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Gop Ethics in a nutshell. Sociopathic. Remember these guys yukking it up in blatantly sadistic terms about stolen elections (Enron financed), rolling blackouts (Enron-manufactured), and subsequent overcharging of Enron's poorest electricity buyers:

ENRON EMPLOYEE 1: So the rumor is true? They're fucking taking all the money back from you guys? All that money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

ENRON EMPLOYEE 2: Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. So she’s the one who couldn't figure out how to fucking vote on the butterfly ballot, but yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you've charged right up her -- jammed right up her ass for fuckng $250 a megawatt hour. Yeah, you know. You know Grandma Millie. She's the one that Al Gore is fighting for.

You can bet the rent that 1 & 2 are big George Bush fans. He's the guy who promised to run the country just like their boss Kenny Boy ran Enron. And then he did it too!

People like 1 & 2 were responsible for vast human suffering. If only there were a way to concentrate the equivalent of the aggregate suffering in its few authors, surely it would snuff out their shitty little lives. And that would be justice. But forget about justice. It would be nice if we just got the operation of the law.

A related query: to what extent is possession of an MBA correlated with sociopathic amorality?

In much the same way American CEO's now make about 411 times as much as the hourly workers in their companies, the death of a white, middle-class American now counts about 411 times as much the death of all other persons on Earth. That's why the Virgina Tech shootings are infinitely more newsworthy than the equivalent or greater daily body count in Iraq. Those are darker people who talk funny, therefore they get maybe a single short-lived news item if say, 170 of them get blown to bits at one time.

That's also why the 9/11 was the Biggest Event in the History of the Universe, or at least since the Chicxulub Impact.

Eric Boehlert asks: Can conservative bloggers tell the truth?

No. Given the Orwellian tension between the traditional meaning of "conservative" and the beliefs and actions of the right-wing zealots who describe themselves as conservative, it is abundantly arguable that since their very identities are BS, pretty much everything that springs from them is likewise BS. If you put the first button in the second hole it doesn't matter how careful you are after that.

When the inside Bushies decided to create their own reality, they evidently started from scratch with a whole new time-space continuum, new metaphysics and epistemology, creating a Republiverse where the knowns, known-unknowns and the unknown-unknowns orbit one another, sometimes trading places in a way that would have dizzied Heisenberg. Sometimes, in such a world, it's possible to forget something before you ever knew it, or remember and forget it and remember and forget all over again, in a sort of occulting flash the like the x-ray pulse from a spinning neutron star. In such a world, where as Grace Slick says, logic and proportion have fallen far behind, it's quite possible that the True Truth is very variable, mysterious and difficult to pin down. How else to account for formulations from senior administration officials, like the one from Scooter Libby that promtped this:

"And so when Tim Russert had this conversation with you, you didn't remember that the vice president told you in June that Wilson's wife works at the CIA," Fitzgerald said, "but when you remembered what you forgot, you remembered that you learned it in June not to be classified."
He paused, then asked incredulously: "As you sit here today, is that your testimony under oath?"

Or this, about the U.S Attorney firings, from Abu Gonzales:

"To my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign."

This, in tunrn, prompts the Post's Eugene Robinson to wonder, "To his knowledge? What on earth does that mean? Is Gonzales in the habit of making decisions without his own knowledge?"

Well, memory is a funny thing. Richard Burton would sometimes get drunk before doing Hamlet, and later wake up in his dressing room thinking he'd missed his call. The janitor or whoever was left in the place would assure him, "Oh no, Sir Richard; you were especially fine this evening." He'd remembered thousands of lines of iambic pentameter without remembering that he'd remembered.

In a lesser instance, I too have been known to make fateful decisions about women in bars or at parties, and then to follow through loquaciously and enthusiastically (apparently) on those choices, without any evidence of higher brain function. But so far nobody at the White House is invoking the Blackout Drunk Defense. Maybe it's time.

As the novelist Richard Price once said to me, “God is a bad novelist.” What ham-handed irony that those on the Right no longer have the slightest concern with “right”, with either factual correctness or ethicality. As the latest Wolfowitz affair makes clear, the Bushian MO is: “Do as you like and cover with lies.”

According to the Post, Wolfowitz tried to apologize to people at World Bank for his “mistake” here (in Republicanewspeak “crime: and “mistake” are now synonyms) but it didn’t go over well:

Wolfowitz attempted to address about 200 staffers gathered in the bank's central atrium but left after some began hissing, booing, and chanting "Resign. . . . Resign." He had approached the gathering after holding a news conference in which he said, "I made a mistake for which I am sorry."

I actually laughed out loud when I read that item. First time in awhile I’ve laughed at a Post story.

The operant theory among the Judeo-Christo-fascists is literally “The Righteous can do no wrong.” They think God himself has given them power, and they themselves are therefore Godly, so Godly that they ‘create their own reality’ (even their own moral fabric in the universe), simply by wishing. Hence, among other things, Iraq, where wishing was ‘mistaken’ for planning.

To the Mayberry Machiavellians of today decency is a sort of sentimental mirage (like True Love) you try to induce in your inferiors, the better to manipulate them. The depravity of this crew is both bottomless and utterly banal (puerile, cliché and predictable). They are the wimps, blimps, wallflowers, nerds, spaztoids, nosepickers and closet-cases taking revenge on the world for not making the prom all about Them.