News of the Whirled

It's odd, yet somehow fitting, that Brian Williams gets caught "conflating" his war stories at almost the exact same time as Jon Stewart announces that he's leaving The Daily Show. Who knows, maybe the impending demise of Williams' career played a part in Stewart's decision. Obviously the two are good friends, and Stewart walked a fine line in lampooning Williams' gaffe, and presenting a greater context for it.

Williams seems like a nice enough guy, and with his appearances on 30 Rock and Daily Show and such like, he's cemented that perception in the public mind. Given his position as corporate news reader, making such appearances is more crucial to career stability and advancement than, say, actual journalistic research. Stewart, on the other hand, may literally be the closest thing to an actual journalist this country has on television, though John Oliver has jumped in impressively and taken it up a notch, with deeper digging and no filters at all. And David Carr's recent untimely passing is a reminder of what real journalists do.

What we've become accustomed to thinking of as "journalism" most often involves video, rather than audio or (god forbid) print. Judicious editing and tight narrative replace nuance and context. The corporate logo, by definition, requires hewing to an establishment line. No doubt Brian Williams considers himself a serious journalist, and even though the helicopter he was riding in did not get hit, he still rode in a helicopter in a combat zone. Not that it matters; the most important subtext of a combat embed is that you're not showing a thing without the approval of the military and the government.

And it's not a minor detail that the conservatools bleating the loudest about Williams' typical lamestream perfidy are mum about the many prevarications of their latest and greatest totem, Chris Kyle. They do not care that Kyle almost certainly fabricated several image-building war anecdotes (one of which ended in a fat judgment against Kyle's estate in the favor of Jesse Ventura), and likely at least embellished some parts of his combat record.

To that point, actually I don't much care about Kyle's lies all that much either, insofar as they don't negate the things that Kyle did that are verifiable. And that's part of the point about Brian Williams. He's merely a product of the machine he works for, a machine that by design employs and promotes team players such as Williams, affable faces to provide a semblance of information between commercials for a tired, bored populace that wasn't going to rise up anyway. This is how consent is manufactured, and pharmaceuticals and automobiles are moved. It's not rocket science.

Nor is the cable commentary circus anything approaching rocket science either. So when a toxic dickhead like Rudy Giuliani starts running his filthy cakehole one more goddamned time, it's tough to get mad at Giuliani, any more than you can get mad at your dog when you leave him in the house and he shits on the floor and chews up your couch pillows. He's a fucking dog, you're the dumbass for not understanding that dogs do what they do when given the opportunity.

Giuliani is just one of countless professional buffoons whose stock in trade is ventriloquizing the moronic delusions of a demographic that deserves everything they're getting -- aggrieved maroons who, in between collecting their gubmint checks, begrudge everyone and everything else, and scribe fanciful tales about the Black Satan in the White House. The idea that Obama is a closet Muslim is ludicrous; the idea that he's a closet atheist, and understands exactly how shit would blow up on him were he to even hint at such a thing, makes much more sense. But we'll never know, because these coddled, cosseted dipshits literally would not be able to handle the truth.

It's unfortunate that the only barrier to entry in becoming a political meme or talking point these days is simply being something that can be described, digested, and shat out in under ten seconds, just long enough to get someone riled up about some nonsense. They would much rather send other people to fight and kill an enemy they know nothing about, make an awful situation even worse, so they can go back to what they were doing, which was absolving themselves from their ongoing fuck-ups.

Network and cable teevee news is all just marketing and public relations, properly diluted and vetted for mass consumption, something to keep people placid yet attentive enough to listen to the words from the sponsors, whether it's the Koch Brothers or Big Pharma.

Takin' It to the Streets

Let's reiterate, for the kids in the cheap seats:  it doesn't matter if you throw Molotov cocktails in the streets, or lay down in Grand Central Station -- it won't do any good, because they don't care. You think a federal investigation or a body camera will prevent the next cop from perforating an unarmed civilian? The ends of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and plenty of others are on video. We can all see what happened. Nothing will be done about any of them, because what the fuck are you gonna do about it, block traffic? Go ahead. Vote? Please. Jesus H. Christ.

