Deep Thought

The lesson is not that The Saga of Shirley Sherrod is yet another tedious "teachable moment" about this country's race issues. There's really no lesson to be had at all, just a confirmation -- a quick round of creatively-edited, sub-performance-art tubthumping by a conservatard blogger and a few Faux News yard apes, and this administration reflexively punts on first down.

Were Breitbart or Fox, like the health-care and financial industries, to launch legions of barbed-tail lobbyist minions to extract humiliating concessions from Obama or famed tough guy Krav Maga Rahm, Breitbart would by now probably have his own Big Babywood basic-cable nutwork, and Rupert Murdoch would have the Lincoln Bedroom renamed after himself. And Obamanauts would proclaim it as a shrewd incremental advance.

I get what Al Sharpton said, that when you win the White House and both houses of Congress, you don't get into pissing matches with a bunch of poltroons dressed up like Paul Revere and carrying misspelled signs comparing Obama to Stalin. That's fine and/or dandy.

But you do, on occasion, have to remind the more obnoxious hecklers that you fucking won, and you have the stage and the mike. I got heckled once as a musician, and I made goddamned sure that motherfucker left the floor with his tail between his legs. These guys cringe before anyone even throws a real punch at them. Frankly, it's just ugly to watch.

You can get away with being wrong, you can get away with screwing up, you can get away with launching your copious monkey-butter across a zaftig Jewish princess' gob whilst discussing troop deployments in Bosnia. But you can almost never get away with being a total fucking pussy, especially when no jobs have been created.

There is a real pattern of this chickenshit behavior developing, and it is going to backfire if they don't deal with it. Carefully deliberated mediation impresses no one, all people see is someone with a knife at a gunfight.

Deep Thought

Remember when Rahm Emanuel was like this hyper-bad-ass back-room enforcer who was, like, gonna make the most of that huge electoral majority and keep party discipline and make those Republitard biznitches cry uncle with that Krav Maga shit he learned in the Mossad? Yeah. Good times.

Stop, Democrats. Please, just stop. It takes real patience and practice to cultivate the level of mind-numbing ineptitude required to actually make the American health-care system worse than it already is.

Lessons

In his effort to hang the 400 pounds of gristle and adipose tissue that is Rush Limbaugh around the thin reed that is the Republican Party's neck, Carville attempts to impart a "history lesson". Take heed, future agitproppers:

Why surely it seems like just yesterday that Al Gore won the national popular vote in 2000 (and arguably won the popular vote in Florida too).

Limbaugh must have called for the incoming Bush administration to allocate ideas based on the proportion of election returns. I'm sure President Bush and the Republicans in Congress graciously accepted their 49.5 percent share of everything. (Note: We would be much better off right now had this actually happened.)

With 50 percent of the federal government during President Bush's term, Democrats might have reduced the deficit (a truly Clintonista idea). Wall Street might have been more heavily regulated and K Street's lobbyists might not have been running the Capitol. Democrats might have invested money into infrastructure improvements so that bridges didn't collapse or entire cities flood.

We wouldn't have spent $350 million per day in Iraq. Heck, had Democrats been able to control 50 percent of the government from 2000 to 2004, we wouldn't have even gone into Iraq in the first place. There might have been more spending on education and a fully funded No Child Left Behind Act.

Carville is absolutely correct, of course, that Limbaugh is a hypocrite's hypocrite for suddenly wishing, even vicariously, for electorally proportionate allocations, especially after two full terms of Li'l Lord 27% acting like his narrow victory over John Kerry was some sort of cloture-proof supermajority generally arrogated by third-world dictators. Limbaugh is full of shit. Count me in as being shocked.

However. One can trace much of the finance industry's ethical and mathematical collapse, its insistence on slamming the quick-fix needle of derivative scams into its beaten veins over and over again, knowing that we'd pay for the rehab, to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed most of the meaningful protections of the Glass-Steagall Act, and which passed the Senate 90-8, at a time when the Republicans had fifty-three seats in that august body.

The idea that if only the Democrats had had even a simple majority with which to counter the inept machinations of the Cheney regime is undone even by the most recent Dem-majority edition, which consistently found itself unable to stand up to the likes of Joe Lieberman, much less actual Republicans.

A lot of Carville's "might have" list may indeed have come to pass at some point, had the Democrats not been so accustomed to punting on first down. I'd have more respect for Carville if he just laid it on the line and asked aloud why exactly Republican legislators feel the urge to genuflect to a serially divorced drug abuser, and probable sex tourist, who in addition to all the moral lapses in his personal life is a pathological liar. Instead we get the usual laundry list of bien pensant whimsies about What Might Have Been, as if even a cloture- and veto-proof majority would have kept them from indulging in their usual "bipartisan" palaver.

