Cakeholes

CHRIS Christie is not a nationally-elected official, an oversight on the part of God and Republican primary voters, many of whom take their marching from God's Own Crystal Set. Peter King is a locally-elected terrorist sympathizer who does have national responsibilities, due to the short-sightedness of the Founding Fathers and whatever's in the water in Amityville.

They are, presumably, grown and educated men, and as such, presumably, are familiar with such concepts as similitude, disaster, and compassion. It should not take until Christie's fiftieth birthday and the distinct aroma of his own lard roasting for him to come to terms with the idea of society rescuing its citizens in need, the same way it should not have taken Randian Superbrain Mitch Daniels sixty-two years to decide just which side of anti-trades-union legislation he was on (nor, even, the five years it took him to realize he'd changed his mind).

As for King, well, fuck him.

Faced with such circumstances we can decide on one of two explanations: either the conversion took place legitimately, in which case you have someone who' been completely oblivious at the top of his lungs for most of his adult life, and who still collects public funds. Or it's bullshit.

Oh, I know, I'm supposed to cut Christie some slack because he snapped at Fox and Friends.As far as I'm concerned that's like giving the Good Driver Award to everyone who stops at a red light.

Listen, shuttling Sandy relief onto the next Congress wasn't even the wingnuttiest thing Boehner had to do that day. That's your party. Those are your people. And while they may be clinically certifiable en masse they are not, that's N-O-T, doing anything outside the GOP norm.

I'll take my Boehner schadenfreude steaming, thank you. You eat the shit that's on your plate.

And, Governor? If someone living on the seacoast deserves immediate government attention after a hurricane, what of a child born into poverty in Mississippi? What of someone too ill or weak to be a cog in someone else's profit machine? How bout the sick or the elderly? They don't have special circumstances requiring assistance; they have everyday circumstances requiring assistance. Which should be provided them--and should continue to be provided them, in perpetuity--by their fellow citizens. Despite your party. And it shouldn't have taken you this long to realize it.

Hey Tony! How 'Bout Resigning From The House So You Can Spend More Time In Junior High?

Jack Shafer, "Anthony Weiner's Semantic Satiation". June 6

FIRST, The Odd Confluence of Military History and Poor Marksmanship, As Performed By the Inmates of Slate Under the Direction of Jack Shafer: Officialdom has been deflecting criticism of itself by accepting full responsibility at least since the time God owned up that Mistakes Were Made in the Garden of Eden, and went ahead and punished Eve anyway. This was not something Mickey Kaus discovered in the wake of Waco. Mickey Kaus has never discovered anything, except how to make an inexplicable living. You would think that absolving yourself by blaming yourself would seem the most natural thing in the world to someone who writes for Slate.

I'm less judgmental about the "sin" that Weiner confessed to this afternoon, of sexting his junk or his chest shots to six women over three years. If you're as old as Weiner (46) and have never done something naughty but still legal, you're probably immune to the power of human desire, have no sense of fantasy, and have been living in a locked veal cage in a convent basement. You don't have to be a libertine to not care about a politician's kinks, as long as those kinks don't get in the way of his job.

Hey, I'd be the last guy to tell you that utter weirdness can't cold-cock (sorry) a man in his Forties, but look: if we're gonna criticize Weiner's pro-forma behavior, both the denials and the Oh Shit I'm Stuck apology, then let's throw in this reaction for good measure. No, it is not fucking understandable. The moment Representative Anthony Weiner could not say "with certitude" whether a cellphone snapshot of someone's underwear was his or not we were done.

Look: it's beyond time to acknowledge that we in the West couldn't deal with the 19th century, let alone face the 20th, and that over the past thirty years or so we've descended into a bunch of children playing in a mud puddle. We already know about human sexuality, Jack. We have at least since Krafft-Ebing. What David Vitter does in private is between him, his hookers, and his pediatrician. We know that. If David Vitter, or Larry Craig, finds a little sexual joy in this lifetime they're probably in the top 50th percentile, and more power to 'em. They're hypocrites, of course, and worthy of our opprobrium for that, and lots else. But we're got the "human sexuality is weirder than Oprah might allow" bit.

But it is about the act here, or at least the context: Sexting? Really? Twitter sex? At 46? I begrudge no man his Kink, but that doesn't mean I renounce all right to consider it. Sending snapshots of your coyly-concealed junk to anonymous accounts isn't sex. It's digital obscene phone calling, virtual heavy breathing. I'd'a defended him for being discovered with a harem of oiled-up cabaña boys; behaving like a fourteen-year-old girl is something else entirely. Pace Congressman Weiner, Congressman Weiner needs a long vacation. And not on the taxpayer's dime.

Dave, Obsequies Are Supposed To Contain An Infusion Of Poppy, Not A Hot Shot Of Heroin

David Brooks, "A Most Valuable Democrat". January 20

LEAVE us begin with Brendan's mention of Brooks' howler, here, since I saw it before I got around to reading the column:

Lieberman played an important role in saving Bill Clinton from impeachment. As momentum for impeachment was growing, Lieberman gave a crucial speech on the Senate floor that scolded Clinton for his behavior but resolutely opposed removing him from office.

Now, I like to think that I'm not altogether unreasonable, and that it's the circumstances of our politics since 1946 which are at least partly responsible for my habitual irascibility. It's likely that the vast majority of Americans could confuse "impeachment" with "conviction by the Senate". It's not a hanging offense, even for someone with a kiosk on the Times' Op-Ed pages. But then Brooks uses it twice, and the second time should have reminded him. I suspect that thoughts of Bill Clinton's impeachment are to Brooks what thoughts of Uschi Obermaier were to my fifteen-year-old self. Let's step over the sticky spot on the floor and move on.

But not far; even correcting for the junior-high civics mistake, Brooks is full of it. Conviction by the Senate was already a dead letter before the House began selecting the most blatant public hypocrites it could find for its Management Team. The only thing Holy Joe's speech did was give aid and comfort to Congressional Republicans who were looking for a place to hide. Which, no doubt, is why it's remembered so fondly, if fuzzily, by Mr. Brooks.

Okay, it did one other thing: it made Lieberman a national figure, in the stick-figure cartoon fashion which is most effective: he's Moral! He's Religious! He Takes A Stand!

We have a regular theme around here, which runs something like this: When do you have to stop pretending this shit is a brave, insightful, hard-headed response to the Intractable Power of Washington, and start admitting that it's the way we've done business for forty years now, and a big reason why we're so Fucked? As in, when does School Reform admit we've been "reforming" public schools since Back to Basics became the first movement to piggyback on the racism and anti-fluoridationism of the Fifties? When does the Republican party--which managed to tie up the signature legislation of a popular President despite a fillibuster-proof Senate--have to stop playing Outsider? When does Reaganism get the blame for the greased-rail economic roller coaster ride that followed, or incontinent tax-cutting for the wealthy face the unemployment rate?

And when does the notion of the Pore Forlorn Centrist Democrat Beset By the Ravening Leftist Mob get laughed out of court?

These policy makers are judging Lieberman by the criteria Max Weber called the “ethic of responsibility” — who will produce the best consequences. Some of the activists are judging him by what Weber called an “ethic of intention” — who has the purest and most uncompromising heart.

Okay, first: this construction has officially done whatever memes do to indicate the completion of a slide into risible self-parody now that Jump the Shark has Jumped the Shark. Second, it ain't as though this doesn't happen on the Right with considerably less provocation: they're still barking at Dick Fucking Lugar here because he voted for Sotomayor, and Mr. Brooks himself is the object of scorn from his party's "purists", which hasn't exactly derailed his career.

But mostly there's this:

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Forty-two Democratic senators voted to let Lieberman keep his chairmanship. Thirteen voted against.

As Ezra Klein of The Washington Post noted recently, this turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions Obama and Reid made. If Lieberman had not been welcomed back by the Democrats, there might not have been a 60th vote for health care reform, and it would have failed.

Which seems to suggest, for starters, that Lieberman's vaunted, fearless, call-'em-as-I-see-'em 90% liberal independence is dependent on what's in it for him.

But of course that's not the case (or, rather, it's not the explanation); what Democrats got in return for having placated the inexplicably-reelected Lieberman was one more Cloakroom sneak thief who helped derail Single Payer for the sake of insurance companies. Funny how Holy Joe's liberal moral conscience coincided with that.

And funny, also, how it dragged the process into a second year, demanded more complexity, and handed the defenders of corporate interests narrowly defined enough cobblestones to break every window in the joint. Only I'm not laughing. If Biden, Reid, and Kerry really imagine this is responsible action, and aren't just saying nice things at Lieberman's stagy pre-funeral, then they're bigger idiots than I imagine. And I didn't imagine they could be.

Let's can the shit. It's real easy to praise the compromisers, quislings, and principled double-dealers of the other party. Especially when your own can be counted on to march in lockstep toward your abiding, single-issue concern with a marginal tax rate of zero for the Elect. If the Democratic party really was run by its activists, those pie-in-the-sky, never satisfied, politically benighted bloggers, there wouldn't have been any negotiations over Joe Lieberman's chairmanships. Because he'd have been on his ass in 2006.

