Surge Protector

Declare this an emergency
Come on and spread a sense of urgency
And pull us through

And it's time we saw a miracle
Come on it's time for something biblical
To pull us through

Proclaim eternal victory
Come on and change the course of history
And pull us through

And this is the end of the world -- Apocalypse Please, Muse


Let's meet three of the surviving victims of George W. Bush's judgment. I have very little commentary; their stories speak for themselves.

Faoa Apineru:

Faoa Apineru should be dead.

In May 2005, he was in a humvee driving down a road in Iraq near the Syrian border when a roadside bomb went off right next to him. The blast was enormous. A shard of metal pierced his face and rattled around his brainpan. He was flown to a hospital in Fallujah, then to another one in Germany and to Bethesda, Md. After many surgeries to fix his brain and face, Apineru made his way to the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System hospital for treatment and rehabilitation.

He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He was barely alive.

....

He's not fully recovered from his wounds. He suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, which is compounded by his brain injury. He still goes to therapy and he talks with counselors at the PTSD center regularly. Not long ago, he had an episode; he saw someone on the side of the road. Looked like an insurgent, like the one who tried to kill him with a horrible bomb, and he had bad thoughts. Thoughts that required another trip to the PTSD center.

"They're the only ones who really know what's going on with me," he said.

....

AP grew up in Samoa. That's about all he remembers from his childhood. The explosion took away most of his memories.

Picture it: You are an adult in your 20s and you have no recollection of where you grew up, who were your best friends, or your first kiss.

AP's mother told him he had gotten into a lot of trouble when he was growing up. His father thought the Marines would be a good place for him to learn discipline and stay out of trouble. He found out later that his grandfather had served in the Marines in World War II.

AP joined the corps in 1996 and worked his way up to communications chief for his unit.

He was in Iraq only once. At least, he thinks so. He doesn't remember any other tours. He has trouble remembering how to spell his name.

Everyone has his or her demons in rehab. For AP, it's the nightmares.

"After the injury, I always think there's people against me," he said. "I know it's not true; I know I'm in the U.S. But that feeling will get me off guard whenever I have pain, or especially when I go to sleep because I have nightmares. My nightmares are so real, I can feel it, I can smell it."

He dreams about getting hit. The dream is always the same. The only variation is when it starts and when it ends.

....

AP went in and out of consciousness. He remembers someone trying to cut off his bloody uniform, and saying that he didn't appear to be hurt.

He thought he was shaken but physically fine. He took off his protective glasses and looked in what was left of the humvee's side mirror. Blood sprayed from his nose and a big gash close to his ear.

"I just thought, 'Oh my God. I'm f -- ed,' " he said.

He thought maybe the gash was just a deep scratch. He tried to stem the flow of blood with his finger. His finger sunk in deep.

....

When he finally came to, he had no idea where he was. He was alone in a room. His hands were tied down.

A nurse came in and saw he was conscious. She called others into his room and when someone talked to him, he recognized an American accent. He spotted a man wearing the chevrons of a Marine gunnery sergeant. Finally, something he recognized. He relaxed. He didn't know it at the time, but he was at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md.

His mother and sister were there, too.

"Who the hell are those people?" he asked a medic.

"Dude, that's your mom," the man replied.

"What's a mom?" AP asked.

He was sent to Palo Alto for rehabilitation in June 2005. He had to learn how to walk and talk and remember again.

It was a long and difficult road. AP hated the hospital. He hated the smell. He sprayed cologne everywhere to get the stink of antiseptic out of his nostrils. He took test after test, and was frustrated that he could no longer think the way he used to think and remember the simplest things.

He stayed up late at night, going over and over the tests until the nurses forced him to stop, to try to sleep. He was moved to a different hospital, but he kept running away. There's a reason for that, one he's reluctant to share because people think he's nuts.

"I'm seeing people, you know, who are dead already," he said. Not guys he knew. People he never met before.

Angel Gomez:

Angel Gomez just wants to drive.

That's what he was doing when he got hit in March 2005: driving a 7-ton truck in the city of Ramadi. A piece of shrapnel hit his head just behind the ear. It took off a big chunk of skull.

When he got to Palo Alto, he was barely alive. Couldn't walk. Could barely talk. His family wondered if he would ever recover.

Gomez has had surgery to replace a portion of his skull. For a long time, he wore a bicycle helmet to protect his unprotected brain. Now, his head is intact and the only sign of his injury is a long, ragged scar that goes up over his crown and back down toward his neck, a little like a ram's horn. His hair is growing longer and covers most of the scar. He wears a cap most of the time.

But the brain injury has caused physical problems. He can move his right shoulder, but his hand doesn't work. He can walk now, but he needs a brace on his right leg. He's not sure if he'll ever regain full movement on his right side.

Gomez has a sweet smile and bright eyes. He speaks haltingly, and peppers his sentences with "you know," "like" and "whatever." He will be in the middle of a sentence and stop because the right word, an easy word, simply vanishes from his vocabulary without warning.

....

Does he remember it?

"Oh yeah, I remember it," he said.

Gomez was behind the wheel when the blast hit. The explosion rocked the truck, but didn't knock it over. A jagged shard of metal flew through the air and hit him in the head. He was otherwise unhurt.

"I was really dazed, you know," he said. "I was like, 'Whoa, what happened?' "

His good friend, Jesse Aguilar, ran to the vehicle to check him out.

"I saw his face," Gomez said. "He was shocked or whatever. I guess he thought I was gonna die.

"My brain was like showing and stuff. I didn't know."

Gomez said his skull looked like an egg does when it's dropped on the floor. He had pieces of skull in his brain.

Gomez stayed awake as the corpsmen and Marines put him in a humvee and drove to an aid station. He said a medic had to prevent him from touching his head, so he wouldn't hurt himself any further.

....

A couple of weeks ago, Gomez was discharged from the hospital. He moved into an apartment nearby so he could take a bus to the hospital for therapy. But he was itching to drive. He just wanted to get into his truck and hold the wheel in his hands. And move.

Shortly after he moved into his new apartment, he was on the bus, talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone, and he had a seizure. He lay on the floor of the bus, jerking uncontrollably, as his brain fought with itself.

His dreams of driving again went out the window that day. The doctors say he'll need another six months before he can even think about getting behind the wheel of a vehicle again.

Tim Jeffers:

At 22, Tim Jeffers is learning to walk.

He's missing both legs just above the knee. He has high-tech prosthetic legs with feet encased in new black-suede tennis shoes.

Rehabilitation for him -- getting out of the hospital and on his own -- will take some time.

He lost both his legs just above the knee. He lost a finger, his right eye and a chunk of skull just above his right temple. The wound healed but swelling remains, causing his head to be misshapen. He often wears a bicycle helmet to protect his brain.

....

Jeffers recently had surgery to implant a synthetic piece of bone into his skull. A couple of days later, he developed an infection and the piece had to be removed.

It will be another six months before the doctors try that procedure again.

....

Jeffers was a convoy commander in Iraq, and had been in-country about four months when he got hit. It was May 18.

"We were in a convoy, running along," he said. "Over the radio, someone said an IED went off between a military vehicle and civilian contractor vehicle with us. We were at a security halt, to make sure nothing else happened.

"I was at a T-intersection at the halt, so I was looking around. There was some trash in the area, so I was looking to see if there were any loose wires sticking out. I turned around and there were two mufflers in the middle of the road. And then, "Bang." One of them blew up."

Jeffers was about 3 feet from the bomb when it exploded. His legs were mangled and the bomb blew out his eye. It took out a small piece of his skull.

"I was awake the whole time waiting for the helo," he said. "I was yelling and screaming and swearing. That's all I remember. Three or three and half weeks later, I woke up."

He doesn't remember going to a surgical hospital at the American base at Al Asad.

The blast didn't take off his legs, but they were mangled. "As far as I know, I got my first amputation in Al Asad," he said. "I don't know how many amputations total I had. I think there were about four, going higher and higher on the legs.

"The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with my dad's face over me. He was telling me to blink once for no and twice for yes, and asking if I could hear him. So I blinked twice. I kinda knew why I was in there, even though it took me a couple of minutes to figure it out."

I have no sympathy for Bush's crocodile tears, especially since he keeps insisting on upping the ante, keeps itching to double down, somewhere, anywhere. I hope he cries every day with the knowledge of what he's done, and what he still wants to do. I hope he prays in desperation to whatever spiteful, retributive deity he thinks he believes in for some mask of solace. I hope it gives him nightmares, night after grueling night. The entire world has literally made every effort to try to talk him out of his tree, to steer him away from the path of futility, stupidity, insanity. He has had his chance -- many chances -- to make things right.

He has no right to cry, to grieve. He got exactly what he wanted.

These people, and hundreds of thousands more like them, have to live with the consequences of Bush's decisions every day for the rest of their lives. Why shouldn't he?

Fried Rice

It's pretty much par for the course that the usual goons are attempting to disingenuously assert that Barbara Boxer -- who is, after all, from the heart of Jeebus-hatin', homo-lovin', fags a-gittin' hitched! San Francisco -- tried to "smear" Condoleeezzza Rice by implying something untoward regarding her sexuality.

