"Drink Entire

against the madness of crowds.”

(Yeah I’ve used this quote before. But I say, when thieving from the best, why be less than shameless?)

What Ezra has up here should be required reading as a balm for the Broderite claptrap that consumes so many tony pages and so much bandwidth. Now that would be some gen-u-ine balance.

It is a thoughtful, sturdily constructed, two-fisted palate cleanser and a tonic against the dead, lightless weight of MSM Conventional Wisdom that is so wrong, so often and yet so touted and so ubiquitous that it sometimes seems to smother the simple truth under blanket after mildewy blanket of twaddling irrelevance.

Ezra hits this right in the sweet spot as he explains how the collapse of the Bush presidency has made Dubya, in a sense, invincible.

I’m just dropping in bits and snips here because you really should read the whole of it.

File under: When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

The Invincible President

How the supposed "uniter" consolidated his power by fostering division.

Ezra Klein | July 5, 2007 | web only

"President Bush's decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. was the act of a liberated man," wrote The New York Times. "A leader who knows that, with 18 months left in the Oval Office and only a dwindling band of conservatives still behind him, he might as well do what he wants."

If the Buddha and Machiavelli had a child, this would be the type of liberation he'd speak about: Liberation from the suffering imposed by democratic checks and balances.
…

The Gautamachiavelli?

The Universe shudders.

Onward.

…
It is a liberation George W. Bush has pursued with a single-minded vigor. From the beginning, he has consciously sought to govern from division, realizing early on that popularity can actually constrain an administration, and consensus is just another word for compromise.

And now, in the latter half of his second term, at 20-some percent in the polls, he has achieved full liberation from shackles of public opinion and congressional approval. In his solitude, he is virtually invincible.

Among the first to notice this strange strategy was The Prospect's own Mark Schmitt. Back in 2004, despite the GOP's control of all three branches of government, he observed that they seemed to be passing legislation by surprisingly slim margins.

…

What the Republican Party, under the leadership of Bush and Rove, realized, was that they didn't have to campaign on their legislation. They could campaign on the perfidy of the opposition.

And if that was to be your strategy, there was no sense in letting the other party sign onto your legislation -- that would actually undermine your electoral appeal. So bills that could have garnered Democratic votes were twisted until no Democrat could, in good conscience, say "aye." Perhaps the best example of this strategy was the Department of Homeland Security, a Democratic idea that the White House first opposed, and then inserted a union-busting provision into, so Democrats had to fight against a broadly popular idea that they, at base, supported. That bill could have passed with overwhelming support. It was a conscious decision to make it a partisan issue so it could be used as a cudgel in the 2002 elections.

…
After the Democrats took Congress, George W. Bush …could have resolved to spend his final years pushing policy forward, and created genuinely bipartisan commissions to resolve Medicare's financing crisis, to clean the tax code and reform the Alternative Minimum Tax, and to end the war in Iraq. Instead, he did precisely the opposite.

To understand how, it's necessary to appreciate George Bush's almost unique circumstances. There are generally a couple democratic checks on a president's power: his desire to retain political capital with Congress in order to pass legislation; his need to retain popularity in order more effectively advocate for his agenda; and his wish to improve the fortunes of his party and ensure the ascension of his vice-president.

Bush is constrained by none of those.

…

Dubya has left the building...

...and entered the Bunker.

And rather than a freak of nature or an ideological malfunction, the Dubya Presidency has been nothing less the dark, stupid heart of the GOP made perfectly manifest. From his rapacious usurpation of imperial powers, to a pet Republican Congress that obediently cast aside their vital legislative and oversight responsibilities without a backwards glance and then eagerly re-cast themselves as his fawning royal court, this bloody, corrupt, incompetent, debt-ridden, looter's-paradise final chapter of the worst presidency in history is the apotheosis of Modern Conservativism.

Beyond than that, I have nothing to add to Ezra's fine work other than we would do well to consider how to operationalizing his hypothesis.

Perhaps using this simple frame:

1. Any reportage on the rancor and venomous partisanship that is destroying our public discourse that does not lay the blame squarely at the feet of the GOP generally, and the Bush Administration specifically, is corrupt and fraudulent reporting on its face.

2. Any individual journalist, pundit or elected official who attempts to allocate responsibility for this meltdown in the public square onto both political parties and movements equally should be considered a liar and a collaborator with those who are trying to destroy this country from within, at least until it is proven they aren’t just idiots.

