It Was At That Moment That He Truly Became Dear Leader

"And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it anymore, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing." -- Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, p. 293

Let's explore a small but important footnote from Tuesday's Two Hours of Hate in Satan's Asshole, better known as Phoenix. At the usual "fake media" attack point in Snowflake's babbling greatest-shits nonsense, he observed that there were several news cameras filming and recording the lies for the bafflement of posterity. He then asserted that because he was talking shit about them, some of them were stopping the filming, that camera lights were going out.

It doesn't need to be stated for the record that that wasn't at all true, right? And yet, despite him telling them to look, and presumably them doing so, and seeing that the cameras were not in fact being turned off, many people in the (admittedly small, perhaps even smaller than Snowflake's tiny wittle doll hands) audience, grumbled in agreement with their dark lord.

In other words, despite being able to see for themselves a very simple empirically verifiable fact -- the lights are either on or off -- these folks looked, and listened, and decided that whatever Snowflake said must be the "truth," simply because he said it. These people have lost their fucking minds. They are more than happy to drive off the cliff with him.

Brand Newt Day

So Pravda's Dan Balz musta drew the short straw on reportage of the Republigoon clown car revving up for next fall. Instead of the tee-ball shots of crazymilfs Snowbilly Spice (Palin) or Mary Tyler Moron (Bachmann), Balz gets stuck with pimping eight-chinned pseudo-intemellectual Newt Gingrich. And pimp that shit he does, like it's a sixteen-going-on-thirty-year-old runaway:

Through intellect and ambition, Gingrich has kept himself in the middle of public policy debates on health care, education, energy and foreign affairs. “Newt’s been the Republican Party’s main idea man for close to a generation,” said Terry Holt, a Republican strategist who closely observed Gin­grich as speaker. “This is a guy who brings unlimited energy and creative thinking to a race that needs new ideas.”

Gosh, it's as if we could just take a Republican strategist's word (and the title of Balz' write-up) and just assume for the sake of argument that Newt Gingrich is a "man of ideas". So much is Balz convinced of this that aside from a quote of Gingrich's asserting a standard wish list and a token nod to the usual states' rights guff, nowhere in the several hundreds of words does Balz remember to include an actual, workable idea enumerated by Gingrich.

Fortunately he does link to the propitiously-named American Solutions site, which graciously includes links to several of Newt's stabs at profundity. Here's a magickal slice of the "ideas" and "intellect" being sold, like a case of spiked cough syrup out of the back of some greaseball's '92 Camaro in an alley:

Let me say that Louie Gohmert that he is a terrific national asset. He has a remarkable range of innovative ideas.

It goes on, lauding Gohmert's "brilliant insight" and "courage" in protesting something Obama wanted to do. Let me say that Louie Gohmert is the drawling hump who apologized to British Petroleum, after their fucked-up equipment had killed eleven workers and polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico, for having to endure Obama's shameless shakedown of their bullshit mud-drilling operation. Let me say that Louie Gohmert needs to be reincarnated at least a dozen times as one or another hapless creature encrusted by industrial pollution, and then reincarnated as a fisherman who has to make his suicide look like an accident so his insurance company will pay off his shrimp trawler and not leave his survivors completely destitute.

Seriously, if you had to make a "fuck 'em right in the neck" list of mouthbreathing assholes in Congress, Louie Gohmert is almost guaranteed to make your top three or five. Every public appearance of Gohmert convinces me more that he is a product of careful genetic engineering, of warped scientists valiantly attempting to find a sweet spot, that perfect cross of willfully ignorant and obnoxiously mean. Not in the childish "those guys are meeeeaan!" sense, but in the real "this guy barely gives a fuck about his family, and certainly not about anybody else" sense.

But in all seriousness, all intellectual honesty, can you read that entire speech and find a coherent workable idea, and even a sketch of how it can be implemented? There's plenty of rhetoric, sure, but it wears about as thin as the usual liberal "let's be the best America we can be/it takes a village" counterpart.

The big ideas seem to be, in no particular order: Gut the tax and regulatory systems, because our crumbling infrastructure can repair itself, and nobody gives a fuck about coal miners until 50 of them suffocate under a mountain of unsafe rock that the MSHA was too defunded or defanged to catch before it collapsed. Indoctrinate the populace with the heroic epic of American Exceptionalism, because you just don't see that at every fucking turn right now, seriously. Talk about God a lot, because if he hasn't struck Newt down by now, he must be pretty forgiving. And so forth.

(Even Gingrich's newfound god-bothering is off a touch; he claims that God has forgiven Gingrich's numerous transgressions, yet apparently does not hold out for the possibility that He might forgive the transgressions of Gingrich's political opponents as well. Of course, Gingrich is too busy effeminizing them and casting them as job-killers to notice this intellectual inconsistency. But then, that would presuppose that he has ever been intellectually honest in the first place. I'm not sure even Dan Balz really believes that.)

I get why Newt Gingrich thinks those things count as ideas; what I don't get is why Dan Balz thinks they count as ideas. See, an idea has to be more than "cut taxes" or "cut spending" -- you then have to explain the expected consequences and outcomes of these actions. If I say "cut spending", I should have to say what I want to cut, by how much, and how that will tangibly help the budget deficit. Every one of these goddamn "cut spending" clowns has the same schtick -- find some bullshit drop-in-the-bucket program that's politically unpopular but fiscally meaningless, and uphold it as the ne plus ultra of government irresponsibility and hedonism.

Crucial to this tactic is avoiding all mention of the Big Three spending programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and the military. Oh sure, once in a while one of the dumber and meaner ones will actually have the cojones to talk about privatizing Social Security, before catching themselves in a sudden rush of memory of how no one's really all that hot anymore to hand their paychecks over to the geniuses who monkeyfucked the world economy. And paid themselves nice fat bonuses for doing so, just because they could. Other than that, those things don't get brought up a whole lot.

It's like driving down a road that has three lane-wide, impossible-to-miss, car-swallowing potholes, and making a big show about the bug splattered on your windshield, acting like the potholes aren't there. Of course, this is constitutent-driven for the most part; the baby boomers are more than happy to ensure they get theirs and fuck over my generation completely and utterly, just like they always have.

And raging militarism is crucial to perpetuating important nationalist control myths, so the only cuts to the military will be in things that directly affect service personnel, such as post-trauma care, post-military job assistance, housing assistance for families while troops are deployed, etc. That's how that one works out. There'll always be enough money in the budget to bankroll another flying contraption the Air Force doesn't want, or to run formation exercises at the Raiders game. When your main concern is maintaining the budget for symbolism, the big cuts always come out of substantial stuff first. So guaranteed, any military cuts will come out of troops' backs.