For fuck's sake, Mr. Brooks: people on the Left in this country get more pushback on their ideas in the average week than you've had since you first touched Milton Friedman's hem. Don't tell me about consequences; I've watched the consequences of Democratic appeasement since 1972. I'd just like to try something different, for once, not only because we're right, but just to see what it might feel like.

There’s a theory going around that Lieberman was embittered by the trauma of 2006 when Democratic primary voters in Connecticut defeated him because of his support for the Iraq war. There’s little evidence to validate this.

I think it's more that the evidence is confused; Lieberman was already so embittered by the WTF reaction to Gore nominating him for Veep, and the subsequent, wholly accurate criticism of his pathetic performance on the campaign trail, that you can't really figure out which footprints belong to which episode.

Lieberman has always sat crossways between the two parties and has often served as a convenient bridge, infuriating Democrats, but then serving the party’s interests at important moments.

For cryin' out loud. Fucking Senate Democrats have more bridges to the other side than Königsberg does.

But This Time, Baby, I Mean It

SO the President wants me--at least in so far as "Liberal" now means "anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman" in addition to its standard pejorative sense--to consider the alternatives.

Short answer: I wish there were some.

Slightly longer answer: So, it's come down to Who I Want Chairing The House Committee on Phone Answering at 3 AM? I wish Irony could have lived to see this.

Still longer answer, with implied "Motherfucker": It's what I've been doing since 1972, and, if I were four years older, since '68. I've been forced to find ways of surviving eight years of Nixon, eight years (plus reverb) of Reagan, and eight years of Bush II for the Inherent Promise of a moderate Democrat, another moderate Democrat, and you. What? Oh, this one's about Congress? Well, that's different, then. It's much worse.

The Democrats in Congress ran for the hills as soon as the last effective Democratic President, for Good or Ill--Lyndon Baines Johnson--ramrodded Civil Rights and Great Society legislation. It found enough courage, eventually, to mount a challenge to Vietnam, and impeach a criminal President. It seemed to totter for a brief moment in early 1981, considering whether to actually oppose Reagan or jump in and grab some personal profits before the Looting of America train left the station. Guess which one it chose?

Oh, right, I'm sorry; St. Ronnie's ideas were just go gawrsh-darn popular they couldn't be resisted. Because he was such an admirable communicator. Really sold us on the Grand Old Traditions of North American corporate privateering, Latin American death squads, and the Bottomless Cup O' Defense Contracting. That's why we haven't heard a peep from the Democrats in Congress for the last thirty years: Reagan's way with a quip.

That's why so many House Democrats, and a third of the Senate Caucus, lined up behind the Bush Tax Cuts even though he'd stolen the Pulpit it was delivered from just six months before. That's why they got maneuvered into voting Bush carte blanche in Iraq right before his first midterm election, on the grounds that otherwise they'd appear (Even) Weak(er) on Defense and Objectively Pro-Rape Room.

How'd that one work out? Not so bad for you; since you weren't there you got to use a streetcorner soapbox speech you'd made as your anti-Iraq War bona fides. Which convinced people, somehow, despite your record of voting for every Iraq War funding measure that crossed your desk; mind you, I'm not saying Democratic voters are blameless. But then, we're talking about Congress, right? So let's just recall the track record: Outmaneuvered, Cowed, Trounced in the Mid-terms Anyway. Given fresh majorities in 2006 ("Because the alternative was so much worse"), they put Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge and proceeded, shockingly, to accomplish nothing. In 2009, with a man in the White House who'd pledged his support for Single Payer, they proceed to dick around to make sure the insurance companies and pharmaceutical privateers had enough time to weigh in, before managing to eke out a victory for Water Added Ham, Sometime in the Near Future, So Long As That's Okay with Everybody. Because it was that or look like a bunch of Unprincipled Do-Nothings about to be clobbered in the midterms.

You stood on the sidelines, sir. Saving your legendary oratorical skills for a month before the midterms, evidently.

I'm sorry, but Just how is it you implied motherfuckers don't get it? Why couldn't you come out and say "It's not Liberal vs. Conservative. It's not Big Tax and Big Spend. It's about Common Fucking Sense vs. Being Lied To and Robbed Blind for the sake of Corporate Profits."? There never was such an opportunity, at least not since Franklin Roosevelt. And he took his. His picture's on the dime. Yours is on a thousand Joker and Bone-through-the-nose placards.

I can somewhat forgive the Clinton administration for being blindsided on national healthcare (though for failing to respond once it happened, not so much). You guys, on the other hand, had that history, plus fifteen years of skyrocketing costs and fifteen years of rapidly descending levels of care on your side. You had an election which offered a generational realignment of the political scene as grounds for making things happen. You're a fifty-year-old man with thirty years of 100% Guano Republican Insanity in your adult lifetime (which had followed fifteen years of Goldwater and Nixon) and you thought these guys could be reasoned with. Even after they pointedly and unanimously kicked you in the teeth just after the Inauguration. In the midst of a fucking national disaster. You're a bright man with a first-rate education; you've been outsmarted by John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Sarah Palin, who don't combine to make a triple-digit IQ.

So now you think I should ride to the rescue, because they're so awful. And here's the thing: I'll be voting next month. I'll be enthusiastically pulling the level for the only African-American Muslim in the Congress, and the only Indiana representative who had the balls, and the safe district, to come out in favor of real health care reform. I'll be reluctantly voting for Blue Dog Brad Ellsworth to take Blue Dog Evan Bayh's seat (nothing you or anyone else could possibly have said would have gotten me to vote for that Time Bandit again), the way Ellsworth reluctantly voted for health care at the eleventh hour, and refuses to defend it in the face of his opponent's well-lubricated attacks. In a state you carried, historically, just twenty-three months ago. Call it force of habit; it's sure not loyalty to the cause. That I'll exhibit after the cause shows some loyalty to me. Hopeyness springs eternal.

And it sure as hell ain't Battered Spouse Syndrome, bub. I cringe when Republicans speak because of the shit they say. I'm not afraid of 'em, because I've seen the worst they can do. Repeatedly. And even if I were, I wouldn't run to a Democrat for protection.

But The View's Nice

Ruth Marcus, "Tom Vilsack's classy apology". July 21

YET another example, where none was needed, that anyone using the term "classy" couldn't get within twenty-five yards of actual class.

I’ve got a pre-existing soft spot for Tom Vilsack,

Sure. He's the ginchiest US Secretary of Agriculture since Clayton Yeutter.

but I thought that was a model apology to the un-fired Shirley Sherrod.

Lemme just ask here if anyone knows exactly when Fucking Life Itself was knocked permanently off its axis.

It was a model of settling on a story and sticking with it. It's not like we needed another.

Y'know, I endured--just barely--eight years of the Reagan administration, and 300-some-odd million of us are enduring the results, and back then no one could get over just how well Ol' Dutch communicated. Of course, he never did an apologizing, and "no one" meant the lapdogs of the Washington press; the Wonder of it All required that you ignore what he was actually saying, and it had to be edited for clarity by someone with a pre-existing soft spot for American Imperialism. So, pass, thanks. It's tough enough finding substance these days, let alone insisting on it.

Apologizing is hard for all of us

Well, BP's been apologizing all fucking summer. David Vitter apologized to Rachael Maddow last week. Joe Wilson apologized. Seems to me apologizin's a piece of cake compared to doing your job correctly and resisting the urge to pop off at any provocation.

If I'd been the one fired from my job by a guy who couldn't be bothered to do his, if my penalty (for doing nothing except be attacked by racists) was loss of my income and a public branding, and his was standing in front of a group of reporters for ten minutes demonstrating his magnanimity, and the apology was being delivered to me, personally, then maybe, maybe his ability to appear sincere would be important to me.

But I'm just a schlub, and Tom Vilsack is the guy Barack Obama tabbed to run the Department of Agriculture. And in that capacity he fired a poor underling simply because she was being targeted by racist assholes like Andrew Breitbart and the racist assholes at FOX. He didn't even bother to look--that's the fucking crux of his wonderful apology--and, of course, he's too important to've spoken to Shirley Sherrod himself, or to've opened her personnel file. So for me apology doesn't cut it, no matter how classy.

That's not to say I don't think he was sincere, or that I don't think he's a good man. It's to say that if you're going to make snap decisions based solely on political considerations you're responsible both for the failure to be diligent and the politics. I didn't really hear much about that part of it at that presser. He's a professional politician. Thousands of rank amateurs in this county heard "released by Andrew Breitbart" or "wall-to-wall on FOX News" and knew immediately that the overwhelming odds were the thing was a sack of shit. He was handed a transcript, of an edited video, and dove in headfirst. If he's held to the same standard as lowly employees, he shouldn't apologize, he should resign (and let the President decide whether to accept). Of course he's not held to the same standard; he's a big shot. They don't resign for mistakes unless doing so is part of the plea bargain. But if he takes "full responsibility" then whomever handed him the transcript and didn't say, "This piece of shit from Breitbart is all over that piece of shit FOX" should be gone. And he ought to be apologizing to everyone who votes Democratic. Compare the Bush/Cheney administration, which didn't even apologize for putting Pentacostal yearlings in charge at Justice, and which, lest we ever forget, got the people it shot in the face to do the apologizing.

