Ken Mehlman Indicted For Being A Fucking Lowlife

Josh Marshall has the screen capture. Nice to know CNN is so blatant about carrying the RNC's water. What the hell kind of "headline" is that? Is somebody really dumb enough to be distracted from all things Abramoff by such a pathetic effort? Probably, or they wouldn't be doing it. Repeated viewings of Paula Abdul's Karaoke Hour have left Americans irreparably addled, and with dashed expectations.

And the article -- and Jeebus, I use that word verrrry loosely here -- elaborates on the outright lie of the headline:

In an address to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Tennessee scheduled for Friday afternoon, Ken Mehlman will single out party leaders and two potential 2008 presidential candidates - Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry - for criticism on a range of issues, from national security to the economy to judicial nominees.

``Not only can they not settle on an agenda, they can't even agree on a slogan,'' Mehlman's remarks prepared for delivery said. He is expected to offer some suggestions, albeit critical ones.

``If they really want the American people to know what they are going to do, then how about, 'Together, Americans can pay more in taxes,' `` the text said. ``Or, 'Together, we can retreat from the central front in the war on terror.

As opposed to the Republicans' slogans: "Together, we can sell our ports to bin Ladin's butt-boys": "Together, we can wipe our asses with the Constitution"; "Together, we can keep the likes of Ken Mehlman from getting married". Yeah, the adults are in charge, all right.

Whatever. So Clinton and Kerry disagree about some things. Republicans disagree with each other all the time; where Bill Frist enjoys torturing cats in his spare time, Cheney prefers blowing away fattened, flightless, half-domesticated game birds. It's a big tent, folks, and we're just here to check out all the (ass)clowns.

Mehlman's text reflected his intention to argue that Clinton's solution to support U.S. troops in Iraq was higher taxes and poked fun at Kerry for joining in the unsuccessful challenge to Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito's nomination from a conference in Davos, Switzerland.


In the 2004 campaign, presidential nominee Kerry was widely criticized for his comment about voting for $87 billion for U.S. forces and then voting against it. Mehlman will parody that line in his speech.


``They say one thing come election time, but their records show that they mean - and will do - another,'' the text said. ``They were for the Iraq war before they were against it. They were for the Patriot Act, until the far-left came out against it. ... I've bought used cars and I know a bait-and-switch when I see it.''

Yeah, I'll bet you do, Kenny Boy. Your fearless leader's been doing plenty of that all along; were you to take a break from your self-loathing and reflect on what sort of animals you whore for, you might come to your senses. Not that anyone's holding their breath for that.

And really, kudos to CNN for plugging Mehlman's talking points in the "news" section. Usually when a company wants to hustle folks into spending money they don't have on something they don't really want, they have to buy what we in the bidness refer to as an "advertisement". CNN has helpfully run Kenny Boy's "advertisement" in the "news" section, thus saving the RNC a few ducats, which they can then funnel to the Dukestir, so's he can buy cartons of smokes at the prison commissary, and maybe keep his creamy white ass from getting churned into butter.

Out Of Touch

I don't think I've ever watched an Academy Awards show (or as I likes to call it, the gay Super Bowl) all the way through. I came close with Chris Rock, and even closer the other night with Jon Stewart. Naturally, political humor was expected, and the pleasant surprise was that Stewart expended more energy skewering the self-satisfactions of limo libs than the mendacity of the Bushies. For one, just scratching the surface of the latter would take all night; for another, it is the former that needs to be poked into action.

But my favorite single moment of the show (besides the spectacle of the Three-Six Mafia making the vaunted heartland run for their remotes as they remonstrated volubly on the inherent difficulties of pimpology) came pretty early on -- the first award, in fact. I have not yet seen either of George Clooney's entrants, and I imagine the Netflix wait upon their releases just got considerably longer. In fact, I have seen very little of Clooney's work, but the wife seems to think he's all that plus the proverbial bag o' chips.

No, it was Clooney's speech that really hit home. I am not a big believer in the much-ballyhooed transformative power of the cinema, but I suppose many people are, and that's a distinction with some effect. But he is correct -- it was "out of touch" Hollywood that grew the fuck up before Bobo's World, it was Hollywood that has at least tried at times, rather than just giving up altogether.

I have no fucking clue what world these crazy biddies are living in, with their pinched faces, pursed lips, and endlessly clutched pearls. It seems that Walmart has become the paradigm of the heartland value. This is emblematic of their cognitive dissonance; even as they grow more and more xenophobic, more insular, more paranoid, they embrace and hump the leg of a corporate behemoth that could not exist without global interdependence, without trade deals with faraway lands. The sweet deals they get depend entirely on those awful brown furriners they'd never live next to. There is more to engagement than perfunctory nukes-for-mangoes visits to India, in a ham-fisted effort to encircle China.

Places where the demographics skew to old people and young children are, quite frankly, doomed, at least in terms of sustainability. The only way a place like Lebanon, Kansas, continues to exist is at the mercy of predominant land-owning families who run herd over the rest of the inhabitants. Everyone else with any sense has moved at least to Omaha. There's not even a fuckin' movie theater; how many other jobs you think that place has? Twenty bucks says that Walmart is the largest local employer by far for these folks, and again, that just underscores their ignorance as far as Hollywood is concerned.

And that brings me back to Clooney's real, unstated point -- gays, in terms of social opprobrium and legal recourse, are the blacks of the 21st century. They are treated like third-class citizens merely because of who they are, by people who not only don't know any better, but don't even know that they don't know any better. And if the red-staters can't even admit that simple fact to themselves, how do you think they're doing with the idea that information and oil are scarce commodities that are always being actively leveraged against them to get them to vote against their own self-interest?

It ain't George Clooney that's out of touch; he's right on the damned money. It's these shriveled culture vultures that need to grow the hell up and understand that the world changes, whether they want it to or not. The old makes way for the new, constantly, endlessly. Some people choose to chronicle the changes, present them to the public at large for informed discussion; some choose to bitch and moan about movies they never intend to see in the first place.

Useful Idiots

As far as I’m concerned, the “Shorter Perfesser” schtick is owned and operated by Roy Edroso, who regularly performs surgical eviscerations of Instaputz’s perfidious nonsense. Yet via Atrios, we see what passes for Serious Thought for some of the students in the Perfesser’s special-ed class:

I think whats wrong with the President is that he is tired, as we say in the south "slam wore out". Like a good blue tick after hunting, he needs to crawl up under the porch out of the heat and sleep for a good long spell. Look at pictures of him, you can see the graying, the wrinkling, and the fraying take place right before your eyes.

Is this guy fucking serious? Bush has taken far more vacation time than any of his predecessors. And for that matter, look what happens when this guy “crawls up under the porch” for a “good long spell” – Katrina, 9/11. God forbid, but should a nuclear war start someplace, I fully expect it to happen during one of C-Plus Augustus’ five-week brush-clearing benders. Not that he’s terribly engaged when he’s at work, clearly. But Jeebus, you want this guy to take more time off?

The man has had to preside over some momentous events during his 2 terms, from 9/11 to Enron et al to recession to Afghanistan to Iraq to a bitter, long and momentously important election to supreme court appointments.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait just a fuckin’ minute, here, Chief. We’ve all seen the photo of Bush being handed (by Harriet Miers) the famous PDB (again, while on a five-week vacation) fortuitously titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike within the U.S.”, which even proffered the method of crashing a plane into an important building or landmark as a likely possibility. As late as August 31, George Tenet was out at the tumbleweed farm giving him security updates. I’ll give the guy some benefit of the doubt that he didn’t want 9/11 to happen, but there was a pretty clear pattern of lackadaisical approach to the preventive aspects of the job there.

As for the rest of it, tough shit, Hopalong. Enron certainly didn’t happen in a vacuum, and Bush’s disingenuous “Kenny Boy who?” didn’t fool anyone who didn’t want to be fooled. This administration has had zero in the way of an energy policy, even before Cheney felt the urgent need to cover his tracks in that area by going pheasant hunting with Combover Tony. Afghanistan we’ll give him, though that would have resolved much better without illegally diverting $700 million to prepare for Iraq, and Iraq itself is all Bush’s. If he lives to be a doddering 90-year-old, that one should weigh around him like an albatross for all time. That the election and the Supreme Court appointments are important is tautological. Would Mike have cut Kerry any slack for being tired from constant campaigning? Doubtful. But then, the life of the iconodule is never one based in reality.

Every step of the way he has been criticized, demonized, lied about, misrepresented, belittled and opposed. No matter what he has done, he has been trashed out by someone somewhere, often including his own party members and some "supporters". He has been betrayed by members of his own party in the senate. His victories are ignored and his losses magnified a thousand times over.

I wonder why that is. I have no sympathy for people who insist on playing hardball on every single issue, who enforce party discipline at every turn, who operate from a place of spite and intimidation and prevarication, and then whine that the game is rough. Fuck you. You wanted it rough, Junior, you got it.

Funny how Mike just lumps all these manifest sins against Lord God King Junior here, yet never quite gets around to enumerating a single one. Exactly what criticism about Bush has been unjustified, Mike? How has he been misrepresented or unfairly (note the qualifier) belittled? Again, Bush has asked for everything he’s gotten, through his indifference and incompetence, his shameless cronyism and arrogant mal-fee-ance.

