Spank Bank

So Wolfie's got hisself a new comb-licker on the side, see, and he also happens to oversee a large bureaucracy, and he's already morally and intellectually corrupt, so it's only a matter of time before people do what comes naturally....

The World Bank's board of directors yesterday announced that Shaha Riza's promotion and pay rise were not reviewed by an ethics committee nor the board's chairman, before being authorised by Mr Wolfowitz, a former deputy defence secretary of the United States and a leading architect of the American invasion of Iraq.

Mr Wolfowitz directly intervened to arrange Miss Riza's move to the US state department in 2005, where her salary was increased from $132,660 to $193,590 (£97,000), topping the $186,000 salary of Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state.

Miss Riza, who has dated Mr Wolfowitz since 2002, when he separated from his wife of 30 years, was moved, as World Bank regulations prohibit spouses or partners from supervising one another.

The punchline to all this is that Wolfie's afraid that this will detract from his work against -- wait for it -- corruption. Just brilliant. Kurt Vonnegut or Monty Python couldn't have scripted it any better, comb-licking, holey socks and all.



If there is one thing the minions and lackeys of the Bush administration can be said to have truly achieved, it is that they have completely suspended our capacity for surprise. Seriously. No action is beneath them, no defense too self-serving and hypocritical. In a way, it must be liberating to function like that.

This Wolfowitz deal is actually pretty mild anymore; it won't blip the usual media retards away from their scintillating Larry Birkhead coverage one iota. Hell, if they weren't going to break from it for the growing -- and nauseating -- MC Rove e-mail dump, a pretty clear violation of federal law (can't wait to hear the "no controlling legal authority" defense), nothing will.

I think about that this morning, after watching Contessa Brewer and Michelle Kosinski yapping about this Birkhead clown for five fucking minutes straight, before finally being a responsible parent and flipping it over to Jack's Big Music Show, and considering e-mailing my epistle to MSNBC to start acting like an actual fucking news network for once. Heaps of corruption and lies abound everywhere, literally permeating and undermining our ability to operate effectively as a nation, and these two dingbats are talking about some goddamned custody hearing for the millionth time as if it meant anything to anybody besides the litigants. Seriously, now. What the fuck is wrong with these people, and how do they look themselves in the eye at the end of the day and call themselves journalists?

I'm tired of hearing the oxymoron of "entertainment news" defended as some sort of epistemological palate cleanser for the slower viewers. Bollocks. Watch The Insider or whatever for that shit; that's what those shows are for. Actual news, on the other hand, never takes a break; there is always another reason never to go to the Bahamas and ride the Cankle Train to the courthouse for Kato Kaelin Birkhead's fucking victory lap.

Either be real journalists on a real news network, or be celebrity ass-sniffers on a celebrity ass-sniffing show. One or the other. Otherwise, quit complaining when bloggers -- that is to say, people who watch the news -- get pissy with you for completely abdicating your professional responsibilities. You act like punks, you get treated like punks. It's that simple.