How this happened is between Vilsack and Ms Sherrod. Why it happened in the first place is something I'd like to have explained. Y'know, before we all "move forward".

Endlessly Repeated Idiocy. And Such Small Portions!

FIRST: one thousand apologies to Jaye Ramsey Sutter for any deleterious immune-system effects from the Pickle Men pic, and Best Wishes for a speedy recovery. I know in my own (still throbbing) lymph glands that it's cold comfort, but the one I was going to use was worse.

This reminded me of the local teevee news Homespun Hoosier Humorist and Whacky and/or Heartwarming Feature Story Narration Sinecure who used to
do restaurant reviews--this is the retired Homespun Hoosier Humorist, from the 70s, not the current guy who used to take his dog along with him as substitute for being even remotely interesting, and who was just seen yesterday encouraging some sixty-something perpetual adolescent to drive up and down his driveway at 8:30 AM of a quiet suburban Sunday in a homemade car which was apparently powered by some combination of late-50s NOVI racing engine and one or more decommissioned naval guns--where was I? Oh, who used to do restaurant reviews, which he sorta landed on after a decade of filling dead air as a sort of local Art Buchwald minus the wit, the political savvy, and the delivery. And every last fucking restaurant got ten stars, or whatever it was. Never varied. I think they might have dispensed with the star system after a while, but not out of any sense of embarrassment, just in the way the Town Slut eventually moves away and gets married. And sometime later he gave an interview in which he explained that very early on in his reviewing career he'd given some beanery or other a mediocre review, and they reported that it hurt their business, so he felt bad and always gave glowing reviews after that.

And he said this as though it were the most understandable thing in the world, and as though the moral of the story was he'd just not quite understood the power of television in his previous decade sopping up the perks of local celebrity. So, a thousand more apologies, Jaye, and lots more in advance, but on the other hand, we consider making people sicker a badge of authenticity.

Sometime yesterday--Halftime, probably--I went poking around the teevee schedule, and while crossing the News divide thought I spotted Jonah Goldberg in the little box o' feed in the corner. Sure enough. One C-SPAN or another was bringing dozens of Americans whose remotes were broken the ruminations of America's Overactive Swim Bladder. I lasted all of fifteen seconds, during which time he was explaining to his inexplicable audience--okay, maybe they were all armed with pies; I didn't stick around--how some liberals were drawn into Journalism, which Might Be a Good Thing in a Way for some reason I wasn't going to wait around to hear, since it would immediately be followed by the observation that however well intentioned this unfortunately led to ever' last bit of information US citizens could come by being filtered through the Filtering Filter of Liberalism. Which he probably then qualified some more.

I didn't check whether the Info button gave the recording date, so it might have been the release party for Liberal Fascism, or the trade paperback of Liberal Fascism, or any of several postponement parties for Liberal Fascism, or the blegging party for Liberal Fascism, or 1998, 1992, or him reciting from Mummy and Pater's flashcards anytime after he reached two-hundred pounds. Doesn't matter.

So either someone, somewhere, thought it was financially worthwhile to have Jonah Goldberg blather, in public, about the psychological makeup, a subject on which he appears no more knowledgeable than on any of the numberless other areas he's never studied, and 99-44/100% of those he has, of a group of people which he gives no indication of knowing a single example of, in an apparent effort to further the sales of a "book" he "wrote" which actually managed to set a new standard of lack of scholarship for Modern English with its title, or else he did so on his own. No wonder these people love capitalism.

And bear in mind that even if this had been an actual opinion, and not the psittacine squawking of some huge, flightless poultry experiment in producing the World's Most Massive Foie Gras gone horribly wrong, he still couldn't defend it; and just pause a moment to reflect where his evidence comes from: some mid-70s Gallup deal as reported in Newsweek, or US News, or somesuch which was based on self-reporting. And how it's continued for Goldberg's life span despite the fact that the last "liberal" act of the Mass Market US Press was reporting the results of the Washington Post's Watergate coverage. "Journalists" reported themselves to be libruhl, therefore they are. The required level of gullibility would also have you believe that all physicians went into medicine for the opportunity to serve Mankind, and all clowns love children.

And that, in turn, pretty much describes my political mood when I fired up the internet generator this AM and found Fareed Zakaria urging a more temperate approach to our sure-to-be successful Afghanistan Surge-a-Thon, if by "more temperate" you mean "anywhere to the Left of Dick Cheney". I mean, sorry, I must have missed the explanation of What th' Fuck Fareed Zakaria is doing there in the first place. His entire public career seems to consist not just of being absolutely wrong about everything while remaining likable, but also in leaving town after the disaster is widely acknowledged in order to follow the Mushy Middle to the Guaranteed Path to the Next Clusterfuck while mentioning "Democracy" a lot.

Sure, sure, there were plenty of So-Called Liberals and/or Moderates who got on board with the Iraq War, and few who've missed many meals for having done so. But most of 'em, to judge from the endless recapitulations after, want us to believe they bought into the Saddam=Rape Rooms Plus Everybody Though He Had Nukes routine, and would just as soon we not mention that they figured backing a sure winner couldn't hurt future employment opportunities in America's lucrative and growing Pre-emptive Invasion Excuse Mongering industry. Zakaria's the only one who immediately comes to mind when "Seems to have actually believed in that Islamic Democracy Domino Effect bullshit" comes up in conversation. And he's the guy who knows Islamic societies.

The crucial judgments that have to be made involve what the troops will do and how much of Afghanistan to cover. One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: "Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?" Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there. Obama should carefully consider all the options before racing to demonstrate how tough he is.

Squish, squish, squish. Y'know, sometime when you have more than 725 words in a major newspaper, and some time to spare from the vital business of showing that Dick Cheney is as full of shit now as he was when you agreed with him wholeheartedly, you might try telling us Why. Or else where we can get good deep-fried catfish in Pittsboro, IN.

What, Having The Stench Of Death Follow You Everywhere Isn't Enough Like War For You?

William "Too Young For Vietnam, Too Old To Think Coherently" Kristol, "Not a War President". February 24

James W. Ceaser, "Alive and Kicking: Reports of conservatism's demise have been greatly exaggerated". February 25

SO far as I know, The Washington Post Company, or whoever cuts the checks, has agreed to pay Col. Kristol for that piece, or "piece" on the Obama speech, despite the fact that the headline somehow manages to say more than the Colonel does, and with more rhetorical skill. Seriously. Read the damn thing if you like; it's 350 words and dull as a second-grader's scissors.

And yet one imagines they're standing around the doughnut box this AM bemoaning the slow financial strangulation of News Gathering Organizations Too Ugly For Television. I know--we could start charging for internet content!

Too often lost in the bridge collapse, subsequent trainwreck, flash flood which suddenly swept the locomotive and several trailing cars downsteam and over the falls, skidding up the bank to slam into the Orphans' Hospital, where the overturned coal stove ignited a fire that consumed everything fine and decent about the country which is Col. Kristol's accumulated body of public utterances is the abiding idea that he represents some sort of vital portion of the public debate we'd be the poorer for not finding in every newspaper in the country, or on its own cable network. As opposed to what he is, which is someone who is inerrantly wrong about shit while acting as a paid shill for Well-Born Idiots, which, seeing as how that seems to be the one thing he's qualified to be, he'd likely do for free. I was pondering that when the idea struck me to flip over to Bill Kristol's Fun Day Book of Games and Stories for Corporate Catamites The Weekly Standard to see if anybody there had something to say that might be worth hearing. For the fortieth time, I mean.

Here's something I'd forgotten, if I ever knew it: the link to the Author's Archive at the Standard is entitled "Other Stories By...." And they say "conservatives" have no sense of humor.

Once there my eye was naturally drawn to Professor Ceaser's story. (He's a professor of Politics at the University of Virginia--I've been estranged from academia a long time: does the entire field eschew "science" now? Or does the School at U of V delve into other areas, say the Theory and Practice of Office Politics, or senior seminars in Student Council Elections: Just Popularity Contests?--and may I say it's refreshing to read a man of letters with thirty years in academia, who hasn't lost the common touch of excessive use of scare quotes?) For one thing, I wanted to know why, if "Conservatism" isn't dead, it's had the same answering machine message for forty years. And, two, I can never resist the incontinent application of that old Mark Twain "greatly exaggerated" bit. Never gets old.

Alas, Professor Ceaser didn't seem interested in explaining to me why such reports could be labeled exaggerations; apparently I, Weekly Standard reader, was presumed to already possess that key bit of information from the lively Burke Weekend just past. Instead he meant me to witness a line-up of the Damned Exaggerators themselves, in whose honor I presumably had brought my own shootin' iron along:

In the rare moments that public intellectuals have not been extolling President Obama's supposed new philosophy of pragmatism, they have turned their efforts to writing requiems for conservatism. These contributions offer variations on the same theme. The conservative movement is dead or dying, the victim of its own theoretical errors. Not mistakes of political leaders, nor the occurrence of unfortunate events, nor even the inevitable grievances that accumulate with holding office, are to blame. The root cause of the death of conservatism lies in the realm of ideas, and conservatives today have earned the just deserts of a defective philosophy.