Rice herself demurs simply that she had thought that, as a single woman, she had come a long way, baby.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday criticized Sen. Barbara Boxer's suggestion that, because she does not have family in harm's way, she will pay no "personal price" in the Iraq war.

"In retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that, that the only question is, 'Are you making good decisions because you have kids?' " Rice said on Fox News.

Come on. That is utter nonsense, and Rice knows it perfectly well. Boxer would not and did not imply any such thing about the decision-making capacities of single people, nor did she, as the other goofballs cynically insist, make any judgments about Rice's personal life, whatever it may entail. (Personally, I think maybe she's just asexual. Some people are; perhaps they just developed different priorities in life. Nothing wrong with that.)

But the thing is that Boxer is absolutely correct about this. Because we have a professional military, and because the citizenry have been dissociated both from the decision-making process and its consequences, there is a cognitive gap between those who actually have skin in this game, those who determine their fates but have no such physical stake, and everyone else, who are neither affecting the terms of the process nor physically participating in the actual war or imminent escalation. I know the Grabthar's Hammer crowd (aka The Knights of Prosperity) like to pretend that they're "contributing" by rubbing the world's nose in their profound fever dreams of vicarious bloodlust, or what they like to think are "ideas" and "principles". But unless we are serving, or have a close friend or relative serving, we are not in the shit, we are merely discussing the smell.

And Rice is indeed fair game for criticism because she has always been -- and continues to be -- one of Fredo's more reliable manure-spreaders any time he decides to drop a deuce.

Former senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), another [Iraq Study Group] panel member, said that Bush's plan is "better than the status quo" but voiced disappointment that he did not agree to talk with Syria and Iran. "Nothing is ever solved by not talking to somebody," he said. Simpson said he was stunned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement that Iran could use talks with the United States to extort concessions. "Where did that come from?" he asked. " What the hell is gained by not thinking of some kind of system to talk? It makes no sense."

Al Simpson is not exactly a pinko commie islamojihadi rent-boy. But he should be a bit more honest about the situation. It is not accidental that they repudiate dialogue with Iran. They don't want dialogue; they don't want peace. They want an excuse to expand the escalation, and take on the mullahs. They didn't laterally move an admiral from PACOM to take over for Abizaid at CENTCOM -- where the only significant body of water is the Strait of Hormuz -- for nothing. They haven't moved a carrier group and a Patriot missile battery to the Persian Gulf for shits and giggles.

And that is why Boxer is right, much righter than Rice's hypocritical defenders and Rice herself will let themselves admit. Someone else deals with the consequences of their grandiose schemes. Someone else foots the bill, pays the weapons contractors and the reconstruction grifters. Someone else takes the bullet, or the sword, or the power drill, or the cluster bomb.

When Pierce Bush has to serve in Iraq or Iran, then Unca George will find a way to jaw-jaw instead of reflexively going for war-war. Till then, it's more cheap sloganeering and cynical posturing, like always. Making this about some imagined insult regarding Rice's personal life (or lack of one) is a ridiculously transparent dodge.

Gas Giant

I think this is one of the more interesting and under-reported stories (understandably so; it's not like there's nothing else going on right now), in that it could set the tone of power politics in Europe for the foreseeable future.

Europe is fretting over its energy supplies following Russia's decision on Monday to halt oil exports to western Europe because of a pipeline dispute with Belarus.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has indicated that Germany may rethink its plan to phase out nuclear power generation. Media commentators in Germany are furious with Russia.

See, Pooty-Poot, he of the transparently benevolent soul and dreamy blue eyes, is consolidating power both internally (squashing dissent; brazenly assassinating journalists and defectors; nuclear terrorism) and externally (restoring an entente relatioship with the ascendant Chinese; shaking down neighbors with exorbitant and sudden price increases on energy resources).

So far Putin's tactics have worked, whether on independence-minded former soviet states such as Ukraine, or de facto satellite dictatorships such as Belarus.

Business daily Handelsblatt writes:

"The case of Belarus harbors a lesson for western Europe: Russia is once again showing how irresponsibly it is handling its increased global role. The world's second largest oil exporter and most important gas producer should be aware that trust and reliable supplies are the most important assets in the energy industry."

"It's precisely this asset that Moscow is putting at stake in its row with Belarus. And in the wake of the conflict with Ukraine, the Kremlin is again proving that it's prepared to use energy supplies as a political weapon. That is why Europe must lessen its dependence on Russian oil and gas despite all Moscow's assurances of friendship."

"And Russia must accept the rules on dispute settlement enshrined in the European Energy Charter. The Russian mechanism of simply turning off oil and gas supplies or doubling prices whenever there's a row is more than impertinent."

Stay tuned on this one. Whether it's murdering and imprisoning political enemies, continuing a dirty war in Chechnya, false-flag terrorism in his own country, or shaking down his neighbors just to remind them who holds all their energy cards, Putin's got major hand right now, and he's clearly not shy about using it. Right now he's just waiting to see what our next move on Iran is going to be, given Russia's business interests in that country. This is Big Picture Strategery stuff, and no doubt Putin is twenty moves ahead of The Decider. If he can use this to start wedging the U.S. and Europe, he will.

Pantloadonomicon

So Crunchy Con Man Rod Dreher has had his come-to-Jeebus moment on NPR, much to the doughy chagrin of Monsieur Pantload:

You'll actually have to go there to hear him 'cause I'm not going to type up his comments. I can't fault Rod for his frustration with the war, though I think he comes across as pretty anti-intellectual and unfair in his tirade — as if there was no good faith or no good arguments for the positions he once held and which lots of folks he respects still hold. I should also say that the comparison to Jimmy Carter is really quite weak. Simply because Carter's feckless foreign policy and Bush's over confident foreign policy elicited similar feelings in Rod doesn't mean that they can be glibly equated. Indeed, even if the result of Bush's foreign policy has had the consequence of projecting an image of weakness around the globe as Rod asserts, that doesn't mean they are similar foreign policies. They do come from very different impulses, I think everyone can agree.

Likewise, simply because Rod has the same feelings as hippies that doesn't mean the hippies were right then (or that Rod is right now). In short, there's a lot of talk about feelings.

He actually has some correct points here -- Carter and Bush, while both being tragically ineffective foreign policy presidents, arrived at their destinations by much different paths, obviously. And Dreher's hippie-based epiphany does not, in and of itself, assert some amazing prescience to hippies per se. If anything, Dreher's being passive-aggressive in his hippie props here, implying that the people who took a principled anti-war stance and stuck to it were dropping acid and forming daisy chains at The Presidio. It's a nonsensical assertion at best, as even the initial wave of anti-war sentiment had plenty of middle-class suburbia voicing its displeasure, when they had the time to get off the hamster wheel and say something. And at this point, even lifelong Republicans, even meat-and-potatoes veterans from the sanctified heartland, have had enough. Is Chuck Hagel a pussy or a hippie, if Pantload or Dreher say so?

This is less interesting in a pure political sense, because neither Dreher nor Goldberg has ever had anything truly insightful to say. Dreher is essentially a milquetoast cultural conservative, a Bobo Lite who fancies himself something of a Hank Hill character, moving out to the heartland because he thinks it's all Jesus and flag factories, and finding out the hard way that a lot of it is crank labs and high unemployment, people squatting in dirt plots with nothing but fear and desperation motivating them. So he's tried to cultivate some sort of spiritual trend among people who drive Hummers to megachurches, because they rilly rilly believe in cultivating a personal relationship with God, especially when He provides a Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts in His house, as well as preacher with a headset mike and a 5000-watt PA system. Raise da roof in His name, yo!

Goldberg is....well, Goldberg -- intellectually sloth-like, to the point where he literally finishes the cover to his next book over a year before he starts writing the fucking thing. He is able to lob epithets at Carter's "feckless" foreign policy without batting an eyelash, apparently forgetting that the word not only means "feeble", but also "careless and irresponsible", like a certain brain surgeon we all know and loathe. So perhaps comparisons of Bush to Carter are not entirely inapt, considering that the end results meet much more than they diverge. Carter cost us prestige on the world stage, but for a lot less blood and treasure, if you want to be practically minded about it.

Which is where this little dance is particularly interesting, at least to me. Again, the political aspect of it is dry and predictable -- someone goes off the reservation; the remaining tribe members instantly find ways to either discredit him or downplay his apostasy. Nothing new to see there. But in the taxonomic, cultural anthropology sense, it is interesting. Actual conservatism used to be at least somewhat practically minded, even at the expense of idealism, not so long ago. Conventional wisdom presumes that 9/11 presented an existential necessity in which conservatism was forced to morph into interventionism, if not actual idealism.

This is flat-out untrue; the pieces were in play long before 9/11. Conservatism did not morph so much as get marginalized by the Gingrich revolutionaries, who subverted and commandeered cultural tropes and semiotic benchmarks to grab power and assert dominance. These people are not conservatives, they are authoritarians. They are pushing power in the guise of idealism, which would be anathema to an old-school conservative. Instead it is interventionism, endless adventurism, wrapped in heuristic affirmations of the people on whose backs their own jihad is waged.

