Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

In which, now that I’ve decided to put together a book, I worry briefly about the whole “fuck” thing, right up until Tom Brokaw and David Gregory decide to generously use their baton-passing moment on the “Meet the Press” platform to preemptively blurb my upcoming opus.

Brokaw: …everyone is paying attention now, in a way I can’t wemembew since waaay back in Nineteen and Sixty-Eight. We are in vewy, vewy difficult times and people want to participate in their own destiny. And of course when I say “participate”, I mean sit back passively and watch as we here in the Stenographic Division of the corporate media give hot rock massages to our fellow employees over in the Politics Division. And so it makes Sunday Morning across all these networks – and especially here on “Meet the Press” – ah, ah, critically important time in American life , isn’t that right teevee’s David Gregory?

Gregory then gives one of the finest Sarah Palin, Pageant-Word-Salad responses I’ve heard in, well, at least several hours:

I think the country is in such a difficult place right now, such a challenging place, people are so engaged… And we just saw it, and what an important interview with the President-elect of the United States on Sunday Morning in a way, on this program, uniquely, can provide insights and answers and ask tough question. To explore the nature of leadership. In Washington and the country and the world. And to hold leaders accountable. As Tim always said to me, as you’ve said to me…

Brokaw: …this show is especially important beyond the Potomac, beyond the Hudson Rover in New York City. uhhhh, across the country. I have been very struck by how important this broadcast is to people as a regular appointment to them.

Gregory then sledgehammers home how indispensably vital the Mouse Circus is to “the people” by presenting difficult issues so that “they can understand it, they can digest it, and they can make it part of their own decision-making and opinion-making in their own lives.”

Translation:

To: Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman of the Board and CEO, General Electric

Dear Mr. Immelt,

Despite what you may have heard from certain Dirty Fucking Hippies quadrants, the poor benighted savages of “Nebraska”, “Colo-Radoh”, “Funk’s Grove”, “Six Flags” and the rest of the largely-unexplored interior of the American continent who buy GE light-bulbs, microwaves and electricity still think we’re relevant, and still believe the thought-pudding we trowel into their heads are actually their own ideas and opinions.

Please don’t fire us!

UR doin it rite!

Love,

Dave and Tom

But ain’t that also just the sad fucking truth?

*Damn, I said it again*

A long time ago, my blogfather and hero -- the late Steve Gilliard -- asked me why I was wasting my fucking time spending my time and talent vivisecting the Mouse Circus. And the simple truth of it was and is that millions of perfectly nice people really go to do their week's political opinion shopping at the Mouse Circus.

That those opinions were more and more turning out to be lethally toxic formulations concocted by Karl Rove in some Neocon Chiba City lab at the behest of his Tessier-Ashpool plutocrat paymasters that were, years after maddening year, going entirely unchallenged by any of Sunday Morning’s overpaid haircuts.

That what I wrote three years ago is as true now as ever:

Left Blogylvania tracks the Sunday Mouse Circus like the mineshaft canary that it is. This puppet show where trial balloons are floated and talking points run around the track is now almost immediately sighted for range and distance by giants like Crooks & Liars and then shelled to dust. This beetle-riddled tree where hacks like McCain and Lieberman nest and preen and regurgitate their smirky horseshit is now routinely used for target practice...

Earlier on MTP, President-elect Obama said “Turns out, premising your economy on 'Greed is Good' and 'What’s in it for me?' isn’t good for anyone. And that spreading the benefits of the economy more equitably means that everyone does better.”

Which is rational and correct, but almost wholly lacking in entertainment value.

However later, just before they blurbed my book-to-be, Brokaw introduced former-understudy-now-Stah! David Gregory as the new Chief Flapjack Flipper at the Mouse Circus with such delightfully awkward, tooth-gritting hostage-reading-a-forced-confession formality that one could not help but wonder what was really going on

in his head.


Gregory, in case you are unfamiliar with his oeuvre, is the one playing “Dawn #2” to Karl Rove’s “Tony Orlando” here:



Dance, baby, dance.



On “Face the Nation”

Senator’s Chris Dodd, D-Central Casting., and Jeff Sessions, R-Dyspepsia talk like adults about the economy and the auto industry.

Then, Tommy Friedman -- dressed in full Sans-a-belt Ninja – unspools his vast,
sticky,
short-circuiting-robot-handed-Mr.-Wiggles-electric bugaloo-gesticulating

superannuated,
h-y-p-e-r-a-n-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e-d
wisdom across the land.


Because the combination of an international banking collapse and massive terror attacks in India just screams

“Show Me A Boob Trick”, don’t you think?