Back in the day, the noted optimist Jim Morrison said "they got the guns, but we got the numbers". In a modern, militarized surveillance/security state, it's really the other way around -- mere numbers become irrelevant when the minority has all the weapons, the money, and the power, overt and coercive. Power gives you options:  to beat, to imprison, to ignore, to propagandize, to wait you out, to fuck up your future job prospects, any number of things. Mainly to refuse to respond to your plaints and your protests and your duly registered disgust at their conduct.

They don't give a shit because they don't need to give a shit because they don't want to give you the satisfaction and risk legitimizing your grievances because fuck you, cowboy. Whose country do you think this is, anyway? Get back in line or the hired dogs will just put on the riot gear and roll out the up-armored assault vehicles.

Of course these are lessons learned from the '60s, that hippies and idealists need to be beaten down, bought off, or spied on and blackmailed. Nowadays, they hardly even need to do that -- the flying monkeys at Faux News and their scumbag commentators will happily ridicule any non-teabagger grievance. Rudy Giuliani and his Nosferatu shadow have opportunistically slithered out of the coffin to piss on the graves of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and anyone else who fucks with Our Boys In Blue, the same type of hyper-paranoid mutt that perforated Amadou Diallo for the high crime of reaching for his wallet.

I respect the idealism of protestors, the sincere conviction that it will do jack shit to change anything. Occupy Wall Street changed nothing, the massive Iraq War protests around the world in 2003 changed nothing. People reserve high praise for the non-violent (well, on the part of the protestors, anyway) resistance tactics of Gandhi and MLK. And those did change some things, but at what a price, a lot of people getting the shit beaten out of them or murdered for saying no, and a couple of martyred heroes.

But the most modern manifestation of the tactics you see when you see protests is the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. A grim combination of pushing people around, presenting the tactics of looters and vandals as the norm, and dismissing and delegitimizing valid grievances, Seattle became the template for defusing the causes of disruptive groups of citizens.

(Some of the comments in the Atlantic article are just as appalling. Look, most reasonable people will acknowledge that pulling hundreds of millions of people out of grinding poverty in China and India is a net positive from a humanitarian perspective. But, uh, it wasn't the average 'murkin manufacturing worker's fault that those countries are hopelessly overpopulated; it wasn't just a couple thousand greedy union tools that lost their jobs, it was millions of working-class people who were promised retraining and opportunities; the usual suspects made all the money from gutting their countrymen's jobs and communities. Whatever potential globalization legitimately had, what it was was just another round of American corporations fucking over American workers, and pocketing the profits.)

About the only protests you don't see getting smacked down are old white guy protests, your Cliven Bundy types, your teabagger rallies, your gun-nut slobs sporting stretched-out beach shorts and assault rifles at the Chipotle ostensibly because Second Amendment, but really because most guys who can no longer see their dicks have trouble convincing women to suck them off.

The reason those protests don't get shut down is because they're useful to the powers that really be. They're a handy distraction, a way to further propagandize and polarize a dwindling but effective slice of the electorate. They've had their lives upended so that greedheads could profit massively from exploiting the competitive advantage of places with a massive surplus of labor, and look for easy answers to pin the blame on.

Body cameras on cops won't hurt, but also won't change much when grand juries literally refuse to indict despite actual video evidence of police over-reaction and misconduct. Those punk-ass cops gang-mauled Eric Garner for selling individual cigarettes; the man lost his life for selling loosies. It's all on video, crystal clear, and still they refuse to do a goddamned thing about it. Video doesn't matter, in a climate where citizens will not just eat the shit sandwich, but run down to the store and buy the bread.

Here's the only video that matters, if we want to understand what's going on here:
Robin Harris in House Party

Stop and Frisk

Obviously there are grand racial implications to the whole "stop and frisk" deal, but stupidly, I persist in asking the (I believe) rather obvious question -- in what place and time precisely is it considered acceptable for police to randomly detain and manhandle passersby? Historians should ask and answer the question of when exactly we became a subservient cage of captive hamsters, each awaiting our eventual fate, but hoping that said fate befell every other hamster first?

And here we thought it was Giuliani that was the only "small man in search of a balcony."

Virtuoso

I don't think that word means what Cillizza thinks it means. Still Cillizza manages to be useful in his uselessness, in showing exactly what's wrong with his "profession". Notice that never once does he address the substance of Russert's questions (because he apparently has a reserved parking space halfway up Fatboy's ass), nor Giuliani's dodgy answers.