Dreher's instincts, however he arrived at them, are correct. It's not about whether "hippies" were right or wrong, nor "liberals", nor "conservatives", nor the useless pod-people who pretend to be conservatives. Dreher has finally come to the fundamental realization that Bush can not be trusted. That he took six years to figure that out is no feather in his intemellectual cap, but better late than never. Goldbleg's continued employment, on the other hand, apparently depends on his never understanding such an obvious fact. When Bush doubles down in another few months and decides to expand the war to Damascus and Tehran, indiscriminately ending thousands of lives with air strikes and "tactical" nukes, he will find an excuse. That's what he does; that's all he does. But if he thinks that merely being wrong for all the "right" reasons somehow absolves him from taking responsibility for what he tacitly and explicitly endorses -- always at the price of someone else's skin, never his own -- then he's simply compounded his own moral dilemma.

Politicians, and the puling scriveners who follow them around and lionize them uncritically, are an odd lot in terms of accountability. In what other jobs can you be so consistently, tragically wrong, and still be handsomely rewarded?

Afflicting The Comfortable

Seems that the Serious Media have finally found a reason to get upset.

January 12, 2007

Mr. Dan Bartlett
Counselor to the President,
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Dan,

On behalf of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and in conjunction with the White House News Photographers Association, we are writing to express our outrage that still pool photographers were denied access to the White House library on Wednesday evening. As you know, following weeks of preparation and the White House build-up leading up to the presidential address, this was a significant foreign policy speech. Forcing newspapers and magazines to rely on a “screen grab” photo from the Fox News network pool feed is simply unacceptable.

In recent months, there has been a growing pattern of restricting pool photographers to White House events, but the situation Wednesday night for this important speech to the nation is the most glaring.

We expressed our concern to Tony Snow and Dana Perino earlier today, and join the WHNPA in asking that this practice end. These photographers provide a vital service to wires, magazines and newspapers around the world, while also serving as a lasting historical record to the events of our times. In addition, a White House photo release is never an acceptable substitute for independent news coverage. Therefore, in our strongest terms possible, we want to express our disappointment that a decision was made to keep even a single pool photographer from the room, and ask that it never happen again.

Regards,

Board of Directors - WHCA
Steven Scully, C-SPAN
Ann Compton, ABC News
Jennifer Loven, Associated Press
Peter Maer, CBS News
Steve Holland, Reuters
Doug Mills, New York Times
Ken Walsh, US News & World Report
Ken Herman, Cox Newspapers
Mike Allen, TIME

I think we all just vomited a little in our mouths. They've let these guys treat them like something they scraped off the bottom of their shoes for six years and now they're outraged? Seriously? Well, never let it be said that these hard-jerkin'workin' folks don't stand for anything.

This is the long-suffering battered wife, finally standing up to her asshole husband, not because he beats the shit out her once a week, not because he's a useless alcoholic sack of shit, not because he molests the kids, but because he grabbed the remote and turned the channel while she was watching her favorite rerun of Nanny 911.

Consider the events of just the past week, not to mention the context of the past six years (or even the past six months). After the hype campaign for Bush's bright "surge" idea, it was instantly apparent that they were more concerned about appearance than substance, even as Bush demonstrated his utter contempt for the clear message voters and polls have consistently sent by initiating a potentially catastrophic strategic plan, which apparently involves covert aggression on Syria and Iran, to goad one or both into a pretext for full-scale attack. And he even had the gall to go and lie to the troops about his rationales, and the experts' opinions on the viability of this week's master strategery.

But goddammit, the Serious Media will not put up with pool feed press photos. Make no mistake, they are On The Case. Great job, folks. Enjoy the cocktail weenies.

Hall Of Lame

I promised myself that I wasn't going to bother this time around with bitching about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's predictably lame selections this year. But, you know, resolutions are made to be broken and all, so we'll compromise and keep it short(er).

Van Halen is a predictably solid choice, I suppose, but it seems like they should have been a first-ballot selection, which would have been a couple years ago by my reckoning. I mean, Eddie only influenced at least as many aspiring rock guitar players as Clapton or Hendrix, if not more. (So, for that matter, did Randy Rhoads. And pound for pound, a surprising number of modern rock guitar players claim relative unknowns such as Michael Schenker or Ulrich Roth as influences.) Why the wait for Van Halen? And is it a particular lineup, or is the one-album Gary Cherone configuration in as an equal to the classic Roth group or the later Van Hagar?

When Roth left and Hagar joined the band, I got a kick out of the ridiculous "Sam vs. Dave" arguments. Each lineup had its own focus, and as such, really became something of its own entity. The early years had some serious flaws (short albums with second-half filler; waaaay too many covers, most of them not worth bothering with), but made up for a lot of that with innovative playing and energetic riffing. The Hagar lineup featured more solid songwriting overall (for that milieu; bear with me, I don't want to get into any weird pissing contests with lonely Bob Dylan/Nick Drake fans over whose desultory poetry was most evocative of T.S. Eliot while Hagar and Roth were cribbing their "hot dog and a shake" verbiage from a restroom stall), with more attentive arranging and structuring from Eddie, but the solos no longer set your hair on end.

Still, like 'em or not, Van Halen at their prime were the apotheosis of what a great American rock band could and should be. What Aerosmith did with that magical Get Your Wings/Toys In The Attic/Rocks trifecta, Van Halen managed to reasonably replicate with their first three albums. Especially given the particular time period, when legitimate punk bands like the Ramones and MC5 were getting overshadowed by poseurs and post-disco hacks, who in turn paved the way for douchey new-wave androgynes, all of whom deserved to get their sorry asses kicked.

Which brings me to REM. I remember hearing Radio Free Europe on my cheesy little clock-radio when I was maybe fifteen. I had no idea what the words were, but I loved the energy and the melody. It was a great introduction to the garagey sound of what derisively became known as college rock.

But the more popular they got, the more I hated them -- twee, precious, tiresomely simplistic, almost to the point of fucking pomo nursery rhymes. Losing My Religion was particularly disappointing, because I actually liked the song, and then I saw the video, Stipe spasming around in his corner with a bunch of creepy, self-indulgent imagery. Feh. In the end, REM had their moments, but were never truly great. They innovated a few interesting things early on, and stuck around for a while, but that's about it. For me, they became a parody of themselves with Stand and The One I Love, the last in particular because its hooky riff was ruined by the disninterested monotony of the lyrics and vocals. Then the infamous SNL skit with Norm Macdonald's Bob Dole joining The Real World, and leaving to the weepy strains of Everybody Hurts after he overhears his roommates talking shit about him. Great stuff.

I dunno, it just seems like, say, The Cars or Todd Rundgren are long overdue, and I'm sure we can all come up with our own pet selections who've been overlooked. And not to slam the other three inductees too gratuitously, but I honestly can't name more than a song or two from any of them. I know Patti Smith has always been a critics' darling, but professional rock critics are mostly useless. The only thing good about the canonized Lester Bangs is that he died with The Human League's Dare on his stereo, which, you know -- look, as an intellectual exercise, ask yourself what music of the spheres you would wish to hear as you drew your last breath. Maybe you'd go for Bach or Beethoven, maybe you'd say Hendrix. There's no goddamned way you're going to say Human League. That's like killing yourself while listening to Men Without Hats -- which in itself is a rather slow and painful form of suicide.

So anyway, I guess I can't dump on the other three too much, because I'm simply not familiar enough with their respective catalogs. But that in itself would tend to mitigate their influence and effect on mainstream pop/rock music, which I would think counts for a significant portion of the selection criteria.

But I suppose the real issue I have, as I've said before, is that it's a bit enervating to consider this strange notion of trying to turn something which is overtly based on sex and energy and vitality into a fetishized museum piece. It's hard to knock truly great and innovative bands finally getting their due, but it's also difficult not to reflexively consider all the great ones still out there, eligible yet hung up on subjective criteria.

Sacrifice

So the revised master plan calls for more sacrifice -- from everyone but the people who got us into this mess, and the people profiting the most from it.

But new public opinion polls found the US public believes the March 2003 US-led invasion was a mistake and broadly opposes sending more soldiers to a battlefield where more than 3,000 of them have already died.

A USA Today/Gallup survey taken Friday through Sunday showed 61 percent opposed a troop increase, compared to 36 percent who supported it. Forty-two percent said they strongly opposed a temporary troop surge, and 19 percent moderately opposed the idea, it found.

Approval of Bush's handling of the Iraq situation stood at 26 percent, a record low, according to the survey, which had an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points.

And almost half said they believed that no matter how many troops might be sent, the United States cannot achieve its goals, the survey showed.

Another poll by CBS television found that just 18 percent wanted to see more US troops in Iraq, 17 percent favor current levels, 30 percent sought a decrease, and 29 percent called for a complete withdrawal.

