Shorter Mitt Romney

"Does James Dobson's cock make my mouth look fat?"

I don't think these people will be happy until every person is low-jacked with a copy of the Ten Commandments and has "In God We Trust" tattooed on their foreheads.

And no, "Mitt", they still don't trust you. They're still weird about Catholics and Jews; how do you think they are about a religion that says the Garden of Eden is somewhere near Branson?

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.

Call Any Vegetable

It's bad enough that, despite his vaunted Yale/Harvard pedigree, apparently C-Plus Augustus spent his entire matriculation either loaded or playing his weird, insecure little towel-snapping frat-boy games. What's worse is that he never stops being proud of that shit.

“I think I got a B in Econ 101,’’ [Bush] said at a White House press conference this morning. “I got an A, however, in keeping taxes low.''

His tax cuts, [Bush] asserted, have helped the U.S. economy recover from the recession he faced when he took office and the terrorist attacks that followed. “I say that the fundamentals of our nation’s economy are strong,’’ Bush said today. “There is no question that there is some unsettling times in the housing market…. (but) I’m optimistic about our economy.’’

Considering his major was history, and he's clearly flunked that while in office, one's confidence in Mister Man's economic insight is definitely not bolstered.

[Bush], in a press conference that lasted little longer than a half-hour, repeatedly played off his own image as a poor student, noting that he likes to remind people that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has “the PhD… I’m the C student,’’ he said, but look who’s the leader and who’s the adviser.

He's made this sort of comment a lot over the years. I'd like him to elaborate on that some time. I'm sure he thinks he's just making a little funny or something, but it'd be interesting to really grill him on this. What exactly does he really think the basis for this hoary chestnut is?

Because the more he trots it out, the more I'm convinced that it's just his way of telling the world once again to suck it, that no matter how much you study, how much you learn, how much you know, you can always be undone by a well-heeled cobag. The meritocracy is for suckas; being born lucky is where it's at.

Since it's been nearly a solid week already, I'm surprised he didn't trot out that stupid fucking story about how Daddy fought the Japanese in WW2, and now he, Prince Junior of Tumbleweedville, can talk to the Japanese leader as a friend and ally. I realize that this is what passes for deep thought and reflection on Bush's part, and that is precisely the problem, or at least one major one.

Honestly, it wouldn't even make sense for die-hard supporters to find these dumb, fake self-deprecations even marginally humorous; seeing as how they constantly evangelize about the existential urgency of What We Face, one would think that seriousness and competence would be of primary importance to them. Then again, they have chronically, tragically mistaken buffoonish, insecure stubbornness for intellectual integrity and clarity of purpose.

---

Although when it comes to trying to salvage a coherent legacy, you can't say that Bush doesn't at least have intent, if not ontological clarity. For him, it is more important to use Petraeus' squinty reports as selectively as possible, accruing all the credit, and using Petraeus' reputation to absolve himself of any blame. This requires significant revisionism.

There has never been a moment when we were not winning in Iraq. Victory has followed victory, from "Mission Accomplished" to the purple fingers of the Iraqi election to, most recently, President Bush's meeting at Camp Cupcake in Anbar province with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni leader of the group Anbar Awakening (who was assassinated a week later). Turning point has followed turning point, from Bush's proclamation two years ago of his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" to his announcement last week of his "Return on Success." "We're kicking ass," he briefed the Australian deputy prime minister on Sept. 6 about his latest visit to Iraq. In his quasi-farewell address to the nation on Sept. 13, Bush assigned any possible shortcomings to Gen. David Petraeus and bequeathed his policy "beyond my presidency" to his successor.

....

One week after Petraeus flashed his metrics, a whole new set of facts on the ground suddenly emerged: an admission (previously denied) by Petraeus that the United States was arming the Sunnis, who might use those weapons in the next phase of Iraq's civil war; the release of a Pentagon report that there is "an increase in intra-Shi'a violence throughout the South" (a report conveniently withheld as Petraeus was testifying); the Iraqi government's expulsion of Blackwater, a private security firm with close ties to the administration, after a band of its guards gunned down Iraqi civilians; the restriction of all nonmilitary U.S. personnel in Iraq to the Green Zone; a report by the Iraqi Red Crescent that about 1 million people are internal refugees as a result of ethnic cleansing (apart from the more than 2 million refugees who have fled the country); and the announcement by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of an investigation into the State Department's inspector general for quashing scrutiny and embarrassing studies of fraud in the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, among other projects.

But we're "kicking ass". Right.

Of course, this has been a well-established behavioral pattern with Bush, a mama's boy through and through. Lacking even the rudimentary skills of intelligent diplomacy or even noblesse oblige that he might have gleaned from his father (were he not locked in lifelong mortal combat with him), he seems instead to have cultivated his mother's more abrasive, abusive people skills. Most of this essentially revolves around viewing people outside the family -- not to mention the üntermenschen -- as a whole 'nother species.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket." In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush's attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him "Pigpen," for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family -- certainly not people like them.)

Bush's deployed his fetish for punctuality as a punitive weapon. When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked. Aides have been fearful of raising problems with him. In his 2004 debates with Sen. John Kerry, no one felt comfortable or confident enough to discuss with Bush the importance of his personal demeanor. Doing poorly in his first debate, he turned his anger on his communications director, Dan Bartlett, for showing him a tape afterward. When his trusted old public relations handler, Karen Hughes, tried gently to tell him, "You looked mad," he shot back, "I wasn't mad! Tell them that!"

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: "KARL!" Rove, according to Draper, was Bush's "favorite punching bag," and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Of course, now he's all righteously indignant about how those meanies at MoveOn have abused poor ol' Honest Dave Petraeus. But make no mistake -- had Petraeus insisted on presenting truly unvarnished information at the hearings, Bush would have unceremoniously dumped him out on his medals, and promptly found someone else to toe the company line. This is not in dispute; the previous pattern makes that abundantly clear.

What is also made abundantly clear is that Bush -- who pretends at convenient moments to be a sensitive soul -- regards other humans simply by their utility to him. If he can look buddy-buddy to them and play on their awe for the office, even better for him.

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. "Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president's support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a 'Big New Thing.'" Other aides played on Bush's self-conception as "the Decider." "To sell him on an idea," writes Draper, "aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision." But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: "Thank you for the privilege of serving today."

You decide which you find more unnerving, that his staffers have simply learned to work with the adolescent ego-trip buttons Bush wears on his sleeve, or the dickless cringing Bolten butters his boss' ass with at the start of each day.

Is it irresponsible to smack Bush around with his own words and deeds, in some vainglorious attempt at long-distance armchair psychoanalysis? It is irresponsible not to.

Getting any satisfaction out of Bush himself is just never going to happen, even reputation-wise. He's obviously incapable of even considering that he's a monumental fuck-up, much less admitting it, even to himself. Even the utterly failed and fraudulent legacy of this administration is going to get soft-pedaled by the corporate media, whose legitimacy after all is underpinned by the symbiotic relationship they share with the powers of governance. They are wedded to their retarded mommy/daddy party narrative, and they are no longer willing to stray from it. There's no reason to -- they make lots of money peddling that same tired-ass frame.

---

The illusion of legitimacy -- both in government and in media -- is required apparently, though for the life of me I can't figure out why. There's no fucking way any more than a fraction of a percent of this country is ever going to leave their comfort zone and actually do something constructive. Hell, even resolving not to waste gas and buy shit at Wal-Mart would be an actual statement; it's not as if rioting in the streets is necessary.

But even those two simple things are evidently out of our power. People on either side would rather be seen indulging in the ineffectual karaoke of marching in the street on some agreed day of commemoration, and then go right back to what they were doing out in the 'burbs. A few people make speeches, lock horns, maybe get arrested, the counts get fudged in the reportage, done deal.

The least we can do, one hopes, is to resolve to stop getting bamboozled into letting intellectual and emotional mediocrities mosey into power and ruin the country, on nothing more than the strength of their last names. No more Bushes, and frankly, if she's not going to resist these fuckers more forcefully, I don't see the need for the continuation of the Clinton dynasty either.