On “Fox News Sunday” as history’s righteous judgment closes over the Worst Administration Ever like a mile-deep mudslide, there she was – Condi Rice -- desperately dragging those goalposts down field one more time. Frantically shaking the Great Etch-a-Sketch of Reality as if it were still the glory days of 2004 when one arched “How dare you question the Dear Leader!?” eyebrow from the White House was enough to still the pens and silence the questions of every mother’s son and daughter in the Big Dollar Media, leaving only a ragged chorus of Dirty Fucking Hippies out on the fringe screaming “You’re being lied to” onto the great abyss where the free press used to be.

Rice: [Iraq] Sure, we can go back now and argue over who did what, who got shit wrong, who outdid who in blood-and-treason points, but that would only lead to war crimes trials, the public humiliation of incompetent apparatchiks like me, and a long-overdue cleansing of the Bush regime’s reeking cesspit of lies and perfidy not solve anything.

It was all “intelligence failure”.

Rice: We have now reformed the system by which we gather information.

Translation: Comrade Cheney not longer has the keys to the shredder, and we’ve taken away the special edition “Fourth Branch O’ Government” Crayons he used to cross out “there are no fucking weapons” and write in “Saddam = 11 Hitlers who have sharks with frikkin' lasers beams on their heads” when the intel wasn’t sufficiently pro-bomb-the-crap-out-of-everything..

Rice: I still think that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein will be a Net Teh Awesome -- because we now have a young democracy. A multiethnic, multiparty, multiorgasmic, multichannel, polymorphously perverse, multiconfessional Iraq.

Multiconfessional?

noun multiconfessional state; multiconfessional states, pl. A country, usually of a multiethnic population, which allows worship of any form of God…

Whatever.

Rice: Iraq is a “trade up”...

Rice: Murderous dictator...

Rice: Invaded his neighbors...

Rice: Used chemical weapons...

It was, in other words, the 1000th tired rerun of every other relentless “catapult the propaganda” operetta which Wallace, for the 1000th time, lets her jabber vehemently out virtually uninterrupted.

Later, Republican Richard Shelby was asked whether or not the GOP would filibuster the Detroit-based American auto industry into oblivion for the benefit of the Confederacy-based Asian auto industry for which he works.

Shelby: Ah thinks we need to debate it and that’s what filibuster is all about. Christmas is a’comin’ and people want to get home.

Wallace: So you’re going to hold Congress hostage?

Levin: Every country that makes cars gives loans to their auto companies.

As regards the billions in unfettered cash already fecklessly thrown at the banking industry, Chris Wallace asks Democrat Carl Levin: Gonna make them grovel a little bit?

Levin: I don’t want anyone to grovel. I want them to prove up and show that this will help people who are losing their homes, small business people. We made the auto industry do it and rightly so, and now the bankers need to do it.

Maybe working for the Murdoch Empire has something to do with Wallace not being able to comprehend the difference between groveling and doing your damn job.

UPDATE: Make that "the Murdoch/Cheney Empire" and a big to h/t Nicole Belle @ "Crooks & Liars" for spotlighting this sweet ThinkProgess audio grab of Wallace on The Mike Gallagher Show:

WALLACE: Let me ask you this, did the Vice President say to you, “thank you so much for defending the president and yes I’m going to be giving you a special exit interview in a couple of weeks?”

GALLAGHER: Did he say all that to you?

WALLACE: Yes.

On “This Week”

Condi Rice continued her “Resume-Builder Final Farewell Victory Grand Tour-Alooza 2008 Fest”, again talking up the “The intelligence problems” of September 11th, and that given what they knew, “The Intelligence didn’t permit any dissent” in the Bush White House.

driftglass: The biggest intelligence failure of 9/11 was a bint named Condoleezza “No one could have anticipated” Rice.

Rice: Before we invaded Iraq, there was a worldwide consensus that Saddam Hussein had bad, scary weapons.

driftglass: Worldwide?! Wow! You mean the Philippines? Argentina? All 22 members of the Polish national intelligence service? Guam? Burkina Faso? All of the countries who learned about Iraq by reading Judith Miller’s regurgitation of Dick Cheney’s lies in the New York Times?

Rice: You don’t have that luxury. You can sit here and play mind games, but 2003 was a post-9/11 world.

OK, you shut up and go away now.


Then, after last week's exciting installment of “Three Conservative and one Donna Brazile”, the “This Week” panel bravely follows up with “Three Conservatives and one E.J. Dionne”, with George Will reprising the role of "Angry Old Man", and Peggy Noonan playing the part of “Bizarrely Affected Pile of Lumber”.



Lastly, with topics like “When does Obama lose his new car smell?” ”The Chris Matthews Show”


continues its inexorable descent into the goofball speculation depths of



Bill Swerski’s Superfandom.




Next week, Matthews will be asking his team of crack reporters...



Where is Joe Biden hiding his secret map to Atlantis?

Could Obama outwrestle an 11-foot, nunchuck-wielding Jesus?