The "sacrifice" that's being "asked" for is merely a restatement of the same contemptuous declarations. Americans are being told to put up with more of the same nonsense, lies, and incompetence, despite making their opinions on the subject quite clear at the ballot box, as well as the consistent trend of polls. (Really, "incompetence" doesn't quite cover it. Criminal negligence or depraved indifference would be more accurate.)

We have already sacrificed our common sense and trust in these venal people. They are so utterly corrupt and mendacious that it not only beggars the imagination, but paradoxically becomes almost mundane upon close scrutiny, because it is readily apparent that it is practically an involuntary reflex with them, like the beat of a heart or the drawing of breath. This has been consistently demonstrated by their actions -- Bush repeatedly used his ground commanders as cover for his failures, until they started openly disagreeing with him. So now they have been replaced, and the new generals are already voicing tacit doubts about the realism of a "surge", a "bump", or an "escalation".

It is too late for any of that, and the numbers don't reflect the requirements on the ground anyway. So these professional military careerists have sacrificed their life's work for Junior's folly, and his inability to admit error. Iraqis have sacrificed their lives, their livelihoods, their society for years to come, because the smart guys in their undisclosed locations prayed real hard and decided they knew better than anyone else. The result? Not only did they actually manage to make Saddam look like a martyr, not only have they now empowered the very same thugs who have killed scores of American troops, but they managed to test the notional insanity that some things could actually be worse than Saddam Hussein's blood-soaked mafia running the country. Now it is hell on earth, on the verge of becoming a failed state, perhaps to be pulled back from the precipice by whatever gang of theocratic murderers manages to claw their way to the top of the heap of mutilated bodies.

Is that enough "sacrifice" for the armchair chin-strokers as they postulate their next big Stratego move?

Nobody named Bush or Cheney will be "sacrificing", not with their lives, their wallets, their job prospects. Oh, we may not see another Bush darkening the door of the West Wing for some time, but you can be sure that wherever there's a grift to be had, a palm to be greased, a well-heeled back to be slapped, a Moonie ass to be kissed, a madrassa-supporting sheik to be coddled, there'll be a Bush, with Cheney's rictus behind him and his hand up his ass. There's no shortage of Bushes to be trained for the next generation of partying, running other people's businesses into the ground, and finding a spot at some government trough. It's the surest bet this side of Bill Bennett's video-poker machine.

And speaking of not sacrificing, the oil companies will fare quite nicely out of this, as if such an outcome were ever in doubt:

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.

Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.

Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."

Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.

Well, that's certainly a relief. As long as Halliburton and Shell and the rest of them get their fair share of the big prize, I guess that's what really counts, right? That it gets couched in the rhetoric of futility, of trying once more to square the circle, is apparently incidental. And if perchance we happen to get duped by our new Shi'a buddies into helping them settle old scores with their enemies and their enemies' clans, well, there's your ever-expanding omelet. Eggs everywhere.

What's most galling is the steadfast refusal of the base to acknowledge reality, gleefully at that. One might expect them to be at least regretful about their vicarious sadism, their retributive fantasies of blood and fire spewing forth from Grabthar's hammer or whatever the fuck it is they wank to. This will be yet another last chance, until the can is sufficiently kicked to the next suit, nothing more than scooting the deck chairs around still again, while people who know absolutely nothing about the people we invaded continue to make dumb decisions based on compromised information and bad faith.

Bush will get his way on this, because he has the poker face of the true believer. Either he gets some miniscule benefit of half-hearted doubt, and figure he genuinely believes he has four aces, or he knows better and he's just a ruthlessly cynical bastard. If he really is just bluffing the Democrats just long enough to pass the buck, I don't even know what to say; it's obviously beneath contempt.

The best we can hope for here is for the responsible opposition -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- to at least insert some sort of accountability lingo into this mess. There are no more Friedmans with which to keep dicking around and fumbling for light. Some sort of contingency plan should be appended to this desperation measure, and then hung about the neck of the fools who got us into this, once and for all.

Headline Of The Day

Some Iraqis Express Doubts About New US Strategy

The rest of them are dead.

Cheney's Got A Gun (Again)

Consider yourselves warned. The fearless hunter is off to another petting zoo to blow away fattened, flightless, semi-domesticated game birds. I'm sure we're all very impressed. It's quite a hobby he's got.

(As always, I should probably reiterate that I have no problem with hunting for food. But what people like Cheney do isn't "hunting", it's killing. I don't know what to make of people like that.)

Here's Another Clue For You All

The Knights of Prosperity step on their thumb-dicks again:

Last night, Johnny Assrocket was screeching hysterically about how Time Magazine's Blog-of-the-Year had been hacked, resulting in the destruction of a day's worth of his pearls of wisdom. The righteous ass vowed to "criminally prosecute[]" the evildoers responsible. He also simperingly gave "[t]hanks to the many readers who have expressed their concern," and urged his readers to congregate at the Powertools News bulletin board so they could "heap abuse on the moron who hacked us."

At the bulletin board, various toolsuckers postulated that "some moonbat from Democratic Underground is responsible," that "someone who could do something like this could do a huge amount of damage to infrastructure, if they were given guidance on what to hit," and that "it takes some degree of intellect to hack a site like Power Line." It was also suggested that the hack was a testament to the popularity and influence of the Tools.

And of course it was an inside job, shucked away with scarcely a nod of embarrassment at the notion that anyone needs to commit an act of electronic terrorism by hacking the fuckin' PowerTools blog. It's far more useful being operable than out of commission -- you know where all the morons are congregated, and the nonsense pretty much speaks for itself. Why hack it?

But hey, bonus points to Captain Corndog for going all Joan Crawford on us.



These clowns are writing most of our material for us at this point.

Boehner Pills

Buried in the Faux News coverage of the momentous handing of the House Speaker gavel to Nancy (She's female! And her Frisco cohorts are going to turn us all queer!) Pelosi, Republican brain surgeon John Boner Boehner floated this bizarre nugget o' hypocrisy.

On the House side, members did their part to pledge cooperation, but those claims were clouded by Republican charges that Democrats already aren't living up to their campaign promises.

"I think they're getting off to a bit of a rough start," said incoming House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio

"In 1994 when we took control of the House, 12 years ago, it wasn't that — we wanted to treat Democrats the way we had asked to be treated. And, frankly, that's what we did. What we really expect out of the Democrats is for them to treat us as they would like to have been treated," Boehner said.

But he added, "Republicans on Capitol Hill want to work with Democrats to deal with the issues that the American people sent us here to deal with."

Right. Because when Kotex Sensenbrenner took his wittle gavel home when he didn't get his way, it was because the Republicans wanted to "work with Democrats". They did everything humanly possible to reform a corrupt, pork-laden system, which is why so many of them are now behind bars, and the country is running record deficits. Boner Boehner's party has wanted to "work with Democrats" so badly, and for so long, that they had to have private meetings in the Capitol basement, locking their newfound friends out, telling them to eat shit and bark at the moon.

But now, now they want play nice for the American people. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

Split Personality

John McCain's presidential aspiration is like Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense -- already dead, he just doesn't realize it. His overtures to the evangelicals (who despise him anyway) have lost him the independents who were the most inclined to vote for him in the first place. And his interminable flip-flopping on nearly every issue of substance is going to catch up with him in spades, just as soon as the first big-name herd animal in the media (probably Li'l Russ) corners him on something and makes him commit once and for all. Either he supports Roe v. Wade or he doesn't; either he has a foreign policy plan or he doesn't.

It's too bad, really; McCain's quick wit and ill temper have actually suited him well for the bloc he has reached most effectively. But there's no walking back from being seen repeatedly genuflecting to the tools currently running the show, and their extra-chromosome base. Nobody in their right mind wants anything to do with either group anymore, and they will go in different directions electorally next year, especially if Sam Brownback Mountain becomes more viable with that shitty-pizza bankroll.

McCain's age, his notoriously thin skin, and his exposed lack of any guiding principle or backbone will combine to squash him fairly early in the primaries. Inside-baseball commentators are already positing that there may be more upside to the Democrats' chances if McCain gets the nomination, but it's looking more and more like, barring a dark-horse in the next few months, none of their potential candidates will have quite enough juice to pull the big tent back together.

The Knights Of Prosperity

"Okay, Gomer, you see if Amir Taheri's got a rumor we can run with. Then Malkin and her crew will smear the AP as terrorist appeasers and source fakers, and we'll see if we can find a phunny photo of Kerry appearing to eat alone. That's our cockslap de resistance! Die Dolchstosslegende lebt an! -- Dan Riehl plots strategery at the Hot Air conference.

This has been quite a week for our diligent little pud-pounders on the right. First the resolution of the heated Jamil Hussein question: does he exist, or is the Associated Press so craven, so engulfed in a conspiracy of silence, so besotted with its overt hatred of the troops and Mom and apple pie, that they take a break from urinating on their burning flag to invent a source?

Er, maybe not. But, you know, they're "checking into it" and "moving forward". Also, they're volunteering to serve in a capacity befitting their dedication to The Cause. Not only that, but I have a 15" cock and a billion dollars in the bank. Chase me, ladies!