All that matters to people like Cillizza is that Giuliani be somewhat artful in his evasions, as if that were reason enough to not just write this clown off once and for all as a skeevy little fuck who literally used the NYPD to walk his good-time girl's dog, and profited quite nicely from teh 9/11, thanks very much. It's all of a piece with Cillizza, anyway; I couldn't find a transcript, but last Tuesday he was on Olbermann beating his teeny meat to this stupid sort of horse-race coverage, never once appearing to consider that these are choices that will affect our lives. Panem et circenses, folks.

Class Act

Like I've been saying about Mrs. Doubtfire from day one -- the more you get to know this hump, the less you like him. Well, get to know him a little more.

I actually find it hard to get terribly moist about any of this; more than perhaps any candidate since Li'l Fredo hisself, Giuliani's primary skill set seems to be knowing how and where to wet his beak, and not only not get caught, but to convince people to thank him for being their daddy. It's not a fidelity issue, so much as a viewing-gubmint-as-a-big-trough issue.

People like Rudy do things like this because they can, and the people who want to vote for this prick will still do so, if only because they regard the electoral process as therapy, as a way to chip at their lingering projections of manifest failure and daddy issues. It's a sick symbiosis, made sicker by the fact that unless photos surface of Giuliani with his cock stuck in a dachshund -- and hell, maybe not even then -- there's always someone dumb enough to fall for his special brand of ego-affirming bullshit.

Update: Didn't realize Bill Paxon is an adviser to Giuliani's campaign, but I'm not surprised. If the fambly-valyews creeps were allowed to dance, they'd surely have a lifetime of it to do in explaining their acceptance of these people.

Suite: Rudy Blue Lies

Here we go again:

As he seeks to court GOP primary voters, one potential sticking point has been his opposition to the Vietnam War in the early 1970s and his vote for Dem George McGovern in 1972. But Rudy has now concocted a new explanation for that vote: He didn't mean it.

....

The article also delves into Rudy's switch to the GOP, which came in 1980. In the piece Rudy seems to suggest that this was driven partly by his discontent with Dems on foreign policy. But as the Standard article accurately points out, Rudy's switch to the GOP neatly coincided with his desire to get a political appointment from the newly-minted Reagan administration.

So why is it that Romney is the official empty-suit flip-flop candidate in this? Giuliani sucks at least as bad; he'd repudiate the town he visited earlier any given day, if he thought there'd be just a couple extra votes in it. By the time he's done he'll have cobbled together the douchebaggiest niches in the American electorate, people who stand for nothing whatsoever themselves. It makes perfect sense that they'd throw their lot with this shameless creep.

Cops and Mobbers

Rude Pundit's right about this guy's hair -- it's like Eddie Munster taking on Count Chocula. All you need is Fred "Franken Berry" Thompson to complete the picture.

Rudy Giuliani stakes his presidential bid on his record of cutting crime in New York - but the union representing the city's 30,000 police officers won't support his run for the White House.
"The New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association could never support Rudy Giuliani for any elected office," PBA President Patrick Lynch told The Post.

Lynch also claimed that "Rudy Giuliani has no real credentials as a terrorism fighter."

So let's see -- cops don't like Rudy, but well-oiled loon Marion Robertson and his retard followers do. Any more questions?

Four Weddings and a Douchebag

Grampa Simpson has a miraculous come-to-Rudy moment on moralizing pronunciamentos regarding candidates' marriages and fidelity. Interesting timing.

As recently as two months ago -- Sept 6, 2007 -- Broder wrote that the Clintons' marriage was the most important political fact about Hillary. "Her marriage is the central fact in her life, and this partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton is indissoluble," Broder wrote. "She cannot function without him, and he would not have been president without her. If she becomes president, he will play as central a role in her presidency as she did in his. And that is something the country will have to ponder."

Well, no shit, Sherlock. There are some -- inside the Beltway even! -- who swear anonymously that the Return of the Clenis is part of Hillary!s dynastic inevitability. Apparently (and don't tell the current occupant about this phenomenon) a certain number of mopes find it easier to simply renew their subscriptions than check out different magazines, or even a book. Broder should be thrilled to draw a paycheck for such tedious observations, since an average fifth-grader could come up with them for nothing.