Look, Jimbo, you won and won big. Grow a pair and tell Limbaugh and the rest of these closet-case ankle-biters to fuck off and die already, and tell the minority party what you plan to do, and if they don't want in, just make sure everyone knows the difference. Even if you're serious about "changing the tone", you still have to continue marginalizing the assholes.

Buying the Hype

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The Iseman Cometh

On the one hand, I suppose most of us -- especially Republicans -- are just relieved that for once, a Republican has a potential sex scandal that doesn't involve diapers or dildos or cruising for man-chowder in a park or airport bathroom. At this point, there's almost something genteel and respectable about boinking a lobbyist on a corporate jet.

If it happened. Eight fuckin' years ago.

And on the other hand, it's almost comforting to see the MSM, Saint Olbermann right along with 'em, scrambling to man the battle stations over this stupid non-story. See, McCain can joke about starting more disastrous wars, talk about being stuck in the desert for the next millennium or so, and have absolutely no comprehensive economic plan as the country veers into recession, and they don't say shit. They hump his leg like a varicose couch pillow.

But the possibility that his advisers thought he might be potentially embarrassed or even tempted -- once again, nearly a damned decade ago, ferchrissake -- and they're on it like the jackals they really are at heart. If they're looking for a way to get a grip on McCain and show his ample feet of clay, he's got handles all over him. Funny how they always only notice the handle that smells like pooter.

Priorities

Maybe if there were some way to make our esteemed legislators think that FISA was using steroids and HGH, they might give enough of a hot monkey-fuck to do something about it.

Then again, Harry Reid couldn't convince a girl scout troop to go out and sell cookies.

Operation Dumbo Drop

I'm not going to make some phony-bold outta-my-ass claim that Washington is some sort of bellwether state. I do know that the state, like California, is not quite as librul as non-left-coasters assume; the eastern half of Washington tends to offset the tidy corporate liberalism of the SeaTac corridor.

But when your party has been given the backhanded gift of an early coronation in what really could be a do-or-die year for significant factions of said party, when the Daddy Warbucks candidate deliberately took a knee to help Grampa Simpson consolidate things and get a little mo', something's up when said front-runner is less than two points ahead, only fourteen points ahead of perennial contender None of the Above, and facing a total 3:1 opposition in the running.

And the Washington state GOP is a bit over-eager in trying to seal this one up for Poor Ol' Straight Talk. I know the Democrats have entire playbooks devoted to the fine Shrumian art of how to fuck up a shit sandwich and snatch defeat from the jaws of sure victory, but damned if you might not be looking at the opening cracks of a summer-long Republican implosion. McCain can't win over the conservatards without openly fellating them and buggering the tiny-pecker-riddled corpse of Saint Reagan, which he just spent the last week doing. And he lost most of the independents a long time ago. He has to shit or get off the pot, and once he does, one of his target demos is going to abandon him.

But never fear. Barack Obama could win with a 75% tally in November, and the Dems will still take Lieberman's shit and let the Blue Dogs push them around. So I wouldn't get too cocky.

Absolute Power

One of the most notable events of the past week, though you wouldn't know it to read the corporate media, was the fiendishly well-timed admission by the Cheney administration that, well, yes we have freedom-boarded several people in our War On Some Terra. Now, we only did it to three people, and all three of them were well-known puppy-killers and child-molesters who were shot-callers for their cells, presiding over ticking-time-bomb scenarios à la 24, blah blah blah. You know the drill, so to speak.

This "news" was followed up, with a rather uncomfortable enthusiasm, of the revelation that by gum the brain-trust reserves the right to do it again. That last was probably the truest thing anyone in the administration has said in months.

The always reliable Charles Pierce gets it way right:

For the past couple of weeks, they've just gotten blatant about it. The administration of George W. Bush is bound by no law, bound by no precedent, bound not even by the forms of democratic self-government, let alone its actual substance, which is being used as a throw-rug in John Yoo's den these days. They will torture and the Congress can do nothing. Their powers to spy, to search, and to seize are unlimited and Congress is not remotely entitled to know even what those powers are. They can imprison without trial. They can force corporations -- and, indeed, individuals within the government -- to violate the law. They are not subject to treaties. They are not subject to oversight, nor even subpoenas. Read this swill from yesterday. Through his actions, and from the mouths of his minions, George Bush is now claiming fully the powers of a tyrant, by any reasonable definition of the term.

This is the only issue in the presidential campaign. It is the only truly existential threat to the country. Everything else -- health care, climate change, campaign finance, the deficit -- mean nothing if we fail on this fundamental issue.

The difference between the Democrats and the current incarnation of the Republicans seems to be this: one group has heard of The Art of War and The Prince, and expends more effort to maintain a noble, dickless veneer; the other has read and internalized both thoroughly, and understands that the lesson of each is simple -- power belongs to those who use it. It is not "earned" through a grinding process, nor "achieved" via pseudobipartisan capitulation, nor "granted" nor "given".