3. To salvage our democracy, the most immediate and imperative act of must be to lance, disinfect, delouse, amputate, cauterize and reformat massive sections of the conservative movement and the GOP. Any solution to the continued and deliberate poisoning of the well of public discourse that does not stipulate to this is a lie and a trap.

Now, wasn’t that tasty?

So why not go over and dine on the whole of it instead of just nibbling on the grocery aisle giveaway samplers here...

“Ethos”

Along with Pathos (“You’ll make baby Jebus cry”) and Logos (“Making baby Jebus cry is objectively wrong and irrational”)…(and , OK, ‘Wackos’, if you’re including Hate Radio), it is one of the three elementary rhetorical devices.

In its original meaning, it is more or less an “Appeal to Authority”.

It saying to your audience, you can trust me…

…because I build these for a living.

…because I have a certificate.

…because I have shed blood for this cause.

Or, in the estimation of the Beltway Bund, Ethos can be confered on a candidate or speaker because of the excellence of their hair, the broadness of their shoulders, and the raw, undeniable pheromonic power of their man-musk.

This assertion that “I know what I am talking about” is at the core of all claims the Mainstream Media make about being the journalists of the First Water for American politics, culture, etc. It is their velvet rope for keeping the vituperative poo-flingers out.

Now Broderella has already been taken to task for the specifics of his column -- "A Mob-Rule Moment" – of a few days ago wherein he expressed his cringing horror

that the D.C. Elite were showing signs of bending to the will of the unwashed hoi polloi that, y’know, elected them.

So that is not my purpose for taking it up it here.

Instead, as an exercise for the class, note here a relatively rare example of the explicit invocation of Beltway Jounralisminess as a proxy for true Ethos.

Note the exact spot at which Broderella unequivocally rests the entire tonnage of his argument on one, thin, reed of “Trust Me”…

A Mob-Rule Moment
By David S. Broder
Thursday, July 5, 2007; A17

Former senator Fred Thompson has begun his unannounced quest for the Republican presidential nomination by telling audiences in New Hampshire that Washington is badly out of touch with the country.

As a senior campaign adviser put it to The Post's Michael Shear, Thompson believes that "the politicians have lost their connection with what people really want and what they really expect."

Few if any of the other 17 men and one woman vying for the presidency would be bold enough to challenge Thompson's claim. The belief that official Washington is deaf to the people's wishes is a staple of political rhetoric for both Republicans and Democrats -- even those, including Thompson, who have operated inside the Beltway for decades….

And then Rip Van Broder comes right out with it.

…
Let a reporter who is not running for anything suggest that exactly the opposite may be true: A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.

From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, philosophers have written of the healthy tension that normally exists between the understanding and strategies of leaders and the sentiments and opinions of their people.

In today's Washington, a badly weakened president and a dangerously compliant congressional leadership are no match for the power of public opinion -- magnified and sometimes exaggerated by modern communications and interest group pressure.
The latest cave-ins involve immigration and trade policy, and both seriously threaten the national interest.

…

He then takes up his balsa wood cudgel and brings it down equally on the defeat of the Immigration Bill and the defeat of Presidential fast-track trade authority. Because in the minds of the Beltway Bund, Republicans dropping anvils on the leader of their own Party is exactly equal in shamefulness and icky Washingtonism as Democrats acting in a manner entirely consistent with a principled opposition which simply does not want this Earth-scourging, labor-hating Administration to be allowed to continue using trade policy to fuck up the environment and fuck over the working man unfettered anymore.

Because according to Broder’s definition of "Ethos", it is the job of everyone -– regardless of principle, party, or circumstance -- to shut up, do what Daddy says, turn that damned music down, and get the Hell offa his lawn.

But back to the phrase that pays:

“Let a reporter who is not running for anything suggest that exactly the opposite may be true

See, but that’s not exactly true, is it David?

Because every day, every one of the Beltway Bund is running flat-out for the fleeting honor of being a “Dean” of The Agitprop Guild.

Every day, with every paragraph, David Broder shows that he is is in a continuous footrace with the rest of his peers to be the Mayor of Punditland. He runs as hard as Nixon ever did for the opportunity to rule over these clowns.


But to get to be the Mayor of Punditland you must run on a the strict Orthodox Beltway Platform.

You must stand in the Center of the Stage, place your hands (both, so as not to show favoritism) upon the Center page of the Bible, and swear The Mighty Pundit Oath written in Middle English using only words that can be spelled from letters in the middle of the alphabet.