Anyhoo, so again, Mr. Idea Man. I've reread the speech a couple times, just not seeing anything besides Mitch Albom-level stories and American Legion boilerplate. (And seriously, whoever transcribed this speech must have used cheap voice-recognition software. Fucking proofread once in a while, m'kay? Looks like a slow third-grader scooped this shit out. "Baton" Death March, seriously? Fugging chumps.)

Near as I can tell, Newt Gingrich has had exactly three big ideas in his entire political career -- mastering a precise vocabulary of loaded words guaranteed to antagonize and conceal rather than elucidate; cluttering up school boards and city councils with red-meat window-lickers who, while largely unelectable at higher levels, are useful for local rabble-rousing and policy shenanigans; and portraying himself as some sort of intellectual emeritus of the wingnut brigade. That last one is simple; when you're competing against marginal oafs like Palin and Bachmann, you pretty much win if you can get through a speech without drooling on yourself.

Ironically though, no matter how much he preaches his bullshit gospel about Christ's forgiveness, it's the issue of morality that will be Newt's undoing (assuming, in fact, that he's running because he genuinely wants to win and thinks he can win, as opposed to Fred Thompson's cute little take-the-money-and-run grift he pulled on the short-bus crowd a couple years back). The morality issue, in his case, is bad even for a politician.

Put it this way -- as a stereotypical godless, hedonistic sybarite, while I don't personally approve of fucking around on one's spouse or significant other, I don't make it a criterion for the people I elect to implement public policy. So, yeah, I found it distasteful and unsurprisingly tacky, even a minor source of irritation that Bill Clinton got his pole smoked by a chunky intern whilst discussing troop deployments in the Balkans. And I was weirded out by Clinton's bizarre compartmentalism, that he seriously felt that jerking off in a sink, instead of ejaculating in said intern's mouth, somehow absolved him of cheating on his wife, or having sex with a sub-sub-subordinate. And his smirking parsimony over the meanings of simple words was just obnoxious. But like most folks, I was far more irritated at the hypocrites who were all too happy to basically shut down the entire government to mess with him over it.

Chief among these scumbags was Gingrich. Maybe I am just a little bit square on the subject, because I simply cannot get my brain around a person who persecutes a colleague for doing the exact same thing he himself is doing at the same time. One expects at least some small measure of honor among thieves, but Gingrich time and again has shown himself to be a man utterly without honor, devoid of character. Expecting character and honor of one's openly purchased politicos is a fool's errand in the first place, but it's one Gingrich's party runs to every chance they get. Maybe for once we should take them up on that.

Update: Anonymous in comments reminds me that it was, in fact, Joe Barton who apologized to BP, not Louie Gohmert, proving conclusively that I cannot tell these inbred goobers apart. Amazingly, Gohmert is an even bigger shithead than Barton, so he'll probably serve at least another ten terms.

It's Not a Flaw, It's a Feature

Per usual, The Beast's Allan Uthman nails the Democrats' perfidy right on the head:

The Democrats seem to be throwing this thing on purpose. The public option is DOA and was probably always meant to be. And it’s not because they’re wussy or incompetent. It’s because they’re corrupt. It’s because all they are is the sock puppet on the left hand of corporate hegemony. Bribery is legal in this country—we call it campaign finance. That’s why we can’t have a single-payer system, and that’s why this bill devolving into yet another massive theft of taxpayer money was a foregone conclusion. In the end, maybe some poor people will be able to get treatment when they couldn’t before, but only in the weakest, most costly and corrupt way conceivable. And if that’s the only way we can do it, then I guess I’m for it.

Of course they're throwing it on purpose. Nothing else explains the scummy opportunism of the Stupidak Amendment, a useless and easily-negated piece of crap tacked on to a deliberately unpassable bill. The whole thing is nothing more than yet another massive upward wealth transfer, because evidently our grandchildren's pockets have not been picked quite enough.

But consider -- even with a 40-seat House majority, it took Stupak to get the necessary votes to pass it by just 5. Forget the whole "Democrats from conservative districts" handjob, those are the constituents who are most in need of a real health-care effort. If they really think abortion trumps their own actual health-care crisis, then I suppose they deserve exactly what they're signing up for. But that's likely not the case, just more politically expedient.

This is a sideshow, and everyone knows it. If it persists -- and it will, because the insurance industry owns treacherous frauds like Max Baucus outright -- the Democrats deserve whatever they get. Including Obama. The only way he avoids being a one-term punchline is if he sufficiently convinces enough people in '12 that, bad as he and his party have screwed this pooch, the other side is even dumber and meaner. But these are all truly awful, awful people, who need to be tossed at the earliest possible opportunity. That'll happen the day Sarah Palin goes away and pigs fly out of Joe Lieberman's ass.

Future Schlock

Really interesting post and discussion over at The Oil Drum, just to get the ol' futurism juices flowing (ewwwwww). I have no value judgments as to whether it's true or plausible, fair or foul, moral or indefensible, or merely the natural by-product of getting one's swerve on whilst reading World War Z and watching Children of Men. But it's certainly provocative.

I would, in fact, submit that many of us are living out a similar scenario, to a much smaller scale and degree, obviously. And if we're not, perhaps we should consider doing so. But think about it -- half the world lives on a dollar a day, which means that pretty much every American and European at the very least is subconsciously protecting their nut. Just making a token effort at the notional advantages of upward mobility is a form of socioeconomic self-stratification.

And for every case where that may be a "bad" or "unfair" thing to do, you can make an equally (or perhaps even more) valid case for it being the most rational thing to do. Let's say, just to pick a random example, that you are an idealistic sort of person, or at least would like to be. You endured the last eight years of Cheneyism, and the previous eight years of Republican witch-hunts and Clintonian triangulations and debaucheries. You may even be old enough to recall the predations of Reaganbush. You are battle-scarred and war-weary, in the political sense. You realize that they're all full of shit, and that said realization is every bit as much a part of growing up as realizing the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

So when you cast your sacred lot not just against the least-offensive douchebag, but actually for someone who finally tickles that funny bone of idealism a bit, someone who not only promises Hopenchange, but more importantly accountability, it will harsh your mellow even more to find out that you have once again been rolled. Worse yet, you see that stupid people have somehow managed to become stupider, and more vitriolic.

Suddenly we're in a bad movie where idiots are strapping themselves with assault rifles to attend health-care rallies, and recipients of government largesse have decided it is their sacred mission to disrupt said debates with moronic invocations against the same government beast that keeps them alive. (It is almost a mathematical axiom that these idiots also have the highest percentage of family members who are on some other part of the dole, because they're too fucking dumb and/or lazy to go to Planned Parenthood.) The media's role is to give the screamers a radically outsized voice in the debate, and the governing party's role is waver and cater to that stupidity. Maybe when they get that eightieth Senate seat, they'll come through with all that Change they promised.