Power is taken, and it is used. It is so simple that even the simpletons clogging the far-right wing (as opposed to the center-right wing, which would be, you know, the Democrats) of the Corporate Party understand it, just as sure as they know that sisters are for fuckin', but first cousins are for marryin'.

Nazi Punks Fuck Off

Roy unearths yet another conservatard tuber who wants to chuck Hitler grenades and then run from the blast radius. Personally, I'm fairly squeamish at any expression of potential mob mentality or groupthink, whether it's a political rally or a megachurch -- either way it's usually twenty-thousand blissfully unconscious assholes who drove there in SUVs with "Earth First" stickers on the never-used tow-bar, to express in unison their love for this or that icon. Hell, it's why I don't see rock bands or sports events in large arenas anymore, to be honest. It creeps me the fuck out, regardless of whether I personally like the team/band/political message. It's unnecessary; it's the antithesis of critical thinking.

But that is a different matter altogether than these puling little assholes trotting out their Triumph of the Will comparisons and their Hitler smiley-faces and such, and then backing away, lamely muttering, "Well uh, heh, see, we're not saying that you guys are, like, Nazis or anything, it's just that Hitler liked organic food and the environment, you know."

No, I don't know, you dumb motherfuckers, and if you're going to have the goddamned nerve to keep up with this shit, at least have the fucking balls to own it. Whatever nasty little scuds I launch at the people who are ruining this country, you can bet I fucking well mean it. Which is why I've never used that particular n-word on them, and probably never will. Some of us still have enough respect for the English language to not pull cheap imagery out of our asses, put it on the shelf, and tell everyone it's a nice collectible, when we can all see perfectly well what it is.

Amused to Death

Pete Stark had it all wrong, but only by one word. He should have said "delusion" rather than "amusement".

Even so, he's not incorrect, except perhaps politically so. Bush clearly is amused, or at least occupied, by the pageantry of the office, the stature and the ability to not only make decisions, but to finally thwart the second-guessers with a variety of pithy "fuck you"s to choose from. Nobody can tell him nothin', not Dad, not Jeb, not those smart-ass Yale profs.

Power corrupts--that's a bland nostrum hiding a more interesting truth. Why does power corrupt? Because it removes others from consideration. To whom does the President answer for his actions? History? God? Here, friends, I have a fine piece of swampland to sell you.

Bush, in his own inimitably incoherent manner, protests too much when it comes to his feigned disinterest in his legacy. His passive-aggressive attempts to slough off the judgments of history ring hollow with feeble hopes of eventual vindication. Look, it's pretty simple -- if he wanted to remain plain and humble, he woulda stayed at the fuckin' tumbleweed farm for the past seven years, instead of playing out his demons at everyone else's expense.

In the meantime, he plays various forms of dress-up to push a preferred point, uses troops as props with alarming regularity, and gives not a hint of acknowledgement to his 25% approval rating. Perhaps this week he will visit San Diego, a reliable military redoubt in supposedly heathen California, and with regimented spontaneity pluck a carefully selected, healthy middle-class Latino urchin from the luckless crowd of Qualcomm refugees. These are the more mindless parts of the job that he may not enjoy quite as much as the more pronounced exaltations of jingoism and unabashed fealty. But it's hard to top the pre-screened gang-snorkelings on How Great Thou Art in the various inbred backwaters, so he settles for what he gets.

And yeah, beyond the usual rote, tedious pronunciamentos about Iraqis findin' them some Freedomocracy™ they can call their own (so long as we can make a buck from it), it's not unrealistic to assume that Junior does derive some level of amusement from all this. As IOZ points out, this does not automatically mean that direct manifestations of obscene cruelty are being deliberately sought. That should be obvious, even to the gutless apparatchiks who forced Pete Stark's tearful auto-da-fé, because they're scared shitless that their upstart cracker contingent won't kick upstairs anymore. What part of "Fuck 'em" are we having trouble with here?

(Funny how whether in politics or popular culture, the climax of the narrative is always the spectacle of cringing, abject apology. People think they need some sense of "closure", even when it has nothing to do with them, even when it's not theirs to "close", even when they can't get past their own sense of smug entitlement to that which is not theirs in the first place.)

But it is the unreasonable person who fails to ask, or at least wonder, just what sort of person causes hundreds of thousands of people to die horribly, millions more to be internally displaced and made desperate, terrorized refugees in their own country (if they have not been fortunate enough to flee), our own country looted, profiteered, and scorned in the process, and just smirk like it's no fucking problem and there's no other way.

Continuing on with the dress-up events and the tough-love speechifying is how Junior keeps it all in the abstract, where by now it is no doubt irretrievably calloused over, only to be peeled away by future cases of Maker's Mark. But those hortatory exercises, enabled by the wretched spinelessness of what was once perceived as an "opposition" party, are about all that's left -- for him, for them, for us.

