It's Good To Be King

Because you can surround yourself with gutless toadies like this asshole:

LEAHY: I don’t think the President was talking about the nuances of the law of war paradigm, he was saying this was going to tell him that he could keep Guantanamo open or not, after it said he could.

BRADBURY: Well, it’s not —

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRADBURY: It’s under the law of war –

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRADBURY: The President is always right.

Sure he is, except when he's awake, or speaking out loud, or thinking to himself. Other than that, he's just okey-fuckin'-doke.

Nice to know our tax dollars go to employ footstools like Steve Bradbury.

How Conservatives Argue

Brilliant stuff. Just check it out. It may not even technically be satire, it's so on the money.

[Tip o' the Hammer to Echidne of the Snakes.]

Unpacking Conventional Wisdom

Just finished watching Syriana, George Clooney's discursive pastiche of oil and geopolitics, and what I could really appreciate was its sense of knowing pessimism. Not necessarily in the conspiratorial "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" sense, but in the more common-sense idea that money and power, by nature and almost by definition, do tend to operate with ulterior motives. That these motives get glossed over by their enablers and starfuckers and sob sisters in the corporate media is not exactly a revelation.

And when the Washington Post decides to put on its trusty HNIC uniform and trot out the usual platitudes, it just confirms all those suspicions that were pooh-poohed as so farfetched and unnecessarily lurid when Syriana was first released.

The headline is a dead giveaway: A Driven President Faces a World of Crises. Seriously? About what exactly can Bush honestly be said to be "driven"? As the current Princess Bride parlance goes, I do not think that word means what the Post headline monkeys think it means. To be "driven" is to be ambitious and forceful, but intelligently so. It means to operate from an informed stance, going toward planned, cogent, attainable goals. That is entirely different from merely being a political wind-up toy that simply goes and goes. Being obsessed is not the same as being driven.

So again, I ask how exactly is Bush "driven", except in the most basic Homer Simpson sense of "me wantee"? Everybody wants something; it is understanding how to achieve or obtain that something and having a plan to do it that defines the "driven". So Pravda is already in the tank after the first indefinite article of the damned headline. This is not good; the question is why they went with such a demonstrably nonsensical adjective. (Not to mention that the rest of the headline naïvely implies that Chimpco hasn't exacerbated at least some of the crises the U.S. faces and will continue to face after they're blessedly termed out.)

The body of the article, I think, tends to provide some answers, as far as tone and stance, keeping in mind that we are talking about a putatively combative, hostile, liberal press.

I am hard-pressed to think of any other moment in modern times where there have been so many challenges facing this country simultaneously," said Richard N. Haass, a former senior Bush administration official who heads the Council on Foreign Relations. "The danger is that Mr. Bush will hand over a White House to a successor that will face a far messier world, with far fewer resources left to cope with it."

Bush has already indicated that the greatest of these crises, the Iraq war, will probably be fobbed off to his successor. In other words, there has never been any real sense of urgency as to what the necessary criteria would be to resolve the situation. Seriously, think about it. Has Bush ever been any more detailed than "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down"? Hell, he hasn't even defined any specific metrics as to what that entails, not that it matters, because it's indisputably failed on that count. The few units that can even operate without significant U.S. support are apparently devolving into ethnic death squads settling old grudges.

So, no real "drive" to resolve that, just a lot of finger-crossing and corner-turning. How about the other crises? Iran and North Korea, rather than being cowed into submission by the Axis of Evil bluster and the subsequent invasion of the low-hanging fruit, were emboldened by our failure to secure the occupation, and have since ramped up their respective nuclear programs. Seeing us get further bogged down in Iraq for three years, with no real end in sight, has only encouraged their intransigence.

As for our deteriorating relations with Russia, I think it's more of a piece with our relations with most of Europe in general, coupled with Putin's seeming dislike for Bush's preening buffoonery. Putin was a KGB colonel; he's supposedly a martial-arts expert and an excellent chess player. Bush rides his bike really fast until he crashes, and is well-known for going to bed early. Occasionally he reads biographies about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington so he can try to impress European leaders with shit even they already knew. Apparently he is skilled at clearing brush.

So it's understandable if a guy like Putin (despite his weird tummy-kiss moment recently) maybe looks askance at a twit like Bush, and figures he's just not worth the bother. It doesn't help that the Russia-Iran reactor deals are money for Putin and friends, and the neocons' mindless sabre-rattling is probably cutting into their action somewhat.

They also showed how the huge commitment of resources and time on Iraq -- and the attendant falloff in international support for the United States -- has limited the administration's flexibility in handling new world crises. "This is a distracted government that has to take care of too many things at the same time and has been consumed by the war on Iraq," said Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Yes and no. They're supposed to be able to multitask, and they certainly have been pre-occupied by Iraq, but like everything else with these people, it's run by the political arm of the administration. It's all photo-op this and good-news that; there's never any solutions or analysis in the real-world sense. If there was, they'd have made the necessary adjustments and changed tack here and there. But nothing's changed; to them it's all just a series of opportunities to bolster one's image and maybe squeeze a dead-cat bounce out of the polls at the right time.

Saying that the Cheney administration is "consumed" by the war in Iraq is kinda like saying that O.J. Simpson is "haunted" by the loss of his wife.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in an interview yesterday that such criticism is misplaced, adding that victory in Iraq is crucial to success in fighting terrorists and in creating a new democracy that could serve as a beacon to other Middle Eastern countries. "Is it a major investment? Yes," he said. "The stakes are high [in Iraq], but we think the rewards are commensurate to the effort, and the consequences of lack of success are sobering."

Hadley agreed that there are "a lot of issues in motion right now" on the international front. "In some sense, it was destined to be, because we have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch."

Christ, Hadley is one of the biggest halfwits in the claque. And that last sentence of his definitely bears some serious parsing. Taking on big issues doesn't mean blindly ramming the door until your head hurts, then running around invoking God and Jesus so your peeps don't desert you in disgust. Taking on big issues means you open your eyes and turn the freakin' doorknob.

Look, I know that Bush has this illusion of himself as some sort of can-do take-charge kinda guy, but someone should tell these simps that it's not enough to tell everyone what a problem-solver you are. At some point, if you want to burnish that particular reputation, you actually have to solve a fucking problem, okay? That's how that tends to work. As far as I can tell, the only "problems" these suckers have actually "solved" are exorbitant taxes on the 1% who put them in office, and keeping homos from getting married. Nicely done, folks.

There's more, as there always is, but you get the idea. They go on and get Madeline Albright's take on things, and she's got some points, but let's not forget her own momentous visit to Pyongyang in 2000, to try to procure some concessions from the original Dear Leader.

How'd all that work out?

So it's not just Chimpco that fucked the dog on foreign policy, some of the go-to people from the Clinton era have some baggage as well. But the thing is that none of it's ever mentioned. Steve Hadley is quoted as if he had something useful to offer, rather than easily deconstructed boilerplate. Madeline Albright is worshipped as if she'd never trucked through some of Kim Jong Il's Potemkin villages in the midst of a horrific -- and preventable -- famine.

It's as if the job requirements are merely compiling and editing quotes to the ideal column space, and vetting your quals with the Beltway power players, rather than having some pride and actually reading those quotes and maybe thinking that they're not worth putting your name over.

Rumsfeld Goober Alles

So the Army might be recruiting white supremacists. What's the problem?

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator from a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."

....

The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, had sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.

The groups are being abetted, the report says, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.

The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."

It would explain a few things, if it's true and as widespread as SPLC claims. It would help explain the seeming ease with which torture was instituted as policy in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and in countless secret prisons around the world to which people are disappeared and rendered. The real aim of torture is not to gather information, but to dehumanize, and if you have someone who already regards his adversary as subhuman, as "mud people", you got a leg up on breaking your subject.

It explains Haditha, and it explains the recent rape/murder of a teenage girl, and the slaughter of her family, including her seven-year-old sister. It explains a disgusting "song" like Hadji Girl, which is apparently just another in a long line of big fucking jokes, like poisoning Supreme Court justices and blowing up Times Square. It explains the pathetic war-trolls masturbating in their pajamas to the song's lyrics, and excoriating anyone who might find the imagery a tad, well, atrocious.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the casual brutality of "Hadji Girl" is coming from people who are simply evil or racist or cruel. The soldiers occupying Iraq are normal men and women who, in other circumstances, would never commit the abuses that have been documented in Bagram and Abu Ghraib and that are now alleged in Haditha. The situations in which this war has placed them -- far from home, surrounded by a foreign language and foreign culture, carrying guns and fearful for their lives -- have brought out behaviors that we would not see otherwise. If American soldiers and Iraqis could meet under different circumstances, things would be different.