But clearly righting the country, and restoring our position and integrity in the world, is going to involve much more than simply waiting out Bush. The people who put him there are still there, in the media, in the commentariat, in the slovenly, despicable Beltway punditocracy that sees everything as an equation of political gamesmanship, instead of policies that affect peoples' lives. Either we want to get the fuck out of Iraq and figure something out with Iran, or we settle for listening to gutless bloviators pretend to insist on yet another last chance, yet one more six-month finale to this mess. Either we start looking for ways to get ourselves and each other off the oil tit, or we wait for somebody to do it for us at a tidy profit.

Because 2008 won't change much at all, really, if 2007 is any indication. So we get a Democratic preznit and a slightly larger Dem majority in Congress. Well, we've had a Dem congressional majority all year now. What, precisely, has changed, and why exactly are we supposed to pretend that more of the same is something better? They'll just engage in further rear-guard faux-centrism, which boils down to talking loud and then letting the thirty-percenters push them around some more. Either stand tall for something, anything, or sit the fuck down already. We need another non-binding resolution like we need another "preventive" war.

Circus Geeks

Okay, who wants to break it to the morons at CNN that it's a "sideshow" because they have chosen to make it so? I don't know anyone who wants to know more about this non-story, nor would I want to. This does not even qualify as the usual celebrijourno crap; it's just freak-show excess churned up by losers who should be reporting on things such as why our illustrious Democratic majority isn't forcing the bastards on the other side (of humanity) to go through the motions of filibustering every bit of obstructionism they can muster.

So fuck O.J. Simpson, and fuck every "news" entity that is still covering this bullshit after the initial report. Clearly there haven't been nearly enough news-copter crashes.

How to Succeed in Counterinsurgency Without Really Trying

Josh Marshall lays it on the line, I think. We can look at the decisions the British made in India, Kenya, Malaya, where they had to find out the hard way that there was no squashing an indigenous insurgency -- there was only continued occupation and brutality, or outright genocide.

The Latin American model, to which Marshall refers, seems much more likely to me in the end. You want to talk about pure unadulterated evil, read about El Mozote, or pretty much any counter-insurgency op in Guatemala or El Salvador during the '80s. That's where this is headed, ultimately, toward a ruthless thug who keeps a lid on things and does what he's told, who values FDI over his own people.

It's just business. But in any case, it's a completely different lemon than the one we were sold, and should be consistently identified as such, instead of mooning over administration log-rolling and disingenuous sock puppetry.

Oops, I Did It Again

More tiresome Britney Spears puttering, see if it keeps the hits coming. Plus, the more management-wonk knowledge I accrue, the more certain aspects interest me.

Los Angeles-based The Firm said: "We have terminated our professional relationship with Britney Spears.

"We believe she is enormously talented, but current circumstances have prevented us from properly doing our job," the statement continued.

Spears hired the company for the run-up to her comeback album, which is due out in the US on 13 November.

The big topic of discussion now seems to be some variation of whether or not her career can be revived. This is silly. Of course it can; show business practically lives on the tropes of redemption and renewal for fallen idols. Who says Hollywood is run by gays and Jews? It's run by closet Catholics, apparently.

But seriously folks, the question should be, does she want to revive her career? She seems to have hit some strange rut where she wants the trappings and lifestyle of enormous success, without all the actual work involved, to the extent that singing and dancing are "work". Not to denigrate either of those things, but the fact is that if you actually have a talent and passion for something, then it's not work -- it's a blessing to make a shitload of money to do something you would do for free, which is where 99% of the planet's actual musicians are at.

Even when we know better, these sordid little tales of celebrity downfall can be interesting, but not because of what we think they "reveal" about people (since we often don't know all or even most of the story). It's that it's strange and somewhat irritating to watch someone essentially take a winning Powerball ticket and wipe their ass with it.

But it must be disorienting to have literally everyone in your life -- and millions of strangers -- wanting a piece of you, acting like it's their right to live vicariously through you. Or in the case of that fucking freak on YouTube (or was it a parody? I honestly can't tell, but I really don't think it was), to use you as some sort of weird cathartic totem for their own demons. The tabulæ don't come much more rasa (rasæ?) than Miss Britney, but she has failed to equip herself with the knowledge and temperament to sustain her career, and has apparently rejected or alienated everyone in her life who can help her in those areas.

It's bad enough when fuckin' K-Fed looks like the better parent, but show bidness has a much deeper bottom, one that could involve porn and robbing liquor stores by the time she's 30 if she doesn't get her remaining shit together. And we'll all see it on YouTube.

Atlas Smugged

The main problem with Atlas Shrugged is that it's sloppy thinking soaked in bad writing. Most people are on board with the core philosophies as such. Productive capitalism is good; rational self-interest even better. These are not in dispute for the most part, even amongst the imaginary hobgoblins of Teh Left.

But AS is the worst sort of cartoon manifesto, chock-full of cardboard characters and turgid pronunciamentos. The parasite villains are single-minded, dogged in their pursuit of stealing from upstanding producers and throwing it to the wind to be wasted and unappreciated by fellow parasites. The noble producers have but one flaw, and it's that they care too much. Oh, boo-fucking-hoo.

By about the umpteenth interminable rendition of this theme, it occurred to me that, despite its pretense toward real-world dynamics, that it was every bit a sci-fi tract as, say, Anthem (an okay book which I retroactively appreciated all the more for its relative economy of prose and theme, and which also is, of course, the template for 2112).

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, nobody ever sent Pinkerton thugs to massacre wildcat strikers along with their families; nobody ever had to literally fight and die for decent working conditions, for a livable wage, for the basic right to not be paid in fucking company scrip and pushed around by company muscle. Rand completely ignores the reality of laissez-faire rapaciousness, of endless work weeks and child labor, to ponder a fantasy of copiously productive benevolence, hamstrung only by the whinging of thieves and moral cretins, and a taped-on love triangle.

I was fortunate enough to read The Muckrakers contemporaneously with AS, which helped to temper Rand's ponderous delusions of grandiloquent, morally righteous industrialists with the more grounded reality of heedless brutality, of incredibly dangerous jobs and places run by obscenely wealthy men. These were not the Henry Reardens of AS; many if not most were corrupt through and through, using pelf and gall as their retaining wall against justice, burning through fellow human beings like cord wood when they weren't collecting them like stamps.

There's nothing wrong with holding the ideals of Adam Smith and David Hume to a more exalted status than that of Marx; indeed, there's everything right about that. But Smith and Hume too often get confused and conflated, willingly so, by every downsizer who's fucked tens of thousands of people to pad his portfolio, by every hedge-fund grifter who's made a killing with bundled subprime mortgage derivatives, by every scumbag who's polluted every waterway within a 100-mile radius of his facility, and then, well, shrugs when the cancer rate turns into a hockey-stick graph.

And in the end, that makes Atlas Shrugged little more than a footstool-sized apologia for the nastiest strains of predatory capitalism, whether Rand intended for that or not. And the more Alan Greenspan tries to buy back shreds of karma, the more I assume that she -- and he -- knew exactly what they'd done all along, with their cultish little reading lab, somehow elevated to the ignoble status of enlightened cocktail-party chatter.

Providing pseudo-intellectual cover for well-dressed, pedigreed barbarism is perhaps the most dismal calling imaginable. To celebrate the anniversary of the publication of this damned thing is nothing but intellectual lepidoptery. It is the Rosetta Stone(d) of every shitbird in a three-piece suit trying to justify his behavior.

I Know What You Did Last Hummer

There comes a time when a conservablogger gets a golden opportunity to take off the Klingon uniform, leave his mom's basement for a few hours (allowing her finally to Febreze the captain's chair and the futon, much to her blessed relief), and strap on a pair of golden kneepads. Dear Leader has provided several lucky 'tards just such an opportunity, you'd best believe they did not waste that chance at sweet, sweet war-chowder, tapped directly from the source.

It was very cool. The President of the United States slapped my hand and called me “brutha”. Top that....

Um, okay. I'll try. How's this: I once met Kip Winger, and he was actually very cool. He even let me call him "Kip", while I wager that these guys were just too caught up the majesty of a reg'lar guy that talks to them like he's Huggy Bear or something.

I mean, this stuff barely fits the realm of "empty-headed crap". No one expected any of these tools to be the least bit adversarial about anything, but I'm still not sure we thought they'd be this slavishly sycophantic. This is a chihuahua nervously wagging its tail, endlessly seeking approval, maybe a nice pat on the head.