The oath which demands that Fortress Fake Center from which the Punditocracy commands the media heights must be held at all costs, and therefore the Washington Power establishment must be defended at any price against yahoos, the blogger vituperati, truth-hawks ™ and assorted flea-bitten peasants.

Which demands that for every scrofulous GOP mole rat who is forced to stop using the Constitution as ass-floss, the Pundit Posse is required to ride into Liberaltown and drag a Democrat out of his or her bed to string up…for…for…well…something!

Every day, column after column, the Broderites of this land sacrifice the Truth on the altar of Centrism in order to earn bonus cocktail weenie points up in the Kewl Kids Klubhouse. In ways as cold-blooded and “partisan” as anything Tom DeLay ever attempted, the Broderites sell us all out one column inch at a time to impress their peers by dressing up in new panties and pasties the same, tired arguments defending their toxic, consensual dogma they have been pushing for twenty years.

And “Ethos” that ain’t.

Hard Drives

with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!

This via ComputerWorld:

Lasers could make disk drives a hundred times faster
There are problems to be resolved
Chris Mellor

July 05, 2007 (TechWorld.com) -- Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though.

According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly.

This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (see "Bootless PCs and terabytes on a dime").

The laser flash duration was 40 femtoseconds -- 40 billionths of a millionth of a second -- which is 100 times shorter than the time needed for a current write head to change the magnetic field direction on a hard drive disk recording bit. Thus there is the promise of increasing data writing speed up to one hundred times. This will enable hard disk data writing speed to better keep up with ever-faster data transfers across networks.

...

Celebrate, my friends, for being witness to a revolution which shall surely usher in a Second Third Fourth Fifth New Golden Age of ultrafast porn storage and retrieval.

Behold the Amazing Jebusaurus!

Because stupid people need museums too.

(Reposted Special!Encore!Performance! [complete with the now-vintage, collectable, original typos] from 04/2006 because I'm so friggin' exhausted my hair falls asleep during important meetings, and then is up all night bugging me to go out and party... in honor of the Blog(swarm) Against Theocracy.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is about the distinction between form and function. Specifically about the talismanic power stupid people invest in the former in the hopes of conjuring the latter.

(Emphasis added)

Genesis of a museum
Creationists, saying all the answers are in the Bible, put their beliefs on display in $25 million facility


By Lisa Anderson
Tribune national correspondent

April 25, 2006

PETERSBURG, Ky. -- The recent fossil discovery of a 375-million-year-old fish that could lurch ashore on bony transitional fins--apparently a long-sought missing link between sea creatures and land animals--made a spectacular splash in evolutionary science circles. But it created nary a ripple on the placid American campus of Answers in Genesis, where an enormous museum chronicling the biblical six days of creation is rising fast amid rolling fields.

Ken Ham, co-founder and president of Answers in Genesis, believed to be the world's largest creationist organization, and most "young-Earth" creationists are as unimpressed by science's finding another piece in the evolutionary puzzle as they are with science's finding the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old.

Using biblical calculations, young-Earth creationists believe the planet is about 6,000 years old; old-Earth creationists believe it could be older. Both, however, take the Bible literally and reject Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory that all life, including human, shares common ancestry and developed through random mutation and natural selection. Evolution enjoys near-universal support among scientists.

Not so among the American public, about half of which endorses creationism, according to polls. While new concepts such as intelligent design, which posits that life is so complicated that an intelligence must have devised it, recently have suffered setbacks from court rulings and scientific findings, creationism thrives, and Answers in Genesis is a strong sign of that.

Just hours after the fossil fish, called Tiktaalik roseae, landed on the front pages of many newspapers earlier this month, it also surfaced on the Answers in Genesis Web site. In a posting titled "Gone fishin' for a missing link?" the organization, in effect, threw Tiktaalik roseae back.

"Because evolutionists want to discover transitional forms, when they find a very old fish with leg-bone-like bones in its fins, they want to interpret this as evidence that it is some sort of transitional creature. . . . It may be just another example of the wonderful design of our Creator God," the posting said.

Absolute certainty

For creationists, there are no transitional creatures and no doubts. In the Book of Genesis, the biblical calendar of creation is as clear and simple as it is sacred: God created creatures of the sea and the air on Day 5. Land animals and man appeared on Day 6. And all of this, including the creation of Earth, happened about 6,000 years ago.
...
According to nearly a quarter-century of Gallup polls, about half of all Americans consistently agree with the biblical account that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Polling also indicates that a majority of Americans say creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public school biology classes.