So really, faced with all that, friends 'n' neighbors, why wouldn't anyone who had the means set about backing slowly away from the toxic retardation of their fellow citizens and the dickless incrementalism of their elected representatives? Doesn't necessarily mean heading for the rammed-earth bunker in the hills with the raincatchers and solar panels and a few Saigas (though there are days where that sounds better and better), but it does mean judiciously assessing the situation and planning accordingly. You cannot get out of a debt-leverage financial crisis by leveraging more debt; you cannot have an equitable recovery by only bailing out the few hundred people who caused the problem in the first place. That's not politics, that's just arithmetic. What they're doing is not going to "work", except in the short term, and except for their own immediate interests.

The important thing is the basic realization that nobody, not Barack Obama, and certainly not the vipers at Goldman Sachs, give a shit what happens to you. The Republicans, vile as they are and unencumbered by facts or intellectual honesty, are at least more honest about their sociopathy. But in the meantime, I dunno. Be idealistic about individuals, but cynical about people. Be skeptical of people who promise to "help", or at least be aware of what's in it for them. Stop watching the network news, and stop voting (except, of course, when the Republitards offer up their inevitable Sarah Palin/Lonesome Rhodes ticket in 2012) -- the best way to disempower liars is to ignore them. That goes for the health-care nazi protesters as well; those animals need to kindly fuck off and die already.

It's been a while since I've had a good, solid rant on, and damn it feels good to be a gangsta. But I do seriously think that we do not necessarily have to be wealthy to have our own "separate peace". We just have to pay attention and plan ahead, live within our means, keep our skills sharp and keep learning new ones, be nice to those in our lives (and on our teevee screens) who deserve it and rid ourselves of those who just bring toxic baggage with them. Be our own mercenaries, basically, rather than worrying about the bloated plutocrats who think they should rent some to save their own sorry hides from the seething masses they helped perpetuate.

Pigs on the Wing

In the panic to inoculate ourselves against the new strain of swine flu, perhaps we could consider quarantining diseased ungulates such as Cheney and Rove from where they might infect decent humans. Really, these assholes spent eight years hiding from any direct inquiry, and now, thanks to a complaisant media, we can't get rid of 'em. Thanks, librul media!

Dick Cheney became a one-of-a-kind vice president for two reasons: he cared deeply about governance, and not a bit about his future political standing.

Those same factors, for better or worse, have turned him into a one-of-a-kind former vice president. In a sharp break with long-standing practice, Mr. Cheney has emerged as the highest-profile critic of the new administration.

This may be the most irresponsible opening descriptor regarding Cheney to tumble out of the corporate media poop-chute in some time. Replace "governance" with power, and you might get somewhere. As for the second assertion, the commonly held misconception that Cheney's positions were informed by the moral courage of not wishing to obtain higher office, this is a canard of the cheapest order. Only someone who cared very deeply for how they are perceived would so eagerly and frequently break long-held protocol in the first few weeks of a new administration.

Cheney is nearly fanatical in burnishing his legacy, no matter how much it requires gainsaying the current administration in a very serious set of circumstances, no matter how much it undermines the attempts (however cynical) to bring the country around on certain critical issues, no matter how much shit he has to fabricate. There is clearly nothing Cheney is not willing to say to make himself look like the bringer of measured pragmatism, and the more it comes at Obama's perceived expense, the better. He's never been right about anything substantial, not even by accident. Yet he is still granted access to what people at least pretend is reasoned discourse. More and more it's just the same inbred claque of beltway hacks validating themselves and each other, neither knowing nor caring what was real and true.

If Bill Clinton and/or Al Gore had behaved that way in March/April of 2001, the pained yowls of the usual wingnut catamites would have shattered glass around the planet. But of course, since Democrats typically mistake civilized behavior for practical strategy, it never really occurred to them to bother carrying on in such a manner. That's not a compliment.

Repeatedly during Mr. Obama’s transition and his first 100 days in office, Mr. Cheney has carried his anemic favorability rating into the ring to slug it out with a successor who enjoys considerable public support on issues from the role of the vice presidency to his trademark issue of national security.

Which begs the question why putatively serious media outlets, not just Fox, continue to enable him in his nasty little hobby. This is a vicious, small man, as comfortable with lying and calumniating as he is with torturing people without concerning himself with notions of actual "guilt" or "innocence". Four out of five Americans repudiate him and his words and deeds. But they need to back that up with something more concrete. At the very least, a decent nation would turn its back on him, as well as any entity granting him entree into reasonable discourse.

But then, a decent nation wouldn't continue to lie to itself about its propensity for murder and torture and futile proxy wars. The main difference between the Cheney administration and prior iterations -- and this certainly includes liberal lions such as Clinton and Carter and Kennedy, and more likely than not, Obama -- is its disdain for even the pretense of circumspection in means justifying ends.

Indeed, its main players took a degree of perverse pride in what they were willing to do to defend their abstract idea of what their country should be, even as they held most of its inhabitants in sheer contempt, and clearly continue to do so. These are, after all, the very same people who had the balls to use fucking Won't Get Fooled Again as their campaign song, not once but twice. That's a special kind of cynical.

Cheney is essentially the John Wayne Gacy of politicians, accumulating molested hitchhikers in his crawlspace even as he screws up the gall to point at how his neighbors let their lawns get a few inches too tall. Some days you almost wish that Obama were the fascist soviet nightmare his lunatic detractors insist he is, because animals like Cheney and Rove would be on the first cattle car to Outer Yakutsk already.

Deep Thought

Isn't Ann Coulter's remaining demographic either too broke to pony up thirty bucks for the same book she "wrote" two and four and six years ago, or too dumb to read in the first place? Maybe she'll come to their foreclosed lean-tos and read it to them.

Palin Truth Watch

I imagine you're as sick of reading and hearing about this dingbat as I am of writing and talking about her, but seriously, I cannot think of even one (1) thing she or McCain has said that has turned out to be even partially true. They're even overcounting their "crowds", and falsely attributing it to unwitting fire marshals.

Is that really even her family, or are they on loan from central casting? Was she ever really the governor of Alaska, or the mayor of Buttfuck, Alaska? Seriously, people, I'm starting to wonder if Sarah Palin has actually ever been to Alaska, or if it was just another refueling stop en route to the desolate Aleutian atoll that passes for her fevered, résumé-padding imagination.

My friends, that sum total of pure lies and the utter absence of a single true or substantive thing, that is desperation you can believe in. It's time to stick a fork in these lying assholes, and pimp-slap the next newbie cultist that proclaims, "I really like her!", because they think they're voting for a wacky new neighbor. Well, common sense, which is what these simps think they rely on, usually dictates that people who constantly lie and exaggerate about themselves are catastrophic when it comes to putting them in charge of anything important. Like, you know, your lives, your health care, job prospects, local/regional/national economy, social/foreign/energy policy, that sort of thing.