There are a lot of things that adults can and should be seriously discussing in the context of policy objectives and abject failures. But these are not adults; this was a birthday party for a hopelessly spoiled five-year-old, is all. Can he count on your unwavering support, if he slaps your hand and calls you "brutha", so's he don't hafta remember your name? You betchum.

Usually the old saying is that we know what you are, we're just haggling over the price. These clowns are not haggling, because there is no price. They're more than happy to put out for free.

Bobo Rising

Sweet Jesus, it's like Christmas in September.

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.

Translation: who in their right mind would pay to read Bobo and MoDo and such? But I'll be more than happy to slap a hoop skirt on the former and take him out dancin' again for free. BoboWatch is back, baby!

Surge Protectors

Seems our allies in Baghdad have had enough of mercenaries, unaccountable to anyone, pushing civilians around with impunity. Imagine that.

The Iraqi government said Monday that it was revoking the license of an American security firm accused of involvement in the deaths of eight civilians in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion near a State Department motorcade.

The Interior Ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday shooting. It was the latest accusation against the U.S.-contracted firms that operate with little or no supervision and are widely disliked by Iraqis who resent their speeding motorcades and forceful behavior.

Oh, come on. Who would have a problem with being treated like third-class citizens in their own country by secretive corporate paramilitary thugs?

Of the many scandalous precedents set by this war, the sheer scale of PMC involvement -- and again, their utter lack of accountability under either civil law or the UCMJ -- may potentially be the worst. The ceding of civil authority to a bunch of heavily-armed rental soldiers would be unacceptable here (one hopes). What makes anyone think it'd be any different anywhere else, particularly in a country that has already been violently chafing under the more conventional aspects of occupation?

If the Maliki government chooses to push the issue -- and they have every political reason to do so -- it could drive a real wedge in even the illusory surge gains Bush has been frantically trying to sell us on. Even more worrisome is how the enhanced presence of mercenaries underscores the real problem of personnel issues, that manpower is really just being shuffled around.

It's a huge shell game, and considering that PMCs now rival actual military service personnel in numbers and presence, if not conditions of deployment, this becomes a test of the Iraqi government's sovereignty. Because they're going to want to prosecute the Judge Dredds in the SUV convoy, and Blackwater is going to try to hide behind the agreements it signed with the U.S. government. And if they're gone, and the rest of the PMC guys are out, the landscape suddenly, drastically changes.

I'm not sure what sort of moral cretin would continue to remain willfully obtuse on this issue, but it's a very real one, and regardless of how much Erik Prince and the DeVos family and the rest of the entrenched Michigan mafia bankrolls the GOP, it needs to be addressed. Private military contracting, without sufficient oversight, has very dangerous ramifications for this country, as well as the unfortunate beneficiaries of our "help".

Woke Up This Morning, Got Yourself A Goon

Yes, award shows suck, but sometimes they serve as a barometer for the industry. This is especially true for the Emmys, where network trolls still hold the power, and keep the real talent (that is, premium cable) ghettoized as much as possible. So you have a couple of rote Sopranos tributes, then James Spader takes Best Actor in a Drama. That sort of shit. Plus the production and pacing off the show were completely jacked.

On the other hand, Katherine Heigl is still pretty hot. You can scan the crowd for quality sweater fruit pretty much constantly on these things.

Tim Goodman has that and much more in his live wine-blogging of the show. It's a fun read.

---

Oh, and I don't care how many jokey "I never win" skits Kanye West does to try to rehabilitate his crybaby image, if that was really his song that he and Rainn Wilson did in the Don't Forget the Lyrics (on FOX!) parody, then he sucks even worse than I thought.

N-now th-th-that that don't kill me
Can only make me stronger
I need you to hurry up now
Cause I can't wait much longer
I know I got to be right now
Cause I can't get much wronger
Man I been waitin' all night now
That's how long I've been on ya

Jesus Christ. This is the sort of stuff 7th-grade girls scrawled on their Pee-Chee folders back in the day. It's just sad and sub-literate, and completely meaningless. But to be fair, Kanye did rock the Li'l Pee Diddly outfit that somebody laid out for him. Nothing says "asshole with money" like....well, an asshole with money.

Sometimes people will trigger your douchebag radar at first, and then they either start to grow on you, or you just realize you misjudged them initially. It happens. Not with West, man -- the more this fucking guy comes up, the more he comes off as just another talentless prick using this muzak thang to get into the sweatshop industry, where sexually harassed teenagers in Saipan can crank out his crappy signature swag for thirteen cents an hour, and he turns it over at a hundred bucks a piece.

He's not a musician, or an actor, or a clothing guy, he's just a brander, which in this day and age is what passes for entrepreneurship. He's Mickey Mouse with fucking $1200 sunglasses. He'd show up to the opening of an envelope (in this case, literally) to pimp his brand one more time.

[cheesy electronic background beat with a pilfered chord or two from some old Van Halen song] Yeeeaaah, yo, come on now.

When I talk about music, usually it's about hard rock/metal, or guitar-based music generally. But I also like soul and R&B; I grew up listening to Al Green and Bootsy Collins and Billy Preston. I like good rap and hip-hop, though it's increasingly rare. But this guy is just a straight-up fuckin' hack.

Seacrest out.

Sunday Blundery Sunday

I ain't hardly bullshittin' when I say that I hope Mike Shanahan gets a scorching case of ass herpes that dogs him for the next fifty years. For once Janikowski manages to beat the yips back on a clutch kick, only to have that fuckface grab him by the shorthairs with maybe the closest-to-the-actual-snap timeout I've seen.

And what the hell is up with the Chargers? I was at least smart enough to take Denver in the pool, but the damned Bolts are costing me money. Sheesh. Doesn't anybody bug Belichick's hoodie or anything? Let's see some creative thinking here, people.

Details

In the coverage of today's DC protest, one might find some mildly humorous snafus.

The first major protest against the Iraq War in Washington since January kicked off today with speeches near the White House, to be followed by a "die-in" at the U.S. Capitol featuring the playing of tap and a mock 21-gun salute.

This is "tap":

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. It's loads o' fun for a good five, maybe ten seconds. Then it just sounds like people wearing horseshoes, stepping on bubble-wrap.

Then there's Taps:

Slightly different. But that's the least of it, as we'll see. Here's the thumbnail estimate for attendance, both anti-war and the euphemistically-named "counter-demonstrators":

Protesters and counter-protesters started to gather by 8:30 a.m. for the event, which is expected to be followed by a week of civil disobedience in the Washington area intended to shift the anti-war movement to a more confrontational phase. Organizers were predicting tens of thousands of protesters, though their permit is for 10,000.

....

The demonstrators were immediately confronted by several hundred counter-protesters, who came to the Mall to demand that politicians see the war through to victory.

Okay, keep those estimates in mind. Now, as to the nature of this virulent strain of yahooism that swaddles itself in flag doo-rags other such jingo bunting:

"It will be a lot of bull horns, a lot of 'singing God Bless America', " said Betty Kilbride, 48, of Arlington, a writer who described herself as supporting the troops.

Bullhorns and singing. That qualifies as "support" if you're cheering on your favorite driver at the demolition derby at the county fair. Otherwise, articulate yourself, and do it in the context of the lies and deception underpinning the policy. Thanks for playing.

Deborah King-Lile, 55, of St. Augustine, Fla. said the Gathering of Eagles prided themselves on not being arrested at protests. "We just want a chance to show America we don't agree with the vocal minority."

Uh, yeah. Dingbat, you are the fuckin' "vocal minority", see? Oh, right, I forgot, everyone is in cahoots to lie to you about what's really going on and make you feel bad. General sentiment has been polled at 2:1 or 3:1 in serious disapproval and disagreement over Li'l Lord Pissypants' idear of successmanship and progress. And the particular event you yourself have chosen, well, it sounds like even 10:1 is a pretty charitable ratio.

And if you disagree, lady, then hold your own fucking march already. The only time these scabs ever show up to anything is in opposition to the actual event. They're circus geeks at a sideshow, looking for an unsuspecting chicken.

