, Young Master Douthat does, in fact, get paid large amounts of non-Sequestered American dollars to rub this piffle out once a week in America's Newspaper of record.

Because thanks to his position of unearned privilege, Young Mater Douthat is completely insulated from ever suffering any of the pain he so casually suggests be inflicted on others in the name of one Republican "compromise" after another.

In the science fiction classic "Childhood's End", the Overlords arrived on Earth with one solution for such debilitating empathy deficiencies:

...

"You may kill one another if you wish," the message had gone, "and that is a matter between you and your own laws. But if you slay, except for food or in self-defense, the beasts that share your world with you—then you may be answerable to me."

No one knew how comprehensive this ban was supposed to be, or what Karellen would do to enforce it. They had not long to wait.

The Plaza de Toros was full when the matadors and their attendants began their processional entry. Everything seemed normal; the brilliant sunlight blazed harshly on the traditional costumes, the great crowd greeted its favorites as it had a hundred times before. Yet here and there faces were turned anxiously towards the sky, to the aloof silver shape fifty kilometers above Madrid.

Then the picadors had taken up their places and the bull had come snorting out into the arena. The skinny horses, nostrils wide with terror, had wheeled in the sunlight and their riders forced them to meet their enemy. The first lance flashed—made contact—and at that moment came a sound that had never been heard on earth before.

It was the sound of ten thousand people screaming with the pain of the same wound—ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bullfight, and indeed of all bullfighting.

Which is one reason I really like classic science fiction. 

Must Love Blogs

The New York Times hit the want-ads in search of some special help for their special people:

Editorial assistant to David Brooks and Ross Douthat 

The New York Times Company, a leading global, multimedia news and information company with 2012 revenues of $2.0 billion, includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, NYTimes.com , BostonGlobe.com , Boston.com, and related properties. The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news and information.

This is a group 8 editorial assistant position that centers on helping David Brooks and Ross Douthat do their columns and blog posts in a timely and accurate way, which requires research, fact checking, linking and writing summaries for everything they write.

There are administrative duties, including making travel arrangements; filing expenses, making and keeping track of office supply purchases; checking reader email accounts; answering phones; keeping files of news clips; opening mail; scheduling meetings. Interest in breaking news and international events; web production and social media skills are important. Flexibility when it comes to working on weekends and in the evenings is a must.

Internal and external applicants should apply to Maureen Muenster, mamuen@nytimes.com.

...

A reminder that this murmuration of handmaidens exists solely to support two of the most insipid writers in America journalism: 

writers whose entire auctorial output, between them, comes to 800 words of piffle, three days a week, punctuated with a long stretches of time off for vacations and "book leave".

Somewhere in America tonight, I hope at least some, small fraction of the thousands upon thousands of real reporters, photographers, editors and copywriters who were tossed out of work and into the teeth of the Great Recession get a helluva laugh at this before heading out for second-shift, gotta-feed-my-family gigs at Hardee's or Office Max or WalMart.

Suburberus

Since the Dawn of Recorded Conservative Time (which began on Jan 20, 1981), a mighty beast has guarded the gates to Republican political success: a three-headed Centrist the Greeks called Suburberus.

Legend tells us that Suburberus was developed at the AEI Skunk Works in a join venture between a very busy Conservative movement and a very lazy Establishmentarian media. For Conservatives, the beast's toxic mantra of "Both Sides Do It" has become the ultimate weapon to simultaneously suffocate both any serious media scrutiny of Republican perfidy, and any serious Conservative introspection on the subject of their complicity in a long and horrifying string of Republican crimes, failures, lies and treasons.

Instead, no matter how rancid the hypocrisy or ridiculous the lie behind which a Conservative finds himself cornered, he has been trained to simply incant "Well, yeah, but Libruls are worse!" and then walk away. Smirking. As if Sweet Baby Jebus Himself had reached down from Republican Heaven and high-fived him for being such a silver-tongued genius.