So shout it from the rooftops already -- she and Ol' Granddad are pathological liars. Call it what it is.

Road to Nowhere

My friends, that is a taxpayer boondoggle you can believe in:

During Palin’s recent convention speech she sharply criticized Senator Barack Obama for wanting to end Bush's tax cuts. She pointed to her sister and husband who are new small business owners in Alaska, “How are they going to be any better off if taxes go up?”

But in fact, the way the hockey rink was built was by raising taxes. Palin funded the project by pushing a special referendum that raised the sales tax by 25 percent. City hall records show the referendum was passed by twenty votes.

One Wasilla resident who voted for the complex is Mike Edwards. He says he spends about an hour a day at the facility watching his son play. He says he’s glad government stepped in to build the new ice because privately run rinks are much more expensive, costing teams as much as $300 an hour to practice compared to $185 at the public rink.

CBS News obtained 86 pages of city council documents that show Palin sought to justify the tax increase to fund the sports complex in part because the private sector had not stepped in to fill the gap. She noted the strong support in the community as a reason to move ahead.

But her most striking argument for raising taxes is one you might not expect from a fiscal conservative. She writes that the rink offers an opportunity for government to stop a social ill like drug abuse or juvenile delinquency before it starts.

So it's like midnight basketball, then. I suppose "community organizers" were involved at some level, not that these bozos would ever admit it.

Even better, media folk are already starting to debunk Klondike Barbie's autopilot "thanks, but no thanks" schtick.

Since McCain tapped her as his running mate on Aug. 29 (hard to believe that was less than two weeks ago) Palin at every opportunity -- using virtually the same phrasing -- has told crowds that as governor of Alaska, "I told Congress, 'Thank but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere.' "

She re-ran the line again today at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio. But she did so in the face of a release from the Obama forces noting that a plethora of reporting shows her stance on the project -- which would have connected the small city of Ketchikan to the even smaller island of Gravina -- isn't so black-and-white.

And now it's a $24 mil road leading to the bridge that was never built, because Palin didn't want to have to give back the money. That's reform we can all believe in, my friends.

Extra points for the scathing ridicule emanating from the Obama camp on this bullshit ("next thing you know, she'll claim she sold [the bridge] on E-Bay"). Seems like after a rather wild week or so, with some oddball weekend polling, the honeymoon is already winding down, pending Granny Glasses Gibson's suckupfest later in the week. She wound up the rubes, but even they have people who might need health care or benefit from stem-cell research, etc. When it sinks into their thick skulls that this crew's answer to all that is "fuck you", it might mean something. Might.

Also, for the Clump for Growth idiots and the retards in the LA Times comments in the linked article, with their "what about Obaaaaama and Biiiiden voting for the briiiidge toooooo!!1!1!" whine, get this, you mouthbreathing fuckheads -- neither Obama nor Biden has staked a mythical maverick claim using this contrived episode as evidence of their ideological independence. Palin, on the other hand, has touted it as a prime character reference at every stop, even though it is not at all true.

Not that any of these, you know, facts stop this broad from repeating it, since she's not allowed to say anything extemporaneous, and her audience doesn't care about facts anyway. They just want a chance to publicly beat off to an image of what they think they are, when not a one of them -- including Palin and McCain -- are remotely the rugged self-made individualists they posture as.

And if they are, then by all means put your money where your pieholes are and quit sucking our tax dollars already.

Jesus Cramp

I had thought that sensible people had long ago forgotten Hal Lindsey and his apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo, but an acquaintance (a very nice guy, but he and people like him are what's wrong with the voting process -- he admits that he doesn't know much about the people or policies he's voting on, and so prays for guidance on whom to vote for) swears by Lindsey's claptrap, so I had to mosey through WorldNutDaily and see for myself. The headline, just a hair north of "Obama and Bat Boy Have Love Child in John Edwards' Basement" country, does half the work for me.

There are no surprises in Lindsey's burbling horseshit, not a one, but supposedly the guy considers himself a Christian, and in their mythology one of the primary betrayals of Jesus was not just the crucifixion itself, but the denial and calumniation of him. Lindsey counters those very teachings he proclaims to uphold.

Barack has apologized to the French and Germans for Americans who are too ignorant to learn their language before embarking on their once-in-a-lifetime two-week visit abroad.

This is a profound contortion of what Obama has said, which is essentially that learning a foreign language in school (any language, not necessarily French or German) is practically guaranteed to upgrade any American's skill set in a globalized job market. This is such an obvious point it shouldn't have even needed to be said, but Lindsey is no doubt spoon-feeding the bozos who take that apocryphal Ma Ferguson quote seriously.

And yet, not true. No American politician in their right mind would hit a high-profile gig in Europe and invoke ugly American stereotypes, and then apologize for them. And Obama certainly did not do anything of the sort. But Lindsey counts on the notoriously thin skin of his audience to be reflexively offended by something that never happened.

He's apologized for the simple Midwestern rednecks who, forced to cling to religion and guns to justify their antipathy, just can't help themselves.

Another lie. There was no "apology" involved; this was merely another attempt to figure out why large groups of people keep enthusiastically voting directly against their own self-interests. Obama's explanation is as likely as anyone else's, I suppose, but there was no apology involved, simply a somewhat ham-fisted attempt to elucidate how these goobers might be won over by common sense, in a situation that Obama had assumed was off-the-record.

The reason Lindsey goes through these logical contortions is to bolster his own point, one that reeks of defensiveness. In Lindsey's brain-scrambled dimension, any attempt to right the ship of state, and identify, correct, and undo past and current wrongs where possible is an admission of error. And since these whackjobs consider the U.S. to be God's True Promised Kingdom, they conflate the country with their sky-buddy. Criticize America, and you're telling God that His wife is fat or something. Big no-no.

And Lindsey knows that he's lying here -- he's got links to newspaper articles satirizing Obama's messianic pretensions, but nothing for his assertions about Obama apologizing to the Eurotoffs for his retard hillbilly cousin.

America has never faced so many different crises at the same time in living memory. The war with al-Qaida and Islamic terror, the Iran crisis, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, the rising price of oil, the falling dollar, enemy acronyms like OPEC, NAM, OIC, U.N. ...

Indeed. Many of these crises have been created or exacerbated by the current regime. The idea that not just Obama in particular, but the 90% of the planet that stands against the Cheneyites in general is that knowing something about how the world works actually has some importance, and that responsibility and accountability are critical.