And, if Bill Clinton had a time machine, would he risk cosmic catastrophe and alter the course of the Civil War by giving AK-47s to William Tecumseh Sherman just so, 100 years later, Marilyn Monroe could marry Cassius Clay and give birth to a daughter which he – Bill Clinton – could have sex with when she grew up and became a hot Clinton White House intern?


Later I caught the last 20 minutes of “Galaxy Quest” in which credulous aliens get themselves into deep, deep trouble by mistaking overpaid actors in a lame teevee science fiction series for real heroes with real answers.

Please, David Gregory

You are our last hope!

Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Sweet Homeless Chicago?

From the Chicago Tribune:

Laid-off workers occupy factory in Chicago

Associated Press
9:51 AM CST, December 6, 2008

CHICAGO - Workers laid off from their jobs at a Chicago factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.

About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began staging the sit-in in shifts Friday, the last scheduled day of the plant's operation.

Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days' notice required by law before shutting down. Workers were angered when company officials didn't show up for a meeting Friday that had been arranged by Chicago Democrat U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, she said.

During the peaceful takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said.

"It's a rarely used tactic," Fried said. "But we're in very drastic time and the workers have taken measures necessary to win what they're owed."

...

I know the kind of people who are sitting in that factory right now. Competent, hard-working, middle class men and women who have watched for 20 years as the great wealth created by their increased productivity and longer hours somehow never translated into higher real wages for them, better schools for their kids, or a healthier tomorrow for their community.

Competent, hard-working, middle class men and women who have watched for 20 years while their futures were methodically crated up and shipped overseas.

Competent, hard-working, middle class men and women who have always believed as an article of American Faith that if they just work a little harder and sacrifice a little more, it would all come out OK.

This is a terribly sad story to be sure, but if the auto industry is not salvaged and rebuilt, if the American manufacturing base is allowed to slip from sickly to dead, and if decadent billionaire CEOs and their political and media sock puppets are permitted to relegate the very idea of a decent, living wage the ash heap of history, expect five stories just like this one, every day, in every major paper, for the next 20 years.

Come Right In, Mr. Brooks.

Your table is ready.

Anonymous Asks

Well...as someone who spends a good deal of time on the intertubes...I just have to ask: Why are you the only one pointing this shit out on a regular basis?
Andrew is nothing more than Cokie Roberts with an accent and testicles...and yet Bill Maher still invites him back to dominate whatever panel of woosies he sees fit to put up with him.
The vast amazing bankruptcy of the conservative movenment remains a bigfoot on the MSM screen for the immediate future...despite their recent extreme public repudiation. What will it take to get this story some real traction?
Global economic collapse doesnt seem to have done the trick.
Just askin......?

Well, by way of an answer, let us remember what Jebus Himself said:

“For where two or three have gathered together in My name,
there will be a velvet rope to keep the rabble away from the cool kids.”

In all human activities, there is a velvet rope; those on the sunny side of it sometimes relish it, sometimes try to kick it down, and sometimes believe it is porous or even imaginary; those on the cold side of it know that it is as real and high and hard and topped with broken glass as any security wall girding a Mexican estate.

Sometimes the velvet rope has a sign hanging from it advising those who seek admittance that they need only work a little bit harder. A little bit longer. A little better.

A little smarter.

A little sexier.

Shinier. Sparklier.

A little more topical.

A little more scholarly.

A little less snooty.

A little to the left and a skosh to the right.

Those on the cold side of it know that this ain’t exactly 100% true.

“Better, smarter, abler” is awesome -- it can get you a guest pass to the bar and once in a great while a key to the kingdom -- but there are way, waaaay too many mopes and nitwits waved right on in as their betters dance their asses off in the foyer, year after year, to pretend that competence in any way correlates to success.

It took toxic decades of Hate Radio and Fox Network junk food to create a public desperately hungry enough for honesty and intelligence to allow a “Daily Show” or “Colbert Report” to flourish not merely as great comedy, but as the Reality Based Community’s de facto teevee news and opinion HQs.

It took the collapse of the global economy, the shredding of the Constitution and a failure in Two!Count!Em!Two! wars after eight, solid years of unrelenting, daily, epic fuckuppery by an Administration of openly sneering idiots and traitors, before Americans reluctantly sent the Party of “I Wanna Haz A Beer With You!” packing and took a hopeful flier on the Smart Guys.

As Glenn Greenwald eloquently notes here, it is a trait that runs through every institution that traffics in influence and power:

...