"It is strengthening. It's not adding more proponents, it's growing in terms of giving increased confidence to those who share that belief," said Ronald Wetherington, an anthropologist at Dallas' Southern Methodist University. He cited an American political climate in which creationists, who include many so-called values voters and evangelicals, feel politically and culturally empowered rather than marginalized.
...

"The 250,000 people going to it will go back to their legislators and pressure them to vote for Jesus," said Volney Gay, director of the Center for Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "There's a suspicion of science and a suspicion of intellectuals in general."

Said Ham: "What we see is if you can get information to people, their worldview will be changed, and the way they vote on issues, on a school board or whatever, will reflect that change."

…

The dinosaur replicas, many of them animatronic, are spectacular: Creationists say dinosaurs lived simultaneously with humans because their death came only after original sin. Some of the more compelling effects are in the key rooms depicting what are called "The Seven C's of History." They are: creation, corruption, catastrophe (the destruction of the world by Noah's flood), confusion (Babel), Christ, the cross and consummation (his death and resurrection).

Along the Creation Walk

For instance, soft lighting, gentle sounds and pleasant fragrances will mark the Creation Walk, where Adam and Eve chat with God in the Garden of Eden before they are corrupted to commit original sin by an animatronic serpent. The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.

"We're trying to make this the most uncomfortable place in the museum to show how original sin has corrupted the universe," Zovath said on a tour through the site.

...
- - -

Terms of debate

Evolution: Charles Darwin's theory, accepted nearly universally by scientists, says that all life on Earth, including human, shares common ancestry and evolved to its present state through random mutation and natural selection.

Creationism: Advanced by religious conservatives in response to Darwin's theory, creationism adheres to the biblical account that God alone created the world and all life in it, much as it is today, at one point within the last 10,000 years.

Creation science: Claims scientific evidence for the biblical version of creation.

Intelligent design: Considered a successor to creationism, intelligent design became popular in the early 1990s after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the teaching of creationism in public schools in 1987. Intelligent design posits that there are weaknesses in Darwin's theory and suggests that an unnamed intelligence must have designed some aspects of life.

-- Lisa Anderson

Future historians -- probably Indian -- will disinter this animatronic idiocy and admire the handiwork of the Pre-Columbian natives who fashioned such cunning, pre-literate totems.

Then they will note the date – the early 21st Century – and the location – at the heart of what was then the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth – and they will laugh and laugh and laugh.

Clearly the Americans, being a generous and noble people, had found a wise and humane was of dealing with the residuum of mentally stunted halfwits that every society will inevitably produce. Those few angrily underclocked child-men who cannot cope with the rigors of math or science or conjunctions or hitting the bowl when they pee.

Like Colonial Williamsburg or South Dakota, Americans had manufactured another wholly fake community for some socially intriguing reason that our descendents (or the descendents of the people we speak to when we call the 800-number on the back of our major appliances when they flake out) will theorize cleverly about.

That rather than efficiently generically engineering the incapacitating disease of conservative fundamentalism out of our blood, we humanely gave them their own s-l-o-w children’s camp. It was a dim-but-cheery place with its own, comforting fake history of the planet, its own cartoon God, and even its own news network that told the stupid people that God loved them better than anyone else. That they didn’t need sense enough to pound sand or as much compassion as God gave a Pitcher plant, as long as they were “Saved”.

And anyway, they weren’t really stupid.

The “elites” were stupid.

And maybe these “Flowers For AlgernonLand” designers even had a few chuckles at the expense of their devolved fellow citizens; perhaps once in a while laughing themselves to tears as the dense denizens of the place scared themselves over and over again scampering down “The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.”

Dumbing down by several orders of magnitude a complex allegory about the inherency of pain and loss in a dualistic Universe within the field of Time…into God’s own a Pull-My-Finger joke.

At least I hope that’s the tale they’ll tell themselves, because the truth is so much simpler and sadder.

The truth is that for all of its think tanks, fake media and Small Gummint bluster, the Republican Party would evaporate tomorrow like dew in a firestorm if it were not kept lavishly stocked with bigots and idiots. Without its bumper crop of racists yielded from the Southern Strategy, its millions of fanatically anti-Enlightenment Christopaths and the millions of garden variety stupids, the GOP would be one dead fucking parrot…and the people running the Party like a Long Con damned well know it.