Even making the caveat that, at this stage of human geopolitical development, there is going to be a hegemon, and as such, the U.S. presents the least malicious option of hegemony, the fact is that we're slipping behind ascending hegemons. Obviously, this is in no small part because people keep allowing themselves to be bamboozled by superstition and outright hucksterism, smooth-talking assholes with a rarely-thumbed Bible in one hand and a script of lies in the other.

[Update: Time inexplicably lowers the bar by chronicling the ravings of some of these Left Behind goobers.

Everything from Obama's left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity.

John McCain is also left-handed. So is Bill Clinton, so is Poppy Bush. So, amazingly enough, are a lot of people, possibly even some Left Behind readers. I expect sites that explicitly cater to the worst sorts of dipshit tendencies of the American electorate, such as WhirledNutDaily, to spend time chronicling the straitjacketed utterances of a horrid little sliver of weirdos. Even though I don't expect much out establishment boilerplate such as Time, I would have thought them at least smarter than to bother with the sort of people who a generation ago would have been bothering unfortunate passersby with their ridiculous babble. Then again, for an industrialized nation, this country is infatuated with superstition, awash in it on a level that would make a Borneo witch-doctor uncomfortable.]

Fightin' Words

As a general rule, the Sunday morning schmuckfests are not on the viewing schedule, but the wife likes the CBS Sunday Morning show, and until football season starts, there's rarely anything worth enduring on the however many dozens of channels I have on the DirecTV. So it was that we happened to let it go into Face the Nation, where I instantly noticed the supposedly intemperate remarks of Wes Clark vis-à-vis John McCain as being accurate for one thing, and automatically controversial for another.

Since almost no Republicans other than McCain and Chuck Hagel have actually served in combat duty, especially during Vietnam, they have long cultivated this phony-tough, crazy-brave veneer for themselves, and hung a Superman cape upon all matters military, persons and objects alike. And since the media weasels are by and large skittish herd animals, many of whom have built up their mancrushes on McCain in print and video, they have a personal investment in things, and are not about to backtrack.

So it is that Clark's fairly tepid and obvious comment is utilized by the very same party who had the fucking balls to dismiss and betray John Kerry's combat service, even as they ran the two draft-dodging incumbents. And so it is that a lazy, coddled, incompetent political media corps -- every one of whom should be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan for a while to help them reprioritize and maybe acquire a more meaningful skill set for their supposed profession -- finds another chew toy to occupy them for a week or so. Kerry's service did him no favors, and became fodder for professional liars. McCain's is not only sacrosanct, but his most distinct job qualification. That sounds about right.

Merit Pay

Congrats are in order to the drug-addled sex tourist, fabulist, calumniator, model husband, foe of cripples and women. Limpballs has made a real mark on the already seedy world of talk radio, and somehow managed to make it -- and the world of politics -- an even worse place than it was before.

Choke on it, asshole.

Kicking Gas

So many reasons to enjoy the WorldNutDaily, from the lists of predatory female schoolteachers to the musings of Chuck Norris. Chuck has some words of wisdom regarding domestic energy production. Let's watch the fun.

As oil and gas prices skyrocket, Congress continues to play the blame game. In April 2006, with the Democrats poised to take over Congress with Nancy Pelosi at the helm, she released a statement saying, "With skyrocketing gas prices, it is clear that the American people can no longer afford the Republican Rubber Stamp Congress." She followed that with the commitment, "Democrats have a common sense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices by cracking down on price gouging." So has the Democrat's [sic] commonsense plan worked? Average gas prices were about $2.50 a gallon at the time. Now they're $4 a gallon and rising. Some crack-down plan.

It's pretty clear right from the start that Norris' intent is simply to place the blame at the feet of feckless Dummycrats. Because, you know, the two Republican oilmen at the head of the executive branch have done so much to tackle this problem. Yes, the Democrats have been full of empty promises on a variety of issues, but that doesn't excuse the ignorance and intellectual dishonesty of people like Norris on this issue. And price gouging is only one of many reasons for the spike in oil prices.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, they are going to discuss this week a cap-and-trade system, something that Obama and MCain [sic] both support. The main problem is official estimates say that it will increase gas by another $1.50 a gallon. Or as Newt Gringrich said in an interview recently with Glenn Beck, "It should be called 'Raise prices and destroy jobs' because that's what it will do. It's going to raise the price of gasoline; it's going to raise the price of diesel fuel for truckers. It's going to raise the price of aviation fuel for an already ailing airline industry. It's going to raise the price of heating oil. It's going to raise the price of natural gas, and it's going to raise the price of coal."

The price for all those things is going to rise whether we like it or not; the only question is if we do things that will help prepare, diffuse the impact and perhaps cushion the blow for the people who can least afford it. I mean, I know that all the oil company executives and oil futures speculators have duly earned their eight- and nine-figure bonuses and all. But all these things Professor Gingrich expounds upon are based on unsustainable premises.

Incidentally, Gingrich was on Face the Nation this morning touting much the same philosophy, with a snappy slogan of "Drill Here, Drill Now, Save Money". Yes, folks, if you let Shell and Exxon drill in ANWR and melt mountains of shale in the Rockies, gas prices will magically return to two bucks a gallon. Jesus, they just count on people to be cartoonishly gullible, don't they? It's an operative assumption for them, because they're rarely disappointed.

Here's where it gets a little weird, with hilarious results:

From the steady decline in the value of our dollar, to trade deficits and oil dependency, our sovereignty is being sold out from underneath us. Might I remind the federal government what one of their original and primary charges is: to protect the American public from the tyranny of foreign powers – which is exactly what is happening through others' financial rule over us. It is sucking the life out of our economy. And Congress is virtually standing by and watching it happen.

Look at the energy chaos that our government has allowed. While we remain at the mercy of oil companies, cartels and OPEC, our government has tied the hands of states and citizens to tap even temporary energy relief from our own land. Here are a few key vistas on the oil and energy landscape at the moment:

Though we have more oil in the shale of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming than combined in the Middle East (800 billion barrels), liberals and environmentalists have made it illegal to touch it.

It's illegal to drill in northern Alaska (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), or off the coasts of Florida or California.

Oil fields in Colorado are being shut down.

We won't develop shale oil fields in the Western states

It's illegal to explore in the Atlantic.

It's illegal to explore in the Pacific

It's illegal to explore in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico

We're not receiving any more leases to drill in the Gulf of Mexico, while China, Venezuela and Cuba are.

We haven't built an oil refinery in 25 years and reduced in half those we have

There's enough natural gas beneath America (406 trillion cube feet) to heat every home in America for the next 150 years, but we can't tap it all.

We have the largest supply of coal in the world, but it's Germany who is planning to build 27 coal-fired electrical plants by 2020.

American airlines are in danger of going out of business.

American truckers are being stranded on the sides of the road.

American commuters are going bankrupt trying to travel back and forth to work, and are being forced to work locally for lower wages.