Leading candidates for [Hillary Clinton's Senate seat] seat still include John F. Kennedy's daughter (Caroline), Robert Kennedy's son (RFK, Jr.), and Mario Cuomo's son (Andrew). In Illinois, a leading contender to replace Barack Obama in the Senate is Jesse Jackson's son (Jesse, Jr.). In Delaware, it was widely speculated that Joe Biden would be replaced by his son, Beau, and after Beau took his name out of the running because he's now serving in Iraq, the naming of the actual replacement -- lone-time (Joe) Biden aide Ted Kaufmann -- "upset local Democrats who believe the move was a ham-handed attempt to engineer the election of Biden’s son, Beau, to the Senate in 2010."

Meanwhile, in Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, who was appointed by her father to take his seat in the U.S. Senate when he became Governor, yesterday warned Sarah Palin not to challenge her in a 2010 primary, a by-product of tension between those two as a result of Palin's defeat of Lisa's dad for Governor. In Florida, Mel Martinez's announcement that he won't seek re-election in 2010 immediately led to reports that the current President's brother, Jeb, might run for that seat. And all of that's just from the last couple of weeks.

The Senate alone -- to say nothing of the House -- is literally filled with people whose fathers or other close relatives previously held their seat or similar high office (those links identify at least 15 current U.S. Senators -- 15 -- with immediate family members who previously occupied high elected office). And, of course, the current President on his way out was the son of a former President and grandson of a former U.S. Senator.

Isn't this all a bit much? It's true that our political/media class in general is intensely incestuous and nepotistic. Virtually the entire neoconservative "intelligentsia" (using that term as loosely as it can possibly be used) is one big paean to nepotistic succession -- the Kristols, the Kagans, the Podhoretzes, Lucinanne Goldberg and her boy. Upon Tim Russert's death, NBC News excitedly hired his son, Luke. Mike Wallace's son hosts Fox's Sunday show. The most influential political opinion space in the country, The New York Times Op-Ed page, is, like the Times itself, teeming with family successions and connections. Inter-marriages between and among media stars and political figures -- and lobbyists, operatives and powerful political officials -- are now more common than arranged royal marriages were among 16th Century European monarchs.
...

Because at the heart of any human enterprise, there is a club, and “better, smarter, abler” alone rarely gets you in it.

In a propitious bit of timing, I was, in fact, at the very minute I was writing this, watching Arianna Huffington on the Charlie Rose show, pushing her new book (which I believe is entitled “Can I Haz Blogging Too?”) and explaining to Charlie how "blogging" and "linking" works such as, for example, how she linked to Andrew Sullivan's excellent article on "Why I Blog".

(The very next day Andrew Sullivan completes the Circle of Blogging Life:)

Arianna Approves

The doyenne of the blogosphere liked my essay on blogging, "Why I Blog". It got lost a little in the election hoopla. But going through my emails today - and finding so many of you venting, explaining, thinking - I was reminded of this wonderful truth...

Ms. Huffington explained how "magical" linking is (And here I always thought it was pronounced "magical thinking") How awesome it all is. How any citizen can be a Thomas Paine!

Rose: Name the top ten most important people in blogging?

Huffington: Well, most of them are the Huffington Post bloggers.

Rose: OK, yeah, but...

Huffington: Well, Mickey Kaus is one of the best blogging voices. John Amato and his video site. Jane Hamsher (Firedoglake). Josh Marshall. Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic.

Sigh.

Now I love “Crooks and Liars” from top to bottom and occasionally blog there. And FDL is terrific. And the first blog I ever read was “Talking Points Memo”, but however good or bad they are, one minute after celebrating blogging as a non-hierarchical universe where “any citizen can be a Thomas Paine”, the “doyenne of the blogosphere” couldn’t scare up a single “Pick to Click” that wasn’t already part of the Great A-List Blogger Keiretsu.

A keiretsu (lit. system or series) is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. It is a type of business group.

As to Ms. Huffington herself, however one might feel about the content of her blog, given that her business model was:

A) Take goo-gobs of money and buy a media empire.
B) Have celebrity friends write columns for it, and media friends link to it.

to now be making the rounds of the talk shows to push a blogging “How To” would seem to run perilously close to being a bad parody of Steve Martin’s “How To Never Pay Taxes” sketch on Saturday Night Live from 30 years ago:

You…can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes!
You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes!
You say.. "Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?"

First.. get a million dollars…

So, Anonymous, in answer to your question,

There is a club.

"The occasion? Celebrating the taping of an upcoming episode of Charlie Rose featuring writer and semi-retired blogger Andrew Sullivan (left), our own foul-mouthed sister, Ana Marie Cox (center), and conservative blog phenom Glenn Reynolds (right, and yes, they're not standing in order of political inclination)."

Some people are in it.

Arianna Huffington and Andrew Sullivan, venue and date unknown.


We’re not in it.

Photo by Earl E. Gibson III
David Mamet, Arianna, Rebecca Pidgeon


And we’re probably never

Photo by Earl E. Gibson III
John Amato, Arianna, Marc Cooper, Ron Silver

gonna be in it.

Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher, venue and date unknown.