Which is why every strategy is aimed at creating more stupid people.

Because the more logic-intolerant the base, the easier everything gets.

For example, imagine how much less you have to spend on marketing when you no longer have to worry about making a well-reasoned argument…about anything.

Piss in their hair and when they start to notice something is wrong, all you need to do is flash a picture of two men kissing and they’ll charge obediently off of whatever cliff they’re led.

Take a massive dump in their mouths and when the start to gag on it, and all need to do is scream “Ted Kennedy!” at them as loud as possible and they’re swallow your excrement like baby birds and beg for more.

Lie them into a ruinous war, send their kids off to die for the greater glory of Exxon, and when they verge dangerously on the edge of beginning to add two and two together correctly, all you need is (HT to the irreplaceable Billmon at the Whiskey Bar for his brilliant post from which I nicked this)…

The programmes of the Two Minute Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teachings.

George Orwell
1984
1948

However, in the end the stupids already have buildings -- constitutionally inviolate buildings -- in which they can enact their own, ridiculous creation mythology over and over again to their widdle heart’s content.

They’re called “churches”, so why do they need a museum?

Because this is about the distinction between form and function.

Deep, deep down these people suspect they’re morons, which is why they need the constant reassurance of their Leaders and their God that they are not. They’re a mob, and a mob can always provoke fear, but in the end they crave the one thing they do not, and never will have: respect.

Respect, and the matriculation into the halls of wisdom of their idiotic ideas.

And since that’s never, ever going to happen, they need an alternative. One that their leaders are happy to provide.

Because part of the tragic deficiency of these people is that they cannot comprehend the difference between an Idea and a Representation Object. A pathetic fact they prove over and over again.

This is what every American Flag Burning debate boils down to: the rage of people who reflexively choose to value a Symbol over the Constitutional Ideal for which that symbol is a proxy.

This is what every Confederate Flag Worship debate boils down to: the rage of people who demand that the fake, manufactured history of their hate rag efface its actual history as a calculated symbol of segregation, lynching and Southern terrorism for much of the 20th century.

This is what every Fundamentalist punch-up comes down to: the rage people who furiously fetishize the literality and inerrancy of a book which is neither, and demand that their Idol trump both the Constitution and genuine religious scholarship.

These are the people to whom the GOP panders because these are the people on whom every one of their victories depends. And to that end they are they are cultivated, fertilized and praised to rafters.

And since they cannot comprehend the distinction between a Building and the Academy, WTF? Animate a few dinos frolicking with Adam and Eve, call it a Museum and Bingo!

Instant parity with actual Science!

Sure it’s every bit as childish and ridiculous as me putting a pair of Eisenhower’s underpants on my head and claiming that I'm the co-architect of the D-Day invasion.

But of course, I’m not the GOP’s target demographic.

(Oh and one correction to the actual article. Ms. Anderson explains the several words and phrases at the end of the article under the heading of "Terms of debate".

She is mistaken.

There is no debate.)

The Crapostle’s Creed

I believe in the Confederate States of America,

the True Government of the USA,
and in Modern Conservativism, Its only Son, our Cult:

Which was conceived by George Wallace,

thrived under Jerry Falwell,
suffered under the Dirty Hippies
and is now enduring the mortification of “oversight”.

Which is descending into a Hell of the Liberal Media's making.

But will rise again from the dead.

And ascended into heaven on a cloud of Aqua Velva

and sit at the right hand of Reagan the Daddy Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the Dirty Hippies
who keep rubbing our noses in the fact
that we are lying, stupid, odious sacks of shit
and wrong about everything.

I believe in Hate Radio, Fox News,

the Impeachment of Democrats for trivia,
the forgiveness of Republicans for any and all crime and treason,
the resurrection of the Party,
and War everlasting.

Amen.

David Brooks

The Power and The Glory.

About every nine columns, David Brooks goes absolutely off-the-monorail monkeyshit over some slight against one of his pet Conservative causes or peeves and violently embraces his inner Limbaugh.

For the other eight he tamps down his seething rage against Reality and maunders on about the woes of flying in aer-o-planes, or waxes mush-headed nostalgic for the sporting days of his youth, or just copy/pastes in other people's research on brain chemistry and says "hmmmm" -- confining his howls of outrage to a muffled, pillow-biting, hrrrrmph.

And in that you can see the pasty hand of intentionality and design.