If there isn't a conspiracy going on here, someone needs to make a movie about one!

This is going to take a bit to unpack, this feeble nonsense, but bear with me. The first thing you might notice is the sheer redundancy of Norris' bullet points; the third and fourth points merely reiterate the first, and he rephrases the Gulf of Mexico and California (Pacific) and Florida (Atlantic) several times. And even Norris' own link on shale oil, rather than actually claiming greater resources than the entire Middle East, makes the more modest claim that "it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia". What could? Why, the shale on federal land that the oil companies wish to extract. The more exorbitant claim Norris suggests appears to come from Orrin Hatch further down in the short interview part of the article.

Here's a brief rundown on the extraction process for shale oil; it requires intense amounts of heat to be generated to separate the kerogen into refinable oil, has not been sufficiently tested and employed in any substantial ongoing process capacity, and can be environmentally destructive. This is not about a few smug latte liberals preserving the scenic views from their cabins in Telluride, it's about oil companies rushing into public land for penny-ante leases to set up processing and refining infrastructures. And by the time they recoup their R&D and overhead -- and the usual bonuses -- the offset at the pump is going to be minimal. Norris and Gingrich and the rest of them would like you to believe that oil produced domestically stays here, but that's not necessarily so. If the cash-flush Chinese or Europeans are willing to pay more for it, it will go to those places. That's how that free-market thing works, cuz.

As for this "we haven't built a new refinery lately" schtick, what do you mean "we", Chief? The oil companies have let their domestic refinery capability run off. Let's see, why might that be? Because they know that most of the major fields have peaked, and it's not cost-effective to dump billions of dollars into planned obsolescence? Naw, that's too simple -- it must be a conspiracy. Well, it is a conspiracy, Chuck, but not of bien pensant Dummycrats telling everyone how to live virtuously. It's a conspiracy of the bottom line. It's business. And hell, Montana's Democratic governor proposed building Fischer-Tropsch refineries to process the state's enormous resources of coal into oil, since the current price makes it more than cost-effective. But those infrastructural efforts take a lot of time and investment.

Meanwhile, what have Americans done to help economize, to conserve, since as we all know, conservatism is holy? Not a goddamned thing, that's what. The only thing that has finally forced individuals to take the situation seriously and dump their gas-guzzlers for more economical vehicles has been the drastic price increases. I think that sucks, because Norris' final point is actually right on the money -- this crisis most adversely impacts the people who are stuck with it. They have to commute because the local jobs pay for shit (what few of them there are), and they can't afford to move to the city because their houses are now worth maybe two-thirds of what they were two years ago, and would take a year to sell anyway.

And nowhere does Norris (nor Gingrich in his FTN appearance this morning) even mention the option of economizing, of driving smaller and smarter. It's not even on the table. No, they're perfectly happy to misdirect people who should know better but can't admit it to themselves, that the promised land of two-buck gas is theirs for the taking, if only we'll let national forests be plundered for profit.

Anybody who believes that deserves what they get, and if they have to pay six bucks a gallon to fill up their penis-compensating jacked-up F350, so much the better. They can pay twelve bucks a gallon for all I care. But the rapidly rising cost of gas is directly due to ramped-up demand from China and India meeting or exceeding production and extraction capacity, and peak supply. Factor in the risk premium caused by the war, futures speculation, and failure to check consumption, and it's a perfect storm. You could start melting down the Rockies tomorrow, and that oil is not going to hit the market for at least a couple years. And not only, as I pointed out, will it be unlikely to offset significantly after initial costs are recouped, but any cleanup costs incurred would be out-of-pocket for the taxpayers as well, one way or the other.

So is there a real solution? I don't think the usual "one size fits all" approach is going to help anybody, except the people who make a direct profit off of whatever scheme they can rope a career shill like Newt Gingrich into endorsing. But one key to it is, as Orrin Hatch points out, the degree to which oil is required for transportation, and how problematic it is to switch that overnight.

A hack like Hatch instantly translates that into "more oil now". But what about infrastructure; can you get businesses and residences off-line from oil-generated power? How much oil would it free up to invest in solar power across the American Southwest? How much oil would be conserved getting the rail system back together, and letting the airline industry transform into more of a business/short-term travel scenario? How much would these things cost? Who cares; if we can pour $3bn/week into Iraq, we can find some money to do something that will pay direct dividends and free up petroleum resources.

I don't think we should be at the mercy of inbred petrocracies and corrupt dictators either, but the way out from under it is not to drill and melt everything in sight. That might be a miniscule, short-term part of a far more comprehensive energy policy, but it solves nothing. It barely qualifies as kicking the proverbial can. And there's no way it should even be proposed, much less considered, without significant efforts to curb waste and excessive consumption.

People like Chuck Norris and Newt Gingrich shouldn't just be ignored, they should be repudiated at every possible opportunity. This is only the start of a very serious situation looming, one that will require a very patient, committed restructuring of transportation and delivery systems, one that will not kill the economy but actually provide it with a new dimension of potential, one that might undercut the oil oligarchy with more regionalized or even localized systems of energy delivery. Whether or not people are happy with the idea is irrelevant; the continuing rapid depletion of oil resources is indifferent to what you think you're entitled to drive. This "math is hard, let's go shopping" approach to dealing with the real world is over, one way or the other.

The only question is whether this problem gets addressed in time before the next big resource crisis -- potable water -- will have to be dealt with.

News You Can Lose

It occurs to me that, since the 'tards at Fux News will believe pretty much anything as long as it's wrapped in the right color bow, that maybe the best way to dilute their credibility is to just mass-bombard them with dozens, hundreds of Daily Show/Onion-style parodies in varying degrees of obviousness and ridiculousness.

Obama spotted entering a Des Moines Motel 6 love nest with Parker Posey, Kathy Bates, and an unidentified Filipina with a four-pack of wine coolers and a case of raging herpes? Sure. Hillary Clinton wipes ass with confederate flag at South Carolina rally? Why not? Al Franken's Playboy parodies turn out to be plagiarized from Ben Stein's old Penthouse columns? Run it up the flagpole; you know at least half these clowns are just dumb enough to salute it.

Between the half-hearted vetting and refuting of these nuggets, then running and eventually retracting at least some of them, it might interfere with their mission statement of making shit up and bamboozling their audience of self-selecting morons.

Patriot Games

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Accountability

Presumably because Mobutu Sese Seko's availability is compromised by his being dead and all, Izvestia has opted to further squander its scraps of credibility by giving legacy floater Billy Kristol a weekly column. Funny how journamalism (especially the opinion-mongering stripe), like politics, is one of those unique vocations where being wrong every fucking time has no effect on your ability to find work.