Ahem. So, we have already established that Hussein does indeed exist, at least for the time being. Expecting an admission of error, or an apology if Hussein turns up in a dumpster, is like expecting a blowjob after a lunch date -- pretty unlikely, as good of an idea as it sounds.

One of their other recent fictional hobby-horses is the Lonely Kerry meme, that on Kerry's recent visit to Iraq, he was ostracized by soldiers because of the "joke" he told right before the election, which was imaginatively recast by the usual armchair Pattons.

Turns out that the infamous photo was taken during an off-the-record interview, which has been corroborated by the two actual journalists who were actually there, as opposed to sitting in Mom's basement armpit-deep in Funyuns and beef jerky, pretending to be Jimmy Olsen on the hunt for the greatest scoop Perry White has ever seen.

The two reporters who met with Kerry that morning are Marc Santora of The New York Times and Mark Danner of The New York Review, The New Yorker and other publications. Both Santora and Danner confimed to me that they met with Kerry -- on the morning of Dec. 17, according to Kerry's office and to Danner. (The person who posted the photo also confirmed that it was taken that morning.)

Danner confirmed to me that he's the guy with his back to the camera, saying his jacket and the back of his head looked the same as in the photo. He added that his position in relation to Kerry was the same as the photo showed. And here's what Danner had to say to me about the empty seats: "If there were empty seats it's because we sought them out. We wanted an empty table so we could talk. It's that simple."

....

Told that the Kerry people had confirmed that the meeting was an off-the-record talk with reporters, Danner replied: "The discussion was off the record, but given the fact that the Kerry people have confirmed it, I suppose it's all right if I confirm it."

"Santora was to my right," Danner also said. "It was very early in the morning at about 8:30, in the green zone. The reason that people weren't sitting directly around us was that we were having a private conversation." Asked if the troops showed animosity to Kerry, Danner said: "Not in any way that I noticed. A number of soldiers came up and asked to have their photograph taken with him."

Gosh, Jimmy, you're never gonna cock-block Clark Kent and get into Lois Lane's panties with that kinda journamalism.

This is pretty standard stuff for them, and certainly not near the most egregious floaters I've seen from time to time over the past decade. But it's all of a piece. Their elected leaders could fuck up a shit sandwich; why should they be any more competent?



Gun Counter Gomer ponders whether Drudge or World Nut Daily is more likely to have the better scoop. Successmanship, like victory, is just around the corner.

[Update: Glenn Greenwald categorically iterates the point that he (and I, and many others across the internets) keep making -- the problem with the Knights is not that they're "conservative". They're not conservative at all. It's one of those "I don't think that word means what you think it means" deals. They're authoritarians through and through, and what needs to happen is for the media who enable these reptiles to propagate their nonsense on the chat shows to recognize them as such. None of them, from the top down, are conservative in the traditional sense of the word. They're merely caught up in this affected cult of personality, where they're never wrong, and everyone else always has nothing but the absolute worst intentions. Unfortunately for them, the real world is not Atlas Shrugged, and they are virtuous heroes battling orcish villains only in their fevered imaginations.]

Flinch Mob

No matter how slowly you speak to them, or how clearly you pre-empt their cheap caveats with obvious "couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" declarations, people will continue to miss the point about the criticism of how Saddam's execution was handled.

Within hours of Saddam Hussein's hanging, the drumbeat began -- as cable-news sages pronounced that the Iraqi scourge's execution will not improve the situation in Iraq. Or, as Newsweek intoned, "Little is gained by Saddam's demise."

These days, the first rule of war coverage is that nothing -- not even military victory -- will improve Iraq's prospects.

Of course, she neglects to mention the obvious -- that the overall situation has deteriorated to such a dismal extent, that "military victory" can no longer even be clearly defined without a lot of "collateral damage". And we are no longer remotely in a position to justify that. We don't even seem to be able to gather and train an Iraqi army that isn't going to start murdering every Sunni in sight the day after we back out of there.

If "victory" can be properly defined, then by all means do so in the current context, and lead us through the prospective steps. No one seems to be able to do those things, not even the people in charge of making the actual plans.

Indeed, critics are so busy trying to transform Iraqi prosecutions into an O.J. Simpson trial that they fail to notice that the families of Kurds and Shiites who were tortured and murdered for rebelling against Hussein now know that the Butcher of Baghdad can no longer hurt them. That's why there was dancing in Dearborn, Mich., home to a large community of Iraqi Americans who fled their homeland while under Hussein's rule. Hussein cannot come back, as he did in 1963 after he fled to Syria and Egypt. He will never terrorize his countrymen again. He will hold no more power on this earth. Somehow, that's no biggie.

When you think of all the innocent people who have perished during the war in Iraq, there is something refreshing about seeing the most guilty Iraqi meet his maker. Opinion Journal's James Taranto used the headline: "The World's Smallest Violin."

Oddly, some human-rights groups have their big fiddles out. Or as Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program, said in a press statement: "The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders. History will judge these actions harshly."

Well, human rights groups also have their (frequently spiritually-based) missions as well. But taken strictly from a practical, utilitarian standpoint, it is still hardly disputable that the execution was a debacle. Given the circumstances, there's probably nothing we could have done "right" -- the Shi'a government was hell-bent on exacting revenge, making an example, and sending a message to the Sunnis. Given half a chance, they would probably have ended Saddam the way the Taliban ended the Afghan Soviet puppet Najibullah -- castrated, genitals stuffed in his mouth, strung up from a traffic light for several days so the birds could have a crack at the corpse. And from the emotional, vengeance-based point of view, fine. I get that, I sympathize with it.

But if the foremost desire is that the killing and violence stop, somehow, some way, then there was no good way to carry it out, because the prime backers of this government are the very same thugs we're fighting in the streets. This was the Mahdi Army's kill, and they wanted everyone to know that. And we should have seen that coming.

This is a much bigger, much more practically-based dissent than Saunders and the rest of the too-clever-by-half snark merchants pretend to believe. They have to know better by now; they can't really be dim enough to think that there was no strategic flaw in how this played out, only the expected whinging from lefty human-rights groups. That's too asinine an assumption, even for them.

Hell, maybe it's not an assumption; maybe, as O.G. nerd warrior Steven den Beste used to insist, regional destabilization was really a feature rather than a flaw.

We keep hearing from Democratic critics of the war that the Bush administration has "failed," because we can't keep order in Baghdad and the Iranians are in a position of unparalleled influence not only in Iraq but throughout the region. Yet this evaluation is based on a series of remarkably naïve assumptions, all of which have been proven utterly wrong.

The announced war aim of the Bush administration was to rid Saddam of his alleged "weapons of mass destruction," and when the WMD myth was finally and definitively debunked, they told us we were there to install a functioning democracy. That didn't pan out, either – unless one considers Shi'ite death squads, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing that puts the one supposedly initiated by Slobodan Milosevic to shame, legitimate expressions of the demos.

America's real war aims are another matter entirely, and they are coming into focus as the situation on the ground develops. After all, why assume that what is currently happening in Iraq isn't part of the program? Surely the Americans knew the dismemberment of the Iraqi state would have to mean Shi'ite hegemony, an empowered Iran, and the prospect of a regionalized conflagration. It defies belief that they didn't: our rulers may be evil, but they sure as heck aren't stupid (and I'm not talking about the president, who is a genuine dolt).

We have every reason to believe that the death and decomposition of the Iraqi state is precisely what they had in mind when they decided to invade in the first place. Furthermore, a civil war had to be the outcome of a sudden vacuum of legitimacy, and it was bound to be a religious conflict, pitting Sunnis against Shi'ites. Looked at in a larger context, it makes perfect sense that the War Party is now playing the "Shi'ite card," as the visit of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to Washington indicates. Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), met with the president, chatted with Condi, and took a tour of the Pentagon. If we're looking for the true origins of the "surge" strategy in Iraq – the prospect of adding some 30,000 troops to "stabilize" Baghdad and rebel provinces – we need look no further than Hakim's Dec. 4 speech [.pdf] to the U.S. Institute of Peace:

"We believe that the deterring factors are not up to the level of their criminal activities. The strikes they are getting from the multinational forces are not hard enough to put an end to their acts, but leave them stand up again to resume their criminal acts. This means that there is something wrong in the policies taken to deal with that danger threatening the lives of the Iraqis. Eliminating the danger of the Civil War in Iraq could only be achieved through directing decisive strikes against terrorist Bathists terrorists [sic] in Iraq. Otherwise we'll continue to witness massacres being committed every now and then against the innocent Iraqis."

Translation: Help us to finally smash the Sunnis by sending more troops.

Taking that polemic at face value, one can at least boil the premise down to its basic yes/no toggle questions. Either they meant to do this shit, or they fucked up royally. The second answer should automatically mean that none of these people should ever again be trusted with our money or our lives, but because their base have their politics inextricably wound up with their personal issues, there is no accountability.

So then we look at the other possibility, that destabilization was not a bug but a feature. That too has its own dichotomous linkage, ascribing intent either to ideology or greed. Take your pick.