As for “victories”, I honestly can’t think of any besides deposing Saddam Hussein. How’s that been workin’ for ya, Mikey?

But what do we do? We start criticizing him again for not being super-human, and we start asking "what’s wrong with the president?", as if we ourselves never get tired, worn-out, run down, and just plain discouraged in our jobs or lives. As a people, have we become this divorced from the realities of high-stakes leadership, and the toll it takes on those who take it on? Worse yet, have we no understanding and empathy for it?
Maybe the real question is, what’s wrong with us?

Fucking moron. Bush knew the stakes when he got in the game. I do tend to agree with Bill Maher when he says that Bush is having to work a lot harder than he thought he’d have to. But that is a by-product of the terribly low bar of achievement Bush has set for himself throughout his life. This is not some bullshit oil company stocked with Daddy’s bootlickers, just waiting for Junior to pop in once a week with a couple of dirty jokes to shake hands and slap backs for a couple hours. This is quite literally a job that holds billions of human beings’ lives in the balance. Every decision Bush and his minions make affects my life, your life, our families’ lives, Mike’s life and his family’s. Now if I get tired and run down (which I am), or Mike gets tired and run down, worst-case scenario is that we might let each of our respective families down. It happens.

And Mike is right in pointing out how much older Bush has gotten in office. I’m sure it is at least in part a response to incessant stress and mounting political troubles, both within and without. So what? That’s the nature of the game, son, and Bush and his henchmen have been instrumental in driving up the stakes. To reiterate the compassion theme from the previous post, I have zero empathy for a guy who is really just reaping the whirlwind he and his friends have sown.

Bush has, has always had, a support system that we proles can only dream about. They got him into prep school, into Yale and Harvard, into the Texas Rangers ownership, into the Texas governor’s mansion, into the White House. And as the stakes rise, the support system grows in direct proportion. So spare us this “one brave soul against the cold, cruel world” soft-soap, Mike. It’s a crock of shit. Bush could have avoided at least half his woes by not being a lazy, corrupt, glad-handing sack of shit. As long as the nation is in this condition, I don’t care if that motherfucker never gets another vacation. Hell, they oughta be working weekends, and not just for Terri Schiavo.

Another reader has more nougaty goodness to share:

You have frequently reminded us that democratization is a 'process, not an event.'

I would add that it's more a bursty process not a continuous one.

Heh. And you thought “truthy” was a fun word to coin. “Bursty”. I gotta remember that one.

We saw a lot of good news in the 1st half of the year from areas of interest to those of us who actively support extending human liberty. This streak lasted roughly from Arafat's death to Condi's visit to Egypt and included the Iraqi elections. Now things have slowed down, at least in terms of large headline grabbing events with protest hotties.

Yeah, for those of you who equate actual liberty with the visual of Lebanese sweater-fruit dangling perkily in protest action, you might be disappointed. You might also take a more serious look at the region, and realize that actual democracy would very likely result in yet more Islamic theocracies. That Beckwith spends more time ruminating about pussy than he does realizing the irony of Egypt’s most recent cynical stab at “democracy” tells you a lot. I mean, I like hot chicks too, but that is largely orthogonal to Freedom™, and the incipient marching thereof.

I would like to think that the president, as is his pattern in September, can alter that environment a bit and regain some public support, but there is only so much he can do with words. Events will matter more and we can expect them to pick up relatively soon. I doubt Bush sleeps too well at night, but if he does it's because he has done what he can up front to maximize the likelihood that the next flurry of activity will break in a good direction for our country and allies.

Your reader's blue tick metaphor is apt. Bush has taken a lot of criticism for the R&R he takes and his 'early to bed' habits, but they are the actions of a leader who understands the that the tempo of events is bursty. We should cut him some slack on this basis.

I don’t get these fuckin’ people, seriously. What other job can you literally fuck up everything you touch, and people would actually rather let you take more paid vacation time, rather than getting your shit together and cleaning up your damned mess? What the flying fuck is wrong with these people? Yes, sorry, guys, I do want a president who puts more time into learning about problematic situations than he puts into brush-clearing and bike-riding. I want a president who can extemporize at some level, at least. It shows capability of thought and process, which in turns informs seriousness of purpose. Memorizing Unca Dick’s flashcards, not so much.

In fact, because the tempo of events is, erm, “bursty”, it is counterproductive to the point of being recklessly negligent to take extended vacations. “Bursty” would seem to require a week here, a week there, not August. What if it gets “bursty” in August, Chief?

Oh, right.

These are sad little people in a sad little world of their own creation, these bedwetters. They are endlessly mobilized, forever ramping up for action against people that they paradoxically trust will be automatically civilized by having Freedom and Democracy forcibly imposed on them. They seriously seem to think that it’s all the media’s fault for making such a big deal out of a needless war, out of thousands dead, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted. They think the media made too big of a deal out of an American city being wiped out, out of 1,500 Americans drowning in their attics while the head of their federal government was fucking around in San Diego.

Doug Feith had nothing on these clowns, when it comes to being the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.

Civil Wars

To repeat the current meme about Iraq being on the very cusp of civil strife is to note that the barn door is open, long after the horse has moseyed up the road. The conflict has been under way for some time, as anyone who looked outside the network media for information would have surmised. Recent examples of this syndrome (not civil war, but our lateness in realizing it) include Rwanda and Bosnia.

We did not take the Rwanda conflict seriously until we started hearing horrendous body counts, which occurred far too rapidly to comprehend, much less respond in a timely fashion. (Still, to our eternal shame, we never even responded at all, much less in time.) Bosnia didn't seem to take shape until the bombing of the Mostar bridge and the Srebrenica massacre, and even then, Serbs and Croats ran riot over hapless UN peacekeepers, their Muslim charges, and even each others' civilians.

So let us dispense with the bullshit pretense that civil war may yet occur in Iraq. For all practical purposes, it has been going on for months. The bombing of the dome was simply a convenient point of singularity people (both here and there) could point to to justify their observations and actions. The ensuing death toll has driven that point home.

But let's say for the sake of argument that we're still one more major event away from an actual civil war, as if such things ever have a formal declaration. What then? Leaving would be irresponsible and morally craven; continuing to stay would be highly counterproductive. Refereeing an endless match of Calvinball was not what the American people had in mind when they signed on to the vision quest of a boy-king who, it turns out, had no vision at all, nor the scruples to admit it once proven wrong, again and again. So this is a tar baby of immense proportions.

I think the first thing we (and by "we", I mean the for-some-reason-still-legitimized corporate media, not actual individuals who had been paying attention all along) need to do is demand accountability from the morons who got us into this. That does not mean an abject apology with crossed fingers; that means that the architects of this mess are either fired outright, or at the very least their errant policies are identified, and modified or halted immediately. This will take some soul-searching by the media, which will be difficult in the absence of said soul. Yet it must be done.

The best you can get out of "legitimate" media is a baffled "But the Democrats don't have a plan either!". This is incorrect -- John Murtha submitted such a plan months ago and was roundly criticized by the gutless cowards that occupy the nation's legislative body. Yet the plan is still there, waiting to be implemented -- or even seriously discussed.

Put it this way -- in the wake of the already-infamous "Katrina video", at long last the themes of competence and credibility from these people has started to wither away even with their own base. Whatever their previous discontents, the reg'lar folk that have hitherto supported this moron have jobs, lives, homes, families, and businesses that they must attend to, day after day after day. They are starting to realize the tragic incompetence of these people in a very visceral way -- if they worked with someone as arrogant and stupid as George W. Bush, they'd do everything possible to get his ass fired, period. Because his lack of....well, of everything -- intellect, curiosity, comprehension, and yet again, competence -- are major traits that are incredibly undesirable in a co-worker, an employee, a spouse. It is no longer mere snark to point out the endless boobery of this man, it is critical to the ability of the business called the United States of America to right itself and be productive and happy once again.

So once the acknowledgement of incompetence has been made, everything else is mere formality. It is no longer enough to whinge about what the Democrats may or may not be capable of accomplishing. They have been remarkably inept at taking what fate has dropped into their collective laps, but that hasn't quelled the inexorable discontent with all things Bush. People have, as they say, Had Enough of this chump and his money-grubbing friends. That is unlikely to change over the next eight months. Even the Democrats will be able to do something with it, provided they can rid themselves of the likes of Joe Lieberman, who may as well just switch parties and have done with it at this point.

But the point is, the video sealed the deal on Bush, if the Dubai ports scheme hadn't quite done the job. It proves pretty comprehensively that not only is Bush incompetent, but that he's indifferent to the suffering of his people -- never forget that after the storm hit, he still went to Arizona to play grab-ass with John McCain on McCain's birthday, then proceeded on to San Diego to trot out his tiresome Iraq/WW2 analogies and pretend to play his git-tar, and then spend another night at the tumbleweed farm on his way back to DC, where he should have had his ass three days earlier. And he's a fucking liar; we can all see him in the video, being explicitly warned about the impending danger to the levees, and compare that to his notorious claim to Diane Sawyer just a few days later that "nobody could have anticipated" the breach of New Orleans' levees. As we keep saying, who ya gonna believe, him or your own lyin' eyes?

