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Cheap talk -- King Crimson

Jeffrey Goldberg has the low-down on the delusional ramblings which continue to emanate -- almost as if for show -- from the Grand Vizier's musty little office halfway up Bush's cloaca. Most interesting is his "if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle" perspective on the most recent electoral math.

“It’s important to keep in perspective how close the election actually was,” he said. “Three thousand five hundred and sixty-two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty-five thousand votes are the difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve taken a short-term hit in the face of a very contentious war, but to have the Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in the country.”

So what? The gap was even smaller in Virginia, where Jim Webb squeaked past Felix Macacawitz, Jr. only in the final hours of the count, and only by some 2,500 votes. Hell, if a couple hundred old farts in Palm Beach had paid attention to those tricksy butterfly ballots, we'd have seen the last of these scumbags back in 2000. If, if, if. If my cock was only a foot longer, I'd have made a fortune in porn.

Rove's selective ratiocinations can't obscure the fact that Jim Webb and Jon Tester, no matter how close the margins, came in and beat two incumbent senators -- one with enough of a conservatard pedigree to have been frequently touted as potential POTUS bait. That's a pretty tall smackdown, and he knows it.

Rove places the blame for the election results on the recent scandals in Congress—congressmen who placed themselves in the orbit of Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist at the center of the Republican ethics meltdown; and the former congressman Mark Foley’s relationships with congressional pages—rather than the Administration’s management of the Iraq war. “If you look at the exit polling, the No. 1 issue, particularly among swing voters, was corruption and behavior,” he said. “After Foley, people said, ‘It’s just too much.’ After that, spending was the No. 2 issue.”

More whistling past the graveyard. The timing of the disclosure of the Foley scandal was certainly propitious, but it barely merits mentioning how cheap and disingenuous it is to see Rove lamely try to distance himself from the slimy likes of Abramoff. The K Street tentacles were everywhere, and Rove and his lackeys helped facilitate that, because they view the responsibilities of government as "keeping the trough full". That's not just what people such as Rove and Abramoff do, it's what they're there for, to facilitate the systems where such arrangements can thrive. It's why they got the big bucks. There's no other reason to have a chin-laden fuckhead like Rove around, except he knows which knotholes to screw to hit the most paydirt.

And then we bounce from one set of chins to another.

Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right. “It’s just gotten steadily worse,” he said. “There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit”—Gingrich was referring to Carter’s suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the “attack” on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a “killer rabbit” during a fishing trip—“that there was a morning where the average American went, ‘You know, this really worries me.’ ” He added, “You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don’t have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can’t avoid thinking about.” Gingrich continued, “When you have the collapse of the Republican Party, you have an immediate turn toward the Democrats, not because the Democrats are offering anything better, but on a ‘not them’ basis. And if you end up in a 2008 campaign between ‘them’ and ‘not them,’ ‘not them’ is going to win.”

The article goes on at some length to cast Gingrich as some sort of elder statesman for the conservatard movement. And considering their sheer lack of intellectual heft, he probably qualifies as such. He can actually think and speak extemporaneously, which already puts him leagues ahead of his nominal party leader. Whether or not the ideas make sense or are practical or even moral is incidental -- the point is that they resonate with the sort of people who need reactionary nonsense to harmonize just so with their preconceived notions.

Even deeper into the pit, Goldberg talks with Tom DeLay who, apparently in a futile effort to avoid eternity shoveling shit in hell, has found him some Jesus (who, it should be said, probably did not want to be found this particular time). It's nauseating and cringe-inducing as only DeLay can be, and is only partially redeemed afterward by the obligatory "can the party find its way out of its own ass?" coda, helmed by Beelzebub's hat-rack, Richard Viguerie:

Conservative leaders have always entertained suspicions about George W. Bush’s conservative credentials—in part because his father raised taxes while President, and in part because “compassionate conservatism,” which was a mantra of Bush’s 2000 campaign, sounded to some dangerously like “big-government conservatism.” DeLay’s willingness to spend tax money in order to keep his party in power came as a surprise to those who believed that he was a doctrinaire, limited-government conservative. “Bush was never a conservative, but Tom DeLay was one of us and he betrayed us,” Richard Viguerie, a founder of the modern conservative movement, says. “He’s like a lot of these guys. They campaign against the cesspool. ‘I’ll clean up the cesspool of government,’ but after a while they all say, ‘I made a mistake—it wasn’t a cesspool, it was a hot tub.’ That’s what they called him, you know, Hot Tub Tom.”

The thing about shoveling shit, whether in hell or in Washington, is that the trick is understanding that it doesn't disappear, it just goes somewhere else. The art is in scooting it around sufficiently so that you look like you've actually done something.