That is the way we humans are wired.

Sometimes, however,

there are compensations.



(For way more than you'd ever want to hear on the subject, the "Not Of The Body" three-part series is available in the Castle Archives.)

Cold Blooded Old Times

...and in this way
they gave you clarity.
A cold-blooded clarity.

However much clarity it may add to my store of wisdom, I find more and more it is not worth the price of being gutshot by the sad, sleazy side of human nature one more time.

The Trajectory of Falling Objects

Which kind of Conservative are you?

Bigot?

Fundy?

Rich?

Or dupe?

Because all of the other self-aggrandizing, self-identified, self-congratulatory subgroups except these add up to nothing more than electoral rounding errors camped way the hell out to the right of the movement’s decimal point.

Political trace elements, now all scrambling to pretend they have no idea who these 60 million other goofballs are that have betrayed the “real” movement and “hijacked” their little six-man-ivory-tower-circle-jerk of small gummint True Believers.

Such are my thoughts when I read this by Andrew Sullivan, 2008:

Rod believes that accepting my civil marriage as equal to his somehow erases the meaning of his own union. But it doesn't. He is free as a person of faith to regard my civil marriage as substantively void and his as substantively meaningful; he is simply required as a member of this disenchanted polis to accept my civil marriage as legally valid.

And then chased it with this from Sullivan, 1999:

Do we not owe something more to the victims of hate? Perhaps we do. But it is also true that there is nothing that government can do for the hated that the hated cannot better do for themselves.

Which, taken together, translates roughly as "Big Gummint solutions for me, but not for thee."

Then I ask the bartender for another round, and he brings me this from Andrew Sullivan from today:

02 Dec 2008 05:05 pm
And They Call It Mormon Love

Donny Osmond on my marriage:

"We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society."

I particularly cherished this sentence:

In fact, some of my best friends are gay.

I suspect he has as many gay friends as Sarah Palin.
…

And I sez to myself I sez “Hells yeah! I mean, in these modern times what sort of sap could possibly hold themselves willfully ignorant enough to fall for that ‘some of my best friends’ horseshit?"

And then the barman sez to me "Here's who", cracks open another vintage “Sullivan, 1999” and pours me a jigger:

[Mencken] reminds me of conservative friends who oppose almost every measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as haters, and on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real life, I know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice toward me or other homosexuals whatsoever.

Sigh.

Bang head on bar and swear like Clarence Darrow being cut off in traffic by Sarah Palin while she yaps on her cellphone to Joe the Plumber.

Of course, Sullivan is plenty smart enough to know that “real life” also includes that moment you speak up, stay silent or join in when the bigot mob is rising like a tidal surge. That moment when you bring your money, faith or influence to bear in support of or in opposition to an issue. And that moment when you step into the voting booth and decide whether or not to use the franchise your forebears died for to keep your “dear friend” a second class citizen.

Now it so happens that I am a big believer in personal, ethical evolution. I believe that a person really can learn from touching the hot stove; really can learn to be less of a shit and more of a human being.

But there are a couple of rather large problems with applying that theory here, the first being, like most of the other Wingnut Apostates we see these days wandering the streets of our fair nation, weeping and rending their "Haig '88" tee-shirts, their fury is entirely centered around yet another self-serving deception: that the Party they joined was a Conservative Camelot presided over by Reaganite Royalty who practiced and preached free markets, Small Gummit and individual liberty until Karl Rove and George Bush snuck in in the middle of the night, coshed them on their noble heads, and messed it all up.

Then, by jiminy, these perceptive Apostates positively leaped to their columns and microphones, and went a-galloping off through every Middlesex village and exurb shouting…!

Shouting…

Shouting….what?

That the Republican Party is top-full with bigots and fascists and douchebags?

And shouting….to whom?

The 60 million Americans who have known this – seen it plain as noses on faces and have been shouting/leaping/hair-on-fire-bellowing trying to get you to notice it – for the last quarter of a century?

Or are you trying to warn the douchebags, bigots and fascists to be on the lookout for douchebags, bigots and fascists?

The problem with absolving Sullivan isn't that he is late to the party. It's that he is Very Late. A suspiciously large number of decades late -- especially for someone who actually gets extremely well paid to be an astute observer of politics and culture -- which leads to that second credibility problem: Timing and money.

The Modern GOP, as is now painfully clear, has always been the furious white guy party. The Jebus party. The gun-fetish party. And the all-of-them-riding-the-short-bus-to-school-together Party.

Not exactly an appetizing bill of electoral fare -- certainly not the kind of people you’d ever trust to baby-sit your Constitution -– but fortunately the Party of God was also the Party of Money, and so the GOP did what any hagged out failure with a ton of cash would do: it went out and bought itself some credibility!