Realistically, my guess is that it's all of the above, that the guiding principle was the PNAC premise that we couldn't break that which was already dangerously broken (the destabilization feature), that right-thinking ideological patriots could go over and make a buck in the process (provided that they cleared Jim O'Beirne's loyalty questionnaire), and that they overestimated their juice so monumentally badly in the first place, there was no way this could ever have succeeded.

And nothing bears this out in clearer detail than this -- these guys found a way to make one of the most despicable thugs of the 20th century look like a martyr to the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims. There is no strategic upside to handing Iraq strictly over to the Shi'a -- from Morocco to Indonesia, only Iran and southern Iraq have majority Shi'a populations. The rest are Sunni, and now they are even more furious. We can keep whistling past the graveyard, telling ourselves that since they're uncivilized wogs, they'll get pissed about something anyway, but how does the reckless incitement of an enormous region of people accrue to our benefit? How does it bring a resolution to the situation, how does it end the slaughter and reduce the danger to our troops and to millions of civilians who just want their lives back? Cui bono, who benefited from this ramshackle gang of masked thugs stringing up the tyrant from a makeshift gallows? Moqtada al-Sadr, mostly. Iran, indirectly. Us, not really at all.

This is how our serious editorial thinkers regularly comport themselves -- they hem and haw over which marginalized stereotype to rail against, as if the principled and predictable dissent of human rights groups trumps had any pull at all, much less the sort of influence that the bumblers at the top have.

But the constant sneering at what used to be unquestioned, exalted principles thinly conceals a deeper resentment at values which we ought to be especially concerned about these days. If we want to be moral leaders, then we have to demand a higher standard of ourselves; we don't act like Saddam precisely because we're better. Either we support tribal barbarity, or institutional barbarity to achieve expedient means, or we don't.

Minority Retort

I think many lefty bloggers, myself included, probably felt at least a brief existential shift after the midterm election results were in, as we found ourselves out of our reflexive minority stance at long last. Would it be worth the effort to kick a beaten, defeated Republican party, already coated in the sewage of its incompetence, excesses, and mal-fee-ance? Would we now turn our energies toward pushing the resurgent Democratic party away from its rightier-than-thou inclinations of recent years -- not necessarily left, but simply back toward its gravitational center, away from the temptations and fleeting blandishments of cozying up to religious whackjobs and defense contractors? (Obviously, the answers are yes and yes.)

Fortunately, the entire right (that is, the far right, as opposed to the center-right, which is the Democrats) wing seems to be undergoing an existential earthquake. Tectonic plates of disregarded platitudes and played-out cynicism grind against each other with all the harmony of two stray cats fucking on an alley fence. And that's at the professional level of the commentariat; the Cheetos-and-Mountain-Dew-Battalion are even more apoplectic than usual.

But a fish rots from the head, as the cliché goes, and so does the right's complete lack of unifying ideas become exposed by their top-down hysteria. Obviously, most people's political principles are informed by their personal values, but the modern neoclown is exemplified by what can only be characterized as abject emotional investment. Nothing else explains it; no matter how many times they're proven wrong by the facts on the ground, they find another diversion to throw.

It's like the final act of any given Mannix or Starsky & Hutch, where the villain (usually played by either Anthony Zerbe or Robert Loggia) scrambles down the dead-end alley, quickening disco pulse and wocka-wocka guitars adding a sense of musical urgency, in his futility attempting to thwart pursuing cops with found objects (garbage cans, hubcaps, bicycles, etc.), knowing all the while he's caught. It's predictable, and desperate, and only marginally entertaining, and even then only if you're simply too lazy to switch over to the Spice Channel, rub one out and go to bed already.

The only thing the clowns had going for them when they were riding high was their tight electoral advantage. It wasn't their stated principles; those were flouted early and often. What kept them in the game was their efficiency at bottling and selling inchoate, random anger and sneering contempt. That the stereotypical subjects and objects of their anger and contempt frequently only had passing acquaintance with reality was not necessarily considered a disadvantage, considering their target demographic. If anything, it's a feature of their operative dynamic.

There's certainly nothing wrong with being angry, and holding your ideological opponents in contempt, in principle anyway. But when it becomes consistently more evident that the facts are working against them, and all they can do is keep playing that same old card from the same old deck, it becomes counterproductive. It bespeaks the fact that they suddenly woke up, found themselves bereft of any useful idea besides pointing across the aisle, and had no idea what to do about it.

So you have your choice of the whimsical hypocrisy of the mercenary idiots on the rent-a-screamer shows suddenly finding their civility bone, and the meta-arguments of the amateurs squinting at their rulers in their virtual pissing contest. It's the cheap prestidigitation of sixth-graders at magic camp, semiotic tricksters engaged in the online equivalent of juggling lemons on a street corner.

Politics can be either an iterative process, gaining and refining knowledge and principles, and using them to address actual problems, or it can be merely a pathetic struggle of affirmation and psychological projection. For too long certain electoral blocs of the country have allowed themselves to be bamboozled by a bunch of chickenshits still working out their daddy issues and their Vietnam-era moral cowardice. Most of them have gotten wise by now; the remainder still need their projected totems and fetishes to dance around, endlessly, mindlessly. They're all C. Thomas Howell in Red Dawn; their anger keeps them warm.

And there's no shortage of addled morons to provide that frisson of smug, sanctimonious jingoism for them, whether it's a $25 mil per year radio pillhead who picks on disabled people, a plagiarizing transsexual who openly fantasizes about shooting presidents and poisoning Supreme Court justices, or some random loser peddling "Rope. Tree. Journalist." t-shirts on the sidebar while he practices his Travis Bickle sneer into the glare of his monitor. Eventually the sugar high and the road rage run out, and common sense may start to leak in here and there, and they look around and realize what they've tethered themselves to, and how there's no more walking it back, no way to reconcile what they've said with what they thought they were. Or not -- plenty of them are no doubt content to go on bitching about the same librul government that provides them with SSI and unemployment checks.

And that's okay -- it would be a lot less frustrating in the sense of actual debate of actual issues, but also much less amusing if they came to the realization of just how utterly ridiculous they really are, scuttling around like they think they're Tolkien characters or something. Being the recipient of one of their wink-and-a-nod closet-case epithets is like having Donald Trump tell you that your hair is all fucked up.

Personally, I'd be far more worried if Trump told me he liked my hair.

[Update: It's as if they're having some kind of weird competition to see who can be the biggest fuck-up, who can play fastest and loosest with actual facts, and actual people's lives. It's not as if, now that the existence of Jamil Hussein has been proven by his arrest, these morons are suddenly going to call a cease-fire in their war on the librul media and common sense.

Nor will they, on the off chance that Hussein turns up perforated and mutilated in a couple weeks, have the fucking nards to step up and admit for once in their rotten little lives that their bellicose stupidity and chronic fuck-uppery have cost a lot of people their lives. I humbly suggest they all do us a huge favor, and go over to Iraq and seek out the truth for us that said media is withholding. Seriously. I'm embarrassed for them at this point.]

[Update #2: The other night I caught a reasonably funny new show, The Knights of Prosperity, about a group of hard-luck mooks who decide that the only way to get ahead in life is to band to together to rob Mick Jagger. It quickly becomes obvious that, because Jagger lives in a Fort Knox-like townhouse with state-of-the-art security systems, their goal of burgling Jagger's lavish pad is simply beyond them. Yet the point of it all is that the poor chuckleheads don't realize that, so they keep chipping away at their impossible dream. It is in that spirit that I dub the Limbaugh/Coulter/Malkin faction of media loons and internet squids The Knights (or, alternately, Nuts) of Prosperity™.]

NFL Playoff Predictions

Even though I already made predictions almost a month ago, I've noticed some referral traffic looking for "NFL Playoff Predictions", and getting directed to my picks from the 2004-2005 season. That seems like cheating somehow.

Also, let's face it -- several of my picks from last month were flat wrong. The cat teams (Jags and Bungles) botched their way out of the playoffs in the AFC, letting the Jets and Chefs ponce in. Doesn't matter, the end result is the same -- the AFC Championship game will be Baltimore at San Diego.

In the meantime, as far as this week's wild-card games are concerned, I'd like to think that the Jets can go into Foxborough and upset the Pats like they did in the regular season, but realistically, experience and treachery (and Tom Brady) usually win out over youth and enthusiasm (and Chad Pennington). Pennington gets saddled with the "noodle arm" smack, somewhat unfairly. The Jets' biggest inequity actually appears to be in the running game. They got nothin' to help Pennington out, and the Pats have a healthy Corey Dillon and a legit Rookie of the Year candidate (in most seasons, anyway; this season had a surprisingly large group of excellent rookies) in Lawrence Maroney.
Patriots 27, Jets 14.

The Chefs, on the other hand, are a genuine threat even in Indianapolis. Their offensive strength perfectly complements the Colts' defensive weakness -- the running game -- and while Trent Green is never going to keep Peyton Manning awake with fear at night, he generally makes good decisions. Indianapolis finished the season pretty weak, and seems to have lost the momentum necessary to go deep in the playoffs. If Kansas City avoids turnovers, grinds the clock with Larry Johnson, and steps up their mediocre pass defense a couple notches, they could pull off a huge playoff upset. I'm calling the upset on this one.
Chiefs 37, Colts 35.