But even as all this goes down, other distractions are being set up. Mississippi is pushing abortion legislation that matches South Dakota's little stunt. (And let me just say for the record, if Florida is America's Wang, then Mississippi is its taint.) Several other states will probably follow suit. Because this is the most important thing on America's plate right now, isn't it, whether or not teenage girls who have been raped by family members can get their incest demon spawn out of them without having to inform said family rapist. Nope, nothing more pressing for us than to keep wanton hussies in their place.

It is something of a cliché at this point to say that issues like that one are emblematic of an American "culture war" in play. But make no mistake -- it is a civil war in the making as well. Issues like abortion and gay marriage have been used for so long to get the fringes' backs up that they are locked in position at this point, and there's no backing down. Now, because we are fortunate enough at the moment to still have the trappings civil society -- elections, institutions, and so forth -- any violence thus far has been mostly marginalized. Sometimes there's a spate of church burnings; sometimes an eco-terrorist group will torch a subdivision of McMansions or a Hummer dealership. Aside from Tim McVeigh, domestic terrorism has not been a huge cause for alarm. It tends to bypass personal harm for property destruction, much to the chagrin of Ann Coulter. (I keed, I keed.)

But a lot of that has to do with how well we've become conditioned to our fate. We are kept busy and distracted. On the one hand, I'm somewhat surprised that there aren't massive weekly protests outside the White House, but on the other hand, every time I see a protest on TV, the first thing I wonder is how these folks found the time and opportunity to get off the hamster wheel. Most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck these days, and taking a day off to yell and march en masse is not a cheap proposition.

Still, let us stipulate for the record that the last three American elections were at the very least tainted. 2000 was portrayed as the deciding of a coin toss when the coin has landed on its edge, but that's glib. You give back the vote to just 10% of the Floridians who were "erroneously" disenfranchised by ChoicePoint as felons, and the discussion is moot -- Gore would have won. 2002 was the first year that electronic voting machines were used in many precincts, and the results were predictably odd. 2004 was the big one, though -- the electronic machines were everywhere, and reports of their "malfunctions" were widespread -- not counting votes, counting them wrong, tallying more votes than there were eligible voters in the damned precinct. By sheer coincidence, I'm sure, every single one of these reported "problems" accrued to Bush. And by sheer coincidence, the CEO of the company that made the machines and controlled the proprietary code to the software had promised in writing to "deliver Ohio for Bush".

As Jeff Wells pointed out at the time, we were so quick to point the finger at the obvious corruption and manipulation of the Ukrainian elections, yet completely ignored the exact same reports happening in our own voting precincts. Voter intimidation, illegal registration-dumping, call dumping to throw opposition phone banks (for which a GOP operative has been convicted; the Republicans spent some $2 mil in James Tobin's defense), and a clear pattern of serendipitous machine "malfunctions". Machines which, strangely, have no paper trail. You get a receipt in about two seconds every time you go to an ATM or an automated gas pump. Yet you couldn't get one from a Diebold machine. Why is that?

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

So here's the deal -- the machinery to steal elections (close ones, at least) is now in place and has been tested. And it works. There have simply been too many credible reports to completely ignore their validity. Now, let us assume, because it is reasonable to do so based on past behavior, that no matter what the polls say in November, they'll try it again, throw a Senate or Congressional race here or there to keep their lock on both houses of Congress. Because if the Democrats control both houses (or even one) after the midterms, impeachment is going to be the word for 2007, and their little money train is going to come to a screeching halt. And we will not be fooled by the media bleats of "impeachment fatigue", that because it was wrong to impeach Clinton, it's wrong to impeach Bush. Anyone floating such an argument should immediately be branded as intellectual cowards, and be drummed out of the business.

So let's say they find a way, in the face of all these polls, in the face of all this evidence that these people are corrupt, incompetent, indifferent, and unworthy of any public office, to squeak out a victory in the midterms. Two things are possible here -- either they stole yet another election, or they didn't. Either scenario faces us with stark choices, if we care about the direction of the country.

If the election was stolen, and there is evidence, then either there is accountability or there isn't. Either outcome will make someone unhappy, but if there is evidence and no accountability at all, then discontent continues to breed in the populace, as it is currently doing. How it will manifest itself, I'm not even going to speculate, but here you have the preconditions for strife along some sort of line. Instead of Sunni vs. Shia, perhaps you have red state/blue state, urban/rural, religious/secular. Bottom line -- either people give enough of a shit to start marching on Washington on a daily basis at that point, or we continue to sink in our quicksand of apathy. Neither situation bodes well for the civil polity; this administration has already shown a jones for secrecy and aggressive surveillance of dissidents, and its most passionate supporters also seem to be the most prone to doing something stupid and/or violent. They have been advocating violence (jokingly, of course, hardy-har-har) for years.

And if this gang actually wound up winning the midterms on the up-and-up, well, what does that say to you about your fella 'merkin? Really, at this point, there is no reason to continue supporting Bush or Cheney or anyone who advocates their tactics, except sheer spite and contempt. When that spite and contempt manifests itself in voting quite clearly against all manner of reason, logic, common sense, and the well-being of the nation, that is (to borrow one of their more shopworn tropes) objectively anti-American. It is putting partisan nonsense ahead of one's country. And I think the sheer level of contempt and disgust erupting on our side would be galvanized in such an instance. I literally could no longer take seriously anyone who could continue to advocate a single Bush policy. These people have botched everything they've touched -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Medicare, Social Security, Katrina, the trade deficit, the budget deficit. (Maybe, as Bill Maher pointed out, we're just in the midst of "fuck-up fatigue". Stranger things have happened.)

Shit, Bush just spent the weekend trading our nuclear expertise to India for a sack of magic beans. What kind of fucking moron thinks this is serious policy? There is more than one way to encircle China, and at the very least we should be able to negotiate like we've got some sort of upper hand in this. Nope. He snuck his way through South Asia, because we're utterly loathed there now, and signed off on something that gets us bupkis. That's not horse tradin', that's horse givin'.

The real American civil war, the one most likely to eventually erupt in some sort of violent response(s), is not one of the arbitrary dichotomies stated above. Artificial distractions such as abortion and gay marriage are really just hortatory rhetoric used to fleece the faithful come fundraisin' time. No, I see the real battle as being between Bush's beloved "have-mores" and the have-nots. After all, in a pyramidally-distributed economy, push inexorably comes to shove. Along comes a "they got the guns but we got the numbers moment", and the Paris Hilton claque has to run for their ski chalets.

I make no dire Nostradamus-like predictions. I am merely saying that something along this line very well could happen; it would not surprise me. (If you've read this far, it would probably not surprise you either.) Predictions don't often work out, even when the results are more or less accurate; some sort of galvanizing event takes place in the meantime that no one could have anticipated. People knew that Europe and the Ottoman Empire would eventually butt heads in a Great War, but nobody could have foreseen that it would been set off by a Serbian anarchist assassinating a relatively modest potentate.

Still, I submit that all the preconditions are here now, waiting for that spark. And despite my tone, despite my festering contempt for the Bushes and their lackeys and the parasites that keep them in power, I hope to hell it never gets that far. And it may not -- we seem to have a limitless capacity for dulling our senses and losing track of the narrative. That's why the Republicans have been so effective with visceral sound barks, and the Democrats lose with their vaunted reason and logic. The dumbassification of America, as Chuck D so thoughtfully put it, continues apace, as we all continue to ratchet down our expectations of ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our so-called leaders, and repeat the plaintive meme of "What will it take?".

I have no idea what it will take anymore; I give up asking. Cheney shot a man in the face while drunk and tried to cover it up, Bush is so adamant about handing the ports over to the UAE that he threatened to veto for the first time, and we saw a video that proves conclusively that everything we've said about this chump is absolutely true. All in the last three weeks. And there have been no consequences, none whatsoever.

The final civil war is perhaps the most pernicious one -- the one we all fight within ourselves, trying to keep our better angels in charge of things as we go about our business and take in what the world has to offer (or bludgeon us with). Jon Carroll has an eloquent take on it, though I still have some issues with it:

It's not easy to love our enemies. If it were easy, everyone would do it. It is not easy to love George Bush, and yet that is the mandate. If I just had to love fuzzy bunnies and Aretha Franklin, I could do that and still have time for a late lunch. But the mandate did not stop with the presidential election. The mandate did not stop with the invasion of Iraq. I must honor the divine spirit within Dick Cheney, or I am a fraud. Maybe not a fraud: I am, at any rate, not following the handbook.

I understand and appreciate where Carroll is coming from. I think American political discourse has been very seriously damaged by the road-rage mentality of the past ten or so years. The debate has been devalued, and many otherwise engaged voters have been permanently tuned out from sheer disgust with the whole thing. It becomes a vicious cycle after that, with the rage and ignorance of the remaining screamers just fueling the paradigm.

But at the risk of being somewhat hypocritical on this, I do believe that there is some qualitative analysis to be divined here. It is no longer sufficient to merely opine that love is the answer. Turning the other cheek just gets that one smacked as well. It would be bad enough to take shit from someone who actually had the upper hand in thought and principle, not just tactics. But to take it from the likes of Bush and Cheney and Rove -- sorry, no fuckin' way.

I show compassion for both suicide bombers and for the victims of suicide bombers. I show compassion for both the conquered and the conquerors. If I am just going to show compassion for the good people, I might as well get out of the compassion game altogether. The good people have plenty of compassion already; it's the bad people who need it.