It bought itself a whole religion, complete with satellites and universities. It bought institutes and governments. It underwrote think tanks and teevee networks. Book publishers and spokesmodels. Coast-to-coast radio coverage and “serious thinkers”.

And it bought itself a teevee-friendly veneer of diversity.

What the Right needed was a light coating of urbane respectability to buy them enough time and access to destroy the country.

And it was people like Sullivan who happily lent it to them.

On the Left, the technical term for a gay or minority political writer is…writer.

But on the Right, the technical term is “celebrity”, which meant as long as people like Sullivan were onstage doing their dancing Conservative monkey act, the Party of God could point to them and say “See, we’re not haters” to the press.

And as long as the con game played itself out, times were good in Tokenville, high-paying gigs were plentiful.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but without the word “Conservative” tacked to their resumes, people like Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks and a growing nest of “Obamacons” would all have had to go looking for honest work a very long time ago.

And so Sullivan miraculously managed to miss the moral dumpster fire that was the Conservative movement as it burned cheerily away in his own back yard year after year after year…

…until the day that Conservatism’s Brand Identification started to fall faster than Port A Potty stock the day after scientists figure out how to turn shit into gold.

Which leaves the Apostates with a serious cash-flow problem.

Over on the Progressive side, nobody in the world is going to pay to read Andrew Sullivan’s thoughts on being a gay liberal.

And over on the Conservative side, well lets just say the Stormfront “Blood and Soil" types appear to be gobbling up those leftovers for 10 cents on the dollar.

And so with the con folded up and gone leaving behind nothing but a trunk full of faded copies of the “Contract with America”, the fairy tale of a treacherously betrayed Conservative Camelot was born.

Or, as the Shrill One put it just yesterday when quoting Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

The Bush Recession

Bigger!
Harder!
Longer Lasting!

From CNN:

It's official: Recession since Dec. '07
The National Bureau of Economic Research declares what most Americans already knew: the downturn has been going on for some time.
By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer
Last Updated: December 1, 2008: 5:40 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy.

The NBER is a private group of leading economists charged with dating the start and end of economic downturns. It typically takes a long time after the start of a recession to declare its start because of the need to look at final readings of various economic measures.

The NBER said that the deterioration in the labor market throughout 2008 was one key reason why it decided to state that the recession began last year.

Employers have trimmed payrolls by 1.2 million jobs in the first 10 months of this year. On Friday, economists are predicting the government will report a loss of another 325,000 jobs for November.

The NBER also looks at real personal income, industrial production as well as wholesale and retail sales. All those measures reached a peak between November 2007 and June 2008, the NBER said.

In addition, the NBER also considers the gross domestic product, which is the reading most typically associated with a recession in the general public.
...

The NBER did not give any reasons or causes of the recession. But it is widely accepted that the housing downturn, which started in 2006, is a primary cause of the broader economic malaise.

The fall of housing prices from peak levels reached earlier this decade cut deeply into home building and home purchases. This also caused a sharp rise in mortgage foreclosures, which in turn resulted in losses of hundreds of billions of dollars among the nation's leading banks and a tightening of credit.

The current recession is one of the longest downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

The last two recessions (1990-1991 and 2001) lasted eight months each, and only two of the 10 previous post-Depression downturns lasted as long as a full year, according to the NBER.

...

Worst.
President.
Ever.

The (Conservative) World is Flat(land)

When I saw the graphic above the other day I thought, Jesus, what a creepily sterile Jello mold into which to pour the toxic contents of the massively failed and fatally deluded Republican foreign policy under George W. Bush.

And when I read the accompanying text, I couldn’t help but picture a clutch of desiccated conservatives crouching around a dying fire in a dim, filthy cave, doomed to play some moldering hybrid of "Trivial Pursuit" and "Stratego" on and on forever. People so completely alienated from the horror they had made that they hadn't bothered to notice they were dressed in rags of the soldiers their policies had senselessly killed.

That the dice they cast were carved from the knuckle bones of the hundreds of thousands who had perished in their rancid war.

From Ross Douthat at "The Atlantic" (which has been cut up shamelessly by me and which we begin in medias res):

The comments that originally accompanied it are from last June, in response to an earlier post of mine on right-wing realism, but they look pretty prescient now:

I think what the GOP is really missing is a particular kind of realist - a Hamiltonian. The pre-war GOP had two wings: Jeffersonian (isolationist) and Hamiltonian (internationalist). The "liberal internationalism" that dominated the Democratic Party and the nation from FDR to JFK was a marriage of Hamiltonianism and Wilsonianism…

The Vietnam War led to the emergence of a left-wing Jeffersonian wing in the Democratic Party, while the neo-conservatives brought Wilsonianism into the GOP so that, by the time of the Reagan Administration, the big tent enclosed Hamiltonians, Jacksonians and Wilsonians, while the Democratic Party was divided between Wilsonians and Jeffersonians….