The "end of conservatism" genre made its appearance just after the election, in the full flush of Obama's victory. Despite ritual claims of intellectuals to their independence of judgment, the general reaction of most of them showed how greatly they stood in awe of the voice of the majority, at least where that majority could be depicted--as it universally was in 2008--as representing the progressive wave of the future. With the moral weight of the public behind them, it was time to pronounce final judgment on what had been the dominant governing coalition of a whole era.

It's all a Liberal Elitist Obama-worshipping plot! Gee, there's a take we haven't heard before.

Reader, imagine yourself a middle-aged Midwesterner whose coffee addiction and grapefruit-sized prostate fortuitously combine to get him up off his office chair every fifteen minutes, max, or else his surgically-repaired knee would lock into place. And suppose that you have adopted, with a reasonable amount of intellectual rigor given your predisposition to indolence, what might be termed a "left-of-center" view of the history and current international activity of your own country. Oh, you're not immune to its Good Points your Rightist opponents are always going on about: its commitment to the exercise of Bronze Age superstition, free of any tax burden; its solid record of defending Free Speech Within Reason, for a large portion of its history, even expanding that to include owning all the fucking television and radio stations in the country, the better to get your message across; the unfettered capitalism ushered in by its Civil War profiteers, now so hallowed as to be imagined it began with its inception, which has provided mostly regular work in good times for its free citizens, and a never-ending backlog for both its own immigrants and the otherwise unemployable children of various other countries. You share the pride in being part of a country which has been brave enough to stare the enormities of enslavement and destruction of its Native Peoples by its White Christian European "Founders", and their subsequent importation of unemployed Africans to perform some field chores, straight in the face and say, "Let's put these people on a stamp!" You frankly get choked up every time you study the remarkable sacrifices American men and women made fighting for others' freedom in World War II, in every theatre of that war. Though you can't seem to remember the name of the Goddamn Socialist Pinko who was President at the time. You bask in the warm glow of her consumer electronics, the wide-ranging nightly salute to the lively arts on her teevee screens, and the astonishing selection of fresh, frequently pathogen-free foodstuffs in her groceries and supermarkets.

No, you're no bomb thrower, Dear Reader, or anything else so radical and physically demanding. But for your entire adult life the one major party candidate for President you supported with more than 80% certainty, and not just because his opponent was A Scum-Sucking Toad, a War Hero and prairie populist has, for pretty much that entire lifetime, been portrayed, even by the great majority of the inheritors of his own party, as a sort of American Trotsky served in Neville Chamberlain's bowler with a Quisling garnish. You have, during that same stretch, seen America's shameful history of attempted post-War reconstruction of Colonialism in Indochina, and subsequent defeat, turned into a sacred crusade for Freedom from Tyranny Provided The Country Was Small Enough To Invade, stabbed in the back at the moment of Victory by Walter Cronkite. You watched with something approaching frank disbelief as a second-rate ham actor with brain bubbles, ensconced at the head of a party of Western train robbers and impenitent former slave owners quadrupled the National Debt while being hailed as the Great Savior of small government. Of the--difficult as it is to imagine--decided downturn events have taken from there in the last fifteen years, or the happy-talk, issues-free, "social" "conservative" pandering in the nation's mass-market media which helped drive them, I feel comfortable in leaving you as judge. Tax cuts Flag burning Partial birth Tax cuts 9/11 Death tax Teri Schiavo What "is" is.

So let me ask you, then: how exactly do you react, Dear Impersonator of Someone My Height, when you read from a professor of politics, that E. J. Effing Dionne and his Commie ilk have once again murdered Edmund Burke out of sheer spite? Oh, and Obama worship. There's that little critique they're hiding from you at play, too.

How 'bout this: Professor, if fucks like Bill Kristol weren't demonstrably wrong nearly every time they open their mouths, it's a good bet we'd never hear any side but yours at all.

Not To Mention That People Pay To See Asashoryu.

Asashoryu's great comeback win in the just-completed Hatsu basho--going 14-1 after withdrawing from the previous three tournaments due to injury--was marred by his making this gesture afterwards. No, really. The Yokozuna Deliberation Council plans to warn him about it. Compare the career of Bill Kristol.

Richard Pérez-Peña, William Kristol's Column in The Times Ends". January 26

Michael Calderone, "Who Should Replace Bill Kristol?" January 26

Scott Horton, "The Sacking of Bill Kristol". January 26

Peter Edmonston,"Thane Says He'll Repay Remodeling Costs". January 26

YES, indeed: compare the career of Bill Kristol. I was not one of the Left Blogostaners who thought the sky was falling because the Times hired him. When your stable includes MoDo, Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Herbert, Collins, and Rich, with John Effing Tierney departing, the sky, like your pants, is already around your ankles. We'll grant the larger issue is probably the idea that the Op-Ed Ward should be fastidiously faux-balanced according to the dictates of someone who imagines Maureen Dowd to be at the far pole of political discourse, one opposite David Brooks; obviously, if the Times would just acknowledge the lack of epistemological rigor--without even addressing the remarkably narrow "range" between "liberal" and "conservative" exemplar--things could improve overnight. How about balancing all those people who were dead wrong about Iraq, or the Bush presidency in general, or the importance of selecting a Commander-in-Chief who doesn't wear earthtones, with someone who wasn't? How about adjusting for abject careerism, Conventional Wisdom molding, or apparent sanity? Maybe one Op-Ed slot should go to someone who has actually met an American who earns less than $125,000 without having to calculate how much to tip.

Just kiddin'. Look, anyway, my problem with Kristol was not that he got the slot, so much as it was he who got the slot: no writer, no thinker, apparently holds no opinions which could not be predetermined by anyone familiar with Hudson Institute press releases, and personally and professionally dishonest. (Again I repeat--since it was on C-SPAN, making me one of thirty-five people who actually witnessed it without working there--that in August of 2002, on that morning call-in show, Mr. Kristol twice told callers that he was "too young for Vietnam". I had no idea at the time how old he was, but it was obvious the moment he said it that he was lying. In fact, it was obvious the moment he was asked the question that he had already been lying about it for years, probably decades. Kristol is in fact a year older than I, making him a member of the last draft class eligible for conscription for an entire year. He got a high draft number [rare for a December baby; they didn't mix the lotto balls thoroughly, apparently] and so was able to go right from The Collegiate School to Hahvahd Yahd. I do understand that should we decide to remove everyone who is personally dishonest from the ranks of journalism/pundithood vast stretches of teevee/newspaper/magazine reporting would go unmanned, but there are probably some arguments against doing so as well; it's just than none comes to me offhand. So Kristol, faced with incontrovertible proof of his hypocrisy--something any college grad should at least have been able to talk his way around, if not confront head-on--chose instead to lie, blatantly, in an effort to get through the following twenty minutes. There's only one reason to lie under those circumstances, and it answers the question of whether the Chickenhawk business is all feathers or marrow-deep.)

Last night I started poking around news coverage of the Kristol Dismissal, beginning with the Times own coverage, a couple hundred words from Pérez-Peña (who now tops Michael Bérubé for Most Superfluous Actions Required To Type A Last Name), including a howler artfully withheld to the last second, when Kristol says of his Times column: "It's a lot of work."

Scott Horton tops that bit, albeit unintentionally, with this from his "inside source with first-hand knowledge":

The source makes clear that the decision not to renew Kristol’s contract is not related to his neoconservative ideology—Kristol’s proximity to key Washington players ranging from Bush and Cheney to John McCain (whom he supported in 2000) was considered a distinct plus. His leading advocacy of the Iraq War also added to his appeal. Kristol was viewed as a mover and shaker whose ideas had ready impact on the political firmament in Washington.

So in other words, when hiring a by-lined opinion writer, the Times imagines that insider connections are a positive, rather than, in this case especially, an explanation for a lifetime as a sluice for slightly-liquified bullshit. Kristol--it almost goes without saying--was one of the "journalists" Scooter (or Dick) called with the Plame story. I'm pretty sure this had made the papers by December, 2007; I wonder why it didn't make the vetting process. I wonder why the Times would offer to pay for what it could get for free, aside from the fact that in printing it on the Op-Ed Ward avoids any more Judy Miller-type unpleasantness while still getting the story out. I mean, Kristol could always claim under oath that'd he'd been lying; who the hell would question that?

The real cake-topper, though, is Calderone's Politico blog, wherein Andy Rosenthal, the other end of the two-shitty-ended nepotism stick here, tells at audience at Columbia that he admires the work of Byron York and Megan McArdle. We are left, again, to explain the frequency of the modern juxtaposition of the utterly incredible and the dirt-common, as well as the self-annihilating sentence; there is, simply, no way anyone could make that statement and simultaneously maintain that words mean things.