But let us put Broderella's latest case o' the vapors in context.

On May 25, 2006, Broder devoted nearly a whole column to that notorious front-page piece by Pat Healy in The Times that documented the state of their marriage in almost comically absurd detail. Broder was very sympathetic to the piece, saying that it showed that "the drama of the Clintons' personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president." If Broder thought the Clinton wasn't fair game here in any way -- or disapproved of the level of attention The Times gave to the Clinton marriage in that piece -- he certainly didn't say so.

And back when it really counted -- when the GOP tried to impeach Bill Clinton over his affair -- Broder thought the Clinton marriage was completely fair game. He wrote multiple columns at the time arguing that his affair threw his entire character and even fitness for the Presidency into question.

They all did. Some of them even had a point -- getting blowjobs from the help is something you expect from Guns 'n' Roses, not the occupant of the West Wing. It was tawdry and off-putting, if completely unworthy of reproaches as serious as impeachment, and effectively grinding government to a halt for the remainder of Clinton's term.

But they went on and on and on about it, each one-upping the last with more and more ponderous verdicts, heedless of the practical consequences, long after there was any point to any of it. And now we are where we are, because these pud-whackers can't stop with their knuckle-shuffle. And we can't get enough of it.

Suddenly a candidate who is running overtly on issues of character and judgment is blessedly exempt from scrutiny in those things. He made a point of embarrassing his second wife; his best buddy was a mobbed-up prick who apparently felt entitled to stick his cock in everything within a hundred yards. His own children don't speak to him and won't vote for him. Does this tell you something about how he does things, is there a pattern worth noticing here?

On the one hand, we don't really want to keep up this habit of digging through the neighbor's garbage, trying to dig up something ugly while acting all Simon-pure. On the other hand, this is all already public knowledge. Now Broder wants to take the high road and avoid all that. For now, anyway; he knows as well as anyone that his profession is that of the herd, and that if he doesn't stroke the cheating asshole issue everyone else will be happy to leave him behind.

And in a profession where the appearance of relevance is the real currency, the only thing that matters when the rest of the kewl kidz pull out their Members Only jackets is to follow suit.

Weekend at Bernie's

Giuliani's judgment speaks for itself quite clearly. There is no sensible, rational reason to support his bum-rush to the balcony, so it makes sense that the people most in support of Rudy are neither sensible nor rational.

Where Chuckie the K intersects with Count Chocula and Marion Robertson, albeit more quasi-intellectually, is in the transcendent belief in will to power. And they know that the limbic trolls that populate their respective fanclubs all possess the same gene. There's no mystery there.

Now, whether Rudy Walnuts can make people believe that his experience at rousting squeegee men and street derelicts translates into the warm pink blanky they crave, and that his sidekick Fat Bernie Gambino's troubles aren't simply a direct product of the very institutions they emanated from, that may be a different story.

But I'm betting not. I always figured Mencken for an optimist.

Fairytale of New York

In what appears to be a perfect symbiosis, America's Mayor picks up the coveted endorsement of the cultural equivalent of its wacky neighbor.

Let's make sure we have all this straight -- a man who has been historically pro-gay rights and pro-choice, and whose single issue is 9/11, is being endorsed by a raving loon who, in agreement with Jerry Falwell, declared that America got what it deserved on 9/11....because of its tolerance of gay people.

Are these fuckin' people trying to make everyone's heads explode, or just another case of douchebags of a feather flocking together?

Update: Roy draws the parallel more clearly, in that the common element between humps like Giuliani and Robertson is, naturally, straight-up authoritarianism. That each likes his served up with a healthy dollop of institutionalized corruption -- Robertson in his gold-mine dealings with various African thugs; Giuliani with Vic Mackey wannabes like Bernie Kerik -- only sweetens the deal for them.

But it also helps blow the lid off of what really makes the remaining stripe of limbics tick. Beyond protecting their chedda from groping do-gooders and hoping to win the lottery, what these numb fucks really really want is to be told what to fuckin' do. It trumps everything, lays bare all the notional fambly-valyews whinges, overrides everything from serial philandering to cross-dressing to Mormonism. Once Romney internalizes that -- and he already has to some extent -- he has the money to keep running with this theme, and this is a static demo that's just waiting for someone they perceive as viable. All these idiot talking points about "electability" are now officially worthless; the core demo has made its priority abundantly clear.