The Bush Administration's foreign policy has been a blend of Jacksonian and Wilsonian impulses. Post-Fiasco, the divisions between these views…

But this is precious little sign of a revival of Hamiltonianism - a hard-headed realism that is internationalist in orientation.

At least, there is precious little sign within the GOP. Daniel Larison has mocked Senator Chuck Hagel for calling his colleagues "insulationist" - what he means to call them is "Jacksonian." They aren't "isolationists" (Jeffersonians) but they are introverted…

Hagel is a Hamiltonian; so is Lugar. And, as you might have noticed, they are being run off the reservation even though, as Larison notes, they have not actually repudiated interventionism at all (which, as internationalists, of course they cannot).

The more interesting question is whether Hamiltonianism will be revived within the Democratic Party. As a (mostly) Hamiltonian myself, I certainly hope it is revived somewhere, for the sake of, well, the national interest.
…

And so they have, it seems. Now the question is whether the GOP can endure as a Wilsonian-Jacksonian coalition, or whether it needs a strong infusion from another quadrant ...

One way to think about this is to imagine a variant on the Millman Chart that organizes the four tendencies by their relative hawkishness: In this division, the Wilsonians and Jacksonians would both fall on the hawkish side of the line, while the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians would…

…the Wilsonians or the Jacksonians. At the moment, then, the Hamiltonian shift toward the Democrats leaves the GOP dominated by two factions that both tend to err on the side of hawkishness,,,.

In theory, one could imagine this problem being solved by a revival of Ron Paul-style right-wing Jeffersonianism (which aspires, of course, to drive the Wilsonian neocons out of the party, and create a Jacksonian-Jeffersonian GOP)…

I still think that the congruence between the Jacksonian views of the GOP base and a Hamiltonian take on the world offers fertile ground for a right-realist revival.

Yes, they really do talk like that: prating wannabe Disraelis and bloodless dime-store Pattons drawing alchemist’s comfort from muttering empty incantations of luck and wisdom while dumping the bloody, shrieking, global mess they made out of chaos, fear and failure into a two-dimensional containment device built from cheerfully congruent angles and single, reassuringly-declarative nouns and adjectives.

A clean, square plate of Cartesian comfort food.

But however reassuring the Kings of this Conservative Flatland may find their lackluster, little map of their made-up little world, it was at a minimum at least one, full dimension short

of being anything approaching a proper tool for framing the fearful and failed symmetry of our nation’s stupidest foreign adventures.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Mawkets!

Mawkets is wha bwings us togeveh today.



In which we break up the usual flow and lead in with this print media story, fresh and hot as the empanadas from the bakery down the street.

AP: Bank Lobbyists Had Big Role In Fallout

POSTED: 7:01 am EST December 1, 2008
WASHINGTON -- An Associated Press review of regulatory documents finds that the George W. Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed.

The review shows the government buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed and ignoring warnings that foretold the financial meltdown.

California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006 warning of foreclosures and other horror stories. She lost her job about a year later in the housing implosion.

The aggressive lobbying by banks included assurances that the now troubled mortgages were OK. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone.

The administration belief in market forces and reluctance to intervene has, ironically, ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.
...

Which was, of course, ushered in thanks to a previous Republican-led death-spiral-orgy of debt, leverage and speculation.

Which was, of course, followed by a massive Republican-led effort to heal the markets-gone-berserk by heroically doing absolutely nothing whatsoever as thousands of farms failed, thousands of factories closed and millions were tossed out of work.

Which has been, if you've been paying attention, precisely the let-it-all-burn-'cause-that'll-teach-'em "solution" to fire safety that certain Republicans have been flogging ever more hysterically over the last several weeks.

Republicans who were weaned on the Wingnut God’s vinegary teat to believe that Franklin Roosevelt was a monster and have firmly maintained ever since they grew into their Big Boy pants and vinyl-based hairpieces that what this country really needs to set things right is a Great Depression do-over.

Republicans like, say, George Will, who extends his tour as bishop of the Church Hooverism

(Founded by Saint Herbert, who suffered under Roosevelt, was crucified under Johnson, rose again under Reagan and became, under Dubya, a truly World Financial Church; One Free Market, global, holy and capitalistic) into a third, livid week on This Week….

Which, after letting Will get beat like a rented mule when the odds were even, opted to go back to their older format featuring Three Conservative and one Donna Brazile.

Or, if you prefer, Goldileft and the Three Boors

Conservative #1: Torie Clarke, who…

…has served as the press secretary to Senator John McCain and held positions on the staff of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. She subsequently moved to the Pentagon to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs during President George W. Bush's first term in office, under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Clarke currently serves as the Senior Advisor of Communications and Government Relations for Comcast Corporation.