I think there's a lot of truth to that; it would be irresponsible to simply take the SPLC's assertions as gospel and instantly conflate it to causality of every atrocity. Still, Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a sign of something, and with recruitment numbers chronically down, it behooves the Army to take it seriously, not only in weeding out potential recruits, but in spotting existing service personnel and getting them out of there before, at the very least, they do something stupid and spark a retaliation torture-murder on their own squad.

And yes, it also bespeaks a certain part of what the soul of the nation has come to, but a lot of it is still a manifestation of desperation and ignorance, rather than out-and-out hatred. For now.

In the meantime, I have no faith whatsoever in the SecDef's ability or desire to rectify this situation, or any other for that matter. I don't think he could even if he wanted to, which is why we are where we are in the first place.

Useless

I think we all already knew that Ann Coulter is clinically insane and a soulless harpy, but apparently she's mildly retarded as well. At the very least, she clearly doesn't understand the irony behind her sneering dismissals of actual science (as opposed to feel-good emotional schmience that's there to give structure and meaning to idiots and ninnies):

In her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, June 2006), right-wing pundit Ann Coulter devotes two chapters to a bizarre attempt to disprove the theory of evolution. With a mix of misleading claims, pseudo-scientific arguments, distortions of evolutionary theory, and outright falsehoods, Coulter places herself not only outside the mainstream but truly toward the lunatic fringe. After all, no reasonable person argues that one cannot believe in God and simultaneously accept the findings of decades of accumulated research on evolution. Yet, Coulter appears to believe that in order to prove that liberals are "godless," she must attack evolutionary theory itself.

Though she stops short of saying that the earth is 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve rode through the Garden of Eden on the backs of dinosaurs, in her quest to disprove evolutionary theory, Coulter echoes the arguments of the creationists from whom even many religious conservatives distanced themselves long ago.

So let me get this straight -- Ann Coulter's book is stuffed with lies and misinformation, and inadvertently shows that she has no fucking clue about that which she gets paid gobs of money to write books about?!? I, for one, am shocked to find this out. I mean, you just learn something new practically every fucking day, doncha?

Further down the article is a lengthier article appended, precisely debunking Coulter's manifold lies and false assumptions, and just all-around general promotion of schmience. The nut of it is where and whom she relied on for her schmientific disinformation.

The jacket of Coulter's book states that Coulter writes from a "keen appreciation for genuine science." Inside, she credits a cadre of supporters of intelligent design:

I couldn't have written about evolution without the generous tutoring of Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and William Dembski, all of whom are fabulous at translating complex ideas, unlike liberal arts types, who constantly force me to the dictionary to relearn the meaning of quotidian. [emphasis in original]

Wells, Berlinski, Dembski, and Behe are senior fellows with the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a nonprofit think tank that aims to "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God," as recorded in a 1998 internal memo.

Yes, the helpful wingnuts at the "Discovery" "Institute", which is of course neither of those things, whom we and many others ruthlessly debunked throughout the protracted course of the Dover case. And I love how DI is referred to as a "nonprofit think tank", as if grifting wealthy religious fanatics in the service of undermining the American educational system has fuck-all to do with thinking, or the formation of sensible, forward-looking policy.

I mean, shit, if we're going to define "nonprofit think tank" that fucking loosely, then I suppose this blog qualifies as such. I sure as hell don't make any money at it, and at least I'm an intellectually honest thinker, which already puts me ahead of the likes the DI tools. Those motherfuckers are simply rent-a-hacks, which is why Coulter finds them such good company. Skanks of a feather and all.

And what's even funnier is that now that Ann has been exposed as a serial plagiarist, suddenly she starts monitoring her access.

On the July 7 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, correspondent Brian Todd became the latest to discuss the recent allegations regarding right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who is accused of plagiarizing at least three passages in her recent book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, June 2006), as well as portions of several of her Universal Press Syndicate columns.

....

Coulter reportedly refused to appear for the CNN segment. During the segment, Todd said: "Coulter's publicist said she couldn't appear on camera."

Hee hee. This is so fucking sweet. Coulter shows up at the opening of a fucking envelope to pimp whatever bumwipe she has polluting America's bookstores, but now it appears that she can't take what she, um, liberally dishes out to her adversaries.

It would be nice to hope that somehow all this might sink in to her legions of monkey-spanking fans, but let's face it -- if they had reasoning and logic skills, they wouldn't be giving her bullshit the time of day in the first place. No, it'll all just continue to feed their insane persecution complex, where good Christians are violently harassed for minding their own business, and the eeeeevil dhimmicrats are keeping poor misunderstood Bush and DeLay and company down, preventing them from carrying out the Lord's work.

I mean, look at the current power structure in the American government -- how could those poor saps possibly arrive at any other sensible conclusion?

Bad News For People Who Think There's Not Enough Good News

Our latest tilt at the whinging "why don't the librul media report all the good news in Iraq?" windmill comes courtesy of former Newsweek Baghdad buraeu chief Rod Nordland, in a short but highly informative interview in Foreign Policy:

FOREIGN POLICY: Are Americans getting an accurate picture of what’s going on in Iraq?

Rod Nordland: It’s a lot worse over here [in Iraq] than is reported. The administration does a great job of managing the news. Just an example: There was a press conference here about [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi’s death, and somebody asked what role [U.S.] Special Forces played in finding Zarqawi. [The official] either denied any role or didn’t answer the question. Somebody pointed out that the president, half an hour earlier, had already acknowledged and thanked the Special Forces for their involvement. They are just not giving very much information here.

That's the thing here that the "good news" ninnies aren't getting through their thick skulls -- it's not that conditions are actually better than the media portrays them. The media is holding out on us, but in the opposite direction, because of military coercion. This should have been obvious a long time ago to any dispassionate observer.

FP: The Bush administration often complains that the reporting out of Iraq is too negative, yet you say they are managing the news. What’s the real story?

RN: You can only manage the news to a certain degree. It is certainly hard to hide the fact that in the third year of this war, Iraqis are only getting electricity for about 5 to 10 percent of the day. Living conditions have gotten so much worse, violence is at an even higher tempo, and the country is on the verge of civil war. The administration has been successful to the extent that most Americans are not aware of just how dire it is and how little progress has been made. They keep talking about how the Iraqi army is doing much better and taking over responsibilities, but for the most part that’s not true.

I can't find the exact link right this second, but I linked a piece on a chat with Nordland before, probably in February or March of '05. The guy is not exactly Cindy Sheehan; in the chat he dispensed with goofballs from either fringe rather abruptly. So his admonitions should be taken quite seriously; he's not grinding an anti-Bush axe.

The fact of the matter is that, despite empty proclamations as to improvements in 14 of the provinces, most Iraqis live in the rest of the provinces. Over a quarter of all Iraqis live in Baghdad alone. And those people have no semblance of a normal life -- almost no electricity in scorching heat, no jobs, no water, no foreseeable future, violence every day. How much has that been reported on by the treacherous liberal media, given the sheer proportion of all those things? Check out the entire interview with Nordland, it's very interesting and informative, two things which are in short supply with the MSM these days.

Harper's not only links to the FP piece with Nordland, but bolsters his assertions about military control of what the media can and can't do:

Many embedded reporters have managed to do fine work from Iraq, but there are significant obstacles for even the best and most determined journalists. I recently spoke with a former senior TV producer for Reuters who worked in Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The producer, who asked that she not be identified by name, arrived in Tikrit soon after the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, and was embedded with American troops for 45 days. She told me that, over the years, she has worked closely with the French army, NATO troops in the Balkans, and UN peacekeepers in covering war and conflict, but she said had never faced the sorts of restrictions imposed by the Pentagon on journalists in Iraq. “I was,” she said, “a mouthpiece for the American military.”

In Tikrit, she was based with U.S. troops at a military compound established at one of Saddam's former palaces, where she provided pool coverage for Reuters TV and AP TV (which was fed to other media outlets). When insurgents attacked civilians, she told me, the American military would rush her to the scene so she could record the carnage and get shots of grieving Iraqis.

When it came to other stories that were clearly sympathetic to the U.S. side, such as funerals for American soldiers killed in combat, the U.S. military was extremely helpful—indeed, encouraging. In such cases, she was granted full access and allowed to film speeches by officials honoring the dead, the posthumous awarding of medals, and other aspects of the ceremony.