I'm dead serious about this. If the freepers and the conservatards and the 30% dead-enders are so damned sure that: A) they are correct in their principles, and their understanding of empirical reality; and B) that they are the silent majority, being wrongly shouted down by MoveOn's minions, then it should be no trouble to organize yourselves for your very own Million Moran March. Please, by all means, knock yourselves out.


Git 'er dunnn, Chief.

Okay, so remember those numbers in the Post article, "tens of thousands" expected, versus "several hundred" yahoos? What a difference a creative interpretation can make:

Thousands of anti-war protesters, including a sizeable contingent of military veterans, rallied on Saturday outside the White House in Washington, D.C., to demand an end to the Iraq war.

Ah, "thousands". Two, ten, thirty, how many thousands? One gets the distinct impression that it could have been fifty or even a hundred thousand, and you'd get this lackadaisical "thousands" thrown out. Given the context and the circumstances, this is inconceivably lazy.

CBS News Correspondent Dan Raviv reports that counter-protester groups, including a contingent of Vietnam veterans called Gathering of Eagles who support the war in Iraq, lined Pennsylvania Avenue and had a verbal battle of chants and slogans.

Nearly 1,000 counter-protesters gathered near the Washington Monument, frequently erupting in chants of "U-S-A" and waving American flags.

Also the guys with the "D" and the little mock picket fence. D-fence! Unh-unh! D-fence! Unh-unh! That shit never gets old, like the dude with the "Jesus Saves" sign in the end zone.

But notice here, "several hundred" has turned into "nearly a thousand" from the Gathering of Weevils crowd. Interesting, that.

Perceptions can change on one or two judiciously placed words or vague statistical estimates. And we all know that estimating crowd sizes is an inexact science at best, not to mention a politically charged one as well. But there appears to be zero sourcing from the CBS article. And the main effort, far more than simply reporting reliable statistical facts to perhaps illustrate the sheer disproportion between the people of all walks of life who are fucking sick of George Bush's goddamned war and the real vocal minority, is to....wait for it....give both sides equal time.

Disinformation

So is the Mighty Wurlitzer being played once again as stooges for the military-industrial complex?

Though Debat, often described in the American media as “a former French defense official,” insisted he would clear his name and sue Riché and his online magazine Rue89 for slander, the alleged fabricated interviews soon became a problem not just for Debat but for ABC. Since 2002, the network has employed Debat as a counterterrorism consultant and sometimes reporter, sending him to far-flung locations to report on Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. (For the past year and a half, Debat has also served as the director of the terrorism and national security program at the Nixon Center; he resigned "for personal reasons" this week, an official with the Nixon Center said.)

Sources also say that Debat claimed in the spring to have received a "large chunk of money" from the Pentagon to conduct a study concerning radical Islam; when I inquired about the contract, a Defense Department official said he would check into it.

Following Riché's report, ABC publicly announced that it had demanded Debat's resignation in June, after obtaining the annotated CV and investigating his claims to have a doctorate. ABC said it had investigated his reports then, and was undertaking a more extensive investigation upon learning of the fabricated interviews at Politique Internationale, but that to date, it was confident that all of Debat’s reports for ABC had been vetted and multiply sourced and were standing up to scrutiny.

Wouldn't it have been easier to just get him on as a staffer at The Note?

Anybody Listening?

Seriously. I honestly can't imagine anyone sitting through this bullshit live; I could barely be bothered to skim the post-mortem.

President Bush's TV address tonight was the worst speech he's ever given on the war in Iraq, and that's saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.

The biggest fiction was that because of the "success" of the surge, we can reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq from 20 combat brigades to 15 by next July. Gen. David Petraeus has recommended this step, and President George W. Bush will order it so.

Let's be clear one more time about this claim: The surge of five extra combat brigades (bringing the total from 15 to 20) started in January. Their 15-month tours of duty will begin to expire next April. The Army and Marines have no combat units ready to replace them. The service chiefs refuse to extend the tours any further. The president refuses to mobilize the reserves any further. And so, the surge will be over by next July. This has been understood from the outset. It is the result of simple arithmetic, not of anyone's decision, much less some putative success.

Exactly. The purpose of the surge was never to resolve the war; it was to keep it going, and now that simple math necessitates at least some drawdown, Bush is lamely attempting to couch that in the rhetoric of success.

I don't even know what to say anymore. This man is either flat-out delusional, or he is as shameless a huckster as any Crazy Eddie trying to sell you an exploding Pinto. Who the fuck is falling for this still, and how much longer is he permitted to play kick-the-can with other people's lives?

Goddamn

Casualties of war:

NEW YORK The Op-Ed by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq questioning the war drew international attention just three weeks ago. Now two of the seven are dead.

Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray died Monday in a vehicle accident in western Baghdad, two of seven U.S. troops killed in the incident which was reported just as Gen. David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress in the "surge." The names have just been released.

....

Mora, 28, hailed from Texas City, Texas, and was a native of Ecuador, who had just become a U.S. citizen. He was due to leave Iraq in November and leaves behind a wife and daughter. Gray, 26, had lived in Ismay, Montana, and is also survived by a wife and infant daughter.

When do we say "enough", and more importantly, when do they finally listen?

Kojo No Tsuki

Maybe the Japanese have the right idea. Abe didn't hold office very long, certainly not long enough for people (especially foreign observers) to pass judgment on him. But at least he understands that lack of confidence in his leadership does -- and should -- translate into administrative paralysis.

Too bad certain other world "leaders" are so obtuse about taking the hint. Perhaps if the citizens had a means of providing it more clearly.

Spiritual Vampires

Lest we forget on this day of remembrance, screw Giuliani and Lieberman, y'know? Fuck 'em in the neck. Just because. Lock 'em in a fuckin' elevator with Kanye West and let 'em duke it out, girly-style. Better yet, just let the elevator plummet.

This is one of the very rare times that you'll ever see me link to a conservatard site, but there's a mildly interesting note (probably very temporary) at Hannity's manure pile. I know it's all exciting and new, like the Love Boat and shit (but with a higher occurrence of herpes), but wait -- before you click on the rilly cool offerings of Charlie Daniels and Sportin' Life Bill Bennett, check out something else. It's a congratulatory clip, saying "Has it really been six years? CONGRATULATIONS SEAN! Letting Freedom Ring Nationally Since September 10, 2001" [all caps in original; italics mine to emphasize date]

Can it really be that simple? Did a squinty, logrolling Lawn Guyland boyo just happen to find his niche the very day after he started? Apparently so. One wonders, in the glorious exploratory spirit of alternate history, what would have happened to SeanBoy in a 9/11-less world. Perhaps a lower-profile career on the rubber-chicken circuit with interchangeable hacks and ankle-biters, à la Laura Ingraham.

As a wise man once said, they flutter behind you, your possible pasts.

Gay Old Party

WTF is going on with these people?

* the bodies of Republican political consultant Ralph Gonzalez, 39, president of The Strategum Group, his roommate David Abrami and "a friend," Jason Robert Drake, were found in an Orlando apartment.

* Gonzalez served with the Republican Party of Florida's House Campaign Division and executive director of the Georgia Republican Party and counted the Alabama Republican Legislative Committee as a client, producing an anti-gay flier accusing a Dem candidate of supporting marriage equality.

* A newspaper, Florida Today, initially reported that there were signs of a struggle, printing "Lovers' fight may have sparked three deaths" as its headline. The paper later scrubbed any references to a love triangle.

* BradBlog has shown the ties between Gonzalez and Florida's vote-tampering congressman, Tom Feeney. From Pat Go Bye Bye:
Gonzalez, who was out to his friends, had ties to Ralph Reed when he took over the Georgia Republican Party and used unethical tactics to beat Senator Max Cleland. He was also the campaign chair for the ethically-challenged Tom Feeney's congressional campaign as well as his state rep campaign after which Feeney became house speaker and got involved in a software-buying scandal involving Yang Enterprise. Feeney is best known for his vote-rigging scheme (which has ties to an unexplained death of a Florida state investigator in Valdosta GA), Jack Abramoff, and a variety of unethical smear tactics against Democratic candidates.

* Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry has ties to Gonzalez and Drake, the latter was determined to be the shooter in the murder-suicide.

* McHenry's office initially denied knowing Drake but confirmed later that McHenry did know him, but didn't specify the nature of the relationship.