The NFC's a tougher nut to crack, because even the top-seeded Bears have been unpredictably bad lately. Success in the playoffs is more about peaking at the right time than having the best record, and the only team of the six that finished strong in December was the Eagles. The Saints have been very good, and maybe their late-season lapses against the woeful Redskins and Panthers will turn out to be flukes.

But few teams have performed like Dallas, who teased and flirted with glimmers of talent through Thanksgiving, only to get their asses pounded by the aforementioned Saints. Since that student-pummels-teacher clinic, Dallas has only won once and lost their final two, including last week's embarrassing home loss to the 3-13 Detroit Lions, which cost the Cowpies their playoff seeding (dropped from #3 to #5) and home wild-card game. Fortunately, since they have Terrell Owens, Dallas is always within spitting distance of the playoffs (hyuk hyuk). And their host this Saturday, Seattle, is a mediocrity as well. If these two teams didn't have to play each other, they'd both be one-and-done. But Seattle has actually established a decent record in recent years at home, so despite their likely efforts to give the game to Dallas, I'll take the home team.
Seahawks 24, Cowboys 20.

The other NFC wild-card game should be more predictable -- the struggling Giants going into Philly to face the resurgent Iggles. It took a couple fourth-quarter gimmes from the awful Washington Redskins last week just for the Giants to get the #6 seed, while Philadelphia is experiencing three little words I never imagined saying -- Jeff Garcia renaissance. He's playing every game like he thinks it's his last, and he's got the team believing. The defense is strong and healthy, and will hang around Plaxico Burress' neck like a clock on Flavor Flav. Tiki Barber will give it his best, but Eli Manning has folded like a cheap accordion as of late, and it won't take long for the blitz monsters to smell blood in the water (trying to see how many hacky sports clichés I can stuff into one sentence).
Eagles 34, Giants 17.

As always, kids, please wager responsibly.

The (Hal) Turner Diaries

WorldNutDaily, in between Chuck Norris columns, presents us with a revolting example of right-wing rhetoric, almost approvingly so.

A radio talk-show entertainer whose earlier statements that he "may" have to assassinate members of Congress if the wrong people were elected Nov. 7 now has set a timetable for those killings.

In a statement on his website, Hal Turner noted that a newspaper has reported that a bill granting amnesty to illegal aliens is expected to be enacted in January, when the Democratic Party takes control of the U.S. Senate and House.

"Members of Congress and the Senate will NOT be permitted to BETRAY our nation by simply GIVING AWAY the most cherished aspect of America, Citizenship, to millions of people who cared so little for what Citizenship means that they came here against our law," he continued.

Several weeks ago, Turner incited much discussion when he posted the following:

"We may have to ASSASSINATE some of the people you elect on Nov. 7! This could be your LAST ELECTION CHANCE, to save this Republic…

"Sorry to have to be so blunt, but the country is in mortal danger from our present government and our liberty is already near dead because of this government. If you are too stupid to turn things around with your vote, there are people out here like me who are willing to turn things around with guns, force and violence. We hope our method does not become necessary," he wrote.

I guess we're all just supposed to assume that this is some sort of Swiftian (or in the parlance of these mouth-breathing troglodytes, Coulterian) satire, right? Hardly. Turner parses his rants like -- well, like one o' them thar trial lawyers they always profess so much to despise.

And like Coulter, Turner is just hopelessly out of his depth in attempting to spin any sort of rational, objective point out of all this. At least he doesn't have Coulter's asinine tic of injecting jerky anachronisms and played-out pop-culture references in the midst of all the foamy schtick. Nope, ol' Hal's all foam.

But he defined his position as commentary instead of advocacy when one supporter wrote to Turner's website, "Hey Hal instead of saying 'may' SAY you WILL KILL THEM!!!"

"No no no no no. Words mean things," Turner wrote at the time. The difference between 'may' and 'will' is the difference between an opinion and a threat," he concluded. "One is lawful, the other is not!"

This sort of hypocritical bluster is easily deconstructed. Either Turner is serious about this, and is just using "may" because he's taken enough jailhouse-lawyer classes to know a weasel-word when he sees one, or it's all just empty, over-the-top belligerence, in which case, why does he bother?

Turn the argument around. Say one of these imaginary liberal boogeymen these douchebags are always nattering on about uses such weaselly phraseology on Turner. "Hey Turner, if you persist in being a fatuous retard, I may have to break into your house, strap you to a chair, and shave your house pets down while you watch and cry like the closet-case you are. I also reserve the option to shave down your beastly wife, right down to the last back-fold."

Obviously, I'm leavening the tone of the hypothetical threat, but you get the point. If Turner were to get a threat on his life or the lives of his family, his assumptions about the sender are that either the person is serious -- if clinically insane -- or is nothing more nor less than a raging fuck-knuckle who needs to get some inflatable companionship and quit pestering the internets with his fever dreams.

So, um, which is it, Hal? Because maybe you think you're engaging in some warped form of "irony" or "sophistry", or some rarefied intemellectual plateau of "satire", but it's none of those things. It's a pussy defense of cheap weasel words that people can only dismiss as either the shavings of someone who has sharpened far too much of his intellectual pencil, or a call to McVeigh-style action. One or the other, sport; hiding behind "may" is as gutless as it gets.

Almost.

In the current posting, Turner has taken an aggressive stance against any effort by Congress to legalize or provide a "path to citizenship" for the millions of aliens who are in the United States illegally.

"Congress will not be permitted to BETRAY our nation by giving Citizenship to tens of thousands who didn't give a s--- about our other laws as they murdered, raped, robbed, dealt illegal drugs, drove without licenses or insurance, stole the social security numbers and/or identities of millions of lawful citizens and most of whom don't give a s--- enough about our country to even learn our language!"

First is the cheap conflation of people who came to the U.S. illegally, and simply worked jobs and provided for their families, with violent criminals operating with relative impunity. I am not a fan of amnesty, not by any means. But it is unrealistic to expect the government to magically root out some 12 million people -- many of whom have children who were born here, and are thus American citizens -- and ship 'em home. And it is insane to clearly advocate violent retaliation against legislators -- of any party, lest I forget to pre-empt any concern trolls -- who are doing what they can to find reasonable ways to resolve the situation.

The illegals who are caught committing crimes get jail time just as citizens do, plus they get deported. To sit there and bloviate over their supposed kid-glove treatment is ridiculous. To insist that violence should be seriously considered as a solution is dangerous, especially since, by definition, Turner's twisted rhetoric is specifically aimed at angry loners who are either too ignorant or too caught up in their impotent rage to get that what Turner's saying is either sheer lunacy or merely masturbatory. And to hide that call for violence behind some puling semantic trick is nothing short of despicable.

Chuck Norris should kick his ass.

Guided By Voices

Is there anybody out there in the "serious" journamalism industry who can give even a half-assed reason why the ravings of this shithouse rat are considered remotely newsworthy? Jesus Christ, this is one step removed from reporting what some crazy fuck with a sandwich board is ranting on the street.

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday that God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

"The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

That's how you know it's bullshit. Everyone knows that He pronounces it "nucular". That's where the Bumpkin-in-Chief picked it up.

Seriously. Who are the drooling morons keeping this guy in business, and why are they allowed to have money?

Pimps Up, Ho's Down

Just so there's no confusion, here's my policy on corporations who might want to give me free stuff to help pimp their shit -- I'm all for it. If Microsoft wants to give me a nice free laptop to road-test their new OS, I say "thanks".

As long as the bloggers in question are respecting the principle of full disclosure, and are honest in their assessments of the products they are being asked to use and possibly endorse, I don't see the problem. I think the nannying idiots who have trouble with the "integrity" part of the equation ought to take a closer look at, for example, the toxic whores on every political street corner, who routinely rent available legislators, help write or "suggest" laws and public policy, and either advise or provide talking points and commentary for the interchangeable Serious Pundit shows and columns. The problem is wide-ranging and systemic. Getting a free laptop pales by comparison.

I don't even have anything snarky to say about this wild discrepancy. It just utterly astonishes me sometimes how completely retarded and out of whack some people's priorities are, especially in areas of "integrity" and "principle". What kind of idiot wastes even a nanosecond of energy on the possibility of low-level blogger payola, when such arrangements are part and parcel of virtually any industry even tangentially related to public relations. If the bloggers are lying, obfuscating, or falsely endorsing, then call them on that. Beating the little guys up for taking a rare scrap while the fat cats park up against the trough is just bullshit.

Secular Pope

We get it already. Jesus.

Again, I mean no personal disprespect to Gerald Ford, who by all accounts was a decent man who did some questionable things for political expediency. It's par for the course, not great, not awful (except, again, for his handling of Indonesia/East Timor, but most of that really falls on Kissinger).

I just find it peculiar, is all, especially for someone who arrived at the office by the accidents of his predecessors' corruptions, and only held office for two uninspired years. They're giving him a Reaganesque sendoff, and the media seems to have broadcast every jot and tittle, as lovingly as two hot coeds gently rubbing baby oil into each others' quivering....sorry, got off on a tangent there.