But when this producer wanted to pursue a story that might have cast the war effort in an unfavorable light, the situation was entirely different. Every few days, she said, she would receive a call from the Reuters bureau in Baghdad and discover that reporters there had heard, via local news reports or from the bureau's network of Iraqi sources, about civilians being killed or injured by American troops. But when she asked to leave the compound to independently confirm such incidents, her requests were invariably turned down.

Well, of course she was turned down, and no doubt the "good news" claque expects and requires no less. But they should also take to heart what CBS reporter Lara Logan, who has been over in Iraq for quite some time now, had to say about reporting on infrastructural improvements:

Logan said she sympathizes with the feeling among individuals involved in those type of improvements that they are seeing a different picture but insists that is an isolated view that ignores the bigger picture. She says new schools, water projects and sewer improvements so far represent “a fraction” of what is needed. Looking back to her recent trip to Ramadi to report on the violence in that city, Logan pointed to the fact that she found herself on patrol in the streets, “wading knee-deep in human waste.”

In a CNN clip from about that time, Logan also alluded to the problem of insurgents going out of their way to destroy new improvements, thus obviating the utility of reporting about them. In fact, she said that there had been instances where military personnel had specifically asked her not to report improvements, for fear of subsequent attack.

But let's be realistic about this "good news" meme -- it emanates from a demographic that doesn't really want actual news anyway. They are the people Stephen Colbert lampoons; they want "truth" (or truthiness) rather than facts. They don't think critically, nor do they have any real intellectual honesty, so facts are useless to them; they don't know how to process them.

What they seek is affirmation of their stated (if not actually practiced) convictions and "values", and when facts get in the way of all that, well, rather than examine their convictions and values and their relationship to those things, they'd rather just dispense with the facts and insist on the "truth". And that is where people in the media need to really make a decision as to whether they want to be journalists or news-readers, fact-finders or water-carriers.

Because as this lunatic fringe of truthiness clashes more and more with the reality of things, they really don't learn, they just react. I think the rhetorical talk-screamer exhortations to violence are just the beginning of a rather troublesome trend in the more ignorant quadrants of the (dis)infosphere. I think that while a blowhard like Melanie Morgan may have just been more or less talking out of her ass when she opined that Bill Keller should be gassed (or murdered by victims' families) for compiling and printing public knowledge, she and her fellow professional screamers overestimate their audiences.

Since much of the appeal of these nasty little shits depends on pushing psychological buttons, exploiting and conflating nationalist hysteria with deep-rooted inferiority complexes and projecting them, the audience is self-selecting. They jump from Limbaugh to Hannity to Savage to Malkin to Morgan, and it's a toxic feedback loop. They already have little jokey-joke t-shirts that suggest lynching journalists who dare report on various and sundry episodes of Chimpco's little fiasco, aka The Great War Between Absolute Divine Perfection And Ineffable Unholy Eeeeevil. All it takes is one moron who takes the feedback loop just a little bit too seriously, and you have yourself a whole new dynamic.

I don't know if Michelle Malkin or Melanie Morgan really want to get someone killed with their snide little comments and "outings"; having some experience dealing with some of these people I suspect at least some of it is on the same level as professional wrestling. They get paid to scream because lots of yahoos enjoy the (heretofore) verbal bloodsport. But I think many segments of their audiences take these things more seriously than the professional yellers realize, and they are flirting with some potentially very dangerous and very irresponsible people.

And even if the SCLM gave them what they think they want, even if they ran wall-to-wall coverage of repainted schools and fluffy kittens, their rageaholia just moves them on to other imagined treacheries. They're spiritual vampires, projecting their own ignorance and despair and feeding off of it.

Kim Possible

It scarcely merits mentioning that I find the neo-Stalinist cult regime of Kim Jong Il contemptible. He's a sociopath who lives large while millions of his people starve to death or barely survive, and are beaten down. They are kept from finding out about the outside world precisely because Kim knows that if they knew how much the world has progressed without them, and regards their pitiable country and its psychotic leader, they'd turn on him in a heartbeat. And Kim's constant provocations are no help to his futile cause.

However, as far as how much of a threat North Korea poses to the United States, it's not even worth bothering with. NK's lame attempt at lobbing a Taepodong into the Chukchi Sea or wherever was par for the course, a flailing attempt by a desperate country teetering on the brink of collapse. It's the equivalent of a drunk guy brandishing a Swiss Army knife, approaching you way down the sidewalk. He's a good thirty feet away, and you happen to be strapped with an AK-47, a flamethrower, and a Beretta 9mm. It is conceivable that Drunk Asshole could throw the Swiss Army knife at you, and maybe even hit you. But he's clearly too incompetent to pull much of anything off, and you'd perforate and incinerate his fucking ass in two seconds anyway, whether he chucked the knife at you or your friends who are standing closer to him.

This should not be taken to mean that we don't have to worry at all about North Korea, just that we should refine our approach. It should be noted that Russia and especially China could do more to help than they have been, but it's also worth noting that we haven't exactly been our own best advocates in this either. "Stick" and "bigger stick with nails" does not a diplomatic arsenal make. Bush's rhetorical Axle of Elvis bluster has been tremendously counterproductive, serving only to spur Iran and North Korea into accelerating, rather than abandoning, their nuclear ambitions.

No one wants to have to essentially bribe a midget jerkoff like Kim Jong Il into behaving himself. But if we make a reunified Korea a viable goal, then we can start using soft power diplomacy, including financial incentives and aid, to start down that path. Look at the "it'll pay for itself, you pacifist pussies" debacle in Iraq, and extrapolate a cost-benefit analysis to North Korea and Iran. Factor in the demonstrable incompetence of the current team of armchair warriors. How do you like them fucking odds, Capitan?

At some point we have to stop with the mindless flag-waving and breast-beating and slogan-chanting, and get on to business. And that's all this is. It's not a matter of national pride, nor is it a matter of national security at this point. It's not even a matter of regional security; China is no more likely to put up with a hostile North Korea than we are.

It's a matter of growing the fuck up, and realizing that platitudes solve nothing, and that running every single thing from the political arm has been incredibly self-destructive.

I mean, Kim Jong Il is welcome to kiss my entire ass; he's a despicable little megalomanical toad. But let's get real about what sort of threat is actually being posed, and start looking at the nature of the problem, and how it can be resolved diplomatically, because it most certainly can.

But you get the distinct impression that the Chimpco gang either can't or won't admit that truth to themselves, and certainly not to us peons.

A Cancer On The Presidency

[small pun for you amateur astrologers out there]

Today is George W. Bush's 60th birthday, and what do you get for the person who quite literally has the world by the balls? (Besides Halliburton stock, that is.) No, when you talk about the intangibles, the traits of character that one wishes for another when one wishes to transcend mere possessions, one boggles at the prospect of deciding with what to further arm a person such as Bush.

For example, Bush himself might, poorly feigning a contemplative state, wish for himself to acquire the strength to overcome the challenges that beset him, or some such. You know the drill -- it's basically that old saying of "God grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." That sort of thing. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it ill befits a person who should, by the very nature of his (s)elected post, be striving for greatness and excellence. One's reach should generally exceed one's grasp in life; otherwise what's the point?

So a mere Purpose-Driven Life nostrum is not enough. Besides, Bush already enjoys the comfortable certitude of "knowing" that he can acquire the necessary strength, courage, and wisdom just by praying. (As for Intelligence, Dexterity, and Charisma, he's on his own, but his certitude perhaps grants him a +2 saving throw.) And pray he does, as he and his staff are forever reminding us. That's worked out quite well, hasn't it?

Much has been made over the years of Bush's notoriously incurious nature, and I believe that that is the center of what ails him -- and in turn, us, and further in turn, the rest of the world. If the rest of the world catches the cold when the U.S. sneezes, what happens to them when the U.S. gets shitfaced and runs into a ditch? So it seems that it is that very nature that needs to be addressed.

There is a paradox of sorts to the ideal of total consciousness. On the one hand, we wish (or should wish) to maximize our awareness of ourselves, of the universe, of our current place therein, and of our potential. All of these things are by definition dynamic, as opposed to the resolutely static model imposed by monotheistic dogma. On the other hand, true total consciousness would encompass total empathy, and that would be paralyzing.

Still, life experience at least tells us that, unless you're a complete potato, you acquire knowledge through empirical observation. You pick things up; you consciously and subconsciously decide whether or not to utilize and incorporate those things into your functions. The easy cultural artifacts might be something like dress or lingo or music; the more difficult ones may be acquiring the ability to discern what is useful and productive, and separate it from what is fluff and nonsense. The point is that you never stop, until you die. That is as it should be. Only a complete fool ever thinks they're at a stopping point, when it comes to knowing and understanding the world around them.