Brainless

I see America's favorite idiot loon is making her periodic pub crawl through what passes for the American media these days. Hell, why not bring in the raving sandwich-board idiot from the sidewalk while you're at it?

I'll see your disenfranchisement, Sweet Cheeks, and raise you the idea that maybe they shouldn't be allowed to write books anymore either. That would at least give the country a much-needed break from your scroungy ass. Apparently the title of the wizened shrew's two-ply manifesto is If Democrats Had Brains, They'd Be Republicans, but I'm inclined to scribble out a quick riposte called If Conservatards Had Brains, They Wouldn't Pay This Insane Tranny Thirty Bucks Every Eighteen Months for the Same Fucking Book.

Shorter title: House of Coulter: Where It's Always Shark Week.

In Oxy Veritas

I guess there's nothing really to add to fuckface Limbaugh's happy horseshit, except to agree that the double standard is still very much in effect. MoveOn is the spawn o' Satan himself, because they dared to criticize the veracity of General NewJesus' testimony. Therefore, anyone who refuses to completely repudiate MoveOn hates the troops. QED, chumps!

On the other hand, a toxic waste of space like Limpballs spouts off specifically against soldiers who dare to disagree with Junior's Master Plan, which all can agree is going just superbly. Some of these "phony soldiers" have literally given their lives or limbs for what Limbaugh and his dark masters earn quite a nice living to believe in. Someone else always does the wet work.

This is of a piece. This is a person who thinks it's funny to parody Parkinson's sufferers; why should his loathing of actual soldiers be any different? They dare to disagree with the people who put money in Limpballs' greasy pockets. And he's gotta get money for his oxy and boner pills somewhere.

It's only a matter of time before this piece of shit either gets caught cruising for head in a public bathroom, or has a bout of conscience and finally does the honorable thing. It boggles the mind to try to imagine what kind of animal still listens to this fucking creep.

Miss Saigon

So this is what our Serious Discourse has withered to -- Gomer Pyle invoking Alden Pyle, and erroneously at that. A man who supported a war while avoiding any active role in it, and still mustering the utter cynicism it takes to wallpaper his broken arguments with it. A person whose moral compass is so shattered, he doesn't hesitate for a second to tether the butchery of Pol Pot to his own false humanitarianism. Yes, because we all remember how quickly we jumped to stop the madness of the killing fields, don't we? Well, no -- that was the Vietnamese Army, of course. We were still too busy comforting our own wounded psyches over the thanklessness of the Vietnamese for what we had tried to do to for them, the ingrates.

The madness repeats itself; the bitter dead-enders who figure that the only reason we lost Vietnam is because we just weren't brutal enough, apply the same template to Baghdad, and harrumph that we shoulda just dropped one o' them magical tactical smart nukes, the kind that only kills al Qaeda, and then the flowers and candy would have appeared as promised. And they apply the same cautionary tales to their proposed run-ups to Iran; they can taste the sweet victory of that one already, like the illicit brew of twenty-dollar park chowder in an anonymous bathroom stall.

In a party which seems to throb with closet-case homophobes, stridently married men seeking glory-hole escapism, it is not unfair to extrapolate that mentality, that seething cognitive dissonance, to an increasingly incoherent -- aggressively so -- foreign policy. The lessons George Bush professes to have learned from Vietnam are those that only he, and the people like him, who bravely supported the war while they sought their deferments and let someone else take the bullet, could glean.

On the one hand, it is only politics, and you want to avoid personalizing the debate if you can help it (heh), but at some point, you have to recognize some of these people for the rotten souls that they are. I'm not sure what else you can say about someone who so breezily appropriates the lives and pain of other people for his own gratification. It's beyond the usual narcissism that has characterized Bush's foreign policy vision delusion; it's straight-up pathological. It's disgusting to see, to listen to. It's an abuse of language, of reasoning, and of what was once an inviolable moral direction for this country.

Let him explain this shit to Chuck Hagel, or Max Cleland, face-to-face, off the record. He obviously has the stones to lie and mislead people who are simply too worn out at this point to argue with his nonsense. Let him take up his thick, shoddy reasoning with someone who actually went beyond the Tortilla Curtain during Vietnam, and see if that gets him the downlow gratification he so desperately seeks. Who knows? Maybe this is just his conscience finally catching up to him.

Or maybe he's just working up his next ass-backwards comparison, once someone gives him a book on the Mexican War or the War of 1812.

Up Your Arsenal

Here is an outstanding comment that neatly encapsulates the moral dilemma of the two-faced "okay we were wrong but we meant well and anyway you were wrong toooooo" crowd of contemptible scribblers.

Ignatieff represents the corrupt and noxious tradition of moral imperialism. There is nothing either noble or tragic about it. Throughout the course of American empire, just as with the empires that preceded it and will probably succeed it, these moral imperialists have been the enablers and helpmates of the more crass and materialistic type of imperialist. Wherever there was a sugar industry to be cornered, a fruit plantation to be annexed, a native population to be moved out, an oil field to be accessed and exploited, a strategically placed peninsula to be militarized, a community of local women to be made into a brothel to serve sailors, a popular local leader who won’t play ball with the imperial commercial interests, these fine moral fellows have floated in on the same warships with their plans to convert the heathens to Christianity or Democracy or Liberalism. They were there in South America, dishing out last rights to converted Inca souls, as the latter were exterminated. They were there in the old west, civilizing the Red Man as he was pushed into the ground or off the edge of the continent. They were in Hawaii and the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, saving red socialist souls for the god of capitalism. And they were in Iraq, writing western Liberal constitutions and intellectually underwriting the butchery that got their reforming feet in the door.

I don't want to hear about how much these fellows love their country. That doesn't do it for me. The United States is drowning in an absolute flood of "country-love", and gagging on the junk food of patriotism. Before I am willing to give these Liberal moralists the time of day, I want an indication that they have some clue about the many things that are wrong with this country, and that they have some disposition to change those things. I want to see some signs that they are capable of emerging from the mass stupidity that witnesses one barbarous episode after another, only to throw them all down the memory hole and put manufactured memories, movie images and preposterous political speeches in their place. But the moral imperialists never get around to that kind of honest critique of their own societies. Their dreamy moralistic visages are always and only pointed in one direction: outward.

The moral imperialists are in love with the American Way, and want to spread it. Well I am not in love with the American Way. I reject much of that Way. I reject empire. I reject the cult of the nation. I reject the brutality of the American economic system. I reject the savagery of the westward expansion, and the genocide of the Native Americans. I reject the culture of guns, gouging and brawling and rumbling. I reject the record of continual, aggressive, warlike conquest. I reject the shallow kinetic culture of greed, acquisition and ceaseless interpersonal competition. I reject the fatalistic acceptance of a grotesquely imbalanced and undemocratic world of economic winners and losers. I reject the revolting commodification of sexuality. I reject the ongoing rape of the environment, and the prevalent love of replacing sublime natural beauty with shoddy human ugliness. But I do believe a better world is possible.