Yeah, but it's also the bad people who have no use for it. Thus compassion gets just as devalued as the political discourse was in the first place. I have no compassion available for the scumbag who straps himself with Semtex and ball bearings and sets himself off in a crowd of children clamoring for candy. It doesn't make me want to annihilate all Muslims, as it does to some folks, but I just don't have the time or inclination to wonder where this asshole's life took such a turn for the worse that he felt like that was his last best hope of political expression. Nor do I wish to be a part of what is inciting him to do such a thing, but at some point you have to realize that such a person is by definition irrational, and that responding rationally to an irrational person is largely a fool's errand.

Look, it's 1930. Mahatma Gandhi felt about the British occupation of his nation the way you feel about, say, Dick Cheney's occupation of your head. He was uncertain what to do, so he did nothing. (That's in the handbook, too.) He searched for a peaceful and dramatic way to disconcert and dispirit the British oppressors. He found an issue: the salt tax. He organized a 250-mile march to the sea, collecting followers as he went. When he got there, he took some salty mud from the tidal flats, boiled it in water and made salt -- illegally. Untaxable salt. Everyone began doing it. It was smart, it was peaceful, it was compassionate, it was kind. And it worked.

But it's not the same, is it? There is so much forcing us into hatred; there is so much to have contempt for. (Just because something is contemptible doesn't mean you need to practice contempt -- just a thought.) All Gandhi had was the British Empire, whereas we have -- what, the Patriot Act? We're such whiners.

The thing is that Gandhi used what was available to him, which was nothing. An ascetic, having obviously renounced all possessions as well as violence, has only such a tactic at his disposal. Gandhi had the opportunity to teach people how to do an end-run around the British that they just weren't prepared for -- but then, the British didn't have the Total Information Awareness network working for them, didn't have the NSA data-mining everyone's phone calls and e-mails.

There is something to be said for the subtlety and grace of passive resistance, but the problem is that the dynamic is too easily steamrolled by the cynicism of the body politic and the 24-hour news cycle. Cindy Sheehan's crusade out in front of the tumbleweed farm started out doing exactly what it was intended to do, which was hold Bush accountable for endangering mothers' sons in a needless, heedless war. Look how easily the message got muddled. Suddenly everyone who had an axe to grind showed up to pimp their cause, and Sheehan was last seen posing as a useful idiot for Hugo Chavez. This does not mean that she doesn't mean well, or that she's not right, but that the dynamic makes it way too easy for the message to get diluted. Gandhi was the original "they got the guns but we got the numbers" guy, obviously, but it was a different time.

I honestly don't know how the hell anyone could maintain a truly focused, effective passive resistance campaign anymore. Americans are too easily bored; Sheehan could tap-dance nekkid on the National Mall tomorrow morning and get little more than a ho-hum at this point. She got arrested at the State of the Union speech for wearing the wrong T-shirt, and it was forgotten by that weekend. The fact that Americans are more familiar with American Idol than their own fucking Constitution and their inalienable rights (or even what "inalienable" means) tells you what that gets you.

Nope. "Love is the answer" sounds nice; it is, as the saying goes, a wish the heart makes. And that is our eternal, internal civil war -- the heart versus the mind, as had been discoursed in so many trite songs. But it's trite becuase it's true. The thing is, love can only be the answer when it's properly applied. Merely love-bombing your enemy, in this climate, gets you nothing but scorn and derision. Maybe it gets you picked up by the cops and thrown into Cook County lockup, where you're subsequently rolled up into a rug and served as an hors d'oeuvre for a prison gang. (That was probably a bit needlessly lurid, but you get the idea.) The point is, love is nice, but it is not in and of itself a solution. It needs targeted application, at the very least. Telling Dick Cheney I love him and honor his eternal spirit, not so much. One might as well piss on one's own leg and suggest that it is raining.

Conversely, the notion that anger can never be a solution is also glib and fatuous. I believe that the proper application of anger, in the proper degree and at the proper time, can be quite effective in accomplishing one's needs. Sometimes people just don't fucking get it, are willfully obtuse, and nothing short of a (verbal) pimp-slap will get their attention. Everyone has been in such a situation at some time in life. The degree in magnitude with world politics does not negate the basic principle.

Does this mean we should always be angry, that we should always scream our thoughts at our opponents? No and no. I think the anger can and should be leavened with humor; I think people respond better to scorn and opprobrium than to rage and fear and the threat of force. I realize that anger can be and often is counterproductive; I submit that in such cases, it is primarily a matter of misdirected energy, of poor application in terms of degree and method. Anger's about the only thing they can't take away from us. We just have to remember that temper is a valuable possession, and as such, we don't want to lose it if we can help it. But love-bombing? Sorry. Na ga da.

We are retreating into despair; we are retreating into cynicism. Despair makes us crazy and cynicism makes us stupid. There's a way out, but it's not pleasant. It means giving up the hollow humor of the defeated, the easy justifications of they-all-do-it-so-why-bother. It's not time to move on, it's time to stay right here.

And at the end of Carroll's bien pensant missive here, that I can solidly agree with. I think it's a fight worth fighting, and I see that there are good people fighting it. It's a war of words, and we have most of the quality wordsmiths on our side here. Unlike the Doughy Pantload and his ilk, we do it largely uncompensated, because we care about what's been done to the country over the past five years, and what more these people have planned for us all. Unlike the think-tank babies and the sinecured weasels, we are not in it to abuse the English language, to molest it and rape it, impregnate it with foul thoughts and vile deeds, and then force it to carry the debased seed to term. That's really what that crowd has done here -- lawn-darted a country and affronted its citizens with their serial abuse of the language, of facts, of history, of intellectual probity. Words mean what they wish them to mean in a given situation, neither more nor less than that.

Anger is what keeps us in the fight, and anger is what will assure accountability. The difference is that the smart, angry people on our side are informed and impassioned, while the leading lights of the movementarians wallow in their nihilist fantasies, gleefully calling for murder, assassination, war, scorched-earth campaigns of every stripe. I hate to sound like I have my rubber-glue shields up, but there really is a qualitative difference in the level and application of anger on the two discrete sides, and if Carroll is right about rage and hostility being ultimately self-defeating, they'll be the first to implode by a long shot. Indeed, they are imploding right now; the challenge is for us to step in with our informed anger, and construct a reasoned, yet impassioned response.

You Can't Handle The Truthiness

One episode that has stuck in my craw for quite some time is the death of Pat Tillman. You may recall Tillman as the hard-hitting NFL safety who walked away from a huge contract extension to join the Army Rangers in Afghanistan. Tillman was killed by friendly fire during an ambush, but the details of his death were covered for some time; indeed, his funeral was yet another cynical opportunity for the armchair warriors to exult in their overall cause, including Iraq. After a year of covering it up, the details of the accidental killing were finally released. And now the Army is launching a criminal investigation into the incident.

The Department of Defense inspector general has asked the Army to open a criminal investigation into the death of Army Cpl. Pat Tillman, the football star turned soldier who was killed in Afghanistan by his fellow Rangers nearly two years ago.

The request, which came out of the inspector general's review of four previous investigations of the April 22, 2004, shooting, will likely lead investigators from the Army Criminal Investigation Command to return to Afghanistan and conduct a monthslong investigation into whether Tillman's death may have been a homicide, the result of criminal negligence or an accident, said an Army official who asked to remain anonymous.

Everything I have read about the incident seems to indicate that it really was an accident. Friendly fire is unfortunately not at all uncommon in war, obviously. The real crime here was the cover-up, which included destroying Tillman's body armor and equipment immediately after his death, thus obviously hampering any investigation into the details surrounding the incident.

As with so many other things, if there was truly no wrongdoing, then why all the effort to cover it up?

Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, told The Chronicle on Saturday that while he was gratified by the inspector general's recommendation, he was concerned about the Army "investigating itself" and said he may recommend a congressional inquiry into Tillman's death and a possible cover-up by the military.

Well, good for Honda, but you can't help but wonder just how many other Pat Tillmans are out there, who will never get a fair shake on how they died. But this is a start, so you can't knock that.

"The first investigative officer indicated two years ago there should have been a criminal investigation, and the Army took his investigative report and sent it up to the regiment level in what he thought was an attempt to find the truth, but which appears to have been an attempt to cover up the truth," Tillman's mother, Mary, said Saturday.

"The whole family has been trying to say there is something wrong here -- it's been there from the beginning, and we've had to go through this horrible process for almost two years. The Army used him. They knew right away he was killed by fratricide and used him for their own purposes to promote the war, to get sympathy for the war, for five weeks."

She's right, and that's what was most galling about all this. They knew what had happened, and still used TIllman's funeral as just another pep rally for themselves. Truly shameful.

Military officials originally said Tillman was killed when his unit came under enemy fire in Afghanistan, a statement repeated a week after his death in a Special Operations Command press release announcing his posthumous Silver Star medal.

"Through the firing, Tillman's voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces emplaced on the dominating high ground," the release said. "Leading his Rangers without regard for his own safety, Tillman was shot and killed while focusing his efforts on the elimination of the enemy forces and the protection of his team members."