Really, what's left, when it comes to trying to convince people of what happens in dark places, while they scratch their bellies and watch NASCAR? Given our apparently limitless appetite for "reality" drivel, I'm tempted to suggest picking four of the busiest intersections in Baghdad, setting up cameras, and broadcasting every second of every day in a four-way split-screen format on a dedicated channel. Let everyone see it for themselves, unedited, unfiltered, unvarnished, just like these guys say they like their advice.

I'd suggest it, but the obvious fact is that people who watch reality shows actually want anything but reality; they simply want a carefully contrived veneer, with all the comfortable story arcs built into the narrative, appearing spontaneous. Four-way Baghdad Channel would not give an opportunity for the viewer to hoot, "Oh no they di'unt!" or some such street wisdom.

It certainly would not be "amusing", not even to the vicarious armchair cockpunchers who are so eager to take their A-game onward to Tehran. But it might, for once in this god-forsaken folly, help set at least some of the record straight. It might remind people that the primary rule of any war is that people die, and the people who don't die have their lives violently upturned, and that we are expressly forbidden from seeing any of that.

There's probably a reason for that.

A Hairy, Wrinkly Position

The U.S. Senate is cordially invited to get a sense of my ball-sack.

You wanna know why people vote for Ralph Nader, or don't bother at all? This is why. May every one of these grandstanding feebs spend their next lives shoveling shit in Falluja.

Useful Idiots

Your librul media at work:

Without discounting any of these conclusions, I think it's necessary to add another explanation for the apparent success of Petraeus' PR push: The media, in some cases out of incompetence and in others by design, helped him get away with it, and indeed actively enabled it.

If you step back and survey the totality of media's performance this summer on the Iraq debate, it becomes a good deal clearer just how awful it's all been -- and just how complicit these failings were in helping to shift the debate:

(1) Big news orgs repeatedly twisted the words of Democrats who had returned from Iraq to make their assessments sound more positive than they were.

....

(2) Big news orgs shifted the definition of the success of the surge from a political goal to a military one.

....

(3) Many news organizations gave tons of coverage to outside experts who said the surge is working, while giving little to none to people who said it wasn't.

....

(4) Multiple news outlets repeatedly and falsely described the September Iraq assessment as representing the sole judgment of Petraeus, echoing White House propaganda.

....

(5) News orgs and pundits are now baselessly asserting that the White House is "confident" that it will "win" the September showdown with Dems over Iraq.

Funny how that keeps happening, and no one in the "free press" ever seems to have a comprehensive explanation for any of it, nor their own individual responsibilities to repudiate and counter such behavior.

Why we are where we are is no mystery; why we allow it to persist is the real puzzle. Can't wait for the post-Labor Day onslaught of Petraeus' squinted successmanship, and the endless sniffing of Lonesome Rhodes' wrinkly ass, which I hear is a heady combination of English Leather and Preparation H. Anything to sustain the hallowed narrative until the next sweeps week.

Opposition Positions

Today's position: the wheelbarrow, to make the carrying of Republican dirty water all the less challenging.

WASHINGTON, July 31 — Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.

Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.

It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.

Yes, because the executive branch has certainly not only proven the urgent need to circumvent to the notoriously lax and librul FISA courts, but that they, the Bush White House, are capable of wielding this power in a, um, responsible and non-partisan manner, like pretty much everything else they've touched.

“We hope our Republican counterparts will work together with us to fix the problem, rather than try again to gain partisan political advantage at the expense of our national security,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a statement Monday night.

Maybe this is some rope-a-dope strategery Harry Reid has cooked up. Given the lack of focus on this particular issue though, perhaps some of us can be forgiven by the Serious Thinkers for having our doubts.

I think this bit is the real kicker:

The White House has told Democratic lawmakers that it will accept a narrow bill now but will come back later for broader changes, including legal immunity for telecommunications companies involved in the wiretapping program.

Basically how this will eventually shake out is that Fredo and his minions get to do infinite amounts of data mining and sifting on everyone, period, and a blanket retroactive no-backsies immunity for all the gubmint and telecom weasels who cooperate with this, right up to the very day someone somewhere grows a spine and says no to these people. Or, you know, not.

I'm sure this is all Ralph Nader's fault somehow.

Chimpeachment

Ron at CenterFace is very cool in throwing the love in this direction on this fine fucking hot day, and in his thoughts on our (as he put it) putative independence, this sentence in particular leaped out at me:

Impeachment is not off the table, you twinks.

Exactly. Just as in war and diplomacy, you never voluntarily take anything off the table in politics. Ever. In this particular case, it is highly likely that the commutation of Scooter Libby is an attempt to quash the revelation of crimes and misdeeds much higher up. This is obvious.