* Drake was also allegedly tied to a gay escort service in Virginia; the prostitution angle -- and who it extends to -- is very murky at this point, with few sources on the record.

[italics mine because I can't do second-order blockquotes]

There's a lot more, and you practically have to have a giant whiteboard to diagram it on. Is it merely a bunch of self-loathing closet cases selling their souls to the dark side, or is their closeted status somehow politically useful as leverage somewhere along the line? But hey, gay porn and prostitution, and suicidal lovers' triangles? Sounds pretty durn Republican to me. The only thing missing is Rush Limbaugh's bag of happy pills and a ball-gag.

Never Forget

• ....that it didn't have to be this way.



• ....that Serious Thinkamators such as Richard Bruce Cheney and Billy Fucking Kristol have been -- and continue to be -- wrong about everything.



• ....that there are people who get paid to lie to you.



• ....that people tell themselves that everything changed so they can avoid realizing how very little has actually changed.



• ....that Saddam had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.



• ....that powerful people in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had everything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.



• ....that Bush airily dismissed a detailed briefing just a month before the attacks, and stared blankly into space and kept reading My Pet Goat after learning of the attacks. Then he ran and hid.



• ....that we still have no idea who is responsible for the anthrax attacks right after 9/11. The trail seemed to stop when it was realized that it was a rather sophisticated milling process that was probably in the U.S.



• ....that the Bush family has been doing business with the bin Laden family for a long time.



• ....that a select few are making a lot of money from a lot of misery.



• ....that "democracy" really means "a country that will sell us something we want at a price we can agree upon, regardless of what its own citizens want or need".



• ....that you're on a need-to-know basis. For your own good.

Feel free to add your own.

Dishonorable Discharge

I don't trust anyone with a stupid berries-and-cream haircut anyway, but Petraeus' hacky little dog-and-pony show should be seen for exactly what it is. If he wants to be the sock-puppet/fall guy for a failed preznit and a catastrophic policy, so be it. How many more people get to die so that the Serious Thinkers can try to save face?

Driving the Waaahhhmbulance

I can't fucking stand Kanye West. Still. I just wanted to share that.

Kanye West, a virtual shut out at the Video Music Awards on Sunday night, threw a hissy fit in front of cameras and crew backstage as the MTV show was coming to an end.

While waiting for a an elevator, West, 29, began yelling about losing all five categories for which he was nominated, including male artist of the year.

"That's two years in a row, man ... give a black man a chance," said West, barking his misery at the nearby reporters. "I'm trying hard man, I have the ... No. 1 record, man."

....

Last year, Kanye hit the stage at the MTV Europe Awards after not winning for best video.

I hope he means "Give a black man a chance" in the "help a brutha out" context; there are certainly enough ellipses in the quotes as well. Given his history of inflammatory comments, I'm not terribly inclined to be charitable in my assumptions, but it is possible that he didn't intend that the way it came out, or was taken slightly out of context.

Still, to be that desperate for a cheap trophy from a crappy basic-cable channel that hasn't shown any actual music videos in roughly a decade, damn. Maybe they can make a special Biggest Fucking Crybaby award for him next year, in the shape of a pacifier. Hell, maybe MTV just enjoys jerking his chain now, the way the Daytime Emmys did to Susan Lucci all these years.

In the meantime, Susan Kanye, like I've said before, go crack a few bottles of Cristall, bang some models, and shut the fuck up already. You're just a lucky -- or unlucky -- break from asking us if we want fries with that.

[Bonus Update: Oh, this is fucking rich -- the piano player has suddenly discovered where he really works. Shocking, and of course, entirely in keeping with Mister Man's overarching notion that if MTV would just let him open, and do the main stage, and give him all the awards, why he'd just be okely-dokely with all that. Imagine that.

Here's a thought, pal -- why not just put together your own fucking show, as Timberlake did just last week on HBO (which, you know, just might have accounted for his somewhat enhanced presence at the VMA show)? If you're as popular as you think you are, the networks will be chomping at the bit to air even a snippet of the Me, Myself, & I: Bask In My Immense Greatness and Smell My Farts, You Worthless Fucks Tour. You could probably even pay a clowder of flunkies to present you with a bucket of awards celebrating your enormous importance to the continuance of humanity's ability to carve and organize sound out of blessed silence with Pro Tools.

As the music industry, such as it is, continues to careen into the tar pits of technological and revenue-model irrelevance, I am reminded that I won't miss the presence of spoiled, narcissistic douchebags like this fucking goon, not a bit. Go pimp some hundred-dollar t-shirts to the wannabe suckas, dickhead.]

Vanessa Hudgens Nude and Lindsay Lohan Topless, Playing With Britney Spears' Pussy While Watching Paris Hilton's Sex Tape

Eh, it couldn't hurt. There are probably blogs about pet hamsters getting more traffic than I am, so what the hell.

Push comes to shove, I'm doing a week of nothing but Britney posts. Don't fucking test me, people.



There's more where that came from.



I'm going to hell for that one.

A Riddle, Crapped In an Enigma

This is the dynamic for the duration -- having to explain shit to people who have abandoned even the pretense of honest assessment or debate.

The only mystery here is how long the people's representatives -- and in turn -- the people themselves -- will continue to put up with liars and cheats telling them to get bent. Until it affects them directly, I'm guessing. And by then it's usually too late. But the very act of getting people to expend energy on this kabuki is the real goal, to keep them distracted and enervated while the authors of history continue to do exactly what the fuck they feel like. We're all just grabbing brooms, trying to sweep back a veritable ocean of deceit and ineptitude.

This is Chimpco's world, bub. We all just live in it.

The Usama bin Bobo Tape

I'll keep this one short and sweet: Blow me, fuckface.

Shrub and Shrubber

The Genius has landed:

"Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit," Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Oops. That would be APEC, the annual meeting of leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, not OPEC, the cartel of 12 major oil producers.

Bush quickly corrected himself. "APEC summit," he said forcefully, joking that Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (for the record, an impossibility, since neither Australia nor the U.S. are OPEC members).

The president's next goof went uncorrected — by him anyway. Talking about Howard's visit to Iraq last year to thank his country's soldiers serving there, Bush called them "Austrian troops."

That one was fixed for him. Though tapes of the speech clearly show Bush saying "Austrian," the official text released by the White House switched it to "Australian."

Then, speech done, Bush confidently headed out — the wrong way.

He strode away from the lectern on a path that would have sent him over a steep drop. Howard and others redirected the president to center stage, where there were steps leading down to the floor of the theater.

The event had inauspicious beginnings. Bush started 10 minutes late, so that APEC workers could hustle people out of the theater's balcony seating to fill the many empty portions of the main orchestra section below — which is most visible on camera.

Even resettled, the audience remained quiet throughout the president's remarks, applauding only when he was finished.

Shit, and Austria Australia is one of our few remaining friends. Nice goin', Harvard. And how much is this little circle-jerk costing us, anyhoo?

U.S. President George Bush arrived in Sydney on Tuesday night for the APEC summit, amid security arrangements unprecedented in Australia. Police cleared a path through Sydney for the president's 30-car motorcade to travel unhindered to the Intercontinental Hotel, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

A 700-strong entourage, including U.S. government officials, Secret Service agents, bodyguards, close friends and media are traveling with Bush.

Y'know, I recall another smart fella who couldn't keep those tricksy countries straight:

LLOYD
Excuse me, can you tell me how to get
to the medical school? I'm supposed
to be giving a lecture in twenty
minutes and my driver's a bit lost.

YOUNG WOMAN
(heavy European accent)
Go straight aheads and makes a left
over za bridge.

Lloyd checks out her body.

LLOYD
I couldn't help noticing the accent.
You from Jersey?

YOUNG WOMAN
(unimpressed)
Austria.

LLOYD
Austria? You're kidding.
(mock-Australian accent)
Well, g'day, mate. What do you say
we get together later and throw a few
shrimp on the barbie.

The Young Woman turns her back to him and walks away.

LLOYD (CONT.)(to self)
Guess I won't be going Down Under tonight…

He SIGHS and zips the window back up.

That proves it once and for all -- it's Preznit Lloyd Christmas.