It serves the lazy Villager media machine equally well by insuring that no issue of political accountability -- no matter how blatant or bloody the crime -- ever needs to come down to matters of truth and falsity; ever needs to reach a definitive, factual conclusion that one side is simply and overwhelming shithouse-rat crazy and the other is not. This method of reporting -- while true -- would also alienate the shithouse-rat crazy portion of the audience which would, in turn, make the boner pill and hair dye vendors who pay everyone's salaries very unhappy.

So instead we get grotesquely overpaid twats like David Gregory who use their privileged access to American airwaves to plop a decent human being like E.J. Dionne down oppose a babbling sot like Peggy Noonan so they can "debate" whether or not "partisanship" is Barack Obama's fault.

Because, y'know, both sides...

But today is a special day in the life of the story of Suburberus, because today an honest-to-God, silver-haired, old-school journalist took off his pince-nez, put down his copy of "Plutarch's Lives", set aside his Lemon Lift tea and said, "dang it!"

In print.

From James Fallows in "The Atlantic":

In Which I Become a Conservative

Nov 29 2010, 2:42 PM ET
Ross Douthat, an Atlantic alumnus, contends today in the NY Times that the recent controversy over "enhanced" TSA procedures illustrates the dominance of partisan reflex in today's politics. Liberals complained about excessive state power when Bush and Cheney were in charge -- but now they're happy, and it's conservatives up in arms about the excesses of Obama, Biden, and 'Big Sis.' EG:

But people who follow politics closely -- whether voters, activists or pundits -- are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing.

Sounds sensible, even-handed, and fairmindedly tut-tutting to all sides. But as it applies to the real world?

The TSA case, on which Douthat builds his column, is in fact quite a poor illustration -- rather, a good illustration for a different point. There are many instances of the partisan dynamic working in one direction here. That is, conservatives and Republicans who had no problem with strong-arm security measures back in the Bush 43 days but are upset now. Charles Krauthammer is the classic example: forthrightly defending torture as, in limited circumstances, a necessary tool against terrorism, yet now outraged about "touching my junk" as a symbol of the intrusive state.

But are there any cases of movement the other way? Illustrations of liberals or Democrats who denounced "security theater" and TSA/DHS excesses in the Republican era, but defend them now? If such people exist, I'm not aware of them -- and having beaten the "security theater" drum for many long years now, I've been on the lookout.

The anti-security theater alliance has always included right-wing and left-wing libertarians (both exist), ACLU-style liberals, limited-government-style conservatives, and however you would choose to classify the likes of Bruce Schneier or Jeffrey Goldberg (or me). I know of Republicans who, seemingly for partisan reasons like those Douthat lays out, have joined the anti-security theater chorus. For instance, former Sen. Rick Santorum. I don't know of a single Democrat or liberal who has peeled off and moved the opposite way just because Obama is in charge.
...

So: it's nice and fair-sounding to say that the party-first principle applies to all sides in today's political debate. Like it would be nice and fair-sounding to say that Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are contributing to obstructionism and party-bloc voting. Or that Fox News and NPR have equal-and-offsetting political agendas in covering the news. But it looks to me as if we're mostly talking about the way one side operates. Recognizing that is part of facing the reality of today's politics.

The bad news is, of course, that Mr. Fallows has reached this somber and tragic epiphany about, oh, 20 years after every Liberal I know figured it out.

The good news is that he has figured it out: Mr. Fallows is a nice guy and a good writer who I assume will now be cast into the same journalistic Gehenna that awaits everyone who dares to take public notice of the fact that the Right is not only completely fucking unhinged, but completely immune to any arguments based on facts, history or simple causality. And that that is, y'know, a bad thing...

Welcome to Liberalville, Mr. Fallows. We have a secret handshake, some headgear you'll be required to wear at Liberal events, dietary restrictions and a few other things you'll need to know about. Not to worry; the pamphlet will cover it.

We also have an official riddle.

Wanna hear it?

Q: If Dick Cheney were caught red-handed tossing burning kittens at homeless veterans from the White House lawn, what would be the first three words out of Cokie Roberts' mouth?

A: "But the Democrats...."

I wrote that over six years ago and it was old news then.

Still, welcome aboard.