The politicians of this country made a tremendous mistake, imho, in initiating an effort to "heal" and "reconcile" the nation after Watergate. Specifically, it enabled animals such as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld to remain on the periphery of respectability, and accede to positions of power that should only be held by responsible adults. Thirty years later, the nation continues to bear the brunt of misdeeds and malfeasance perpetrated by the sort of people who should have been purged from the government back then. Goddammit, unrepentant killers like Elliott Abrams and John Negroponte are in key national security positions. What kind of ridiculous bullshit is that?

The threat of impeachment, much like the presence of nuclear armaments, carries with it at least some deterrent threat. Efforts to get all kumbaya with a soulless cadre of shiv-carrying bastards will -- quel surprise -- get your ass shanked, with no remorse whatsoever. You are not doing anyone any favors by trying to "work with" such folks. People who think virtue is its own reward need to get out of the house once in a while.

That is why these Unity-Hey-Can't-We-Just-Get-Along deals are just scams. It's nothing more than a political Ponzi scheme to defer true accountability. There are no longer any good faith arguments to be made for continuing to implement bone-headed, futile policies. There's just no getting around that, and Republicans who can't divorce themselves from a failed, corrupt, and utterly incompetent administration do not deserve to be brought back in the fold under the guise of "unity". It's not unity, it's just stupidity. Either you're ready for something different, or you're not.

The real lesson to pull from Watergate and apply to the current administration is that there is more to the concept of accountability than merely seeing to it that wrongdoers are punished. It's also ensuring that these things don't keep happening, and the way to ensure that they don't continue is to get rid of them. Tough concept, I know. But one that is vital for our fearless opposition party to truly internalize. They need to quit selling themselves -- and us -- short, because there is just no upside to it for them -- or, again, for us.

I expect Scooter Libby to serve the sentence that was duly meted out by a Bush-appointed judge, after trial by a jury of citizens, prosecuted by a Republican prosecutor with an absolutely spotless record of performance and integrity. I don't think that's too much to ask, and I don't think it's too much to ask my elected representatives to do everything within reason to intervene in that cause, to make an honest effort to put these creeps in their place.

Either this is a country of laws, and not men, or it is not. If not, and if our legislators don't so anything about it, then maybe it's time to just tip the whole thing over, start again. At some point, we have to be tired enough of this shameless bullshit to step up and re-iterate that we are the bosses, and that the motto of this country, no matter what Fredo thinks, is not "Because I Said So".

Sabotage

I can't stand it. I know you planned it. I'ma set it straight, this watergate.
I can't stand rocking when I'm in here, 'cause your crystal ball ain't so crystal clear
So while you sit back and wonder why I got this fucking thorn in my side
Oh my god, it's a mirage, I'm tellin' y'all it's sabotage
-- Beastie Boys

Might as well have some fun with this Coulter bullshit, right? Because otherwise, we might have to consider the truth of the matter, that the "responsible" media, for all practical purposes, might as well be deliberately sabotaging political discourse.

Not only did they refuse to repudiate Coulter's latest round of nonsense, NBC brain surgeon David Gregory decided to turn the tables on Elizabeth Edwards, and innocently ask if perhaps, once we strip away the toxic rhetoric and "ask me about my dead son" cheap shots, Coulter has an actual point?

Well, no. If she had an actual point, she wouldn't need to conceal it with obnoxious stunt columns and endless hair-tossing, which seems to be her tell that she's on her heels in the debate. That's obvious enough.

For anything noteworthy to be accomplished -- that is, to be rid of this vile beast, and have it expelled from our teevee screens, so that we can get back to the all-important Paris Hilton coverage -- the debate has to move beyond Coulter herself. She's merely the current totem for the channeled, choleric nonsense coming from the Archie Bunker sector of American politics. She speaks for idiots who have deluded themselves into believing that they are disenfranchised by special interest politics, when the fact is that they -- and Coulter -- are The Man.

Anywhere white middle- and lower-middle-class Americans have found themselves on the outs, it's because they've allowed themselves to be bamboozled by Jeebus-abusing hucksters and their paid liars in the opinion-making industry. They get all ginned up over gay marriage, and then wonder why their jobs have been outsourced to Bangalore or Guangzhou.

Tragically, I find myself agreeing with the people who work these rubes over, again and again -- fuck 'em if they're not going to pay attention. American political capitalists enjoy pretending that their hero is Adam Smith, but it's really P.T. Barnum, who famously opined that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. They do not seem to be going broke with that philosophy.

But the media's bidness is show bidness, and their product is conflict, and Coulter is a master salesman of that product. So she comes on to Tweety's dog-and-pony show, Tweety makes an ass out of himself by kissing her ring, Coulter makes an ass of herself every time she opens her cakehole. And folks talk about the Conflict Product they were sold between all the commercials for trucks that carry nothing to nowhere, and pills designed to stave off the realization of a crushing hamster-wheel existence -- which, when you get right down to it, is why most of these shows are really on in the first place.