As Poputonian points out, the Founding Fathers were very cultured men, if not pedigreed men. They read and understood great philosophers and moral arguments. They were students of the Enlightenment, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment. They had to work to acquire what they had, and to learn what they knew. This may be the true distinction between men of their caliber and people like George W. Bush. Same goes for dogs -- would you rather have a smart mutt who observes and understands things, or a nervous, inbred, yappy show dog, whose purebred bloodline has essentially bred out any common sense and favorable characteristics he would otherwise have? One is worth more money on paper, but the other is by far the better companion. Bush is famous for expecting loyalty from others, but he's apparently the center of his own universe, so his loyalty to others is entirely conditional on their ability to coddle him and put up with his nonsense.

So the zen thing to do would be to hope that Bush finds the gift that cannot be bestowed -- the ability to truly reflect, to contemplate, to comprehend one's own place within the universe, instead of constantly pretending that all questions were answered twenty years ago when he finally stopped drinking. Or maybe he could look at the demise of his "acquaintance" Kenny Boy, and ponder the nature of karma. But the realistic gift for him would be to rub his nose in his manifold failures and corruptions, and beat him with his own willful intractable ignorance, until he finally fucking gets it.

Good luck with that one.

High Plains Grifter

You can bet I'm not wasting a tear on Kenny Boy Lay's sudden demise, but I'm not exactly gloating either. Lay got off easy; I wanted him around to watch his empire get parceled out to some of the people he gleefully screwed over, while he rotted away in the can, frantically sharpening his toothbrush handle in anticipation of fighting off would-be jailhouse suitors.

Instead, the guy kicks in his Aspen vacation house, awaiting what was almost certain to be effectively a life sentence. And that would have been straight out of the "couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" file. People who are dumb enough to believe Lay's cynical invocations of God as he left the courthouse that final time in May, are probably also just dumb enough to buy Lay's classic "turnip truck" defense. To believe Lay's defense, you would have to believe that a basically self-made millionaire with a PhD in economics was so in the dark on everything, he allowed himself to get rolled by a cadre of corrupt executives.

Hell, it worked for Reagan, and it's not like Lay had any better options, though I imagine his Lord and Savior would have wanted him to tell the truth. Perhaps I have a different understanding of Christianity than the professionals do.

So now we get the somber replays of Lay's hardscrabble childhood and his road to the top, paved with pelf and greased with connections to various glad-handing sacks of shit, who shall remain nameless for the moment. We get Baba Wawa supposedly musing on the poor boy's chronic stress, as if it weren't entirely self-inflicted.

I don't think Lay was evil, just indifferent to the point of depravity. Like all grifters, he operated from a vantage point of sheer contempt for the marks and rubes he dealt with. It was their fault for being suckers, as if the proles actually had any say in what their supposed betters decided for them in secret meetings and backroom deals. It was the fictitious Grandma Millie's own fault for not knowing that there were slimy cocksuckers in Texas gaming the system, deliberately selling overages on power lines and then having the fucking gall to charge extra to unclog those lines. It was California's fault for producing so much and having so much money there for an enterprising person like Ken Lay to cheat us out of. As P.T. Barnum famously said, it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

Because I suppose nothing these days appears to be coincidental, upon reading of Lay's death this morning, I couldn't help but think of Frankie Pentangeli (or even Vince Foster) for a second, and of course I wasn't the only one of that mind. It's probably not true, but if we learned anything from the lurid legend of Vince Foster in the '90s, the point is to get the machine in motion and get the lie out there, just to motivate the base. Perhaps the left's base does not operate the same way as the drooling Coulter/Malkin claque, and perhaps it's just that their dirty tricks machine isn't nearly as well-oiled.

Now, assuming that Lay's body is dutifully identified and properly disposed of, let us hope that our professional journamalistas might pull their heads out of their asses and pursue some of the larger loose ends (yeah, right). How about Lay's role in Cheney's so-called Energy Task Force, which we may never be allowed to know about, because apparently we're children? How about Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, meeting secretly with Lay, in the midst of a crisis engineered mostly by Lay and his associates?

After the California’s energy debacle of 2000, Davis and Bustamante filed suit under California’s unique Civil Code provision 17200, the “Unfair Business Practices Act,” which would order all power companies, including Enron, to repay the nearly $9 billion they extorted from California citizens. The single biggest opponent of the suit, with the most to lose, was Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay.

Lay, a very close friend and long time associate of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney, and one of their largest campaign contributors, hastily assembled a meeting with prominent Californians (confirmed by the release of 34 pages of internal Enron email) to strategize opposition to the Davis-Bustamante campaign and garner influential support for energy deregulation.

Included in the meeting were Michael Milken, “junk bond king” convicted of fraud in 1990 who currently runs a think tank in Santa Monica that focuses on global and regional economies; Ray Irani, Chief Executive of Occidental Petroleum; former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Riordan and Schwarzenegger were at that time being courted as GOP gubernatorial candidates.)

Attendees of the meeting received a small four-page packet entitled “Comprehensive Solution for California.” The packet called for an end to the federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in California’s energy crisis and proposed saddling consumers with the $9 billion loss. Discussions further focused on preventing Davis’s proposed re-regulation of energy markets.

With Davis in office and Bustamante his natural successor, there would be little chance of dismissing rock-solid charges of fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, fake power delivery scheduling, and blatant conspiracy. The grooming of a governor amenable to a laissez-faire and corrupt energy market was essential. Recalling Davis and replacing him with Schwarzenegger was the solution. With Governor Schwarzenegger in office, Bustamante’s case is dead, as few judges will let a case go to trial to protect a state whose governor has allowed the matter to be “settled.”

It's too bad Jason Leopold's credibility is completely shot, thanks to his asinine "Rove indicted" fake scoop from a couple months ago. One could posit that Leopold got suckered by his source for nefarious reasons, but no matter. The fact is he did a lot of digging on the Enron story back in the day, and it would be nice if the whiny, defensive, narcissistic punks in the corporate media would due diligence for once in their sorry lives and check some of these things out. California's political and financial systems were thrown in complete upheaval by the machinations of scumbags like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, and they were enabled and encouraged by people who are still very much in power.

For once in your stinking lives, you gutless whores, quit your damned starfucking and navel-gazing. Ken Lay was a criminal, a thief. His family does not merit "respect" or kid-glove treatment, any more than a kid that holds up a liquor store should get "respect". Report the fucking story, and then dig deeper. Afflict the comfortable and corrupt, don't be their enabler or sob sister.

Killing Is My Business....And Business Is Good

Let me be perfectly blunt: If Steven Green is in fact guilty of what his platoon mates have accused him of, he needs to end himself now. Seriously. There is simply no walking back from stalking, raping, and murdering a 15-year-old girl, and murdering three of her relatives, including a 7-year-old girl.

There may be more here than meets the eye. This may not be a simple My Lai/Haditha war crime, though there's nothing simple about that, obviously. But I mean that we sort of get that under the highly compressed circumstances soldiers in any war face, small-unit cohesion can warp and erupt violently away from the discipline of traditional command-and-control structures. We at least get the idea that sometimes platoons snap, the lizard brains take over, and lots of innocent people die horribly, as in Haditha. What's different here is that Green may actually be something of a psychopath to begin with, and found himself in a situation that complemented his existing temperament.

Several soldiers allegedly planned the attack over drinks after noticing the woman near the traffic checkpoint they manned in Mahmudiyah, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. The soldiers allegedly worked out an elaborate plan to carry out the crime and then cover it up, wearing dark clothes to the home, using an AK-47 assault rifle from the house to kill the family, and allowing authorities to believe that the attack was carried out by insurgents, according to investigators.

"Allowing authorities to believe"? That's why they used an AK-47, to make the authorities believe that insurgents were behind it. C'mon people, didn't anyone ever tell you about using the passive voice?

Former Pfc. Steven D. Green, 21, and other members of 1st Platoon, B Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, allegedly carried out the crimes on March 12. Several soldiers told authorities that Green killed all four people and that he and another soldier raped the young woman.

The plan worked, at least until soldiers began discussing the incident last month while they were going through stress counseling after two other members of their platoon were captured at a checkpoint and beheaded by insurgents. Army officials began investigating the day after hearing about the events in Mahmudiyah.

Once again, an atrocity that, as with Abu Ghraib, was only found out because other soldiers had consciences. This does not exactly give one confidence as to what else might be out there, waiting to be discovered.