Maybe we're just not supposed to notice. Take Peter Edmonston's piece on John Thain, the ex-Merrill Lynch CEO who spent $1 million redecorating his office last Spring, and who, like the Christian school that beat the girls with learning disabilities team 100-0 in basketball, suddenly discovered the error of his ways just after the PR snowball gained enough mass to start rolling on its own. Million-dollar 'dos belonged to an earlier era, he now realizes; namely, the one in which you didn't get called on this crap:

“They were a mistake in the light of the world we live in today."

Which, I gotta admit, sorry as either one is, still makes two more apologies for egregious behavior than Bill Kristol's ever gonna make.

Okay, So He Wasn't Perfect. No President Is Ever Perfect. So Stop Criticizing Him For Not Being Perfect, Already!

Karl Rove, "Bush Was Right When It Mattered Most". January 22

THE Times lets us know that some of the Bush43* Jolly Junketeers had their feelings hurt by what they felt was personal criticism of their man in Barack Hussein Obama's inaugural speech. Mr. Rove, apparently, was among them (though that's not what the piece some staffer wrote his Journal column would have you believe). Meaning--do not get ahead of me--that the same administration, some of the same people, and, in fact, its very political architect, who came to power with an orchestrated six-week effort to cover their criminal enterprise--and their criminal incompetence--with a series of personal attacks on their predecessor, leave it with a hissy fit.

It's fitting, yes, and again we ask "why not?" and "who ever deserved it more?"

Which ought to be enough: we're sick of you people; have you not been out in sunlight in the past four years? Just go away. Cheney's found happiness speaking to the twenty-five people in the country who wouldn't rather kill him. You can too. (Karl, maybe you could orchestrate another takeover of the College Republicans! Sounds like fun. Although it still won't get you laid.) If you insist otherwise we can go on like this; at some point you're going to stop commanding whatever interest that now remains, except on FOX, and the real truth will start coming out, at which point you'll wish you'd taken this time to dig fallout shelters.

I remind you Joe Fucking Klein complained about the Vandalgate story, and he might as well have been a member of your administration, and look what it got him. Like the groundhog, only six more weeks of slime. Not a rhetorical denunciation of failed policies at a time of great national anger over what was done in our name, but patently false accusations, planted and fanned in the Press. Oh, of course, the Court-appointed President didn't sully his hands with it; it was just his Press Secretary and Sources in the Administration who Spoke on Condition of Anonymity. Yeah, that fooled us.

So as much as one is tempted to say "Eat it, assholes, and remember it's just the appetizer course," or "Tell it to Max Cleland, Fuckface," and be done with you, the rules are pretty clear, and you wrote them: it's the President's job to say "Nothing to see here, folks"; the rest of us are supposed to keep it alive indefinitely, amid general merriment. So the intrepid blogger follows the link to hear just what The Brain has to say (or whoever wrote it; my own doubts about The Brain's ratiocenations are well established, but if this is an example of his work, and what wowed 'em in the Oval Office for seven years, we're lucky to be getting off with just a few major disasters). Let's climb aboard the Former Air Force One with the other freeloaders, shall we?

The former president and his wife thanked each passenger, showing the thoughtfulness and grace so characteristic of this wonderful American family.

And they smelled like the wild mountain thyme, I suppose. Fuck, aren't we to expect that Bush's days of revealing his true nature in public are finally behind him? Aside from all those inadvertent revelations every time he opens his mouth, I mean? Conversely, are we to expect we'd hear the truth from Karl Rove if they weren't?

Yet, as Mr. Bush left Washington, in a last angry frenzy his critics again distorted his record, maligned his character and repeated untruths about his years in the Oval Office. Nothing they wrote or said changes the essential facts.

Which are exponentially worse than even they know.

To start with, Mr. Bush was right about Iraq.

Well, it's a relief to finally get that settled.

The world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power.

No doubt about it; today the world is a safer place.

And the former president was right to change strategy and surge more U.S. troops.

Complimenting Bush on The Surge is like applauding Karl Wallenda for his final landing. Okay, sure, you keep going with what worked for ya, but look: number one, "The Surge" was not a change in "strategy"; it was not even a change in tactics, the category it properly belongs in. It was a PR cover for doing precisely what we had been doing, while stretching it out until the end of the administration in a worthless bid to save face. We "surged" an additional 15-20,000 troops, to return our troop level to around 150,000, roughly where it had been all along after the opening weeks. But we weren't at 130,000 because of some "strategic" decision; we were there because we've worn out our manpower and matériel. We increased levels, not by employing troops which had been hangin' 'round the PX at Fort Dix, but by increasing the deployment time of troops already in Iraq, and shortening the already insufficient R&R of those who'd come home. If we've pacified (for now) Sunni chieftains by buying them off (which we started doing before The Surge) it merely underlines how completely unprepared we were to face post-war Iraq in 2003, and how idiot ideologies trumped sound practice for years. If the Sunni have driven out foreign elements, well, it goes to show how few there were to begin with, through all that time you were insisting we were fighting al-Qaeda. Finally, and plainly, it's rather easy to say Iraq is on the Mend (there. I just said it.), but what happens in the long term is anyone's guess, and it's not going to have a fucking thing to do with The Surge. Although, if you think things're so great, why not winter there this year? Maybe you and 43 can fly in together, in broad daylight, on a commercial flight. You know, like Ahmadinejad did.

Mr. Bush was right to establish a doctrine that holds those who harbor, train and support terrorists as responsible as the terrorists themselves.

Next stop Pakistan!

These tough decisions -- which became unpopular in certain quarters only when memories of 9/11 began to fade -- kept America safe for seven years and made it possible for Mr. Obama to tell the terrorists on Tuesday "we will defeat you."

First, what made it possible for President Barack Hussein Obama to mouth off to terrorists is the same thing that made it possible for you: chest thumping is rarely fatal, and frequently rewarded.

Second, "in certain quarters"? Where? Who's forgotten 9/11? Same people who were insufficiently overjoyed by Saddam Hussein's capture? You gotta try getting out more, now that you've got some free time. It was your fucking fault. You had every opportunity to set things right, time and time again, and you stayed the course, remember? Who kept fucking with that stupid Color Alert Scale, anyway?

Mr. Bush was right to be a unilateralist when it came to combating AIDS in Africa. While world leaders dithered, his President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief initiative brought lifesaving antiretroviral drugs to millions of Africans.

Okay, two things here: as much as we appreciate the antiretrovirals, tripling aid to Africa while 50% of the increase goes to Abstinence Programs which have no connection whatever to the problem is a unilateral Republican absurdity. Second, it's simply amusing to hear this one touted as Bush's African Legacy (worked on Katie Couric, there Karl; I guess that counts for something); where was it on the campaign trail? It's like you've fallen to #18 on the list. "Never hit anybody with a golf ball".

At home, Mr. Bush cut income taxes for every American who pays taxes. He also cut taxes on capital, investment and savings. The result was 52 months of growth and the strongest economy of any developed country.

Aw, what th' hell? Sure. Nice handling of the economy. Bravo. Tax cuts worked like a charm. I hope every American voter'll remember you for it. And this is the best damn Tootsie Roll I've ever had. Enjoy your time off. May it seem like forever.

_____________
* julia informs us that Bush's Oval Office Note was headed "From 43 to 44"; even worse, we find that Politico's Obama coverage is called Politico44. This faux-jock bonhomie, this reductio ad NASCAR, cannot be allowed to stand, if not for the sake of the Republic, at least out of respect for my lunch.

Bush Farewell Tour, 2003: Take That, People Who Said It Couldn't Get Any Worse!

The President of the United States personally thanks decorated Marine Jim-Jeff "Bulldog" Gannon-Guckert, who served as his official Press Room bodyguard before it turned out he couldn't handle flak, either.

He diggy, diggy, diggy, but no meat dar.

-Joel Chandler Harris
IF a great novelist is required, among other things, to be great, or at least very good, days on end, months at a time, then the Bush administration is the Tolstoy of Stupid, and 2003 is its War and Peace, Now With Twice The War! It is a year which will begin with The Sixteen Words You Shouldn't Say In A State Of The Union Address, the suggestion to Tony Blair that painting one of our planes UN blue and flying low over Baghdad might draw enough fire to make the international community forget who it was dealing with, and the granting of the first of two years' worth of White House Press passes to a dog-tagged and Brazilian-waxed male prostitute who was, at the height of 9/11 paranoia, working under an assumed name, and go downhill from there. And not just downhill as in "things have hit a bad patch", but rapidly, precipitously, headlong-into-ghenna-fire stuff, month after month, leavened only by the dark humor of an administration, and a lapdog press, conducting obliviously premature Victory celebrations, and whatever slapstick one could make of Christopher Hitchens wetting himself again. On the bright side, visionaries could point to the day when a war so badly conceived as to render "ill-" hopelessly inadequate, one politically timed, unimaginably corrupt, and shockingly wasteful, would yet allow Keith Olbermann to poke his head up from under his desk and become a Liberal.