So these meat puppets preach the gospel of "objectivity" when it's an inversion of the conventional meaning of that word on at least a couple levels. For one, there's nothing "objective" about presenting two opposing viewpoints -- say, evolution versus "intelligent design" -- as if they were merely equally valuable differences of opinion. One has an overwhelming reserve of peer-reviewed expert analysis and empirical evidence bolstering its case; the other is a ham-fisted political concoction playing dress-up with religion and science, and abusing both in the process.

Another way "objectivity" is degraded in the media meat grinder is that there is no recognizable counterpart on "the left" (whatever that is anymore) to Coulter's level of availability and screen time. As I said before, when Chomsky gets an hour with Tweety, then we can talk about "both sides" being heard; till then, five minutes with this or that interchangeable mealy-mouthed, co-opted limousine liberal commentator doesn't equate, not by a long shot. Even then, at least Chomsky, whether or not you agree with his various analyses, does his homework; he attributes obsessively and is as solid an extemporaneous thinker/speaker as you can find in politics. He's every bit as strong a polemicist as Hitchens or Coulter, so what's the problem here?

Obviously, the problem is ratings, in the minds of corporate media, but again, that's another issue if their concern is really "objectivity". Clearly, it isn't. Chomsky is not a screamer, nor does he insult and berate his opponents the way Coulter or Hitchens do. And unless you are willing to pull on the colorful latex mask and cape, and strut around the ring like a preening asshole, you do not get invited to the big show, podna.

Another media syndrome is that of contrived contrarianism, an art form which people such as Coulter have mastered, and many would-be media princes are apprenticing. It explains Gregory's stupid question of Elizabeth Edwards, even as he has cultivated something of a rep as one of the more contentious members of the MSM, able and willing to ask Bush the "tough" questions. Or so the theory goes.

No, if we had a press with a backbone, they would stand up and walk out en masse the next time they are being lied to or stonewalled by Bush, Pony Blow, or Dana Perino -- which is to say, at the very next press conference. Look, it's simple: if the people you are covering are not helping you move your story forward in any appreciable way, then you are merely transcribing, you are not reporting. This is why it sometimes appears as if David Gregory asks the "tough" questions -- because hardly anyone else ever does much of anything at all. They're deathly afraid of never being called on again, or losing their press pass, or whatever. They are more worried about being accused of bad form than bad reporting. Bad reporting doesn't get you disinvited to Sally Quinn's next appletini schmoozefest.

I don't understand why they should fear such a thing. The object of their profession is to gather news. There is no news at a press conference, there is only spin. You can either keep transcribing spin, and get a shot at the gravy train, maybe roll wif MC Rove and his posse at the next par-tay, or you can dig up facts and then report on those facts.

Guess which choice feared media pit poodle Dave Gregory made.



It must be hard to avoid the blandishments and temptations, the golden opportunities to rub elbows and bump uglies with brilliant philanthropists such as Karl Rove. What this has done systemically to a large swath of the Washington press corpse is to imbue them with that smug, jaded elitism it takes to buy into their own jaundiced redefinitions of "objectivity" and "contrarianism". As long as Gregory asks the tough questions of the preznit, and gives Elizabeth Edwards a hard time, he's shown his "objectivity". He's vetted his quals to his bosses, who after all may need a favor from some scrub in the House who's owned and operated by MC Extra Chins' big red machine.

It's vital to the continued operation of the corporate media machine that its components and self-delusions -- objectivity, contrarianism, probity, controversy -- remain contrivances for our bread-and-circus consumption. Real objectivity, real contrarianism, those things would bring the house down. They don't want people asking "what the fuck" about Dick Cheney's little policy chop-shop that's fucked up this country for six years running; they want that resentment channeled at Paris Hilton, and her pseudo-political doppelganger, Ann Coulter. But they would have to put Cheney on To Catch A Predator for people to get up on their hind legs and take notice.

Television had already subverted our epistemology long before Survivor and its inbred ilk further confused the notion of what comprises "reality". But those shows have cemented, especially among younger-skewing viewers, that reality is whatever you want it to be. It becomes a very solipsistic, self-referential way of viewing what is obviously a hugely interdependent framework, and it has the ancillary benefit (for the people at the top) of communicating very clearly that the best thing you, Joe Citizen, can do is just STFU and get back to work. That was the idea all along, keep people confused and broke, addled by energy drinks and toys, living beyond their means, slavering at the chops for months for a fucking $600 phone.

That's why, as interesting and important as the Post series on Cheney's machinations truly is, it somehow ends up being published at the end of June, traditionally the dog days of hard-news stories. People are gearing up to watch some retard gorge on hot dogs next week; multi-part stories about the internal unraveling of their government don't gain much traction. Indeed, by the time the series appeared, Jo Becker had already been at the NY Times for a month or so, and coincidentally had a byline in that paper the same day the Post series finally broke. That strikes me as an editorial issue, certainly not one of reportage in this instance, but even here, it's hard not to wonder whose thumb might be on the scale.