But consider what this one event has wrought, on top of the senseless slaughter of innocent civilians, including a small child and a teenager. I doubt if any single policy application was changed because of what they thought insurgents had done, but you never know. It probably went on a virtual pile of other undoubted insurgent atrocities against civilians, but it could also have very easily resulted in a crackdown killing other civilians.

And the two soldiers from Green's platoon, who were kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, beheaded, and their bodies booby-trapped. Revenge killing perhaps? Might those two soldiers still be alive had Green not done what he (apparently) did?

If he didn't do it, if he's been unjustly accused for some bizarre reason, then hopefully the truth comes out and Green can get on with his life. But it seems incredibly unlikely for soldiers to drop such an enormous dime on a fellow soldier from their own platoon. And in the event that it's true, we don't want to hear about how stressed out you are, boy. Every soldier is stressed out; every soldier is in harm's way at every moment of every day, with no end in sight. One can only imagine how living like that tears down the psyche after a while.

But Green's crime has shamed all of them, as well as himself, his family, his country. Maybe he can make a case for PTSD, or maybe he's just Ted Bundy in a uniform. Maybe he thinks he'll get away with it, the way William Calley got away with it. I don't know.

I do know that, on this beautiful Fourth of July, there are greater things on my mind than hot-dog-eating competitions and waving a flag at a parade. I love my country, and I love what my country's all about, which makes me hate what people like Steven Green do to shame it all the more. And his defense is likely to shame the military and the country even more. His only possible out is to claim that he was driven to commit these horrible crimes by the circumstances soldiers face. (Either that or they're lying, which again is pretty unlikely.) He should be marginalized from what 99.9% of soldiers are doing, and face the full consequences.

And, you know, I'd like to think that this sort of thing would weigh heavily upon the consciences of Bush and Cheney, but I know it doesn't. Maybe Saddam would have terrorized that poor family at some point if Chimpco hadn't arrogated power unto itself, but we damn sure know that we wouldn't be responsible for their deaths, and now it appears that we are.

Unplugged

There's nothing like a nice long weekend to unplug (as least as close as I am able to do so) and recharge the batteries. We went to Fort Bragg, indulged in fresh fish and microbrew. We saw the makeshift cenotaph in a field next to the highway a few miles north of town. We went to the tidepools and touched sea anemones, and looked out toward the horizon, where the sea meets the sky and goes on forever.

And for that short time, we were reminded that the earth and the ocean absorb all deeds and men, good and bad, just as the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust. It may take a generation or two to undo what our fearless leaders have wrought, but life goes on, and it is our decision whether it trudges along in grim endurance, runs like hell, or paces itself with enough time to observe and appreciate the details.

High Noonan

Not to belabor the tragicomic self-immolation of Peggy Noonan's addled brain, but I was distracted from a couple of big-picture points by her unfortunate choice of imagery.

The first clue is right at the outset of the column, where Nooners declares herself a contrarian. I don't have the stomach to ingest her nonsense on any sort of regular schedule, but I have read enough of Noonan's goofy nonsense over the years to know that she's the establishment poster girl, and nothing short of Reagan's shade appearing to her in the midst of a bender will ever change that.

Plus the obvious: people who have to tell you they're contrarians are like people who go to the trouble of telling you they're not gay -- they're desperately full of shit. They're really trying to convince themselves. Soon as they've decided to apprise you of these things, they've already lost the battle. So Peggy Noonan is a contrarian like Dick Cheney is a humanitarian.

Which brings us to our other big beef with Nooners' nonsense (in that column anyway). In the first section of the column, where she's getting her hate on for the Hillarybot and gushing about her lactating codpiece nourishing the troops he's consigned to his poor judgement, Noonan laments Hillary's "lifetime in politics". This is part and parcel of perhaps the most sickeningly patronizing and false Bushie cultist meme of all -- that Bush is just some sort of outsider come inta town ta fix what needs a-fixin'.

Give me a fuckin' break. Bush's first foray into politics was what, 1978? Just because he spent the '80s failing upwards in Daddy's "businesses" doesn't mean he hasn't been an inside man his entire adult life. This is fucking nonsense, and painfully contrived nonsense at that. Only a complete jackass seriously believes that George W. Bush is the Washington outsider he pretends to be.

Which explains a lot about his most devoted followers.

Obama Been Elidin'

I think Barack Obama means well. I believe his professions of faith are sincere. They do not strike me as brazenly cynical as the constant hectoring and nagging of various "family" organizations, or the usual gaggle of Republican politicians who use their public piety as currency.

That does not mean that Obama is right, or that it was even a point that needed to be made. Nor did it sound as if Obama had any real solution to propose.

Like most liberals who are religious, Obama finds a powerful demand for social justice embedded in the great faith traditions. He took a swipe at those who would repeal the estate tax, saying this entailed "a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don't need and weren't even asking for it."

Well, you can find principles for social justice within or without traditions of faith. I think there is a sort of quiet, maybe even unintentional arrogance, on the part of many people of faith, to presume that secular or agnostic/atheist folks are somehow bereft of what are really rather fundamental, universal moral principles.

And I don't know where he gets the idea that the people who would benefit from the repeal of the estate tax haven't been explicitly asking for it. Just because Bill Gates Sr. has voiced his opposition doesn't indicate a trend. There is no other reason for the prolonged life of the asinine "death tax" pseudo-debate, than because the elite class of people who rent politicians expect certain returns on their investment. It's a rather naïve rhetorical flourish on Obama's part.

But he insisted that social improvement also requires individual transformation. When a gang member "shoots indiscriminately into a crowd . . . there's a hole in that young man's heart -- a hole that the government alone cannot fix." Contraception can reduce teen pregnancy rates, but so can "faith and guidance" which "help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy."

Fine. But again, what Obama -- and really all the faith-based hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers on both sides of the aisle -- fail to see is that such personal, transcendent issues are specifically not the role of government. You want to set up a church group to counsel troubled teens in your neighborhood, then do it already. You want to try to guide others into your belief system, then go out and give it your best shot. Just don't expect everyone else, whether or not they agree with your personal take on the universe, to endorse it, institutionalize it, or pay for it. It's that simple.

Michelle Goldberg, whose book I would like to eventually read but probably won't for some time to come, lightly chastises Obama for reinforcing the myths Republicans have implanted about the godless left (when in fact a great many people on the left are religious, they just don't feel the need to rub everyone's nose in it), but I think misses the more important point as well.

He gets the spiritual void at the heart of American life, and the need for social movements to offer people meaning and existential solace along with practical policy solutions. "Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds -- dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets -- and they're coming to the realization that something is missing," he said. "They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them -- that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness."

Again, how and why is this somehow the role of a government or a political party? Fix the roads, regulate commerce and product quality, maintain the court system, defense capabilities, infrastructure, banking, etc. -- that's the role of government, as far as I'm concerned. I hate this touchy-feely "something is missing" shit that has nothing to do with running the country. Look, if you feel something's missing, go to church. Knock yourself out. What kind of a person turns to a politician, of all people, to feel better about themselves?

This is where it starts getting real thick:

When I was in Dover, PA during the intelligent design controversy, a preacher's wife told [me] that if evolution is true, life has no meaning. "Where's this universe heading?" she asked. "What's the purpose of it all? There's no standard, no guidelines."

Yes, and? Why is this relevant to anything? The objective implication of this woman's plaint is that the Dover court's role -- and by extension, the American government's role -- is to affirm her need for structure and purpose, for assurance in an indifferent, entropic universe. Government apparently is there to resolve the regular existential crises of believers.

Let's stipulate that these folks have come by their tragic misapprehensions of government's functionary role for a reason -- politicians have encouraged them to do so. In their need for structure and assurance, they bond themselves to a deity who scratches them behind the ears when they're good, scolds them and swats them across the nose when they're bad, sometimes does shit to them for no good reason at all, and dangles the promise of a better future after their earthly rehearsal. And they vote for their political leaders the same way.

Maybe I'm the one that's naïve here; maybe I'm just stubbornly refusing to recognize the cold hard political reality that politicians instinctively know. If so, that's a sad commentary on the state of the electorate, and maybe Mencken was right that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

But we never see nearly the level of energy expended on getting to the vast pool of non-voters, compared to the energy spent attempting to wheedle percentages of religious votes back and forth over various social issues and non-issues. Why is Barack Obama preaching to the choir; why isn't he trying to motivate people with voter registration rallies and events or something along that line?

It's not that Obama's speech doesn't have some worthwhile points; it does. But he and Goldberg miss the greater point that mainstream public figures seem reluctant to talk about, this double standard where the religious get to wedge their belief system into public policy, and then erect a wall around their pet beliefs to protect them from the supposed predations of godless bureaucrats. Instead of reminding the religious pharmacist that his beliefs do not entitle him to push his customers around, and deny adult women prescriptions for birth control, they would rather lecture everyone else on their intolerance for his, um, intolerance.