Just Decide, Baby

Don't get me wrong -- I do think new Raiders coach Lane Kiffin is going to improve the team. (Then again, they were 2-14 last year, and are a league-last 15-49 since their epic choke in Super Bowl 37, four seasons ago. Technically I could probably help them improve.) But there are some gaping holes that were self-inflicted in this offseason/preseason, starting with the draft back in April, and culminating with Kiffin's week-long game over who will start at quarterback this Sunday.

It's all but official: Josh McCown is the starting quarterback for the Oakland Raiders in Sunday's season opener.

Three team sources confirmed the ever-leaking secret Thursday after McCown took 90 percent of the first-team snaps for the third straight practice, with Daunte Culpepper offering occasional relief.

Raiders coach Lane Kiffin won't say who the starter is until Sunday, even as national and local media outlets continue to report McCown won the monthlong quarterback competition with Culpepper and Andrew Walter.

"You look at it this way," Kiffin said Thursday. "If you gain a competitive edge, great. If you don't, it didn't matter, you weren't going to get one anyway. That's all it is."

That's stupid. For one, we're talking about the Raiders facing the second-worst team in the league last year, the Detroit Lions. The Lions have never won in Oakland, and if I recall correctly, they haven't even won a game in California in something like fifteen years. They're a consistently bad team in general, but an even worse road team. So these silly circumlocutions do not inspire confidence in the team's vaunted new direction. It looks like a fucking ant farm that fell off a high shelf and shattered on the floor, marginally controlled chaos. Just pick somebody, dude. It's fucking Detroit. This is the Toilet Bowl; let's quit shitting ourselves and pretending it's something bigger. New direction starts with defining what that direction will be, and who you will be counting on.

Kiffin hasn't even decided who his center will be, and this o-line gave up 72 -- yes, seventy-two; that is not a typo -- sacks last year. Free-agent pick-up Jeremy Newberry performed well in his preseason action, but he's entering his 11th year, had multiple surgeries, the last of which led to his release from the 49ers. If you're rebuilding, then rebuild. Go with the young guy (in this case, Jake Grove), give him an occasional breather with the talented veteran, but recognize that your center is the key to the success of your o-line and your QB. This should have been settled last weekend at the absolute latest; you can't even make the lame "competitive advantage" argument over leaving your center undecided.

More and more I have started observing football not just for the on-field action and strategery, but for the off-field management tactics. And the Raiders' management has been sloppy as hell. There is no excuse for last-minute jerking off over crucial positions, and there is no excuse for not having JaMarcus Russell signed as the season is beginning. If they keep dicking around, they may as well bench him for the year and deal him in the offseason. This is ridiculous.

[Update (9/9 4:30 PDT): Same old Raiders. After spotting the Lions 17 points in the first half with utterly incompetent play (and uh, Newberry went down in the Raiders' very first series), the Raiders briefly tantalized the die-hards with nearly twenty minutes of solid play, even grabbing a one-point lead for a minute or two. A missed tackle on a 3rd-and-long with about six minutes left made the difference between forcing the Lions to punt and allowing them to continue their drive, which they naturally scored a touchdown on. After that, it was back to deer-in-the-headlights time for Josh McCown, who will always just be a pretty good backup.

It's not entirely McCown's fault -- this is an organization that has now become accustomed to losing, systemically, like the Cardinals or (until recently) the Bengals. Poor talent management inevitably results in poor coordination of that talent. They could have drafted Matt Leinart last year and started developing that position more long-term; instead, they took the overrated Michael Huff, who got burnt several times today by Joe Montana Jon Kitna. And they're still trying to sign JaMarcus Russell, who now reportedly wants $35 million guaranteed on a 6 year/$61 million package. Again, that should have been nailed down back in fucking April, and if not, you take Calvin Johnson, who made the Raiders pay today.

Incompetence from the top down. Probably another 4-12 year in the making here, with very little actual positive momentum to show for it. It's easy to blame Al Davis, but he's not the one missing tackles and blowing coverage. And it's time to cut bait on Sebastian Janikowski, who sat out the preseason and still can't help shanking field goals and fucking up kickoffs, costing field position several times. You can get a low-rent rookie to do that shit.]

Master Debaters

Edroso watches the turd-burglar-fest so the rest of us poor saps don't have to, which should entitle him to hazard pay. Read the whole thing and enjoy the bunch of carnies and goons that is the cream of the Republican crop these days. Real step forward from the current gibbering buffoon, "playing" for another couple months so that one of these reprobates has some political cover for extending the misery of a wronged nation....as well as Iraq.

I still don't get the appeal of Ron Paul, and the few times I have seen Huckabee he comes across as more of an unctuous stooge than anything truly sinister. But Roy's right, even the husk of Saint John McCain generates a lot more respect than creepy dickheads like Hunter and Tancredo, even if said respect is tinged with more than a little pity and head-shaking.

(And really, what sort of maladjusted, med-shorted freeper putz is seriously looking to waste their vote on douche-nozzles like Hunter or Tancredo? Come on. The people for whom those clowns truly speak are unlikely to venture in from their Mojave crank labs, and risk running into The Man at the Indio voting precinct.)

Republicans are more prone to vote for people whom they feel embody the traits they think they see in themselves, which generally distills to something along the line of "amiable doofus". So I think Romney, who is the most blandly amiable, stands for practically nothing, and happens to have the added advantages of telegenic appearance and a shitload of money, is still at the wheel of this here clown car. Huckabee may be reaching over and messing with the e-brake, and Lonesome Rhodes is about to wrestle Willard for the wheel for most of this month, but Romney is the most-moneyed, least-obnoxious contestant in a loser's field, and that's good enough for what's left of the Party O' Gawd.

Special mention must be made of Roy's withering broadside at America's Mayor, for whom it seems that this honeymoon, like his many other ones, is pretty much over:

Someone obviously told [Giuliani] the jig is up about 9/11 -- now he brags endlessly about what a prick he was running New York. Listen close, death's-head whorefucker: no one in Bumfuck -- and, you know, all America is Bumfuck -- gives a good goddamn.

....

Kathryn J. Lopez seems to think the New Hampshire crowd's obvious disgust with the malignant Giuliani is a baseball thing. Okay, K-Lo, have it your way: fuck the New York Yankees, fuck Rudolph Giuliani, and fuck you.

"Death's-head whorefucker". Awesome.

Top Ten Questions at the Values Voter Debate

Sounds like a good time.

10. "Which one of you guys promises to take that smutty Singing Bee off the air?"

9. "How do you plan on being as fundamentally indecent as the current occupants?"

8. "I don't have a question; I just wanted to let you all know that I'll probably vote for whoever picks that Sarah Palin as a running mate."

7. "Who do you think God wants us to nuke first, Iran or France?"

6. "My son wet the bed again while his Ten Commandments sheets were on. Does he need more Jesus Camp to wash away his yellow sin?"

5. "It's not gay if it's a chick sheep, right?"

4. "Paula Abdul -- temptress or antichrist?"

3. "If the Lord didn't want me to periodically grind my loins against the TV screen, then why did He make John Gibson so steamy and hunkalicious?"

2. "Is that Mary Matalin giving Fred Thompson a lap dance?"

1. "When you find yourself at a moral crossroads, do you ask yourself, "What would Les Kinsolving do?"

Lowering All Bars

Let's cut the shit -- this is another photo-op for Bush to try to sell his lemon, cynically dangling the possibility of a drawdown, even though the Pentagon has already acknowledged that current levels are simply unsustainable. But this is the new product rollout, and as such, he gets ahead of the game a couple weeks before Petraeus heads in to give his (ahem) unvarnished opinion.

It's far from clear, however, that Anbar will prove to be a model for other parts of Iraq - mostly because Sunnis dominate and tribes are strong and there's less of a sectarian factor.

Administration officials are fond of recalling that one year ago the Marine Corps intelligence chief in Anbar concluded that, in essence, the region was a lost cause in the absence of real support by the central government. At the time administration officials downplayed that assessment by Col. Pete Devlin, but now they cite it as a measure of how far Anbar has come in reducing violence and creating hope.

Well, of course they do. Now that previous negative assessment has rhetorical utility. Now there will be an excuse to drop another pallet of benjamins for subcontractors to judiciously disburse.

[Bush] also met with Sunni tribal sheiks and members of Anbar’s governing body.