I dunno. It all plays into the comfortable myth of comity and bipartisanship that the beltway media and their grief pimps always try to peddle. That they milk it for a solid week, at the expense of many other compelling stories that we really should be informed about in more detail.

Even benevolent myth-making should be regarded with some measure of skepticism.

Update: Just watched the NBC Nightly News coverage of today's service, which included clips of Tom Brokaw's eulogy, as well as Brokaw himself in the studio providing additional "commentary". Apparently when Serious Journalists are put out to pasture, the big money's in becoming a court hagiographer. I'm sure the epic tome is forthcoming, praising the cozy centrism that serves as oxygen to the beltway party circuit, aka "contemporary history".

Quasi-Celebrity Mixup

Apropos of nothing, when I caught this headline on Google News, for a split second I thought (and, it should be said, secretly hoped) that they were referring to Randy Moss and Shannen Doherty. I wasn't sure Pete Doherty was even still alive; usually when your sole claim to fame is being fucked up 24/7, you don't last that long. Keith Richards is an exception, kid, not an example.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Screwing The Pooch

The guiding philosophy behind the sudden urge to revise the master operational plan seems to be something along the line of, "Hey, we've been doing it doggy-style so long, why don't we try the good ol' missionary position? Or the wheelbarrow, that's one's always fun."

Bush, who was expected to showcase his new proposals in a speech by January 15, has been considering "all options" -- including what some have dubbed a "surge" or "sustained surge" in the number of US troops in Iraq.

But most opposition Democrats, a handful of prominent Republicans, and even the top US military commander in Baghdad, General George Casey, have warned against a prolonged expansion in the US military presence.

"The longer we in the US forces continue to bear the main burden of Iraq's security, it lengthens the time that the government of Iraq has to take the hard decisions about reconciliation and dealing with the militias," Casey told the New York Times in a telephone interview on Friday.

"And the other thing is that they can continue to blame us for all of Iraq's problems, which are at base their problems," said Casey, whose comments were published Tuesday.

I never get tired of the "blame the victim" caveats at work here, as if we bore absolutely no responsibility for unleashing forces that the Bushies either did not comprehend or didn't concern themselves with, even though they had been warned beforehand many times by many knowledgeable people. They thought they knew better, they heard what they wanted to hear and funneled the intel they wanted to use, and they let their legacy pundit proxies defame and accuse all who disagreed as pussies, appeasers, traitors.

And these are cultural and sectarian issues, and ancient grudges predating us which are in play here, obviously. But that doesn't absolve us from our responsibility, even if one still somehow believes that this was all just an honest, if tragic, mistake.

Meanwhile, a survey by the private Military Times media group, which caters to a US military audience but is not affiliated with the US Defense Department, found active-duty US troops disapproved of the way Bush has handled Iraq.

Just 35 percent approved, while 45 percent disapproved, according to the survey, the result of mailing questionnaires in mid-November to 6,000 drawn at random from the group's list of active-duty subscribers.

The poll found that 50 percent were very or somewhat confident that the United States would succeed in Iraq, while 41 percent were not very or not at all confident. The survey had a three-percentage-point error margin.

I think this shaping up to be a very intriguing State of the Union speech, which in the parlance of official beltway dickheads is supposed to set the tone for the legislative session. That is no longer in play; if Bush cannot even convince a majority of the troops of his judgment and acumen, then all he can do is beg a few senators and think-tank douchebags to provide a fig-leaf for his obstinacy. Good luck with that.

The situation is now simply far too all-encompassing -- and even paradoxical -- to address with even a tightly-focused troop surge. The Iraqis want us to get the fuck out, but if we do, the Sadr militias that have taken up sizable chunks of the Iraqi armed forces will engage in wholesale slaughter. The violence, as bad as it is, is practically guaranteed to spike sharply, and probably abate only as they run out of people to murder. The problem is political as much as it is infrastructural, as much as it is a tactical military situation. All you can do with more troops, without addressing political jockeying by a largely impotent Green Zone government, without even basic services and jobs, is clamp down and engender more seething hatred, encourage yet more desperation and futility.

Bush clearly doesn't get this. He's seen too many John Wayne movies or something, or thinks that a Hail Mary, followed by recovering an onside kick, followed by 50 yards of hook-and-ladder laterals will recoup that two-touchdown deficit in the final 30 seconds of the game, and we can all be heroes. This is not Rudy; anyone who actually watches football knows that that shit almost never works, which is why it's such a story when it does.

It's nice to pray and constantly iterate one's moral superiority and good intentions, but that doesn't pull a failed state of 25 million people out of the gulch. It's not a plan, it's not a fix, and shame on Bush and McCain for even pretending that it is.

Body Count

Estimates abound for violent deaths in Iraq, contra the puling whinges from the "what about all the good news" claque. Take your pick as to which one is the most accurate.

As enraged crowds protested the hanging of Saddam Hussein across Iraq's Sunni heartland Monday, government officials reported that 16,273 Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police died violent deaths in 2006, a figure larger than an independent Associated Press count for the year by more than 2,500.

The tabulation by the Iraqi ministries of Health, Defense and Interior, showed that 14,298 civilians, 1,348 police and 627 soldiers were killed in the violence that raged in the country last year.

The Associated Press accounting, gleaned from daily news reports from Baghdad, arrived at a total of 13,738 deaths. The United Nations has said as many as 100 Iraqis die violently each day, which translates into 36,500 deaths annually.

Let's take the lowest (AP) estimate and extrapolate. The population of Iraq was estimated at 26,783,383 as of July of last year. U.S. population at the same point in time is estimated at 298,444,215, just over 11 times the size.

Can you even imagine 153,081 Americans, nearly 90% of them civilians, perishing in the space of a single year, in a variety of horrible methods from being shot on the street to being power-drilled in the neck to random suicide bombing in the market? Seriously, it's impossible to even comprehend, but it takes very little thinking about such an awful scenario to at least realize that any semblance of normal life would be completely gone under such circumstances. Add 50% unemployment and 4 hours a day of electricity to that mix, and you have a recipe for practically infinite violence.

And despite premature reports of a post-execution lull in street violence and protests, that has already changed for the worse.

In Samarra, a mob broke the locks off a bomb-damaged Shiite shrine and marched through carrying a mock coffin and photo of the dictator.

The demonstration in the Golden Dome, shattered in a bombing by Sunni extremists 10 months ago, suggests that many Sunni Arabs may now more actively support the small number of Sunni militants fighting the country's Shiite-dominated government. The Feb. 22 bombing of the shrine triggered the current cycle of retaliatory attacks between Sunnis and Shiia, in the form of daily bombings, kidnappings and murders.

Monday's protest came on a day that saw the U.S. military kill six Iraqis during a raid on the offices of a prominent Sunni political figure, who was suspected of giving al-Qaida in Iraq fighters sanctuary.

Until Saddam's execution Saturday, most Sunnis sympathized with militants but avoided taking a direct role in the sectarian conflict — despite attacks by Shiite militia that have killed thousands of Sunnis or driven them from their homes. The current Sunni protests, which appear to be building, could signal a spreading militancy.

Sunnis were not only outraged by Saddam's hurried execution, just four days after an appeals court upheld his conviction and sentence. Many were also incensed by the unruly scene in the execution chamber, captured on video, in which Saddam was taunted with chants of "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada."

The chants referred to Muqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shiite cleric who runs one of Iraq's most violent religious militias. He is a major power behind the government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Many Sunnis are also upset that Saddam was put to death the day that Sunni celebrations began for Eid al-Ahda, a major Muslim festival. The judge who first presided over the case that resulted in Saddam's death sentence said the former dictator's execution at the start of Eid was illegal according to Iraqi law, and contradicted Islamic custom.

The law states that "no verdict should implemented during the official holidays or religious festivals," said Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, a Kurd.

....

Mourners at a mosque in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit slaughtered sheep as a sacrifice for their former leader. The mosque's walls were lined with condolence cards from tribes in southern Iraq and Jordan who were unable to travel to the memorial.

Saddam's eldest daughter briefly attended a protest Monday in Jordan — her first public appearance since her father was hanged.

"God bless you, and I thank you for honoring Saddam, the martyr," said Raghad Saddam Hussein, according to two witnesses. She addressed members of the Professional Associations — an umbrella group of unions representing doctors, engineers and lawyers — in the group's office parking lot in west Amman.

Ah, the M-word. In our haste to prop up Maliki's Green Zone government -- held in place largely by its degree of cooperation with al Sadr and his Mahdi Army death squads -- we took a deposed, pathetic tyrant who had already been rendered impotent, and allowed the vengeful Shi'a government to turn him back into a rallying point.

This has very real potential to compound what is already a largely irretrievable mistake on our part, one undertaken in bad faith, and in a toxic mix of arrogance and hubris. Undoubtedly more American troops will have been unnecessarily endangered by that action, but it is mostly the vast numbers of civilians, whose main crime at this point is that they have no way to get out, at the mercy of yet another gang of thugs.