So instead of getting caught up once again in this tiresome feedback loop, this circle jerk of parsing the role of religion in American public life, how about we start from the other end, and determine what sort of things we want government to be responsible for? Shouldn't religion be a personal matter, and as such, shouldn't it be out of the government's purview?

Or is it that Americans really do need to affirmed and validated, that scratch behind the ears, rather than good, efficient, competent, honest government?

Got Milk?

At this point, it must simply be assumed that instead of an actual paycheck, Peggy Noonan is paid with vouchers for Black Velvet and Paxil.

Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could.

Um, yeahhhh. Holy fucking shit, do WSJ columnists not have editors or anything? Regardless, this one's worth its weight in gold, and it's going up on the header of this blog for a while. Mencken's taking a few months off; I want people chewing on Nooners' slab of insanity into election season. The Democrats oughta make that their fucking campaign slogan, just to gross people out.

But let's backtrack a tad and look at the context in which this grotesque image resides. Nooners is trying -- way, way too hard -- to ventriloquize Hillary Clinton's supposed complete and utter lack of basic human empathy. Apparently Nooners' chemical diet has given her, as with her superhero lactating preznit, special powers to see into the souls of others.

She doesn't have to prove she's a man, she has to prove she's a woman. No one in America thinks she's a woman. They think she's a tough little termagant in a pantsuit. They think she's something between an android and a female impersonator.

No one in America thinks Karen Hughes is a woman either, dearie, but that hasn't stopped her from gumming up the gears of mediocre governance.

[Hillary] is not perceived as a big warm mommy trying to resist her constant impulse to sneak you candy. They think she has to resist her constant impulse to hit you with a bat. She lacks a deep (as opposed to quick) warmth, a genuine and almost phenomenological sense of rightness in her own skin. She seems like someone who might calculatedly go to war, or not, based on how she wanted to be perceived and look and do.

Now, I am definitely no fan of Hillary, but Nooners is making some bizarre leaps of assertion here. She's overstating Clinton's calculated demeanor, and conflating it with Noonan's own peculiar assumptions of what a woman is or is not. No one sees Condi Rice as a "big warm mommy" either. That is orthogonal to whether she is skilled at what she does or not (mostly not).

Clinton's endless triangulations and petty machinations, to be sure, are tiresome, as those traits were in her husband. Neither of them ever met an issue they couldn't massage and finesse into something politically useful, as with Hillary's recent abject utilization of flag desecration. Instead of defining her philosophy to the Democratic base (in the broader sense) by espousing more libertarian principles, she cynically pimps symbolic issues to people who loathe her and will never vote for her.

This is all in the service of being seen as a "serious" candidate by "serious" media, and "serious" commentators who work within those media, such as Father Tim and Tweety and Wolf Blitzer.

And Peggy Noonan, house loon for the financial industry's house organ. And they say the blogs are unhinged.

Alpha Mosquitoes Of The Fever Swamp

In the shifting sands of the blogosphere, it's never a good idea to deal with or even discuss critics unless one has the time and energy for a protracted pissing contest. Eight-plus years in the trenches of various inane flame wars have taught me at least that much. Besides I've always believed in the old-school Hollywood cliché, that as long as they spell the name right it's all good.

But the other day I came across a prime example of how the other side thinks. Actually, they don't think per se, so much as react based upon (here we go with the jargon again) strategically placed memetic and heuristic filters. What I want to do is not respond to the critics so much as take a brief look at what is going on there, and look at some of the processes.

First of all, the post is one of (I assume) thousands clogging the hive-mind of the right's borg-blogs, excoriating John Murtha for supposedly renouncing the U.S. as a greater danger to world peace than Iran or North Korea. Here's how inept this particular post was -- it approvingly linked to an Editor & Publisher article where Ann Coulter conferred her tacit approval of fragging Murtha, then blockquoted an extended excerpt from an article quoting Murtha as saying what he supposedly said. But no link to the article whence came the excerpt, which looked to be pretty much the entire article anyway. So it's not only sloppy and slapdash in its execution (if not outright misleading), but someone should maybe tell this doofus about fair use and attribution.

Anyway, as most sentient bipeds have now been apprised, that original article has been rather extensively corrected:

"An article in Sunday's editions misinterpreted a comment from U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., at a town hall meeting in North Miami on Saturday. In his speech, Murtha said U.S. credibility was suffering because of continued U.S. military presence in Iraq , and the perception that the U.S. is an occupying force. Murtha was citing a recent poll, by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that indicates a greater percentage of people in 10 of 14 foreign countries consider the U.S. in Iraq a greater danger to world peace than any threats posed by Iran or North Korea."

Naturally, there has been no clarification or correction on the Bare Knuckle site, nor would any sensible person even bother asking, obviously. The propaganda goal has accomplished exactly what it was meant to; the lie ran halfway around the world before the truth had a chance to get its shoes on, as the saying goes. The machine requires regular feeding and manufactured outrage.

If you look in the comments section of the BK post, you'll see where one enterprising troglodyte excerpted one paragraph of one of my recent posts, with no comment or response to my point, nor even an explanation of what the excerpt had to do with their lame point about Murtha. Then, of course, the officers of the 82nd Chairborne whip out their Superman gravatars and go to town with the usual dippy epithets, yet none actually bother to counter much of anything with a cogent argument. Obviously I couldn't care less about tone or civility, but few things are more annoying than belligerent morons who not only refuse to defend their point, but are proudly defiant of their willful ignorance.

But what really gets me is this: the comments of the post start out with a fun little "contest" to pick a nickname for Murtha, such as "Jihad Jack". And that's just bullshit, pure and simple. The fact that they are unserious people, posturing and preening and pretending to be serious, is demonstrated by them putting their trust in a six-deferment pussy doughboy like Karl Rove, and shitting all over a man who volunteered for two wars as a Marine, and has served Congress honorably for decades, and in fact has a pretty conservative record.

And it's not as if Bush's glad-handing corner-turning boilerplate doesn't instantly evoke fond memories of Baghdad Bob. But the obvious parallels are lost on these guys, besotted as they are with their warporn and Coulter-groping.

Enough about these animals; they are preceded by their smell. A larger-scale problem is that of perception. Usually when you hear of a "mainstream" figure -- be they a politician or a media flunkie -- complain about the abusive, choleric nature of internet discourse, you can bet that the object(s) of their plaint are on the left side of the dial, as it were. Nobody on the right complains about Michelle Malkin, or Ann Coulter, or Michael Savage. Nobody on the right is disavowing the irredeemably intemperate (and generally inaccurate as well) nature of their commentary.

No, when you hear about the "fever swamp" or the crazy blogonistas, it's about the top-down command-and-control structure Kos operates from his impenetrable secret mountain fortress, or Atrios' angry -- no, unhinged -- posters. Moonbats, really. And we're hearing these critiques not just from the usual suspects on the other side, where it's to be expected. We hear it from the "moderate" tools who are trying ever so hard not just to tack to the middle or to the right, but to make sure that the actual righties see this cynical tack in that direction.

And that's not only galling, it's self-defeating. We're angry for some very good reasons, and we're the ones on your side, assholes. Trying to curry favor with people who quite literally want to destroy you (politically, if not yet physically) is such an abject exercise in futility, you can't help but marvel that they can't see that for themselves. And they have the goddamned nerve to use their own base -- the very people who are the most knowledgeable about the issues, and the most passionate and motivated to actually get off their asses and vote -- as rhetorical leverage, as political whipping boy.

This is exactly why, against my nature of listening to and even encouraging reasoned dissent, I dumped Marshall Wittman, aka Bullwinkle, off my blogroll months ago. I have no illusions that it was even on his radar; that's obviously not the point. I simply could not stomach any further cynical excursions into his weaselly little mind, where he saw fit to excoriate the "fever swamp" of the left every other fucking day, but never had a goddamned thing to say about the knuckle-draggers festering on the right, who pass around lies and half-truths until everyone's on the same page, who think it's funny to talk about fragging a Congressman, not to mention a veteran of two wars.

Bullwinkle had made it abundantly clear that he couldn't be trusted to delineate the clear difference between the angry left and the angry right. I have never seen anyone on the left openly advocate violence against any member of this administration, nor would I (or anyone else I can think of) endorse such a thing. We despise them, sure, but only to the extent that people get off their hind legs and go to the damned ballot box, get these ticks out of our hide once and for all, before we're drained.