It wasn't until the end of May, weeks after a May 5 memorial service in San Jose, that the U.S. Central Command announced Tillman died "as a probable result of friendly fire while his unit was engaged in combat with enemy forces."

In fact, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle, the first investigator had delivered a report on May 4, 2004, concluding that soldiers involved in the incident had committed "gross negligence" and should be appropriately disciplined.

I don't what practical result will come of all this, if it will bring other wrongful deaths that had been glossed over out into the light, or if it will simply provide some closure for the Tillmans. I do know that the Army did wrong by Pat Tillman, and that's reason enough to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

Religious Tolerance

The widow of a National Guardsman who was killed in Afghanistan last September has had to deal with the VA's ongoing refusal to inscribe a Wiccan pentacle on his headstone.

....National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart's Northern Nevada Veterans' Memorial Cemetery memorial is blank. Stewart died in Afghanistan in September when his Chinook helicopter was shot down. He was a member of the Wiccan religion, which is not recognized by the Department of Veterans Affairs for use in veterans' cemeteries. Consequently, his widow's request that a pentacle, the symbol of Wicca, be placed on his memorial, was denied.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and its National Cemetery Administration prohibit graphics on government-furnished headstones that have not been approved as "emblems of belief."

So they're happy to use his godless pagan ass in war, but he's not good enough to have his faith respected this little bit? Mind you, in terms of approach to rational thought and empiricism, I have about as much use for Wiccans as I have for Opus Dei or what have you. But a Wiccan has never knocked on my door and tried to recruit me, nor have they insisted on some divine right to indoctrinate everyone's children with their brand of mumbo-jumbo. So in terms of live and let live, I'm pretty fuckin' okey-doke with 'em, especially in comparison to the rest of the lot.

Maybe that's why they don't get as much respect -- it hasn't yet occurred to Wiccans that most Americans just pretend to have faith, and just go through the motions, while what is really expected out of the faithful is political activism. Perhaps Wiccans should organize better and find a few congresspersons to rent. That's the way it's done in Jeebusland.

On the good foot, it seems that Sgt. Stewart will eventually get the inscription. His battalion commander and even his congressman are trying to help:

The battalion commander in charge of the Nevada National Guard unit that lost Sgt. Patrick Stewart in Afghanistan in September said Thursday that he believes the Department of Veterans Affairs will act favorably on a request to allow a Wiccan religious symbol to be used for Stewart's memorial at the Fernley veterans cemetery.

Wonder what Marion Robertson and the rest of the screamers will do when they find out that the congressman, Jim Gibbons, is a Republican. Apparently Rep. Gibbons didn't get the memo. Good on him, but it would have been nice if Mrs. Stewart didn't have to deal with this for six months running. They should have just done it; if they had wanted a dog inscribed on the thing it would have been done right away. There is just an inherent hypersensitivity in the bureaucratic infrastructure over anything that might ruffle the Christofascists' wittle feathers.

Perhaps the mouthbreathers in the great state of Missouri can bring Rep. Gibbons and any other free-thinkers up to speed:

Missouri legislators in Jefferson City considered a bill that would name Christianity the state's official "majority" religion.

House Concurrent Resolution 13 has is pending in the state legislature.

....

The resolution would recognize "a Christian god," and it would not protect minority religions, but "protect the majority's right to express their religious beliefs.

The resolution also recognizes that, "a greater power exists," and only Christianity receives what the resolution calls, "justified recognition."

State representative David Sater of Cassville in southwestern Missouri sponsored the resolution, but he has refused to talk about it on camera or over the phone.

How do ya like them apples? More on this later this weekend, but suffice to say that this is but one in what looks to be a lengthy series of shots across the bow.

Deposit In The Spank Bank

In the world of fluff news, It Girl Jessica Alba is miffed at being on the cover of this month's Playboy, especially since, you know, she's not posing in it or anything.

Let's begin by saying Jessica Alba is a little pissed off at Playboy Magazine. In their March issue, Playboy issued an article titled "25 Sexiest Celebrities." Well, anytime the word 'sexy' pops into play there is a good chance you will see Alba's name among the list. Though Alba would normally appreciate the gesture, Playboy went one step further by placing a promotional image from Alba's last film, Into the Blue, right on the front cover.

Though we haven't received any confirmation, it is also said that the image of Alba also has the bunny logo superimposed onto her bathing suit.

It turns out that Alba herself had no idea her image was going to be used and is now ready to go to court against Playboy in order to have the latest issue pulled off of newsstands.

It goes without saying that in this era, Playboy practically has to resort to such cheap marketing tactics. The internets, with their numberless gigabytes of free porn, have rendered skin mags practically obsolete. Even a complete moron can go on LimeWire or whatever, download the real deal, and have hours of monkey-spanking adventure in a matter of minutes. So-called "laddie" mags such as Maxim and Stuff, with their oh-so-close pictorials of this week's starlet shoving her muff in your face (like you mind, pal), co-opt the youth market, who weren't exactly going to show up for the next short fiction piece from T. Coraghessan Boyle in Playboy in the first place.

So Playboy, while still an American institution, is sort of caught in a niche these days. I always liked that they never went down the skankier roads of Penthouse or (gack) Hustler. The latter magazine in particular didn't even put up the pretense of class, with its endless parade of spread pudenda and sullen faces. What I'm saying is that at least Playboy tried, and as off-putting as some of Hef's bathrobe extravaganzas and bimbo collections may be, at least he was never a creepy cum-soaked goon like Bob Guccione or Larry Flynt.

Having said all that, this thing with Alba is still a cheap stunt, especially if she's not getting a piece of the action. If you're going to use her ass to push paper, at least share a little of the proceeds. That's how showbiz is supposed to work.

And, you know, maybe Jessica Alba might keep it all in perspective as well, and remember that no one's waiting to see her in the next indie character study. I'm not saying that she can't or can act; I'm saying that her fans don't give a shit. They just want to see her in a bikini. So spare us the innocent Amish girl story.

Another One Bites The Derb

Via Wolcott, apparently yet another cornerstone in the House of Conservamative Thinkamology has decided to engage in rank apostasy agin' the cause of Freedom™:

"The question is not 'are we willing to do whatever it takes to win?' The question is: WITHIN THE PARAMETERS OF WHAT WE ARE WILLING TO DO, can we win? My answer, based on my best judgment as to what the American people are willing to contemplate doing, and such knowledge as I have of Iraq, and of human affairs in general, is: No, we can't."

That's the nut of it right there, what ought to encourage the mass conservatard embarcation of the proverbial bandwagon. Yes, it leaves Dear Leader in the lurch, but only the looniest and most fundamentally dishonest among them can say at this late point that it is not a lurch of his own construction.

Only an out-and-out sociopath can look at the past week's bloodbath and not cringe; only an outright lunatic could still want to move onward to Teheran -- or even Damascus, for that matter. And once that conclusion is inevitably reached, the walk back from the argument is also fraught with intellectual peril for the pseudo-intellectuals of that lot. How to leave with some semblance of honor intact, and not leave Iraq to a further decade of damnable chaos and death? How to pay for all this, and still let poor Paris Hilton keep all her hard-earned pelf? How indeed to retain what is left of our national honor and prestige, without further wallowing in millenarian nonsense?

These are all Serious Questions for the self-styled Serious Thinkamators in the NRO crowd, who are always the first to jump forth on matters of the National Soul. Perhaps the Doughy Pantload can find an analogous Simpsons riff to wax moronic about. I believe Bart sold his soul in one episode for a mere five bucks. Ours was a bit more costly.

Oh, it was so much easier for Victor Davis Hanson when he had only us weenies, traitors, appeasers, naive dupes, George Clooney fans, and gibbering Bush Derangement outpatients to deride and cast beneath the dust of his Humvee chariot. But now even the coalition of the willing at NRO (his home team!) is being rocked by the loss of high-profile defectors, forcing Cliff May to treble the sunshine he blows out of his ass to meet production quotas. Hanson may yet wind up at Pajamas Media, where delusions die hard.

Heh-indeedy. Cue the theme music, perhaps the Pink Floyd chestnut The Fletcher Memorial Home.

Schmecurity

Apparently the Bushies have cribbed their port security plan from their Social Security plan.

A United Arab Emirates government-owned company is poised to take over port terminal operations in 21 American ports, far more than the six widely reported.

The Bush administration has approved the takeover of British-owned Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to DP World, a deal set to go forward March 2 unless Congress intervenes.

P&O is the parent company of P&O Ports North America, which leases terminals for the import and export and loading and unloading and security of cargo in 21 ports, 11 on the East Coast, ranging from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Miss., to Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the company's Web site.

How the holy hell did six become 21 is what I'd like to know. "Oh, by the way, those six you've been talking about all week long? Here's another fifteen we forgot about. Our bad."

And hey, I wonder just how the good folks in Gulfport and Corpus Christi feel about their boy now? Can't say you weren't warned.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R- Va., said he will request from both the U.S. attorney general and the Senate committee's legal counsel a finding on the administration's interpretation of the 1992 amendment.

Adding to the controversy is the fact Congress was not notified of the deal. Kimmitt said Congress is periodically updated on completed CFIUS decisions, but is proscribed from initiating contact with Congress about pending deals. It may respond to congressional inquiries on those cases only.

Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley stated in a letter to Bush on Feb. 21 that he specifically requested to be kept abreast of foreign investments that may have national security implications. He made the request in the wake of a controversial Chinese proposal to purchase an oil company last year.

"Obviously, my request fell on deaf ears. I am disappointed that I was neither briefed nor informed of this sale prior to its approval. Instead, I read about it in the media," he wrote.

Awww. Poor Chuck Grassley is feeling a bit unloved. Maybe he should take it up with Bill Frist, who just pulled a serious 180º on the ports issue from his earlier principled critiques.

This is the part in the ventriloquist act when the dummy pretends he's not really a dummy. Good luck with that one, girls. Make sure to explain it to your constituents; I'm sure they'll appreciate the heads-up.

Central to the debate is the fact that the United Arab Emirates, while a key ally of the United States in the Middle East, has had troubling ties to terrorist networks, according to the Sept. 11 Commission report. It was one of the few countries in the world that recognized the al-Qaida-friendly Taliban government in Afghanistan; al-Qaida funneled millions of dollars through the U.A.E. financial sector; and A.Q. Khan, the notorious Pakistani nuclear technology smuggler, used warehouses near the Dubai port as a key transit point for many of his shipments.

Since the terrorist attacks, it has cut ties with the Taliban, frozen just over $1 million in alleged terrorist funding, and given the United States key military basing and over-flight rights. At any given time, there are 77,000 U.S. service members on leave in the United Arab Emirates, according to the Pentagon.

Well, shit, then I suggest we endorse Bill Maher's idea and outsource Secret Service protection to them while we're at it. Not such a hot idea now, Harvard?

[via Americablog]

A Stern Line In The Avocado Dip

Wolcott uncorks that brilliant jab at conservabot über-tool Billy Kristol, who offered his sage assessment on Faux News that we have simply not been "serious" in our prosecution of the Iraq War. Untrue, Billy. That's the whole problem -- this was the best your gang could do. Every single policy measure or emergency response they've mustered since, from Medicare to Katrina, has only confirmed it. They're incompetent chumps who have cluttered the decision-making process -- that damned Beltway bureaucracy they so loudly declaim -- with their hand-picked idiot cronies. They fired everybody who had a clue and dared to speak up with the truth, and replaced them with yes-men.

The Times offers up some standard-issue speculation as to what an Iraq civil war might entail, as if weren't already under way. One section reminded me of something I've been remiss in reiterating:

Some experts have advocated a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three main sectors for the main ethnic and religious groupings. But a violent crackup could not easily be kept stable.

It might well incite sectarian conflicts in neighboring countries and, even worse, draw these countries into taking sides in Iraq itself. Iran would side with the Shiites. It is already allied with the biggest Shiite militias, some of whose members seemed to be involved in the retaliatory attacks on Sunnis after the Shiite shrine bombing last week.

And Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait would feel a need to defend Sunnis or perhaps to create buffer states for themselves along Iraq's borders. Turkey might also feel compelled to move in, to protect Iraq's Turkoman minority against a Kurdish state in the north.

If Iraq were to sink deeper into that kind of conflict, Baghdad and other cities could become caldrons of ethnic cleansing, bringing revenge violence from one region to another. Shiite populations in Lebanon, Kuwait and especially Saudi Arabia, where Shiites happen to live in the oil-rich eastern sector, could easily revolt. Such a regional conflict could take years to exhaust itself, and could force the redrawing of boundaries that themselves are less than 100 years old.

"A civil war in Iraq would be a kind of earthquake affecting the whole Middle East," said Terje Roed-Larsen, the special United Nations envoy for Lebanon and previously for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It would deepen existing cleavages and create new cleavages in a part of the world that is already extremely fragile and extremely dangerous. I'm not predicting this will happen, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario."

Regional destabilization was one of the primary arguments against invasion from the outset, during that innocent summer of 2002 when we were all just debating the idea academically. And time and time again, I recall that one of the most frequent responses from the hardcore advocates of invasion, in the jargon of the technocrat, was that destabilization would not be a flaw, but a feature. Indeed, it was a cornerstone of the PNAC agenda. And it was easy to see where they were coming from, in abstract principle -- we were looking at a bunch of dictatorships run by inbred clans, keeping a lid on fundamentalist fanatics. Something had to give in the wake of 9/11. So far, so good.

But the holy mission to motivate fanatics to unfuck themselves hit a snag -- it assumed for some reason that they couldn't possibly be more fanatical, or become organized in their fanaticism, or recruit ever more fanatics -- or hell, just retaliate out of nationalist sentiment. The premise was apparently that they would just be so instantly wowed by our winsome combination of massively superior firepower and moral clarity that they'd instantly surrender.

How's that been workin' for ya? Conservatives are now in disarray, as they try to decide amongst themselves whether we just haven't tried hard enough up to now (Kristol) or if we just need to learn when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em (Buckley, O'Reilly, George Fwill). And their figurehead has proven, even as he makes the rounds with the same speech he had in '02, that he was never up to the rigors of the job at hand, with or without starting a war.

Would that this lesson not have come at such an impossible cost in blood and treasure, but the movementarians are now inexorably sliding toward a chaos of thought, a collapsing of the Borg, if you will (and you might). It's about to get even more interesting, and not in a particularly good way.

Getting Their Story Straight

Like the proverbial ant farm that has been dropped and dashed to bits on the ground, cursing its inhabitants with sweet, sweet freedom, the minions at the Corner of J-Pod Cul de Sac and Doughy Pantload Boulevard begin walking back their senior conservatives' newfound heresy on the Iraq War. Enter Serious Thinker Ramesh Ponnuru:

William F. Buckley Jr. has been skeptical about the Iraq venture for some time. Two years ago he said that if he had known before the war that Saddam Hussein had no WMD, he would have opposed the war. The mosque bombing appears to have been the final straw for him.

At least Buckley, gin-soaked poltroon that he is, has a final straw. But note Ponnuru's dismissive tone here: "Oh yeah, Bill says he would have opposed the war if he had known beforehand that Saddam had no WMD." Well, no shit, Sherlock. Everyone would have opposed it at that circumstance. That was the fucking selling point, no matter what ex post facto reasoning of convenience the Kool-Aid Brigade would like to pull out of their asses.

But implicit in this is that Buckley was some sort of conservative outlier, some sort of heterodox maverick, in a circus tent where each clown is so damned sure that he's the one driving the overstuffed Volkswagen. Not gonna fly, Ramesh. Buckley is number one Superfly O.G. conservative gangsta, ya heard? This whole "Bill doesn't speak for the rest of us shit" is dead right out of the gate. Just because Buckley has chosen to mix copious amounts of Bombay Sapphire into his Kool-Aid doesn't mean y'all haven't been drinking out of the same trough for the past three years. Now it's "Bill who?".

This is a refinement and extension of Bill's position in response to new circumstances. It's not a case in which a full-throated supporter of the war turned on it and came out for an immediate withdrawal. He wasn't a full-throated supporter of the war, and he hasn't (yet?) come out for immediate withdrawal.

Again, the passive-aggressive modality, steering Buckley into the corral with the rest of the naysayers. Ponnuru can't come out and call Buckley a traitor, as if he were Howard Dean or something, because that would mean a new career start for Ponnuru, one that would likely involve the exchange of fruit and trinkets for small-denomination bills at the freeway off-ramp.

Perhaps Ponnuru and his fellow armchair warriors might take a tip from Buckley -- who despite his manifold faults, is not an idiot -- and understand that nuance has its place, particularly in hugely important issues such as this.

I myself think that Bill's conclusion is premature.

I myself have little patience for twee faux-thinkers who lard their prose with reflexive pronouns. And I myself wonder just what the hell it would take for Ponnuru and his fellow Serious Thinkers to get the damned message, that even if their casus belli had been legit, this whole adventure has been handled so ineptly, so inexcusably poor in its postwar phase that sensible people can only marvel that its architects are still employed.

Yet Ponnuru lightly chastens Buckley for his "premature" conclusion. Jesus H. Christ, what exactly does it take to make the scales fall from your eyes at this point, Chief? Are we just being obstinate for the sake of being obstinate, simply to avoid acknowledging that someone else might have been right all along about this entirely avoidable fiasco?

Perhaps the mighty Cockpuncher of Fresno State has the answer. At this point, Hanson's impassioned missives are the columnar equivalent of sausage -- lots of filler and floor sweepings. You can't help but assume that if his wife cooked him a Belgian waffle for breakfast, he'd find a way to harrumph a four-point pronunciamento on the parallels of waffles to the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War.

The insurgency in Iraq has no military capability either to drive the United States military from Iraq or to stop the American training of Iraqi police and security forces — or, for that matter, to derail the formation of a new government.

Actually, they've done exactly that. Hanson's premise is undone from the very first sentence, in the second clause, if not yet the first. Even if we left with our tail between our legs, and the rest of the world were pointing at said tail, we'd never admit it, so that first clause is rendered inoperable anyway. (But if you don't think we're just another bombing or two away from a "peace with honor" marketing campaign, you haven't been paying attention.)

But if Hanson can explain why the training of Iraqi defense forces has gone so dismally without some attribution to the capabilities of the insurgency, I'd like to hear his thesis. That would be a pretty neat trick, seeing as how that's exactly how it's come down. Baathists, sectarians, and Kurdish separatists have steadily infiltrated the ranks of IDF conscripts, either thwarting the training outright, or forming units to serve their own needs over that of the country.