Clarke has been a close colleague of Mary Matalin since the Reagan administration.

Conservative #2: Matthew Dowd:

During the 2002 election, Dowd was a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee.

During the 2004 election, Dowd was chief strategist for George W. Bush's re-election campaign.

And Our Mr. Will as Conservative #3.

Clark: Just because things are on fire and Conservatives who believe in fucking up the government have been in charge of the fucked up Gummint, is no reason for more Gummint.

Dowd: I must agree with George Will. At a time when confidence in Gummint is at an all time low, proposing Gummint solutions is tricky.

Translation: At a time when Conservative incompetence, perfidy and malice has driven confidence in Gummint to an all time low, proposing Gummint solutions is tricksie.

Dowd also opined that if Barack Obama wants to prove to Conservatives that he loves America he needs to cut Democratic programs.

Oh how I do love it when Republicans get together and talk about unity and sacrifice and what Historic Victory Democrats need to give up and cut to because they need to prove to Epic Fail Facestabber Republicans that they’re Good Americans.

Will: It is possible that everything is fine. That it’ll all work out and the Evil Gummint shouldn’t do anything. Right now, most mortgages are being paid off. Most people are working. Go, Hoover, Go!

Translation: Mawkets that bwessed effect.

That dweem wiffin a dweem.

Looks like management finally read the hundreds of “Stop putting actual smart people and economists on the show that humiliate George Will” comment cards that George Will has been stuffing into the ABC suggestion box, because this week, instead of humiliating Will once again and to his face, Robert Kuttner had to rebut this drivel prospectively and from all the way across the dial on PBS’s “Now” (h/t Heather @ Crooks and Liars).

An hour later, the same snuffling nonsense showed up over on ”The Chris Matthews Show” (where we learn that the Republican Party is now apparently divided between the Bill Kristol wing and the “Rush Limbaugh wing”)

Katty Kay: People are scared. Even economists are scared, and they’re not even human: they’re 93% silicon, 12% metal filings, 15% guns and 20% butter!

driftglass: But that’s…140%?

Katty Kay: And you wonder why we’re in trouble?!

David Ignatius was honest enough to opine “The (Obama) honeymoon is a hurricane.” The Republican Party doesn’t know its ass from its eyeshades anymore. They have no idea who they are.

But Chris “All tactics/No principle” Matthews bulldozed on relentlessly, arguing that the crazy Left will fight anything that looks conciliatory, which will have the virtuous effect of giving Barack Obama the chance to push back and show the Wingtard Right that he’s not a…Democrat?

Or something.

Because only in the doodlefuck MSM terrarium does a razor-thin/stolen election on the Right equal an endorsement of the most radical, failed, Neocon policies…while an overwhelming mandate for Progressive Issues is merely a golden opportunity to sell those very issues out at remaindered prices to appease the opposition, who are the last defenders of a completely bankrupt political ideology.

Later, Matthews asks “Is Bush gonna hang around and do ex-President stuff after he’s gone?”

No. He’s an idiot.

Fuck no. He’s a fucking idiot.

Hahahaha! Oh God, we’re you serious?!

Matthews: Boy, you guys sure all talk big now that he’s leaving.

Once again proving that many a truth is spoken in jest.


Lastly, on “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace helpfully reminded Lindsey Graham that he sorta kinda said President Elect Barack Hussein Obama would suck and we’d all probably be smothered in our sleep by his Sekrit Muslim terrorist buddies.

Huh? Remember that? Huh? Huh?

Picture of Graham taking out a handkerchief the size of a mainsail and mopping his sopping brow from chakra one up, over and back down to his hand-puppet hole.

Then came the Very Stupidest Question So Far This Year…

Wallace: Are you satisfied that Bob Gates will follow Barack Obama’s orders?

Graham: The Surge was Awesome!

So Wallace then repeated the question again, slower -- “Is Bob Gates gonna listen to Barack Obama’s or is Barack Obama going to listen to Bob Gates?” – as if it actually made sense, but just hadn’t been heard correctly. Although I suppose this sort of zero-sum, “Who will be the footstool and who will wear the hobnail boots” thinking is the inevitable legacy of working for Rupert Murdoch.

Then came a commercial for an Exciting!New!Fox!Show! called “Secret Millionaire” (tag line, believe it or not: “Share The Wealth”) presumably because when the Evil Gummint helps poor people, it lacks the “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” entertainment value of a WalMart doorbuster pre-Christmas stampede and is therefore best left to the munificence of rich people on Fox reality teevee game shows.

Or, as Shakespeare put it (and I later abused it):

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods of Mawkets;
They kill us for their sport.”

After which Saxby Chambliss assured America that he trusts “the financial community” but not Wall Street.

Word has it Saxby Chambliss also always trusted Wayland Flowers

But was deeply suspicious Madam