Violence is not part of the equation, or the rhetoric, yet it is part and parcel on the right. "Jokingly", of course. Because nothing says "teh funny" like Ann Coulter opining that Tim McVeigh should have blown up the New York Times building, as if it weren't in Times Square. I know I'm splitting a side at such a notion. That anorexic cunt should go on the road with Larry the Cable Guy -- and stay there.

There are such massive qualitative differences between the two sides, many of which get discussed and, in a sense, peer-reviewed by commenters and fellow bloggers (and ultimately approved by King Kos, of course) that it is flat-out irresponsible for someone not explicitly of the right to just throw out blanket condemnations of "the left". Bullwinkle and the rest of the Shrum/DLC jagoffs need to get some shit straight, that their opaque disavowals do nothing for them. They are obsessed with shaving a point here or there from erstwhile Chimpco supporters who apparently have some buyer's remorse or something.

I say fuck 'em, those swing demos. They should watch and read as many news sources as they have time for; if they still can't figure out for themselves that this gang has royally fucked up pretty much everything they've touched, and has no plan to fix any of it except to politicize and distract, then what the hell can Bullwinkle or I or anyone else say to convince them? Either they pull their heads out of their asses or they don't; dumping on the people who have been paying attention all along is massively counterproductive.

Erections In Baggage

[Or: Embarrassingly Insignificant Boners; Ejaculates In Bonobos, etc.


And here I used to think that Rash Limpballs' EIB network stood for "Enemas In Broadcasting" or "Empty In Brain". It's somewhat hinky that righty radio's chief gastropod supposedly has his doctor write him off-name scrips to protect his anonymity. That alone is a story that smells at least as bad as Rush's anal cyst.

No, the real question is why the Dominican Republic? Who the fuck vacations on the benighted island of Hispaniola, especially an extremely wealthy guy like Limpballs, who can easily afford a nice getaway on the secluded side of St. Bart's?

No, the Dominican Republic is mostly known for seedy, ugly things like money laundering, drug trafficking, and sex tourism. And talented baseball players, but if Rush is secretly scouting for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, then why the secrecy, and why the boner pills?

And why have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert steered completely clear of this? That may be the weirdest part of all.

Regardless, it should be noted that the fat fuck didn't miss a beat; he returned to his stupid dog-and-pony show joking how he'd dipped into the blue M&M's at the Clinton Library. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but it had the whiff of desperation, as if he realized in the back of his oxy-addled lizard brain that his mouth-breathing fans, while clearly stupid beyond redemption, might still remotely start understanding just how badly they've been played all these years.

Fortunately for Limbaugh, they'll forget all about this once the next outrage is contrived and packaged for them, with Limbaugh even unwrapping it for them and wiping their asses while he's at it. Can't say he doesn't earn his pelf to at least some extent.

Cheap Shot Of The Week

Separated at birth:

Abramoff money-laundering sidekick Amy Ridenour


Animated sitcom protagonist Peter Griffin


You be the judge.

[Ridenour photo swiped from Roger Ailes.]

They Don't Call It ClownHall For Nothing

It's around 110º in these parts all weekend, and serendipitously enough, I just finished up another couple classes, and I'm broke, per usual. This all translates into another fun-filled spelunk into the intellectual cave of ClownHall. Let's just pick three at random to peruse.

First we have the wit and wisdom of one Carey Roberts, whose picture can't possibly do him justice, unless he meant to look like Ed Gein. Roberts tackles one of the more pressing concerns of our nation and its God-bothering (uh, I mean God-fearing) inhabitants -- what we in the proverbial 'hood refer to as biznitches an' hos.

If you happened to take in a Yankees game last week, you probably saw the message flashing on the stadium’s giant screen: “Until the Violence Stops: NYC.” Next Tuesday you can trot over to Prospect Park and “Run Until the Violence Stops.” And the colorful posters dotting the subways constantly remind us to “make New York City the safest place on the earth for girls and women.”

What’s going on? An invasion of the New Jersey purse-snatchers?

Well, if you haven’t heard, Eve Ensler, that nice lady who brought us The Vagina Monologues, decided it wasn’t enough to get college girls to ritualistically chant that three-syllable word that starts with a ‘V.’ “When I started this 10 years ago, no one said the word ‘vagina,’” Ensler notes with satisfaction. “Something has shifted in people.”

Now there’s an accomplishment to put on your resumé.

"Vagina" has always seemed a bit clinical to me too, but I suppose something called The Bearded Clam Monologues might not be quite as popular (except, of course, with me). But I'm seriously unclear as to exactly what the problem is here, and I'm not exactly Phil Donahue. Awareness of domestic violence, and resolving not to put up with it anymore. Growing up about references to naughty bits. What's the crisis, Chief?

Any way you cut it, VDAY is beyond absurd. Men are four times more likely to be homicide victims than women. And the latest research shows women, not men, are more likely to engage in domestic violence.

Of course, if a couple gets into a mix-up the lady is more likely to get hurt. But can we expect men to tolerate the abuse forever, especially when the domestic violence hotlines treat men who call for help like perps trying to game the system?

He actually has a very small point here -- domestic violence is sometimes a two-way street. But nowhere near always. And does it really need to be pointed out that there are very good reasons why law enforcement have to make snap decisions often predicated on bias against the man? It's not just the obvious physical discrepancy, but the mental and attitudinal differences. Men stalk, men terrorize, men threaten children and kill family pets. Women very very rarely do any of those things, and when the abuse is mutual, cops catch on pretty quickly. They are aware of the psychological gamesmanship and enabling that goes on in abusive relationships.

And you know what, guys? If the crazy bitch is faking it, then get the fuck out already and get a restraining order. That's how it works, and that's another reason why cops don't usually buy that argument -- because it's bullshit more often than not.

After all, in the feminist worldview violence is not just being punched, kicked or shoved. To the luna-chicks, careless facial gestures and inconsiderate name-calling are all proof of the epidemic of violence that those strong, invincible women must endure.

And then there’s the rampant garden-variety caterwauling—shameful!

We know that caring, emotive women are far more likely to make facial gestures than those unfeeling, stoic men. So when the Goofball Girls talk about violence against women they’re really referring to those villainous ladies who cast grimacing looks.

No shit. Remember the good old days when you could get liquored up at the block party, look down your neighbor's wife's cleavage, and say "cunt" just for comedic effect? I mean, what the fuck, people?

Does this guy actually have a wife or daughter, a sister perhaps? I assume he has a mother, but there may be some issues there. Subscriptions, even.

This part is just fuckin' priceless:

This is not the first time in recorded history of an outbreak of mass hysteria. The Salem witch-hunts. The recreational lynchings of black men. McCarthyism. The Vietnam War demonstrations.

But there is something especially frightening about the contemporary outpouring of feminist angst. Because as the recipient of billions of dollars in government largesse the domestic violence crusade carries the imprimatur of political legitimacy.

I'm not sure who taught this old fool how to lard his prose with fifty-cent distraction words like "imprimatur", but it ain't workin', Cletus. I'm sure the only reason the Holocaust wasn't somewhere in that hysteria laundry list is because of judicious editing. There is hyperbole, and there is utter stupidity, and the latter is the blunt implement accidentally utilized by those unqualified to wield the former. This is not a witch-hunt, nor is it an effort to lynch innocent men. This is clearly a campaign to help women who have been isolated and terrorized by psychopathic boyfriends or husbands, to let them know that, contrary to what their abuser tells them, they can turn to someone.

I have no idea why this asshole thought such a thing would be comedic fodder for the voices in his head.

Even the titans of industry have begun to smile on VDAY. The Rockefeller Foundation kicked in $500,000 for the New York City program. I wonder what John D. would have to say about dissipating his oil fortune on a high-estrogen rant?

Verizon was another VDAY Sugar Daddy. And the Avon Foundation coughed up profits from sales of beauty products. Mascara to cover up the bruises—get it?

No, I don't get it. I don't know from makeup, but I thought mascara was that shit women put on their eyelashes. According to his byline, Roberts fancies himself as something of a prober and lampooner of current events. Take your pick as to whether that was probing or lampooning. Smells like one-handed butter-churning to me.

---

Next is young Nathanael Blake, whose countenance strongly suggests that a well-timed piece of ass would change his whole outlook on things. It's just a hunch. Note to all professional virgins out there (this means you, Ben Shapiro) -- when done correctly, sex relieves tension. Even more than praying endlessly and asserting your moral superiority. This is one key reason for the popularity of sex throughout the ages.

It's even more fun when another person is involved.