Silent But Fredly

It's not exactly a secret that political terms have become hopelessly debauched. The perennial example is the abuse of the word "liberal", of course, generally by inbred radio ravers, masturbating to the sounds of their own specious harrumphing between Husqvarna ads.

But what does "conservative" mean anymore? Neocon, paleocon, "social" and "compassionate" conservatives, and on and on. There was a point in time when I recognized certain precepts cribbed from Locke and Mill, and espoused by what would now be considered "paleocons", as reasonable in conjunction with a balanced perspective on the world. That is, personal responsibility can be mutually enhanced with a certain level of community responsibility, where everyone is theoretically happy and productive, or at least endeavoring to be.

I think Reaganism (or perhaps trudging through Atlas Shrugged in high school) set me straight about just how shallowly these self-professed students of Mill really felt about him, or about Hume and Scottish Enlightment, or whatever unfortunate historical shade they conjure to give the veneer of seriousness. Otherwise it would be too clear that they spend most of their productive time reading the sides of cereal boxes (see Goldberg, Jonah).

Their goal was and is to play on a toxic mix of people's fears, dreams, and carefully-clutched myths to keep themselves in power. Thus vast swaths of rubes were alternately riled and affirmed with the notion of dusky-hued welfare recipients performing an institutionally-mandated smash-and-grab on productive citizens -- which is precisely what those orators and their greaseball benefactors in the defense-contractor class were and still are doing, only with a far larger price tag.

So it should be no surprise at all to see Fred Thompson as the latest conservaclown to enter portentously into what used to be at least a nominally respectable and interesting process. Mind you, I still think that Thompson -- and Newt Gingrich, when he waddles into the fray in four or five months -- represent a sort of briar-patch fringe of acceptability. They're there either to corral certain demographics and then herd them off into more financially-viable candidacies, or simply to circumscribe the boundaries of comically hypocritical rhetoric, toeing a careful line of stupid in the dirt for even the most mindless ruminant to follow. (And let's face it, some folks like their stupid to be paint-by-numbers easy.)

It's a slightly more artful, stylized stupidity. Both Thompson and Gingrich are skilled orators, weaving colorful webs of pure horseshit, preaching the usual gospel of anti-Washington, anti-Hollywood, anti-liberalism boilerplate neither one seems quite ready to apply to their own lives. Of course, Gingrich's high-profile rambunctions eventually undermined any relevant moral standing he might otherwise have tried to evoke, unless you're just a complete potato getting your "news" and "facts" from closet-case evangelists or one of the Faux News fucktards.

But Thompson has not yet been afforded such scrutiny, though there's no shortage of evidence that, well, he's exactly the sort of Washington-fattened, Hollywood-corrupted cafeteria conservative he rails against:

So when longtime lobbyist and Hollywood actor Fred Thompson -- a man who once rented a red pickup truck in order to campaign in Tennessee as a man of the people -- indicated this week that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination, we knew how the media would describe him: Authentic. Folksy.

....

But Chris Matthews and the Beltway pundit crowd don't encounter many actual working-class voters as they stroll the dunes of Nantucket. A wealthy lobbyist/actor who rents a red pickup truck to play the role of a regular guy strikes them as "authentic" and "folksy." Mark Halperin wrote this week that Thompson won his first Senate race "after driving his trademark red pickup truck all over Tennessee."

It wasn't "his" and he didn't "drive" it, of course, but the illusion of authenticity is all that matters to the pundit class. Thus a wealthy lobbyist in a rented pickup is folksy and authentic. (A Nexis search for "Fred Thompson and (Thompson w/20 folksy)" returns 40 hits since January 1. Several mention the red pickup; only Wonkette bothered to mention it was rented. The Washington Post assured readers that "[t]he signature red pickup truck from Thompson's Senate campaigns will be dusted off.")

As always, I'm not entirely sure what the fucking problem is with these people. I'd hate to think that Tweety Matthews spends his time sitting up in Nantucket beating his teeny meat to the notion of Fred Thompson chomping a cigar, telling Michael Moore to fuck off instead of openly debating him, and renting a fucking pickup truck to troll amongst the goobers who are fooled by such antics. But that's apparently what people like he and Helpy Halperin (another unctuous douche posturing as a serious reporter) do.

I think another problem is that, as their fame and money tend to distance themselves from whatever working-class roots they might have had, as well as actual working-class people now, they reflexively, instinctively conflate all these "folksy" tropes with some sort of Man O' The People personage. Fred Thompson spent years raking in money as a fucking lobbyist, then rented a driver and a red pickup truck to become senator for Cooter's Gulch -- a job which he himself has alluded was too much work, then went back to Hollywood and carved his niche as the NASCAR circuit's thinking man. And married hisself a trophy wife twenty-five years his junior. How the fuck does all that become "folksy"? It's like watching a white person who's uncomfortable around black people, lamely trying to ingratiate himself, transparently grasping at cultural straws. Yeah, sure, I'll bet Tweety down wit' da Fitty Cint too, yo. Jesus, it's pathetic. Perhaps they can't be themselves because they don't know who or what they are anymore.