Look at the additions to the political lexicon alone: sixteen words! WMDs! Islamofascism, Shock and Awe! Greeted as Liberators! Coalition of the Willing, embeds, de-Baathification! Steely-eyed Rocketman! Mission Accomplished! flypaper strategy! Democracy is Untidy! east, south, west, and north somewhat! Bring 'em on, a few dead-enders, Werewolves! rape rooms, spider holes, mobile anthrax labs! six-months, tops! Curveball, Chalabi, Saeed al-Haideri, Chemical Ali, Qusay and Uday! Custer Battles, LLC! Toppled statues and Insufficient jubilation! The New Iraqi flag!

Commander Codpiece!

Preznit giv me turkee!

Scooter giv me Valerie Plame!

Okay, fun's fun; I set out with a vague notion of memorializing the end of the Bush presidency by reminding people of some of its foibles, failures and fuck-ups, and particularly some that might have been forgotten simply due to the volume of available material. But by the time you reach 2003 the laugher starts mocking you. In the United States of America, in the opening decade of the 21st century, a march to a war which was militarily and politically unnecessary, which was sold on lies and based on transparent falsehoods the mass market press, and the Congress of the United States, would pretend not to recognize, was incompetently, sometimes criminally conducted, and which turned into a major international cultural disaster almost from the start, a political disaster soon after, and a military disaster within a couple of months, was yet absolutely inexorable. In a country full of intelligent people with instantaneous access to global information, large numbers of the natural political opponents of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as the independent Press, all of whom had had months, even years, to comprehend what sort of petty criminals, intellectual thugs, cheats, grifters, certifiable paranoids and pathological liars, political fabulists, sexual cripples, amoral opportunists, mercenaries, professional racists and religious hypocrites they were dealing with, threw in behind him! Saddam must go! Hans Blix must go first! They had pictures of the same two Nixon leftovers who were now driving the push for war shaking the hand of the Worse Than Hitler tyrant who now threatened Civilization herself, or would, once he managed to produce the necessary weapons in sufficient quantities and find some way to deliver them. Discovery of how Saddam Hussein came to be the Iraqi strongman was a Google or a Wiki away. The political manipulation of 9/11 was already crystal-clear; the gleeful, unrepentant, and consequence-free looting of the public treasury was already on display. That the whole thing was being led, or "led", by the cosseted scion of a venal band of New England plutocrats whose original paltry allocation of wits had been furthered dulled by decades of nightly alcohol poisoning was becoming clear even to people who had devoutly wished otherwise for the sake of the country, and his hard-on to top his Daddy by "finishing the job" in Iraq was common currency. What was to be expected of the Bush administration was what we got. It's fine and fitting, now, that Bush is treated as a leper, and Cheney as a leper who also flings feces and has a shotgun. But what about the people who missed this at the time, or who wanted to be on the right side of the coming Victory parade (for which there's still $20 M in Congressional-approved funds in the till somewhere)? One of 'ems our next Secretary of State.

Remember PFC Jessica Lynch, who fired her weapon until it was empty, was shot multiple times, raped, sodomized, and tortured in captivity, protected at great personal risk by a kindly Iraqi civilian, who walked six miles to tip off the military, which rescued her via Special Ops? All true, except for the part after "Lynch". When the story fell apart, via the BBC, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria "Torie" Clarke called the accusations, "outrageous, patently false and unsupported by the facts."

PFC Lynch, then twenty years old, showed more personal courage and honesty than all the grey men who ran the war combined. And while that may not have required much at all, remember: she stood for the truth when she had plenty to gain by not doing so, and plenty of pressure to simply go along. Compare the biography of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. Compare the actions of Four-Star General Colin Powell, later so "conflicted" by his UN performance. Remember who fought, and still fights this war, and remember just what kind of people they do so for.

It ain't funny. I contend, and will until someone shows different, that the Iraq war was pencilled in for 2003 by the Bush campaign in 1999. There was too much insistence on the jump date to believe otherwise; we short-changed Afghanistan before we'd even entered Kabul, because specialist units were needed on schedule for Iraq. We cashiered any general officer or service branch Secretary who argued for sufficient troops; we went ahead even without permission to use Turkey as a staging area. We went to war with one-quarter the force doctrinally required to occupy Iraq because the political timetable, designed to make 2004 a military victory parade followed by a re-election pageant, was fixed: 2002 was too early, reserved for provoking a casus belli in the No-Fly Zone--in the event, made superfluous by 9/11--while 2004 was too late, open to charges of Wagging the Dog, as well as blowback from a less-than-favorable initial result. We called for no sacrifice beyond bravely facing Mall crowds; you don't call for sacrifice from people you hope will show up at the polls for you in a twelvemonth. We went to war so these scumbags could get re-elected and continue looting the Treasury. And the whole thing gets treated as if they'd just misread the intel.

It's not funny. Read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City for a look at how we ran the place once we took it. Tell me then that mere incompetence explains using Roe v. Wade as a determinant of which recently-graduated college Republican would redesign the Iraqi health care system, and which manage its economy. How many US military families are missing a father, mother, a wife, a husband, because of this? How many more Iraqis are? George W. Bush, now, can manage to dredge up a mistake or two he might've made. "Mission Accomplished" is an example.

No shit, Sherlock.

It ain't funny.

Bush Farewell Tour, 2002 Edition: The Aristocrats!

WE'RE not exactly up-to-the-minute at Chez Riley--damn! I meant to warn you to sit down and swallow your coffee first before unleashing the news--so when I get not one but two emails mentioning Bush's remarkable Britney Spears impression Final Press Conference I had to switch on the teevee and aim in the general direction of cable news to try to catch up. Which landed me at the Joe Scarborough and Horrible Blonde Appendage Show--while I'm thinking of it, is there anyone in the History of Television who looks less likely to have invited a Woman to sit down and discuss the day's events with him, absent No Other Choice?--just in time to hear Joe defendo-'splaining, or apolofending, his actions the previous show, when he "was a little rough" on some guest or other who had, one took it, herself been too rough on the Still Acting President, at least by Joe's lights. (During the course of said attacko-traction, or retracto-punch, Scarborough told us--twice--that he was "almost a libertarian". Which, of course, means he is a libertarian, not in a dictionary-definition sense, but in the workaday American political sense of someone putting a label he doesn't understand on a series of philosophical positions he doesn't actually hold, in order to fool, or impress, people who do not exist with the fact that he's a self-centered asshole, which they already knew.) Joe's point--I'm granting him one, of course--was that people were too tough on Bush because they did not remember what it was like after 9/11, which is to say that by now most Americans have casually strolled far enough away from their initial hysterical pants-pissing that murderous poltroons like Scarborough have been forced to adjust their rhetoric if they want to continue making money off the suckers.

And Still Acting President Bush used the same argument yesterday (I caught a few excerpts this AM), though considering the shambles he's left of himself, his party, the Presidency, the country, and the Christian religion I'm not willing to elevate it to the level of Talking Point anymore. It's just one of the few remaining soggy straws still afloat. People don't remember what it was like after 9/11! To which I suppose the immediate reply is "I guess that's lucky for you, since if they did you wouldn't have anything to grasp at at all."

Which is followed by "who was stoking the fucking fires? Who turned it into electoral lemonade?" You cannot pretend that this was some mob action you sadly were forced to join. At this point you're reduced to defending yourself on the grounds that you weren't really in charge, followed by blithering about the absence of metaphysical certainty and plain Bad Luck. If people really did remember "what it was like" the first thing they'd recall is all the assertions that you were in charge, and all the declarations of metaphysical certainty and Divine Blessing for our noble revenge plan. That Events may overtake even the most vigilant and best prepared of Men does not make you one of them just because they got you too. On the contrary. How different would your Presidency have turned out had you been able to counsel some small degree of reflection, some sense of perspective, instead of fanning the flames of fear and hatred? Of course, you'd be a different man, but then that's the point.

Let's do look back, shall we? It turns out, right off the bat, that there was no still-smoldering emotional or philosophical obstruction to a simple understanding that what you were urging in the aftermath of 9/11 was an unlimited, interminable "war" on a tactic. And that there was no real shortage of people saying so, only a shortage of teevee face time for anyone who did. People who on 9/11 had no idea who Susan Sontag was may have been throwing rocks at her a week later, but if the President of the United States had chosen to frame the attacks as acts of homicidal insanity, and demanded--with, remember?, practically the whole of the international community behind him--the extradition of those responsible, it might have worked, or it might have failed, but what's certain is it couldn't have failed as spectacularly, nor as expensively, as giving the Taliban until sundown to get out of town, 'les'n George W. Bush get all John Wayne on their ass. And don't get me wrong; you certainly did pretty much exactly what I expected you'd do. Let's just not pretend it was your only option.