Anyway, let's see what Blake has chosen to opine about.

Several weekends ago, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece by a woman who blames the Bush administration for her abortion. She wrote that it gave her, “practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.”

The story is simple enough. She’s a career woman approaching middle age, and one night she and her husband neglected to use contraception. The next morning, she tried to get a prescription for Plan B, an emergency contraceptive that kills the embryo by preventing its implantation in the uterus. After her doctor and her internist refused (as was their right) to write her a prescription, she gave up and trusted to luck, which failed. She then got pregnant, got an abortion, and blamed it on the government that kept Plan B from becoming an over-the-counter drug.

Note the buzzwords "career woman" (translation: uppity cunt who thinks she's soooo fuckin' smart. Like Hillary.) and "neglected". I'll give the kid credit -- he's actually a better writer than Roberts, and I think part of it is because he's a little more passionate and a little less condescending about the subject.

Doesn't make him right. He's clearly trying to set this woman up as a heartless, careless shrew who just wants her fornicatin' pleasure, even if it costs a precious life. And that doesn't appear to be the case, if one actually reads Dana L.'s opinion piece (though the piece itself is perhaps a tad hyperbolic and self-serving as well).

But let's get right down to it -- Dana admits that she neglected to put in her diaphragm because she and her husband were in the throes of passion, and didn't want to kill the moment. She sounds a little harried; maybe the career is a ball-buster, maybe there's regret over lack of quality time, but the job is what it is and the mortgage still needs paying. Don't see too many "family values" whores going that extra mile to figure out just how the fuck working families are supposed to keep a parent home for the kids' sake and still put food on the table, with prices outpacing wages every fucking year. Nope, much easier to point the finger than crunch the numbers. Maybe they're praying on it, which is working out just superbly.

And Dana also attests to the fact that her cholesterol medication is Category X, specifically not to be taken by pregnant women. This was not a simple case of a ballbusting career shrew wanting to eliminate a speed bump to her dreams or suburban corporate smilf life, no matter how much Blake would like to disingenuously phrase it. Dana sounds a bit sadder and wiser about the whole thing; perhaps hubby can go down to the Planned Parenthood clinic and get snipped. Then there's no worry about diaphragms or emergency contraceptives or any of that.

But in the meantime,there is simply no goddamned reason Dana's doctor couldn't just prescribe the Plan B for her and let her make her own informed choice, terminating what was at that point a zygote. Now she has to live with knowing what she's done, simply because a small cadre of self-righteous assholes have decided that they get to impose their particular brand of morality on everyone else. That is what all this boils down to, and I kinda hope that sometime soon Blake decides to forgo the condom because it just feels too good to stop, and a couple months later he and whatever farm animal was dumb enough to fuck him have to Make A Choice. Perhaps he will want the child, but she doesn't know if she wants to spend the rest of her life raising yard demons for a sanctimonious fool she may or may not want to stay with. It happens, and again, the basic premise that these moralists keep conveniently overlooking is that we ascribe a certain amount of decision-making power to adults.

Don't get me wrong, abortion is certainly not a choice I would ever lightly endorse, but since I have a (freakishly large) penis, it's not really my decision to make, is it? More importantly, it's not a decision for me to legislate for millions of women whom I will never meet or know, who would be forced to live with the consequences of others' self-aggrandizing moralism.

I think it really boils down to women not only having sex, but having the nerve to enjoy it. One of my favorite Menckenisms (other than the one that graces the header) is the definition of a Puritan as someone who is petrified that somewhere out there, someone is having a good time. I think that goes a long way to informing the self-indulgent hysterics of these so-called conservatives, who are really just a bunch of nattering Gladys Kravitzes who just can't leave other people alone.

---

Our final victim is none other than William F. Buckley, whom I have always fondly called "Fuckhead" for short. (Maybe the "F" stands for "Francis". Who knows? Who cares?)

Fuckhead decides to pull his gob out his eighth vodka martini to weigh in on one of the most pressing issues of the year 2000: Is George W. Bush too much of a stammering retard to entrust the most important job in the world to?

If your assignment was to write an essay on the stupidity of President Bush, you could start in with some confidence. The reason for this is that George W. Bush hasn't any flair for the spoken word, so that you can take specimens of this weakness and deduce, for your composition on G.W. Bush, that he is stupid.

Someone could point out to Fuckhead that Bush is demonstrably stupid without ever venturing into his stubbed-toe oratory. Someone could also just run into town and grab another bottle of Skovar, there's a good lad.

9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Social Security, Iraq, Medicare, North Korea, Iran, Iraq. That's quite a list of accomplishments, n'est-ce pas? (For you ClownHallers, that be Fronch.) Seriously, any cursory examination of the man's life pre-politics, and what he's done since stealing Florida in 2000, does not exactly make the argument for him having even moderately good judgment, or any particular acumen. He famously brags about how he makes all of his decisions from his gut, to the point where he botches decisions on Middle East peacekeeping simply because he literally doesn't know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. How fucking smart is that?

On the matter of the president's uttering sentences that are garbled, Weisberg can't be argued with. But a difficulty with language can be attributed to many public figures, paradoxically, even to such as have proven skills. The young Dwight David Eisenhower, for instance, actually wrote military manuals when he served under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was a fussy overseer and a guardian of holy prose. And of course we know that en route to the White House, Ike served as president of Columbia University.

But it remains true that some of Ike's improvised spoken language was as impenetrable as the Rosetta stone. After his answer to the question, What would he do if the Soviet Union again laid siege on Berlin? someone made a wisecrack to the effect that resourceful Soviet cryptographers would have given Khrushchev absolutely contradictory accounts of what President Eisenhower threatened.

Well, perhaps MacArthur provided Eisenhower with the sort of discipline and attention to detail needed to overcome the inability to volubly extemporize, as Fuckhead might phrase it. But no matter. Ike's record pre-Presidency speaks for itself, as does Dubya's. Dubya would have pissed his pants in any engagement of WW2, and he sure as hell wouldn't have made it anywhere near an Ivy League school without his last name.

As for this Eisenhower speech Fuckhead refers to, a link would be helpful, but let me hazard a guess and offer that the times called for a bit of rhetorical ambiguity, that one had to find a way to make it clear that war and nuclear annihilation were certainly undesirable, yet still possible given adequate provocation.

Now, if after three years of prosecuting a disastrous pre-emptive war that the rest of the world had warned him against, he still had to sneak in the back door of the occupied nation to spew the exact same horseshit that has no bearing or basis on empirical reality, that victory once again was just around yet another imaginary corner, then yeah, I'd have to say that Ike was stupid as well.

Weisberg reproduces a few sentences from Bush that establish the claim of verbal clumsiness. But Weisberg won't settle for that. His thesis is that Bush is incompetent to think and speak, and that he elected to settle with that incompetence because of laziness, since thinking consumes intellectual calories.

Now there is a problem here, and Weisberg ignores it. It is that Bush has confronted in public contests nimble opponents. You would not do combat with the waspish Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, if you could help it. Ms. Richards is one of the sharpest tongues in town (it was she who said that the senior Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth). Bush not only survived the encounter, he defeated the wasp.

George Bush met in public debate Al Gore, an experienced debater, and walked away with immunity, as he would do four years later in his encounters with John Kerry.

First of all, Weisberg has compiled several books of Bushisms over the past several years. This is not exactly a new or isolated innovation. It's curious, to say the very least, that a man who has attended both Harvard and Yale, been in and around politics his entire life, had everything handed to him, is still apparently completely unable to speak or think extemporaneously, even after five years in the White House. It bespeaks much more than the mere temptation to call the guy a schmuck and leave it at that. It tells you how he functions, it tells you how he thinks, it tells you everything you need to know about how and what he prioritizes, which is sort of important when you're The Decider.

I don't know enough about Texas politics to know how Bush managed to beat Ann Richards (and I'm not going to bleg the issue because it's of tertiary importance), but I'm sure it had very little to do with his debate performance. Money and smear campaigns are how he and his posse have always rolled, why would Texas have been any different? As for Gore and Kerry, they were their own worst enemies, uncomfortable and wooden, alternately pompous and faux-self-deprecating, trying way too fucking hard and it showed.

None of that shows the most important aspect though -- that in each of the debates, the lesser candidate won. I'm the last guy to stick up for Gore, but he would have been light-years better than this clown. Kerry, ditto. Awkwardness was no reason to not vote for those guys, except in America, where politics is a job where qualifications are inversely proportional to electability. Americans apparently just want to vote for someone who will scratch them behind the ears and indulge their more petulant characteristics, which is where the serious thinkers at ClownHall come in.