After all, as long as Our Mr. Brooks can wheel his great, moon face from the NYT, to PBS, the Chuckles Rose Show, or the Sunday Mouse Circus, and softly expound wingnut talking points, then the pig people have some soft, pink, “respectable” upright-walking spokesman from whom they can draw sustenance for their execrable ideas.

But about every ninth time he puts pen to paper, Bobo suddenly decides he is instead some kind of wingnut warrior/poet. On those occasions Tom Friedman helps him shave from head to toe, then he oils himself up, squeaks “Prepare For Glory!” into his makeup mirror and leaps into his cracker-dry little column looking for blood.

Which, first and foremost, considering that Brooks is not so much a boil on the ass of journalism, but an ingrown zit just inside the rim of journalism’s right nostril, is terribly, terribly funny.

Because this pathetic little fraction of a journalist has one and only one schtick: Defender of the Faith.

If Limbaugh, Dobson, Rove and the rest are the Inquisition of the Church of Reagan, creatures like Bobo are supposed to be its Jesuits. Supposed to be able to rise to the defense of the Cause with some veneer of intellectual rigor, as Fox and Hate Radio work the mobs and torches.

And let’s face it, his Faith is dead. His dogma blown to atoms by an unbroken string of unmitigated failures.

He is an empty, pastel sack, stuffed with smaller, emptier sacks, lint and Bush/Cheney ’04 bumper stickers, because at the root of his problems are the simple truths that:

1. Bobo’s “Secret Genius” of a president lied us into Iraq. Deliberately and with premeditation.

2. Compounding the morale bankruptcy of duping a grieving nation into an unnecessary war is the fact that Bobo’s “Secret Genius” of a president has prosecuted his war as if unparalleled incompetence were a virtue and unwavering pigheadedness in the face of one’s own unprecedented incompetence was something for which they gave out shiny, new dimes.

3. It turns out the only consistent through-line of this Administration is the ruinous pattern of loony-ideology-based decisions, executed by incompetents, profiteered by cronies and ultimately covered up by thugs. It is the Bush Administration DNA.

This is what Bobo is now stuck defending.

So, like all Neocon Regime Dead-enders, Bobo longs for the glorious days of old.

He dreams of loping again over great, wide swaths of issues in his Seven League Conservative Boots. Longs for the bygone era of big, empty rhetoric about the Conservative Utopia to come once the Dirty Hippes are swept away. Yearns to be able smother honest debate by hurling terms like “Conservative Compassion”, “Conservative Competent”, “Conservative Honor”, “Conservative Pragmatism”, “Small Gummint”, “Stand behind the Commander-in-Chief” down from the heights of his NYT aerie.

After all, what good is it to have napalmed and conquered Mount Olympus if you can’t use it to rain lighting bolts down on the Evil Liberals?

But of course, Bobo can’t lope anywhere.

He, like all of his ilk, now huddle together on a vast, rubble-strewn plain, unable to move in any measurable way except for the slow tumble of their own fucktard Brownian motion, having stranded themselves in a minefield they themselves laid.

A millimeter to their left, Katrina.

A little to the right, the unfolding horror of the Department of Justice.

Ahead of them, filling the entire horizon, the vast, lie-studded catastrophe that is their Excellent Iraqi Adventure.

To the rear, a million lines of shrill, self-righteous prose from the Clinton years about the need for Presidents to be held to the most rigorous possible standards, investigated constantly no matter how trivial the reason, and impeached for any infraction. Prose now stacked beneath the Republican Party like ancient dynamite: lethal, volatile, and liable to go “Boom!’ at any moment.

Behind every yelp they want to make about how awful and mean everyone is now, leers the demon rictus of Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Jerry Falwell.

Over every fake protestation they want to register over how terrible the partisanship has become, Conservative Kingmaker Grover Glenn “bipartisanship is just another word for date rape” Norquist looms.

Rumbling just below the surface of every reckless demand for “More War!” when we have no more troops to send anywhere is the conspicuous absence of Republican cowards ages 18-45 that are staying away from the war they demanded in their millions.

And ringing in the air are the voices of millions of Dirty Hippies. Those who have spent the last 30 years begging, pleading, warning and lecturing the Party of God to please-please-please don't tear down our vital institutions and erect a labyrinth of barbed wire, nitroglycerine and hate.

That the day would come when you may actually need to solve genuine problems, and the machinery you are giddily smashing today for narrow, short-term, partisan gain is the very machinery you will need to solve those problems tomorrow.