Fred Thompson's a man of the people all right -- people like Tweety Matthews. People who understand fundamentally that they have long ago abandoned their working-class roots, but need to keep up the appearance. It's the same as the nonsensical genuflection to "social" conservatives, people who apparently are so enamored of the sacred institution of marriage, every one of their leading candidates has been married multiple times. Thompson has made no bones about his marriage interregnum, when he chased pussy, and minded not at all when it chased him. Fine and dandy, but let's not pretend that it has fuck-all to do with any sort of honest description of "social conservatives".

Probably the most strained exhortation against even the notion of gay marriage has been the cliché of the fantastically-promiscuous bathhouse queen, naturally conflating to a blanket assumption of the promiscuity of gays in general; this injunction apparently does not apply, even retroactively, to Bachelor Fred. The problem is not that he fucked a lot of women, the problem is that he acts like he and his prospective constituents have some sort of moral high ground in spite of it.

Again, none of this is a surprise, of course -- it's to be expected in a cultural climate where smart people write books, and stupid people interview them, write about them, talk about them -- and ultimately convince other idiots to vote for the wrong man. Their stupid little orthodoxies are never challenged, because the paychecks of all the players depend heavily on merely maintaining the pretense of it all.

You want more of the same, just six inches taller and with a more authenticated drawl, then Fred's your man. I still don't think he's serious, he's just there to rake in some launderable dough and galvanize the retard vote, but obviously stranger things have happened. Regardless, it would be nice if for once self-professed "moderates" like Tweety would get off their fucking knees and report fully and honestly on these people, instead of getting all swoony and exposing their daddy issues for all to see. Shit, I'm embarrassed for him.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes it's an excuse for neutered cats like Tweety to reminisce about how much fun it used to be to have a cock.

Roberts' Rules Of Boner

In a bout of scenery chewing that would make Shatner blush, John Boehner Boner gives it his all, and still comes up short.

Rumor has it that after the holiday recess, he'll be appearing on Oprah to discuss decorating tips and compare menstrual cycles.

Pussies

It's official -- change is in the air!

Democrats said this week they would have jeopardized their fall bargaining position if they had insisted on keeping withdrawal timelines in the current supplemental spending bill (HR 2206). Persisting now would likely have resulted in another veto and would have handed Republicans talking points for the Memorial Day recess about which party supports the troops in the field.

Democrats were particularly worried about the prospect of Bush declaring at wreath-laying ceremonies that "Democrats have stopped resources for the troops," said Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.

Well, then I guess the problem in September will be that, what with Veterans' Day around the corner, and then the '08 campaign season, their "fall bargaining position" will be comfortably ensconced within their sphincters.

I don't know how many times these people need to have it beaten into their thick skulls. The Democrats still think Washington is high school with money, and in many respects it is. But at the operative level, it is prison, and you either find something to sharpen and prepare to fight dirty, or you grab your ankles and be a bitch. It's not that complicated, and if they couldn't muster the courage to take on Kid 28% now, why will they suddenly screw up the nerve to do so in September? Instead of forcing the Republicans to spend their summer regrouping and retrenching and getting their story straight, they have now allowed them to spend it reconsolidating their position, getting everyone back on the reservation and preparing for the fall campaign.

So again, nicely done, Democrats. Enjoy your recess. Hope no one gets shanked in the yard.

[Update: Olbermann sums the situation up wonderfully. These people, these promised agents of change who were given a very clear mission in the election, abdicated their responsibilities utterly. They are punks, they are clowns, and they sure as hell don't deserve a vacation or a recess until they start getting their shit together. Failing that, maybe it's time for a serious third-party effort. Not Nader, but hell, big what if, but it would just fucking sweet if Gore decided that his party was a bunch of undeserving puds and went his own path. As unrealistic as it sounds, all it really takes is enough people getting seriously tired of this bullshit.]

[Update #2: Sweet Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, it's even worse than we thought:

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break — the second recess since the financing fight began — and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

I think it's time for a third party; hell, even a second one would be nice.]

[Update #3: Credit where credit is due:

The four Democratic members of the Connecticut House delegation banded together and said in a joint statement today they will oppose the Iraq spending plan, a plan with no timetables for withdrawing U.S. troops, and instead "demand legislation that includes consequences" for the Iraqis and "a plan to redeploy and then bring our troops home."

....

The state's only Republican lawmaker, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4th District, intends to vote for the plan.

In the Senate, which is expected to vote Friday, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., opposes the measure. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and is a strong war backer, is observing a Jewish holiday and cannot be reached for comment.

Does Lieberman spend Yom Putzur up Bush's ass, like every other day, or does he come up for air?]