They seem to think that they're choosing between dying on their feet and living on their knees, but they're really just dying on their knees, and apparently can't wait to do so. That it manifests itself in the incoherent alignment of Giuliani and Robertson should signal bad tidings for Giuliani's campaign, and for the fortunes of the Republicans themselves. Creepy douchebag, or empty rich suit? Your call, geniuses.

Made Men

Ladies and germs, your GOP front-runner, Rudy Walnuts:

In 2000, more than half the mayor’s cabinet had opposed Mr. Kerik’s appointment to be police commissioner. His detractors had noted, among other concerns, that Mr. Kerik did not have a college degree, a department requirement at the time for captains and above.

Mr. Giuliani waved off the dissenters. “I believe that the skill I have developed better than any other was surrounding myself with great people,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book, “Leadership.”

“Too many leaders overlook candidates with unusual résumés because of a failure of nerve,” Mr. Giuliani wrote. “By the time I appointed Bernie Kerik, I had hired so many people that I was immune to such criticisms.”

And what of Big Pussy Kerik, anyway?

Mr. Kerik earned $150,500 as commissioner but pleaded poverty. He turned to Lawrence V. Ray, a friend of a few years, who had an engaging manner and a big bankroll.

In 1998, Mr. Ray was the best man at Mr. Kerik’s wedding — and paid for much of the event. Weeks later, Mr. Kerik recommended Mr. Ray for a $100,000 job with Interstate Industrial Corporation, a New Jersey-based construction firm with tens of millions of dollars in city contracts.

Two years earlier, the owners, Peter and Frank DiTommaso, had paid more than $1 million to buy a transfer station from Edward Garafola, a mob soldier, and hoped to obtain a city operating license. But city investigators had found that the company employed mob figures and used mob-controlled trucking firms.

The DiTommasos, who adamantly and repeatedly have denied any ties to organized crime, hoped Mr. Ray could help resolve their problem with the Giuliani administration. Soon after being hired, Mr. Ray took Frank DiTommaso to meet with his friend the correction commissioner.

Mr. DiTommaso recalled the moment for city investigators: “Mr. Ray walked into the office, unannounced, just walked right in; Mr. Kerik got up and came around the desk and give him a big hug and a kiss.”

Within months, Interstate had hired Mr. Kerik’s brother and the commissioner had begun lobbying behind the scenes for Interstate.

One night in July 1999, he sat in Walker’s, a bar in downtown Manhattan, defending Interstate to Raymond V. Casey, a cousin of Mayor Giuliani who was chief of enforcement for the city commission that was reviewing Interstate’s license application. Later that year Mr. Kerik telephoned an assistant commissioner at the Department of Investigation to say that Interstate’s owners, as far as he knew, were clean of mob taint, according to a person familiar with her account.

And that September he had city detectives investigating the company meet Mr. Ray in his city office, a location that underlined for the men that the company had powerful friends.

The lobbying stopped on March 2, 2000, when Mr. Ray and Mr. Garafola, the mob soldier, were indicted on federal charges in an unrelated stock scheme. Top Giuliani officials suspended Interstate’s $85 million in city contracts.

Three weeks later, Mr. Kerik sat down for a nearly two-hour interview with top officials at the Department of Investigation. He talked about his relationship with Mr. Ray and the DiTommasos, about the hiring of his brother and the meeting at Walker’s.

He neglected to mention a key fact: Interstate was paying for $165,000 worth of renovations on his new apartment in the Bronx.

I still think the funniest part was Kerik's Ground Zero fuck-pad he had for his trysts with Hurricane Judith Regan. It's going to be fun watching Rudy run, hunched over in his Count Chocula posture, from the Mrs. Doubtfire schtick, and more seriously, from Fat Bernie's little butterball of corruption.



Yup. I can see why all those suckers paid good money to hear this clown yap about leadership and management and people skills, 'cause he clearly had them in spades. Every time this hump pulls some "Bernie who?" crap, that pic is going up. It's going to be a fun year. Run, Rudy, run!

Update: Almost forgot:



Hey, look! Rudy's got a new dress!