So you have Shia death squads murdering Sunnis, Kurdish peshmerga ensuring that they will have some measure of autonomy sooner rather than later (thus inciting similar Kurdish separatist movements in Turkey and Iran), and anti-American Saddamists monkey-wrenching the whole operation just because they can. How else would Thucydides Gump here explain the drop of stand-alone battalions from one to zero?

First, through the use of improvised explosive devices (IED), assassinations, and suicide bombings, they hope to make the Iraqi hinterlands and suburbs appear so unstable and violent that the weary American public says “enough of these people” and calls home its troops before the country is stabilized. In such a quest, the terrorists have an invaluable ally in the global media, whose “if it bleeds, it leads” brand of journalism always favors the severed head in the street over the completion of yet another Iraqi school. [emphases mine]

Y'know, I have been as passionate a critic of the network media's mores and standards as the next guy. I find their content and coverage generally callow and gutless, dancing endlessly around the facts of the story in order to maintain the veneer of "objectivity". But Gump overtly implies here that the media have simply caused the appearance of violence and instability, by their selective focus. In other words, it's not nearly as bad as they make it sound.

Tell it to Bob Woodruff, asshole. He took the shrapnel while you were humping Good Dick Hunting's leg for a dinner date. Perhaps he miracled said shrapnel into his face just to make Chimpco look bad. They are a nefarious, tricksy lot, the media. Anything for a story. Just because you get to hang in the Green Zone for some syrupy "truth tour" doesn't make you Moses handing received wisdom down from Mount Sinai.

Can-do Americans courageously go about their duty in Iraq — mostly unafraid that a culture of 2,000 years, the reality of geography, the sheer forces of language and religion, the propaganda of the state-run Arab media, and the cynicism of the liberal West are all stacked against them.

2000 years? Perhaps Pericles merely means the current culture, but obviously there are cities here that are 8000 years old, eons before Gump's go-to war between Athens and Sparta. Whatever. This is not a matter of a feckless citizenry so besotted with leftist cynicism that they sold their own troops down the Tigris, this is a case of a shamefully hubristic cabal of secretive bastards who got the war they wanted and still fucked it up immeasurably. There is no walking back of those facts, no matter how Hanson would like to have them.

And yet he persists, as today's cherry-pick demonstrates.

Screaming Iraqis and mangled body parts still dominate Americans' nightly two minutes of news from Iraq. And, indeed, Iraq is still a scary place within the Sunni Triangle.

Sure. Just within the Sunni Triangle it's "scary". Basra, al Anbar, not so much. Right. There is relative stability in the south because the Shia are cleaning house with death squads. There is relative stability in the north because the Kurds are getting their ducks in a row by securing their oil interests. And once we leave, who's to say that the masses in the south won't want a taste of the north's petrodollars?

But again, this is all the media's fault for feeding these baseless impressions we have of this applecart we knocked over.

Opposition politicians in the United States charge that our troops don't have enough body protection or heavily armored Humvees — suggesting that our fighters have been almost criminally ignored.

Any troops that have to ride in ghetto-armored vehicles, or whose families have to buy body armor for them to wear in combat, have been criminally ignored. I don't give two shits if it's Hillary Clinton or John McCain who has the temerity to point that out, and neither should Hanson. But he is determined to beat these tiresome tropes right into the ground -- the media, the opposition, the cynics; the media, the opposition, the cynics.

Well, bullshit. Who you gonna believe -- Hanson, or your own lyin' eyes?

But Iraq, like all wars, is not static. What was supposedly true on the ground in Iraq in 2003 is not necessarily so in 2006 — in the way that the situation in Europe in 1943 hardly resembled that of May 1945.

Yet while things have changed radically in Iraq, the pessimistic tone of our reporting remains calcified. Little is written about the new Iraqi government, the emergence of the Iraqi security forces or the radically changing role of the American military.

Actually, there's been an enormous amount of coverage of the Iraqi government, its elections, its people braving violence to show up and vote. The coverage has been there, even when it hasn't been fully warranted; much of it had the redolent whiff of the in-house propaganda puff pieces that the Bushies have become infamous for.

And as much as the December elections got reverential coverage, Hanson's right about one thing -- very little coverage was devoted to the fact that it took over a month to figure out who won. Very little coverage has been devoted to the fact that all of these elections in the past year have been conducted under stringent martial law conditions, and observed from Amman, Jordan. Hmmm, I wonder why that could be? Institutionalized pessimism, I suppose.

Almost every media stereotype about the American military vanishes when visiting frontline bases. The world still sees dated Abu Ghraib photos, not Iraqi civilians receiving topflight care in the emergency room in the American-run hospital in Baghdad.

Christ. Hanson, like the rest of them, still doesn't get it -- the real crime of Abu Ghraib was not simply what was portrayed in the photos (selectively, one imagines Hanson intoning soberly), but that despite the coverups, it's becoming more and more clear that this was policy. This was not a few bad apples venting their homoerotic steam on hapless detainees. The similarities between interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram are simply too close to be merely coincidental. And all Secdef Magoo can do is give smartass ripostes to serious questions about the needless defamation of American reputation.

That the Abu Ghraib photos are now a couple years old (and thus "old news" presumably) is merely a testament to just how difficult it is for justice to penetrate the wall of silence that always surrounds official atrocities. How long did it take for something (which turned out to be far too little) to be done about My Lai? Did the inexcusable span of time somehow diminish the vile nature of the crime? Does it ever, for any crime? Of course not. So one is not the other. It's nice that we're no longer torturing people at Abu Ghraib (supposedly). That does not mean that the Iraqis aren't doing it themselves, nor does it mean that what we already know should go unanswered.

It was nearly an impossible task to remove Saddam Hussein, foster democracy in the heart of the ancient caliphate and restore on a relatively short timetable what took the Husseins three decades to destroy. Meanwhile, all this must be done surrounded by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia; in the midst of a larger war against Islamic fundamentalism; and while under global scrutiny from a largely hostile audience.

Yet what amazes is not so much the audacity of even thinking the United States could attempt such a thing, but rather that it may just pull it off after all — if only we remain patient.

I think every serious player in both political parties will soon have to address a very serious question -- if you knew then what you know now, would you have done the same thing in the same fashion, and why or why not? It is time the nation had a truly serious conversation about the subject, hopefully short on the usual furbelows of Freedom™ and Democracy®, and how we're changing the region. Because so far only a liar or a fool could say that the region has changed for the better. The Cedar Revolution seems to have petered out; Egypt had a dog-and-pony show of an election that could only have been a bigger joke if it had used Diebold machines; the Palestinians voted in a terrorist organization.

Really, the big winner in all of this has been Iran, and Hanson knows it as well as anyone. He can get his rocks off shooting AK-47's at Balad all he wants, but he knows the truth. We've painted ourselves into a major corner here, and the calls for "patience" fall on deaf ears. It's been three long years since we were told that the mission was accomplished. The country is going broke, and the bloodbath continues unabated. Plaintive whimpers for "patience" must now be tempered with real vision and planning, something that no one in this diseased administration seems able or willing to conjure up.

The System Has Failed

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There's Something About Mary

Generally I avoid the Sunday morning political wankfests like the plague anyway, but I particularly avoid Press The Meat, due to my low tolerance for Father Tim's fulsome nonsense and wink-and-a-nod conspiratorial countenance. It's impossible for me to watch even two seconds of this show and not think about how he's in on it all. He's not an objective observer or commentator, he's part of the problem.

And yet, swamp thing Mary Matalin's bravura flackery for Good Dick Hunting got major buzz on the internets today, so I decided to catch the MSNBC rerun tonight while dicking around with a couple of Kreutzer etudes. (I find that having mindless background noise going while I'm practicing pieces and scales and such actually helps my concentration, in an oddly dissociative way that's hard to describe, but that most musicians (especially guitarists) understand. Once you have acquired the basic positions and fingerings of a piece, it's actually easier to develop intermediate muscle memory when you're not obsessing and hovering over it. So I'm big on watching Letterman while playing a Bach violin partita or some such. I am considering getting a life eventually.)

And when it comes to mindless background noise, MTP certainly fit the bill. Particularly ironic is that Li'l Russ devoted the first portion of the telecast to a one-on-one with Michael Chertoff, rehashing everything that went down with Hurricane Katrina last summer. I say this is ironic because I believe that it is actually Katrina that serves as the lodestar in pinpointing Dick Cheney's sense of humanity, his moral compass.

It simply cannot be overemphasized that in a time of immense crisis, when hundreds of thousands of his countrymen truly needed him, he could not be counted on even to cut his fucking fishing trip short. I know about technological advances; I understand that they have state-of-the-art equipment even out in Jackson Hole. That is not the point, and people who claim not to grasp it are simply being disingenuous. When confronted with an enormous disaster -- particularly one that had been anticipated, and one which everyone had been duly warned about -- a real leader steps up and asks, "What can we do to help?". He does not pretend to play a git-tar and dawdle for three whole days; nor does he keep fishing for five whole days.

Suffice to say, that one event tells you everything you need to know about what kind of a man Cheney (and Bush, for that matter) is; his handling of the hunting accident just reinforces that conclusion. Leave it to our intrepid media to dutifully ignore that pattern.