Well, that day has now come.

What was foretold has come to pass, and the very best regime dead-enders like Bobo can do now is mill around, take the occasional potshot at a Clinton, and every so often freak out at their confinement and beat their faces against the invisible bars of this prison of their own making.

As he did yesterday in his column, “Ending the Farce” and about which much has already been written.

The low points in this oozing mashup of lies and doctrine were:

“The drama opened, as these dark comedies are wont to do, with a strutting little peacock who went by the unimaginative name of Joe Wilson."

Shorter Bobo: How come Dirty Hippies get all the chicks!?

Slightly Longer Bobo: That sumbitch Joe Wilson has better plumage than me. His hair: fertile and luxuriant. His “take” on this Administration’s perfidy: dead on. His wife: hot and smart. And here I sit, a balding hack on the wrong side of history who must make do pleasuring myself into a tube sock while leafing through the National Review and dreaming of Maggie Thatcher.

Where’s the fucking Justice!

Joe Wilson is then variously described as “P.T. Barnum of the National Security set” and “an inveterate huckster”.

He and his missus were “creepy”.

Those who think poorly of a White House willing to sanction burning an undercover agent as part of a larger, pre-cooked plot to panic America into the war Neocons wanted all along are full of "fevered vapors and gleeful rage”.

The Plame Story “pretended to be about the outing of an undercover C.I.A. agent.”

Anyone in the media who was genuinely pissed at how far into the cesspit the Bush Regime had sunk was merely “artificially appalled”. Fitzgerald was “throwing journalists in jail” and the whole of it was “like watching a city of Ahabs getting deliriously close to the great white whale.”

Libby was:

"the only normal person in the asylum.”

“People who knew him thought him discreet, honest and admirable.”

Translation: I knew him. We had lunch, and he paid for his own salmon! And such a sweet-sweet smell of English Leather coming off of that man! This is not some swarthy cutpurse; Libby is a friend to inbred D.C. establishmentarians, and a dog-loyal thrall to his demon master. What higher virtues can there be?

Then:

“Fitzgerald, having lost all perspective, demanded Libby get a harsh sentence as punishment for crimes he had not been convicted of. The judge, casting himself as David against Goliath, demonstrated an impressive capacity for talking about himself.”

Translation: The Republican-appointed prosecutor asked the Republican-appointed judge to use the Republican-approved sentencing guidelines to determine the amount of time Libby would do in Club Fed. But jail is for little people, brown people and Democrats.

And those who are outraged are simple acting out their “assigned posture in this drama.”

So let’s cut through the fog and the moss and the carnival mirrors, and to the marrow.

As sure as the shitty Greek place that goes up in convenient a fireball one night, what happened to gin up a war with Iraq is case of arson.

A case of something destroyed by bad men for criminal ends, that has now leaped far past the original boundaries envisioned by the match-flicking, gas-spreading Neocon sociopaths.

Something that has grown from an insurance scam to a Dresden, but however complex the story, it is still a group of conspirators acting in secret to the detriment of society. Still a crime to be solved.

And if the crime of lying the nation into a war and discrediting anyone who stood in the way is arson, Patrick Fitzgerald’s team are the firemen,


trying first to put the conflagration out, then trying to sift the crime scene for evidence of who did this and why.

Libby, then, was the faithful rat, in charge of blocking the hydrants


and slitting the hoses so that the firemen could not do their jobs.

And what appalls Bobo is the simple fact that Libby -- a loyal “Cheney’s Cheney” Conservative -- was actually tried, convicted and sentenced in open court.

The terrifying reality that, however weakly, oversight has returned, and the reckless, arrogant, treasonous activities of his friends and sponsors in this Administration may now actually start coming with price-tags that cannot be ducked, dodged, draft-deferred or bribed away. (Pardoned and commuted, yes.)

And the worst nightmare of members of the Party of Personal Responsibility is actually being held personally responsible for the monstrous things they say and do.

The Gilliardians Have a New Joint

(click here)

The beer is cold, the views spectacular, and snark corn-fed and free ranging.

Drop on by and tell 'em "driftglass sent you".

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The "Damn, but I'm tired" edition.

On “Face the Nation” — Dick Lugar talked like a grownup about Iraq. Unfortunately this is not 2004. Too late, of course. And Lugar’s President has proven beyond any doubt that he would rather see the world go up in flames than back off one millimeter from of Chancellor Cheney’s doomed Armageddon On The Installment Plan.