So, no sale, Mr. MBA President. If people remembered 9/11, they'd remember that not only did you shoot first and ask questions never, but that the invasion of Afghanistan was a near-perfect exemplar for the war you really intended to fight, the one you fucked up beyond all measure. Our rhetoric framed it as The Battle for a Civilized World, but in reality we were afraid to take casualties; we had no plan in place for the aftermath, or none beyond the cheery illiteracy that supposes the entire population of the world to be eager suburban burgher wannabees, anxious to wash worm burgers down with corn beer while watching American Idol for Wogs. The domestic PR campaign which turned al-Qaeda into SPECTRE succeeded in hiding what we were up to from us, permitting you to substitute military hardware for thought.

The jury may still be out on whether the primary motivation was political--Bob Woodward's risible defense, in Slate, of the idea that we invaded Iraq as a response to 9/11, and the even more risible notion that the decision wasn't made until January, 2003, merely reminds us that we license barbers but not "pundits"--or just True Belief informed by a political decision reached, most likely, in 1999. But we know for sure that we quick-kicked Afghanistan in late '01 or early '02--removing key personnel, leaving the dirty work to hired local thugs--to jump-start Iraq. We know that 2002 was spent promoting the next war, and promoting the idea that questioning the next war and the administration who loved it was treasonable at best. 2002 went from the Axis of Evil to Gloves Off at Guantanamo, with stops along the way to sucker a pathetic Democratic leadership into scheduling a one-time, Olly-Olly-Oxen Free authorization for any conceivable lethality your administration chose to pursue--no further questions, no declaration of war--and scheduling it astonishingly, disgracefully, three weeks before a national election. And as if "unprecedented abdication of legal responsibility, ethical responsibility, the fundamentals of democracy, and higher cortical function" wasn't enough, to do so immediately before an election they would have, historically, been expected to win. I grant you are not responsible for the sorry aggregation of moral cowardice on the other side of the aisle, but you are responsible for the attempt--make that successful attempt--to maneuver Congress into authorizing a war without declaring one, in the heat of a political season instead of with due diligence, and for threatening to do as you damn well pleased anyway, regardless of the outcome.

And if you imagine some future historian will absolve you, let's note that he or she will be required to overlook, not just that, but a year-long, concerted disinformation campaign culminating, on September 8, 2002, with the breathtaking--and no more so than in the incredible distain for its near-total transparency--collusion of the Vice President, the front page of the New York Times, and a host of Meet the Press and major network political chief who, in life, preferred being known as an incompetent fame whore to admitting there could possibly have been anything hinky about the deal he might have been expected to notice. This postulates, I think, the accumulation of more gullibility than there is in the entire history profession in a single theoretical future entity.

But hey, hope, like stupid, springs eternal.

And 2002 wasn't just the Year of Ignoring Hans Blix, Disgracing Scott Ritter, and mushrooming a nonexistent threat. Future historians, if any, might wonder at the first US Presidential proclamation of the right of presumtive self-defense; the first administration in history sued by the Government Accounting Office; the ongoing Enron scandal; the Downing Street Memo; the cashiering of Eric Shinseki; Mitch "I Played RISK™ Once" Daniels reducing $100 billion dollar estimates of the Iraq war's cost to less than half that; the Clear Skies Initiative, which relaxed controls on air pollution; the Healthy Forests Initiative, which relaxed controls on logging; the suppression of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts as urged by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, otherwise known as Exxon-Mobil; John Ashcroft's, well, unholy obsession with "The American Taliban", John Walker Lindh; Ashcroft's, well, questionable Operation TIPS, which would have organized mailmen, meter readers, and our strategic Fuller Brush Salesman reserve into a sort of American Sturmabteilung, except with more unintentional homoeroticism; and the President's urging patriotic Americans to get back to shopping full time, lest the terrorists win. Which, as we now know, they did anyway.

Bush Farewell Tour: Let The Weasel Soar!

THE Times anticipates this one in a weekend Op-Ed, which sent the intrepid indolent researcher right to the Search page to see what "Bush" +"Presidential Records law" might turn up in the way of contemporary coverage, at least in the first four pages or so of results, until he got bored and went back to watching the ballgame.

Contemporary, in this case meaning "November 1, 2001" when, despite the enormous pressures of the 9/11 attacks, mounting Operation Enduring Freedom Fries, the anthrax attacks, the difficulties in deciding whether the frame for the anthrax attacks looked better on Saddam Hussein or The Former Soviet Union (a call ultimately left up to Judith Miller), and the Herculean task of intercepting every last phone call, email, fax, kaffeeklatsch, and snatch of back fence gossip in the country--why, the background checks necessary to set up the Strategic Block Captain Program [STRATBLOC] alone required the reassignment of most of the twenty-five FBI agents attached to the Clinton Scandals, Inc., desk--only half of that comment is made up, by the way--Acting President George W. Bush still found the time to give a chilling foretaste of the next seven years of what historians now jokingly refer to as "his Presidency": he rewrote, via Executive Order, the 1978 Presidential Records Act, excluding from its provisions, well, Presidents. And Vice-Presidents. And anyone named "George", living after 1978.

And here's one of those little historical tidbits people like me--high, clinically depressed, or both--can't get enough of: the decision was written by a then-obscure White House mouthpiece named Alberto Gonzales, later, of course, a Supreme Court nominee.

By the way, what we meant to say above was "foretaste of the chilling Presidency to come", not the other way 'round, since by then we'd already been treated to great heaping platefuls of the Stupidity and Venality on the daily menu. The Times, as we would expect, reported the story with the utmost professionalism, turning a naked power grab by a skid-row bum turned Presidential usurper designed to hide, in perpetuity, public records, and the public's right to know--supposedly the lifeblood of operations like, well, the Times--(effectively sealing off, not coincidentally, all evidence of the criminal activities of the aforementioned bum's father, the Crime Family the father had now passed along, as well as the rap sheet of the bubble-brained capo di tutti capi that father had replaced) into a faux-balanced He said/He said between the Commander-in-Chief in a Time of War and a few fusty academics. In fairness, a couple weeks later the Gray Lady published a scathing editorial moderately deploring the act. In theory.

We don't really mean to be unfair, at least not any more unfair than usual; this was, indeed, a time of great national anguish, which as Mnemosyne has since told us, as She already had countless times before (I guess you can afford infinite patience on the Time beat), is probably the exact moment when you want to be more vigilant, not less. Still, situational-adjusted oversight might be forgiven had realistic standards been applied to the Bush administration, the Bush "election", or the Bush candidacy, for that matter, before Everything Changed, but the news there was taken up with Al Gore's lying ways, Bill Clinton's lying ways and, later, Laura Bush's three weeks as a grade-school librarian and her Crawford Ranch decorating dilemmas. Asking questions and expecting answers is, after all, what lost us Vietnam.

Anyway, by fiat George W. Bush determined that the decision whether to release the papers of Ronald Reagan, e.g., rested with George W. Bush, a complex legal mind-twister which actually makes sense if you pretend you're Alberto Gonzales and really need your job. The American People had not yet begun to notice the funny smell, let alone realize it was coming from the vicinity of its own underwear; this made it incumbent upon a Free Press, and hey! Look over there! Isn't that Bill Clinton with a hot Rolex?

Yes, there were other things to think about at the time, and yes, there's also such a thing as doing so a little too eagerly (if you think I'm exaggerating the abdication of Press responsibility, note that when the Bush administration tried to use the thing four years later to avoid releasing some of John Roberts' records the Boston Globe called the order "little noticed"). By the time of the decision Bush had already delayed the release of the unvacuumed Reagan Papers for a year, despite his clear conflict of interest and the direct contravention of the Republican argument, now eight years strong, that "The President is not above the law". (What a shame Irony was dead.) In fact, had President Clinton been as guilty of trading pardons for campaign contributions as the Burton Commission was claiming investigating, he would have been legally unassailable; Bush, by contrast, had the merest assertion of possession, and would eventually lose in court.  And Alberto Gonzales, of course, would eventually be given a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Okay, fine. Let's just say, arguendo, that the Press just couldn't let go of Clinton's cock, or sniggering in general, and/or let's say it was totally in the tank for the Bush Crime Family, Cheney's agents, or SMERSH. Even so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury:  on November 1, 2001, Presidential Press Secretary Ari Flescher, a man who had already demonstrated the administration's, and his own, personal, contempt for the truth, anything approaching the truth, or anything which might accidentally brush up against the truth in the middle of the night while headed for the can, as well as each and every "professional" "news" "gathering" operation, told the assembled Press that ''more information will be forthcoming because of the order", and the Press reported this rather than grabbing him by the necktie and pummeling him unconscious. Nothing can explain that, let alone excuse it. We are just twelve months away from the day a male prostitute catering to the Marine fetish specialty market would be admitted into the White House Press room, fully credentialed, little more than 8 uncut inches from the Most Powerful Image In The World. But we're getting ahead of our story. Let's just say, then, that abject fear is one thing, supplicating yourself to a sleezeball like Ari Fleischer, not to mention a malicious clodpate somehow elevated to the Presidency is, and was, quite another.