Anyway, Mary Matalin, she of the tiresomely high-profile marriage to fellow circus geek James Carville. Where to start? Pretty much everyone has already unloaded their snark on her appearance, and it was indeed unfortunate, a style that may best be described as Walmart Dragon Queen, somewhere between Katherine Harris and Cruella DeVil. About the only thing missing was a coat made of Dalmatian puppies. Just really unpleasant to look at, in stark contrast to Maureen Dowd, who was pleasant and understated in both appearance and demeanor. MoDo seemed to understand right away that there was nothing to be gained by trying to keep up with Matalin's histrionics, and was content to let Matalin dig her own hole (shudder).

But that's mean and cheap, and by golly, we're about the substance here at the Hammer. So let's look at some of that substance:

MR. RUSSERT: Initially, there was—seemed to be an attempt to blame Mr. Whittington. Was the vice president part of that? Aware of it?

MS. MARY MATALIN: Absolutely not. When I spoke to the vice president Sunday morning, he made it more than clear that it was his fault, no matter what the conditions, no matter how much the shared risk. That this should not be blamed on Harry. What happens here is that’s not the first account. That’s the wire account of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The very first account, Katharine Armstrong just lays out the facts, and she includes in there how apologetic the vice president was at the immediate scene.

What happens as these stories go from the local to the national is you stop giving out facts. You stop answering questions, and you start making denials. “No, Cheney wasn’t drunk.” “No, it wasn’t Cheney’s fault.” So as it progressed through the week, that’s what happened.

If you go back to Katharine Armstrong’s original description, given in context to locals who understand the frequency of hunting accidents, unfortunately, the culture of Texas, through the eyes of a person who actually saw, who has an expertise, there was no fault described. She laid out the facts: what Mr. Whittington had done, what the vice president had done, and included, clearly, the vice president’s immediate reaction which was profuse apologies.

You can see where this is going already. The strategy is clear from the outset -- it's all the press' fault. They blew a picayune story out of proportion; they got their facts mixed up; they started a feeding frenzy; they operate in bad faith when it comes to Chimpco, because as we all know, Chimpco has been more than fair with them from day one.

In other words, it's all a big conspiracy. Except Mary has some trouble keeping her story straight on that account. Note in the excerpt above how she blames the "wire account" from the local Corpus Christi newspaper, the outlet Cheney's camp first approached with the story. Yet later, Matalin claims that the press strategy they chose was the best one possible because they felt a local outlet, which supposedly had some profound understanding of the hitherto alien cultures and mores of hunting folk, would give the story fairer play.

This was another extremely off-putting aspect of Matalin's entire appearance -- the sheer contempt and disdain she demonstrates for all things "Beltway", juxtaposed with her (and the Republicans') false idolatry for Bobo's World and its supposed mysteries. It's a transparent attempt to claim working class mores for themselves, when one has fuck-all to do with the other. I worked on my grandparents' dairy for years when I was a kid; killed chickens for dinner, raised cows and pigs for slaughter. Even went deerhunting once. And I've worked my share of blue-collar jobs. I have nothing whatsoever in common with Matalin and her fellow assholes, and I deeply resent their clumsy overtures at some wistful vestige of Americana.

The pretentious exaltation of all things small-town is just so transparently dishonest. There is nothing to exalt about a bunch of inbred politicos camping at the ranch of a donor who basically runs the county, to raise money while they get sauced and drive up and shoot fat birds that can barely fly. That is not sportsmanship; that is sadism. It's the American version of fox-hunting, a despicable practice that outlived its usefulness years ago. There's nothing wrong with actual hunting, but that is not hunting; it's merely killing.

MR. RUSSERT: But they were quoting her directly, and many suggested that she also told the papers that she had first thought that the vice president had had a heart attack, so maybe she didn’t see the whole event.

MS. MATALIN: She saw enough to be able to describe the—what happened and who was where and what happened immediately afterwards. Yeah, that’s the problem with this. That’s why—that is exactly why you’re—Tim, you’re going right to the point of why we wanted to have—rather than just throw something out there that night or the first thing the next morning, why we wanted to take our time. Speak to the sheriff so we’d have the voice of authority. Have Katharine be able to share with other witnesses, and she could be an eyewitness. That’s why we wanted to take our time because there were differing accounts, and there was mass confusion. And all—the whole first night was a very human reaction to get Harry and his family attended to.

That's another trope Mary leans a bit too heavily on throughout -- we're only human, you see. We're not alien Borgs like you unfeeling bastards who only care about stupid facts. We're real people, real Americans. Oh, say can you see....

Like her glow-in-the-dark king-size novelty flower broach, Mary's schtick wears thin real fast. Look, lady, when the (nominally) #2 person in this country's government goes on yet another taxpayer-funded vacation, and accidentally shoots someone, we have a right to know about it. It's that fucking simple. Everything else is window dressing. Cheney had both Secret Service and his own medical staff. There were more than enough people around to tend to Whittington and his family. There is simply no good, logical reason for them to have sat on this story as long as they did. Either Cheney was drunk, or they were scared shitless that Whittington was going to die during the night, and wanted to make sure they had their story straight.

Or both.

MR. RUSSERT: You mentioned “speak to the sheriff,” and this is another issue raised. The “Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said at least one deputy was turned away shortly after the shooting because security personnel at the Armstrong ranch were not aware of the agreement between the sheriff and the Secret Service.” What was the agreement? Why wasn’t the vice president interviewed that night after Mr. Whittington was brought to the hospital? Why wasn’t he interviewed by the sheriff that night? Why did they—we wait 14 hours for an interview?

MS. MATALIN: The vice president was informed of the decision to be interviewed the next morning. The original request was that he be interviewed at 10 o’clock. He asked if he could move it up to 8 o’clock because he wanted to—shoot his day up to get to Corpus Christi to see Mr. Whittington. Now it took The Washington Post an entire week to speak to the culture of rural enforcement in a hunting area in south Texas. And it was through the voice of none other than the Democratic state party chairman.

This is rural law enforcement. They hunt from October till the end of February. There’s a presumption of accident. There was—everybody knows everybody down there. Somebody had talked to some ranch hand and said this is an accident. They never go screeching in there. Some deputy who had heard it another way went to some other border post, and nobody there wasn’t going to be allowed in to talk to anybody or let anybody in to see the vice president. That’s just national security. But the suggestion there by the press, not the locals, was that Cheney was covering up. That it’s always done this way. No, it’s not always done that way. If someone had done some reporting or even called the Democratic state party chairman, they would have learned it’s always done the other way where there’s a presumption of accident.

Notice that she provides absolutely no insight to Russert's question. Why did the Secret Service --by their spokesman's own admission -- turn the local sheriff away? She doesn't answer. Instead she recooks her previous trope about reg'lar folks knowin' best, that there was no point in "screeching" in, jes' another huntin' accident.

I don't know what kind of morons Matalin goes hunting with, but hunting accidents are not commonplace, and they're never taken lightly by law enforcement. Ever. For one, a fair percentage of the time there's either foul play, negligence, or intoxication involved. For another, it's just common sense. Even if everything's on the up-and-up, and everybody's story squares, and no crime took place at all, it's still up to the cops to make that determination. Certainly not the property owner, and certainly not the shooter.

Someone was grievously injured by a firearm discharge. Accident or no, it is up to the cops to make the determination as to what the fuck happened. It really is that simple, and anyone who doesn't realize this -- including Mary Matalin -- should proceed forthwith to their local police station and ask them for yourself. They do not say "oh, it's just another hunting accident", and if they do, they shouldn't be cops, period. There's no such thing as "just another" hunting accident, any more than there's "just another" auto accident. Hunters know this more than anyone else.

But again, I'm actually pretty sure that Matalin knows all this, because she has made sure to couch her snide little responses in this bullshit "heartland" boilerplate that's meant to reassure the base. It's all a big code -- "they" (the "media elite" and the "blue states") think you're rubes out in flyover country.

Sadly, it works. And you know what? They are rubes, as long as they keep falling for this shit. They believe that Mary Matalin understands their concerns. They think that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney give a shit about them. They think a "local gal" like Katherine Armstrong would piss on them if they were on fire. Sorry, folks, but they really don't share your concerns and your values. They're using you, because they know you'll keep falling for the code words, the "us vs. them" narrative.

So I dunno what to tell ya, heartland folks. You want to believe some troll that's been botoxed and spackled within an inch of her life, over your own lyin' eyes, knock yourselves out. Maybe suckers deserve exactly what they get, especially when they seem to want it so badly.

Of course, there's so much more to what transpired -- David Gregory's unnecessary apology to that useless tub of shit Scott McClellan; Paul Gigot dutiful bootlicking; MoDo's quick evisceration of the Dragon Queen's bullshit, replete with DQ's off-putting head-shaking and Gore-like sighing. Check out the rest of the transcript; it's all there, and most of it's to be expected.

What I find curious is that Chimpco's camp thought that this would be the most effective tack to take -- to send their most notorious flack to hump the same old "it's the press' fault" talking points. It reeks of desperation; it's an indication that they may be ever-so-temporarily thrown off their spin game.

If only there were an opposition party that could make truly effective use of the chronic disarray of the ruling claque.