Some clarity about what that really means is in order. The administration has been resolute and steadfast in their sweet constancy, in absolutely refusing to meet with either Iranian or North Korean representatives. Hell, they're proud of that shit, even though neither Kim nor Ahmadinejad is directly responsible for the deaths of any American troops. (Addendum: though no doubt the latter character is bound to be pretextually connected to whatever supposed Quds Force units are said to be supplying more powerful IEDs to insurgent groups.) But he'll meet and shake hands with the very same Anbar Sunni sheiks who, before they were "persuaded" to get on board, were planting IEDs in every garbage can and dog carcass they could find.

North Korea is comparatively contained now only because of Christopher Hill's ability to climb down from John Bolton's previous belligerence, and essentially negotiate right back to where things were in 2000 -- only now NK's nuclear ability has been finalized. So it's the same policy of Clinton-era checkbook diplomacy they spent years deriding, only now with actual nukes.

Iran obviously has been treated in the exact opposite manner, actively doing everything to ratchet up the tension, rather than defuse it, which could have been accomplished several years ago, with much less effort than Bush is expending right now, meeting face-to-face with people who have American blood on their hands.

It would be nice if the Bushies' cheerful optimism were true, but I can't think of a single thing they have ever claimed or forecasted that was even partially true. Iraq and its subsections will be at relative peace (i.e., more orderly spasms of sectarian cleansing) when there's another strongman (and ancillary provincial strongmen) running the show, period. CNN lowered the bar even further in its fluffy "they took our Blackberries and put us on double secret probation" reportage, which had the distinct whiff of children who think they won tickets to a secret amusement park ride.

Bedtime for Bobo

Labor Day is typically when lip service is paid to workers and organizers of the past, before we all get ready to head back to the grind. I'd like to take a slightly different tack and spare a thought for those people who, in a rational world, would be practically unemployable, yet are well-compensated for producing practically nothing at all. Many come to mind; we'll look at just one, one we haven't picked on in some time.

Let's get something straight -- Bobo is not a sophist. A hack, a shill, a toady to the worst strains of American political boobism, and a situational ethicist, sure, but sophistry implies a coherent tack, a plan, a vision beyond "once bought, stays bought".

The real question, as I have beating on more than usual lately, is how and why people such as Bobo manage to keep getting face time.

We've been seeing, hearing and reading a lot of pseudo-funny churlishness from Brooks – a lot of Brooks, period. Maybe NPR, PBS, and Times audiences have been calling in, demanding, "More David Brooks!" More likely, editors and producers think him a conservative congenial to liberals like themselves. It doesn't hurt that many conservatives think him a traitor.

I think he's right; I can't imagine what kind of asshole would be calling/writing in begging for more Bobo. It's editorial -- and not in the "congenial to liberals like themselves" sense, either, which is highly speculative at best. It's just that Bobo's comparatively diffident bromides put a more user-friendly face on the intellectual offal normally produced by the Coulter/Limbaugh/Hannity cretin wing. But that's not intellectual probity, it's a corporate hack's idea of "balance".

The distinction seems utterly lost on the decision-makers, so enamored as they appear to be of Bobo's woolly aphorisms and sloppy thinking. "See folks," they seem to say, "they're not all assholes." No, they're not. But they are all wrong, and have been for some time, and don't seem to be in any rush to get their shit straight. They are not entitled to their own facts, no matter how much they would like to selectively squint at things.

The article is full of evidence at Bobo's intellectual dishonesty, which abounds like Devil Dogs at Rosie O'Donnell's breakfast table. It's such an easy mark, it misses the point by belaboring the obvious -- again, why is a proven hack clogging up so much air time? Because the defense contractors that own the networks, and the pharma/insurance companies that buy advertising, would rather push the breezy familiarity of an amiable dork than someone who might actually give up the game. It's important to keep the Pepsi vs. Coke dynamic going, above all else.

So it's all noteworthy, but this one passage may explain the situation more than anything else:

On the News Hour in 2004, [Brooks] announced that John Kerry had flunked "the Joshua test" by meeting Brooks' young son Joshua and turning him off. "Anyone who can't relate to a 10-year-old boy can't relate to the American electorate," Brooks opined, but if he was right, why does he disparage Westen for saying pretty much the same, with regret, not a smirk?

Because, as the author notes, it's not in Bobo's portfolio to actually inform anyone of much of anything. He's a vested member of the machine that prefers to treat adults like mushrooms (keep 'em in the dark, feed 'em lots of bullshit), which has deliberately infantilized the dialogue and its participants. It makes perfect sense that Brooks would claim to disqualify Kerry simply for being awkward in talking to Brooks' son.

It's also complete bullshit -- even Kerry had been smooth and adept, even genuinely so, in engaging young Joshua, Brooks would have presumed it to be a limo-lib contrivance. Worst-case scenario, he'd have decided after much solemn consideration that even if Kerry had passed Bobo's reg'lar-guy quals (as if Bobo himself would not come across as a preening hard-on at virtually any blue-collar gathering), Bobo just could not have changed horses from Preznit "He fergot Poland!!1!! in mid fuck-up.

One presumes that, come enlistment age in a few years, Bobo will not exactly be exhorting his son to risk life and limb for Junior's folly. That's for the hallowed Wal-Mart-economy heartlanders Bobo worships in print. In the meantime, putatively liberal media outlets are happy to give Bobo face-time, and Bobo is more than happy to return the favor, milking his rhetorical straying from the conservatard reservation for all its artificial worth.

Legacy Pimps

I continue to be puzzled by how the media world works. For one, someone is actually desperate enough to take a paying gig to tell Himself's side of the story, because that hasn't been done nearly enough for most of the past decade. The other, of course, is that someone else saw fit to report on what probably passes for introspection and contemplation down on the tumbleweed farm, but smells a lot like navel-gazing and un-self-aware wallowing. Jesus, how about more novels from the vampire's point of view, while we're at it?

Mr. Bush conveyed a level of sanguinity with his unpopularity. Mr. Draper recalled that in their last meeting, in May, Mr. Bush pointed outside to his dog, Barney, and said, “That guy who said if you want a friend in Washington get a dog, knew what he was talking about.”

He otherwise addressed his unpopularity as a tactical issue. For instance, in May he said that this fall it would be up to General Petraeus to convince the public that the Iraq strategy is working.

“I’ve been here too long,” Mr. Bush said, according to Mr. Draper. “Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn’t make it on the news.”

Lies on top of lies. For one, most of us already know that the White House has a very direct role in helping Petraeus present his report. For another, give me a break; everything Bush does, no matter how utterly meaningless, makes the news. He should be thanking the media -- without their laziness, incompetence, and institutional cowardice, the portion of Americans who have chosen to believe their lyin' eyes over Bush's mindless cheerleading would be much higher than 70%. But they allow him to drive the narrative; the office always gets to make the first move, before the chat-show ankle-biters figure out their talking points and party poses.

This is not even debatable, and for Bush to characterize this dynamic as such indicates a real narcissistic dysfunction on his part. It doesn't occur to him that his "rosy picture" is and has been bullshit; the real problem is apparently that people don't want to watch his Thomas Kinkade paint-by-numbers schtick so much anymore.

I am not being snarky when I say that this is a highly problematic mindset for the leader of a supposedly mature, responsible world power to take. This is bunker mentality at its worst.

But this one takes the cake:

But he said he saw his unpopularity as a natural result of his decision to pursue a strategy in which he believed. “I made a decision to lead,” he said, “One, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance, and that may be true. But the fundamental question is, is the world better off as a result of your leadership?”

Not that it would matter to someone so clinically autistic in their decision-making and processing of empirical data, but does he really want a referendum on that question? Any Democratic candidate who does not take that question, sprint with it, and hang it around Bush's (and his party's) neck should get off the stage right now, because this is what 2008 should be distilled to.

Even the notion of a "Freedom Institute" started by Bush is a slap in the face, a pale attempt to legitimize the most tragic, sloppiest tactical and strategic thinking this country (and the world, sadly) has had to endure for a long time. Then again, if it keeps the likes of Billy Kristol off our airwaves, it might almost be worth it.

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.