Bush Farewell Tour, Part 145: Paying Armstrong Williams Is Like Buying The Cow When Cows Are Free

ONE thing most everyone to the left of the American center can agree upon--excluding any who've been elected to Congress, that is--is that George W. Bush was given the biggest Free Pass in History after 9/11; any of several of his responses would have led to a Bill of Impeachment for Carter or Clinton, if not right away, then certainly as soon as the initial supply of warm, pants-drenching urea was exhausted. (In fact, if I'm not mistaken, by the time they'd been eight months in office both Carter and Clinton had been impeached.) And Lord knows, given the enormous popularity of movies featuring the madcap antics of People Who Weren't Really All That Funny When They Were Doing Teevee Sketch Comedy, it's understandable how a country like ours would still find Splooge-Stained Blue Dresses and What the Definition of "Is" Is a continued source of merriment, but My Pet Goat not so much. In fairness, of course, at least Clinton Scandals, Inc., were something we could laugh off; the big problem there being that we didn't, not for seven years or more, anyway.

Which reminds us that at this respective distance, the attack on Pearl Harbor had been investigated by The Roberts Commission (a Presidential commission set up days after the attack, which reported a year later); the Hart Inquiry (a one-man Navy investigation undertaken in 1944 so that important information [including courts-martial evidence] would not be lost); the Army Pearl Harbor Board; a Naval Court of Inquiry; one-man expert inquiries supplimental to those two ordered by the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy, respectively; The Clarke Investigation (into the handling of pre-attack intelligence and communications, also ordered by Secretary Stimson); and the Joint Congressional Committee investigation, which delivered its 40-part, 23 volume, 25,000 page report July 20, 1946, after eight-months' investigation; compare the 9/11 Commission, which took a year and a half to produce the bi-partisan slush it was designed to, having previously taken a year of bad publicity just to begin the formation process. Of the above, all were completed in less time after the event than it took for the single investigation of 9/11, excepting the two supplemental Services inquiries and the Congressional investigation, which did not begin until after the War.

And again, in fairness, that War was over a lot quicker, too, giving them an unfair head start.

You might recall, despite the Mass-Market Media's expressed desire that you not, that on 9/11 Acting President George Walker "Interesting Day" Bush basically turned tail and ran at the news, stopped by the nearest Air Force Base with a broadcasting facility to tape a message, before donning a flight suit and jetting off to land on an aircraft carrier that had been cunningly turned so terrorists couldn't see the San Diego skyline in the background. [on edit: sorry, I got my chronologies mixed up there!] Bush came in for some criticism for the long delay in his return to Washington.

Now, look: I don't think that just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the time was a) under fire and b) legless still ordered his driver to back up, and managed to lift the mortally-wounded Anton Cermak into the car, that every President of the United States should play the hero, nor even that it's a good idea; I just think Bush hagiographers ought to have the decency to shut th' fuck up about Roosevelt. And I realize that there are bound to be conflicting stories whenever a) there are fast-moving, highly-charged events, or b) Dick Cheney is involved. Personally, I would like to imagine a President who would either dive under the nearest mountain range for protection, or begin talking about Everlasting War, but not both at once. In the end Bush is said to have acceded to the demands of that same Secret Service he had overruled on the matter of departing Emma E. Booker Elementary School just a brief time before. Thus Bush's vigorous leadership was forced to make itself known through videoconferencing, though whether he inquired if the NYFD had been provided with Bibles the Washington Post has not chosen to let us know. Though it is sure that they had more use for 'em than that spy plane crew.

One of the little details that may have settled into the detritus of Time deserves to be dusted back up. It took about twenty-four hours for the shock to wear off enough that people began seriously to ask Just Where Th' Fuck The President Had Been While All This Was Going On (it is, as usual, a process which would result, not in demerits for Bush, but plaudits for Rudy Giuliani, thus prolonging that national agony for six fucking years). It occurred, in of all places, the New York Times, later such a skeptical analyst of White House spin. Bill Safir(e) questioned his Commander-in-Chief's absence; two days later a front-page story with the byline of R.W. Apple, Jr., and Safir(e)'s own column revealed the truth: that credible threats to Air Force One had been intercepted, their credibility resting on the fact that "code words" had been transmitted, along with the message "Air Force One is next".

Now, let's be fair: these people are predisposed to hero worship and Sky-Is-Falling insanity on the sunniest of days. So the fact that this was the first piece of real Breaking With the Compact piece of political bullshit I'd heard since the attacks (under such circumstances I'm supposed to be tacitly supportive, and you are not supposed to take the time to Cover Your Ass. Of course, we all know who breaks first.) should not be reflected on the ink-stained wretches of the Lapdog Press. It is only in retrospect that the average American has come to understand that Islamic extremism was not the only Evil unleashed on the country in those days; there was information from Dick Cheney's Office, too.

But the thing about Safir(e) was not just that he stovepiped it (apologizing, in the process, for ever having doubted), but that he claimed this suggested the presence of a high-level mole inside the White House, a claim which apparently became inoperative once a frightened nation decided a couple days later it had better pretend to admire whatever idiot was nominally in charge of giving empty bullhorn-spouted platitudes at Ground Zero.

Which reminds us: the heroic fireman standing next to him on the rubble turned out to be a Republican prop, the battered Port Authority badge George Howard's mother "presented" him in remembrance was actually wrested from her by the Secret Service, and when the men on duty denied ever having passed on that "credible threat to Air Force One" message to Cheney, his office simply invented someone who couldn't be traced. The code name, by the way, was "angel". A-N-G-E-L. Someone saying "angel" somewhere was hard evidence of a threat. I shop some places online where they won't let you use something that simple as a password to buy socks.

Bush Farewell Tour: Great Personality, Works Out Regularly, Doesn't Overthink Things. Couldn't We Have Just Slept With Him Once And Been Done With It?

Ben Feller, A.P., "Analysis: Bush's personality shapes his legacy." January 3

WHEN the idea of a retrospective of the minor abuses and petty criminality of George W. Bush & Friends struck me a couple years ago--and I promise I'll be getting to the research any day now--the basic impetus was what the lesser lapses, the more garden-variety venality, said about the man and his minions, and how the great engines of Public Relations and the cheerful quislings of the Press facilitated them, how they worked overtime to try to convince people there was Nothing To See, Please Return to Your Homes and Places of Worship in the aftermath of the 2000 election. (There was, and is, the other consideration--it's been with us quite a while now--that the sheer weight and import of Bush disasters has rendered everything other than the major felonies unimportant and too-quickly forgotten. Thus what would have remained as headline-grabbing scandal in earlier administrations--Burt Lance, say, or Bobby Baker, or Margaret Truman's singing voice--are with this one just charges to be dropped so prosecutors can concentrate on the capital offenses. Lord knows I can't remember half the stuff these people got away with or tried to get away with.) I realized such a look back might butt up against a concerted last-ditch effort to resuscitate his presidency, or even the man himself, while he was still in office and able to issue pardons; I did not, at first, have any precedent available for a President hitting Truman-like low approval numbers and keeping them for, well, approximately the length of the entire Truman administration.

What I did not consider was the total collapse of world financial markets and the resulting desperate attempts to give the man something, anything, that could be called a Legacy and not a list of indictable offenses. And, as God is my witness, I never stopped for a moment to ponder what The End of His Presidency puff pieces, if any, were going to look like.

What they look like is that Feller piece linked above, which I stumbled upon in the Sunday Racist Star under the headline "Bush has revealed his human side". It is the salient defense of the once-proud American Economic Miracle that fish, barrels, and ammunition remain well within the average family's budget, available for the cost of the average daily and found in boxes at every major intersection. 

Digby,  understandably, found the piece unmitigated flummery. But I'm just left confused, since it makes my point for me--you have, at the end of the Bush Presidency, The Associated Press trying to construct a legacy out of the exact same nonsense it, and much of the rest of the Mass Market Press, tried to construct a President out of in 2001--but, on the other hand, it does so with an enviable efficiency I couldn't even have dreamt of.

He's a fast-moving, phrase-mangling Texan who stays upbeat! [paragraph one] He relaxes by clearing brush! He gives people nicknames! [paragraph two] He likes punctuality, and stays optimistic! [three] Demands punctuality. [six; the cupboard's damned empty already, apparently] Early to bed, early to rise! [seven] A sixth sense about other's preparation! [eight, nine] Reads the Bible! Works out! Challenges Secret Service men to keep up! Competitive! Likes to be in charge! [ten] 

Hates being interrupted by cellphones. [eleven] (Okay, so there's a little bit of good in almost everybody. Motherfucker could have banned the goddam things after 9/11, then, but did he? We ban shampoo, box cutters, and corkscrews, give duct tape and plastic a bad name, turn emergency preparedness into a sick joke, and allow the importation of children's toys built out of radioactive strontium, but free-range idiots can still stand immediately off your left shoulder in the supermarket check-out line and discourse on real estate, soccer practice, and the results of last week's Pap smear in a voice more appropriate to attracting help while trapped in an elevator, and with impunity, yet.)

I mean, this is the best they can do. Instead of being offended, we might show a little respect. After all, it's at least a comparable challenge to Hitchcock deciding to film an entire movie on a dinghy.