Q: Iraqi’s haven’t done shit, right?

Lugar: Right. These are people who have no experience in government. Who don’t come to meetings. Many of whom hate each other.


On “Meet the Press” — Patrick Leahy talked like a grownup about the criminality of this Administration
.
Then, nothing but horse race toutage.

Oh, and Hillary.

Oh, how she laughs.

Oh, how she smiles.

Oh, how lifelike her hair is.

On the media toxic waste spill that is “Fox News Sunday” — Skeletor Chertoff does his job as a closed tape loop of Administration talking points

Wallace: Why aren’t you raising the Terror Alerts in America?

Chertoff: The election is still too far away for scaring Americans into voting for pinheads. Like a taser to the taint, jacking up Terror Alerts is a very short-duration behavior modification tool.

Chertoff: If, before 9/11, anyone would have suggested that terrorists would hijack planes and crash them into buildings, they would have been laughed at?

Yes, he really said that. The lying, “No one could have anticipated” meme that follows on behind every Administration failure.

In fact, he said it over on “This Week”

On Immigration:

Wallace: Why not fuck all the touchy-feely, “long term solution” crap and just resubmit the requests for all these enforcement-only tools – laser cannons, attack droids, orbiting particle beam platforms -- and use the plight of illegal immigrants to force the Evil Democrats into an embarrassing corner?

Wallace: So…the Preznit is not going to submit his own plan?

Then, “Fairness”

Wallace: Should Congress pass a law to put more Liberal voices on the air? We’ll have a Fair and Balanced debate, next.

I love that Wallace doesn’t even pretend to be anything other that a Bush Regime toady anymore.

Thence came a “debate” between Michael Gallagher – wingnut Hate Radio rodent who never stopped smiiiiiling for a single second -- and Mark Green of Air America Radio.

Gallagher: The “Fairness Doctrine” is an antique, 1949 dinosaur. Like the Constitution. Or the Geneva Convention. An my One Party Christian State has no need of such ephemera (OK, Gallagher wouldn’t say “ephemera”. Would not understand the term “ephemera”. Would perhaps assume it was something queer. Or perhaps a kind of Brazilian snack-cake.)

But the “debate” was easy to deconstruct.

On the one side, Wallace feeding Gallagher softball questions, while Gallagher repeated (because when you serve the Big Lie, that’s the only way it works) “Fairness Doctrine. Fairness Doctrine. You want the Gummit the mandate speech!”

While smiiiiiling.

On the other side you have Mark Green giving a calm explanation of the process of allocating scarce bandwidth and the social compact that is supposed to guide the exchange of these scarce and valuable licenses in exchange for the use of the public airwaves.

“No one here is proposing mandating speech. Nowhere in any written or spoken remarks has anyone on my side ever suggested that we want to mandate particular speech.”

“You want the Gummit to take away mah Free Speech!”

Back and forth and back and forth like that; facts and reason “rebutted” by Gallagher repeating the same lie over and over and over again.

All while smiiiiiiiiiling.

But it works, because of one, simple fact; people who get their opinions from Hate Radio and Fox are as dumb as a pig’s ass on a stick.

You know, these people:

From Newsweek (h/t C&L) (emphasis added)

Poll: What Americans (Don't) Know
We asked Americans about current events, history and cultural literacy. And we got some pretty disheartening results.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek
Updated: 4:53 p.m. CT June 23, 2007

July 2-9, 2007 issue - For our What You Need to Know Now cover story, we asked our polling firm to test 1,001 adults on a variety of topics, including politics, foreign affairs, business, technology and popular culture. The results were mixed, to be charitible. NEWSWEEK's first What You Need to Know Poll found many gaps in America's knowledge—including a lingering misperception about an Iraqi connection to the September 11 terror attacks, an inability to name key figures in the American government and general cultural confusion.

Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in 10 Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right—and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq.
…

The most powerful nation on Earth.

The most prosperous nation in history.

A democracy, in command of a mass, interactive communication technology so potent that, outside of science fiction geeks, two generations ago it would have been considered magic.

Given all of our blessings, all we have going for us, our public discourse on the most vital issues of the day should resonate like so:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives; some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Richard II, III.ii

Instead, we get this:

We represent the Agitprop Guild,
The Agitprop Guild,
The Agitprop Guild
And in the name of the Agitprop Guild,
We wish to welcome you to Punditland.


Sigh.