The Restroom Archipelago

Ben Stein steps up to excoriate the "Stalinist" police tactics that snared one toe-tapping U.S. Senator. Ordinarily you'd just chalk this up to either brainless polemicism or a ham-fisted attempt at irony. I prefer to give Stein the benefit of the doubt and assume he's being refreshingly naïve, instead of charmlessly disingenuous.

Senator Craig has been the innocent victim of a set-up by the evil-minded police of Minneapolis-St. Paul that Stalin would have admired.

Here's the deal: Senator Craig went into a men's room at the Twin Cities airport. He entered a lavatory stall. He tapped his foot. He may or may not have reached his hand down under the lavatory partition to pick up a piece of paper or to make a signal.

That's it. That's the whole thing. There was no sex act of any kind.

So the policeman who happened to be in the next stall walks Senator Craig off, starts bullying him, accusing him of lying and, implicitly, threatens to ruin Senator Craig's career.

ALL FOR A MAN TAPPING HIS FOOT IN A PUBLIC BATHROOM.

This is insane.

If a police officer can wreck a man's career over this trifle, then we might as well not have a Constitution or a Bill of Rights.

Oh my. Yes, let's just call it a day as a constitutional republic because poor ol' Larry Craig got caught cruising an airport bathroom. Especially considering all the Fourth Amendment rights that have been eviscerated or disappeared just from the War on Some Drugs, the fact that the U.K. (and soon enough the U.S.) has built a post-9/11 surveillance society, chock-full of behavior-enforcing cameras and such, this is questionably reductive on Stein's part. All the constitutional abuses we've endured as of late, and this is the last straw?

Let's look at the facts. All reports stemming from this incident have stipulated that the sting operation had been initiated by a string of civilian complaints, and that several dozen men prior to Craig had been busted under similar circumstances in this same restroom. This is neither coincidence, nor an isolated incident, nor an unfair application of behavioral standards.

There was no "he may or may not" ambiguity over whether or not Craig swept his hand across the underside of the stall divider, in an apparently standard usage of [rolls eyes] "tearoom etiquette". The police officer has been similarly clear that there was no "piece of paper" for Craig to attempt to pick up. Any such piece of paper would have to have been Craig's own, unless he is in the habit of picking up stray scraps in public restrooms, and he never did produce nor even describe this mythical swatch. Bottom line -- either Craig's lying or the cop is. Who has more reason to lie here, by several orders of magnitude?

Here is where Stein gets a bit credulous on how and why things happen:

Look, I spend a lot of time in Idaho. These are good people. I can readily see why a Senator from there would quietly plead guilty to a small charge rather than risk a public fight - even though the police seem to have wrecked Craig's career anyway.

What I don't understand is why the GOP is tossing Senator Craig overboard as if he were a terrorist.

Maybe you should ask them, Ben. Seriously. And while you're at it, find out why Diaper Dave Vitter has gotten a complete pass, from his own party, from the media, across the board. I agree that Craig's pillorying for a (even if true) relatively minor offense was swift and merciless. But he pled guilty to it, banking that it would go away.

I think there's a story there too -- the story took three weeks to break after the plea adjudication, which itself was seven weeks after the violation and arrest in the first place. I bet there's a hell of a story behind that, if any of our insipid intrepid media souls wish to dig into it before another shiny object appears over the horizon.

Even if it turns Senator Craig is gay, so what? Barney Frank is gay and he's one of the best members of the Congress. There are lots of fine gay public servants.

Senator Craig has been the victim of a police lynching. A party that believes in individual rights should be rallying to his defense, not making him walk the plank.

I couldn't agree more, and Stein deserves credit for staking his points unequivocally. But again, Ben, why do you think this is? Could it be a natural consequence of a party inextricably tethering itself to small but noisy moralistic claque? And really, haven't Republicans compromised and abdicated the principles of "individual rights" just as readily as any big-gubmint red-diaper-baby dhimmicrat?

Isn't it about paying fealty to the multinational merchant princes that really run the country, about preserving order and hyperconsumerism at whatever cost, so that the modern East India Trading Companies can retain and expand their natural places at the top of the pyramid? Let's face it, without tapping into those limbic "values" sentiments "modern" Republicanism has exploited so well, they'd have a much tougher time bamboozling people into voting against their own rational self-interest.

A party that truly valued the rights and primacy of the individual would not go batshit over ridiculous fambly-valyews head-fakes, or wish to hand "unitary executive" powers over to errant reprobates like Bush and Cheney. And they sure as hell wouldn't have thrown a long-serving loyal party member under the bus in the space of a week, and a vacation week at that. We've all had plenty of fun with Craig, but Stein's right that this precipitous intra-party lynching is not something for Republicans to be proud of, especially given their visible hypocrisy on matters sexual and not.

And if any of that actually makes Stein change his mind about what his party has to offer next year at the ballot box, I'll be astonished.

For the Love of Money

Okay, I get that articles like this, bereft of anything resembling actual news but still needing to talk up the state lottery industries, are basically insouciant fluff. But Americans already wallow in insouciant fluff, and many of us have a very unhealthy attitude about money, including (perhaps especially) large sums of money. Everything is on the margin, and in the case of housing, that's turned into a dangerous proposition that bit a lot of people squarely on the ass, even though it was entirely foreseeable.

It's a very Cribs mentality, actively encouraged by finance-driven industries which have to count on people being ignorant or frivolous with money. A large windfall is for some folks apparently an opportunity to indulge their inner asshole. This is really too bad; having money should simply be an opportunity to not have to worry about money anymore, to find out what you really wanted out of life, unburdened of having to survive paycheck to paycheck. To be the sort of person that came to find you really wanted to be able to buy a $98 million diamond-studded skull, well, you might as well just go the traditional route and swim in booze, drugs, and strippers until the gravy train derails.

Seriously, though, I think most of us reach a certain age of maturity where we stop spanking it to meaningless overtures of bling and flamboyance, and yet are still plied by endless blandishments of jonesmanship and covetousness. It's a natural part of living in an economy that would collapse if everyone lived within their means. Don't get me wrong, if I won the lottery -- of course, I'd have to play first -- I'd have some fun with some of the money, no doubt. But not in this weird, flashy realm of vulgar excess cultivated by a celeb-sniffing me-first pseudoculture.

One of the commenters in the linked article claimed to have won $20 mil or so in the lottery, and wanted to use his winnings to build a race track and buy a hundred Ferraris to race on it. I was six years old once too, but at some point we have to grow the hell up, take a look around ourselves, and understand the opportunities afforded us by such miraculously long shots of luck. I don't buy the "mo' money, mo' problems" axiom either, but I certainly wouldn't mind finding out for myself.

Coming Clean

Senator Wide Stance is out -- of the office, anyway, if not yet the closet. Maybe he's one of those "downlow" guys you hear about who "identify" as "straight", but just happen to enjoy cock. It makes no sense to me, but I guess it's not supposed to. Whatever lies people have to tell themselves to get through life is between them, their beards, and their constituents.

At any rate, Craig's gone. Diaper Dave the Family Guy, whose wife sanctimoniously swore that she was no milquetoast Hillary who would put up with her man's tomcatting....well, he's still in the Senate, and his wife still hasn't worked up the smug, delusional self-respect to leave his hooker-renting ass. Real shocker there.

No doubt there is some hetero/homo hypocrisy at work here; this is, after all, the Party O' Gawwwwd. And we all know how Gawwwwd feels about those people, or at least we know what the sideshow carnies who claim to speak for Him tell us. But it's probably also conveniently pragmatic -- Craig is up for re-election next year in a state with a Republican governor, while Vitter's state currently has a Democratic governor, but by the time Vitter is up for re-election in 2010, that could change, and people will probably have either forgiven or forgotten. And there's clearly not much downside to Vitter riding the storm out; the media never really bothered following up on him or Palfrey, she of the supposedly large and entertaining client list.

It's a seedy business, politics; Craig, whatever his personal problems, was certainly a Republican's Republican, a man to whom it probably never even occurred to obstruct a botched war or shameless upward wealth transfer, certainly not on matters of (ahem) principle. But his lurid weakness, and his ham-fisted way of dealing with what would have been a quickly forgotten misdemeanor for a regular schmo, gave his good friends and colleagues a chance to throw him under the bus.

It's a cage match, baby, and apparently Craig has finally, erm, tapped out.