[all emphases in original]

Now, there's a great deal more that's right with America than is wrong, and our respect for the principles of law and human rights, however flawed, is substantially better than that of many countries, especially those in the Middle East, especially those in thrall to medievalist dogma.

But we are slipping, and we are notoriously averse to serious self-reflection. The existence of burqas does not absolve us from our own responsibilities, nor does it magically negate the concrete reasons why we are where we are, and fail to do anything sensible about those reasons. And smug putzes like Ignatieff, who tend to cloak their half-culpas in passive-aggressive rump bien pensant weasel words, do not help things. Nor do the Everything Changed and Everything Matters dime-store philosophakers, who refuse to face realities with the same grim determination as the Ignatieffs and the Friedmans.

One of the great things about there being a million little debates on the internets is not only that they serve as correctives to the bland posturing of the Serious Thinkers, but that they knock down the smug delusion that these people know something profound that escapes us peons. This has been consistently proven untrue, yet the same people are saying the same things, five years and countless lives later. And other people nod and respond, and cooperate at least objectively in the ridiculous notion that any of them still deserve a place at the discussion table.

They don't deserve such a place as long as they continue to avoid the central task accorded them, which is repudiating their initial foolishness of judgment. And they may be right, in the professional sense -- if they admitted that their esteemed judgment was so tragically, fatally flawed, they really would be out of a job. The operational integrity of The Village utterly depends on preserving the veneer of studied perspicacity.

The most recent week of guests on The Daily Show, two of whom were Bill Kristol and Cheney hagiographer Stephen Hayes, illustrates this perverted logic. No doubt Jon Stewart brought them on to be willing, somewhat amiable targets for what Stewart (to his credit) has evolved into a slightly more aggressive, penetrating interview style. (Though Stewart is also in the habit of trying to backtrack and lighten things as the interview winds up, which is a mistake. There is no reason to give even the appearance of retreat from sniveling tools like Kristol and Hayes, who are well-compensated for their intellectual panhandling.)

Stewart's intent seems to be to render their arguments inoperable, which is not difficult to do. But because these people have no substantial ethical moorings, and because they are part of a corrupted process, just having them on actually serves to legitimize them further. It should not be an opportunity for weasels and hacks to show that they can be good sports and take a joke; it's not a fucking joke. These are repulsive people whose paid mission is solely to defend other repugnant people, and their lies, corruption, cronyism, and failed policies, which affect us all. I don't think Atrios was off the mark when he recently opined that Kristol is a person of the sort whose image should be routinely spat upon by decent people at this point. And in a thoughtful, contemplative nation more tethered to its founding principles, that would be the case.

Instead, people like Kristol are welcomed and lauded in what passes for modern salons of Serious Discourse in this country, without a trace of irony. Being wrong in and of itself is not a crime, but nor should it be buffered by its "good intentions". It should be hauled out and recognized for exactly what it is, and why it happened in the first place, not for personal retribution, but to avoid future occurrences.

But when you have people who were clearly, objectively wrong, and refuse to admit such, and either color their professional regret with dolorous pud pounding (like Ignatieff), enable it by cheerfully licking the same boots that got them there (like Hayes), or insist, at absolutely zero personal cost to themselves, that we must prepare to trudge yet further into the Big Muddy, and by God use their same fucking map that got us there in the first place (like Kristol), the least a responsible media presence can do is to stop giving them a soapbox. Kristol has his own fucking magazine, yet the Washington Post feels some ontological need to give him a column. Hayes is a sloppy thinker and a lackey to the worst sort of people American politics has to offer. Ignatieff peddles his weepy tropes in the country's largest magazines.

These people are nothing but poseurs, charlatans, pseudo-intellectual concern trolls. There is no goddamned reason for any responsible media entity to give them so much as the time of day, even if the mission is to refute what they say. Facts never mattered to them in the first place; what makes anyone think that even the most comprehensive refutation of their bullshit will sway them or their idiot fans one iota?

Frag Hags

Just when you figured it couldn't get any worse, the Pat Tillman saga does exactly that, as years of lies wrapped in deceptions and smothered in secret sauce eventually get found out, somehow. It's despicable, through and through, at every level of the game, from the men in the platoon who destroyed the evidence and tried to get their stories straight, all the way up to the thoroughly dishonorable men who chose to use an honorable man as their recruitment prop.

And to what end? Some asshole general who was the last one standing when the music stopped gets reprimanded. Ooooh. A reprimand. That sounds about right.

And I don't want to hear any of this "fog of war" bullshit. Yes, I'm still willing to buy into the essential story that Tillman was a victim of accidental (if meticulously placed, apparently) friendly fire. After that, there was no fog, only cynical decisions made by pathetic, ass-covering freaks who deserve whatever misfortunes life has to offer them.

But this story does not have a retributive or punitive moral, obviously. We can "know" as sure as shit that the true knowledge of Tillman's demise went right up to the top, preceding his funeral, and nothing substantial will ever occur. That is the nature of political crimes -- either people are made an example of and wind up at the end of a rope, or nothing at all happens. Nothing in between, unfortunately, so nothing meaningful will happen to any of the participants in this ugly, manipulative charade.

What it is, however, is very illustrative of the system in general, and the beasts in particular who are currently running it. Because let's face it -- if the evidence had never been made public, they would have been happy to know the truth for themselves, and wrap the lies in a flag and serve it up on a weekly basis. The line between knowing and not knowing is fragile, and realizing how just the knowledge of seemingly simple, isolated events affects our perceptions of the whole process is essential.

Abu Ghraib is another example -- it was something that Iraqis already knew about, obviously, but without the actions of one man, we would never have known about this systematized, deliberate barbarity. We still don't know much; recall that our esteemed legislators, who regard us as children, sat on the second set of photos, deeming them far more problematic than the first. What do you think that means?

You don't even know what you don't know, and most of the people who do know and can affect that, have absolutely zero incentive to change that dynamic for you. It took a corporal who was willing to literally risk his own life to get the Abu Ghraib photo CDs (which were, you recall, trophies of a perverted, sickening sort; they were bragging about this shit) stateside, into responsible, human hands. It's taken three years to find out that Pat Tillman was shot square in the forehead from ten yards away with an M-16, practically point-blank. How many service personnel have been indicted or tried or convicted and sentenced just this year for the most heinous, despicable war crimes?

And that's just the stuff we think we know. Maybe we should keep all these things in mind as well -- as disparate as they may initially seem -- before letting the usual crew of Magic 8-Ball-using Barcalounger Spartans tell us anything about anything, much less about anything important, such as war.