Fascinoma

So Wesley Clark had the balls to speak the plain truth about Saint John McSame, "I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president." Now the Brownshirts are going to shriek about it like vampires spying sunlight. But this kind of thing should be refocused actually, the point should be made thus, "If McCain's military experience so qualifies him to be commander in chief, why did he tell the country that Iraq would be a cakewalk and that we'd be greeted as liberators, and that it was safe to walk in that marketplace (wth only 100 armed guards) and that the Surge was working, despite meeting none of the stated goals and that we should be ready stay in Iraq for 100 years, at a billion dollars a day. None of these things bespeaks good judgment."

Or, at the risk of tarring some Democrats with a broad brush, one could simplify it, "He helped get us into one of the worst disasters in American history, why should we listen to him?"

The booboisie might actually undertsand that.

It seems to me that where most of us have irony "conservatives" have compartmentalization. It's like they've had corpus callosotomies and so the right brain doesn't know what the left brain is doing, thus they can be sanctmonious and corrupt without the slightest cognitive dissonance, embarrassment, sense of hypocrisy or other discomfort.

The writings of Charles Krauthammer raise an interesting ethical question: at what point does it become permissible to spit on a man in a wheelchair?

Today I alighted from the Judiciary Square Metro stop and went south towards Constitution through the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, a truly weird, but at least low-profile bit of kitsch -- complete with names of the fallen etched in stone a la the Vietnam Memorial. I'm sure some of these fallen were fine people who gave the last full measure of devotion and fully deserve to be honored, possibly better honored than this. But I can't say that, in general, cops are my heroes. Most strike me, as I've said before, as gym teachers with guns. "Give a little man a little power," a friend once told me, "and right away he thinks he's powerful." Copthink, in a 25 words or less.

But I digress: what struck me today was the 30 or 40 children aged 10 or under in some kind of tan Sheriffs Association t-shirts and green safety-patrol sashes and camouflage hats like South African kitskonstabels being chaperoned around by adults in similar outfits and invited to genuflect before the fallen. A bit too Hilterjugend for my liking. But I guess your police state isn't complete until it has some child-soldiers.

Now that four dollar gas is here to stay the basic something-for-nothing premise of American Republicanism might get a wee bit harder to sell. It's pretty much always been: "A growing free-market economy will solve all our problems soon, finally producting that perpetual motion machine that converts lead into gold, or hydrogen into helium, or whatver keep the balloon afloat in the nonsptop orgy of more, more, more which will then last forever or until Jesus takes us away to Paradise -- whichever comes first." Now watch me drive my Hummer.

New definition for conservative: one who believes in the "free market" like virgins believe in unicorns.

I'm really tuning out most mainstream media today, like millions, I'm sure, because they are ever more staffed, populated, dominated by fonts of conventional wisdom, fundamentalists of the centrist faith that all is right with America -- just some turbulence there people; the guys in suits will have it sorted shortly -- that the white men in Washington are doing all they can to keep our country decent and secure.

I remember, eight years ago, that even in my Hollywood hovel, as far from the seats of power as one could be in America, I learned, by reading a few truth-tellers (notably Joe Conason in Harper's) that the published record showed George Bush to be an unprincipled bungler, whose touch turned everything into a swindle, a fiasco, or both. But the multimillionaires who deliver our the "news you need" either couldn't see this, or wouldn't say it, and as a result one of the most loathsome brats ever spoiled by this rich, fatuous land rose to its most powerful office. The results have been horrific on a planetary scale, and just how horrific they are and will be, we can't even know yet; and of course this being carefully ignored by the 'people we trust to bring us the news we need.'

If only I believed in hell, I could rest easier knowing that someday these souls, along with their GOP overlords, would boil in liquid shit, or the equivalent for their criminal negligence. Alas.....

They keep rolling in like the dry heaves, the tributes to Timeh Russert, for raising to an art, well more a money-minting machine the kind of journamalism that ignores the unbelievable truth that GOP has devolved into a crime syndicate that steals elections, loots the treasury, counterfeits the causus belli (in order to facilitate stealing elections and looting the treasury), perverts the Justice Department into a dirty tricks squad, and perverts American democracy into a fascistic police state wherein the President can eavesdrop upon citizens without warrant, imprison them without process, torture them into telling any story he likes, and leave the rest of us basically with the right to remain silent about all this. Real journalists might have found the nearly incredible story of such absolute corruption an irresistible challenge, greatness thrust upon them as it were (the task: to make the mere awful truth – which sounds like hyperbole – plausible), but no, the haircuts and bleached teeth on our TV’s would rather the truth remained unbelievable, confined to the backwater of the internets and the Daily Show, so they find other things to worry about like whether Michelle Obama is sufficiently and eternally proud enough of the country that enslaved her ancestors and often treats people of her race as second-class citizens to this day. On the other hand, Cindy McCain, we are told, has “always been proud” of her country, although this pride, like Rush Limbaugh’s, has apparently sometimes needed a little chemical assist, which she got by stealing drugs from her own charity. You can bet that Timmeh’s disciples won’t be talking up the oft-opiated aspect of Cindy McCain’s pride, not will they wonder much how proud she was to be called a cunt in public by her Senator husband. Of course, maybe he was waving the flag while doing it so she knew it was all in fun.

But speaking of the C-word, here’s another gal who really puts it into the country, the blinking idiot Nancy Pelosi! She who is greasing the national anus for the easeful passing of a Congressional pardon of the poor, defenseless telecoms who so patriotically allowed the Preznit’s men to eavesdrop on whoever they wanted to without a warrant -- provided the bills were paid on time. Why, thanks to Nancy and Steny Hoyer, and Jay Rockefeller and Silvestre Reyes, we’ll probably never have the slightest idea what the GOPers were up to that made the ACLU stalwart, and also Attorney General John Ashcroft, and that liberal weenie FBI Director Louis Freeh threaten to resign. Musta been some full-strength terror-busting! Anyway Thanks Ever So Much Nancy!

Lost among the many effusions about Tim Russert's gooey greatness is any sense of the real Tim, a quintessential American story, actually, just a timeless story of human nature and the several ways it can go. For Tim, however much he must have had on the ball back in the Golden Era of Moynihan, had grown into a pompous, self-satisfied, bloviating, self-deluded idiot, so certain that his bullshit detector was made infallible by his Buffalo upbringing that he swallowed the admimistration's chips by the bushel. He was, in later life, living proof, like so many of his money-grubbing ilk, that when people do not grow wiser with age, they often grow incredibly stupider.

Tim, they say over and over, exemplified all that was right with journalism, but some us, including Atrios, disagree. He cites the Phildalphia Inquirer for this bit of egregious hagiography:

How quickly they forget, forget that Tim himself said that whatever a government official says to him is "off the record" (as if he were Father Confessor) unless that official says it's otherwise. Several people pointed out that this turns the journalist into a mere orifice for spin. Indeed, Dick Cheney's office valued Tim highly in that blow-up doll capacity, as Cathie Martin testified under oath.

Of course the noise of all the Man Crushing on the departed Timmy has drowned out all these memories, if they can be called that -- since even when fresh most media people ignore such ugly truths like they were Granny's farts. The truth is: Tim Russert was a middlebrow ass-clown who got incredibly rich spreading the conventional wisdom and corporatist spin for Jack Welch and his accessories, while of course ignoring the crimes of Republicans, even, and perhaps especially when he himself was caught up in them, as in the Plame case -- which only the threat of prison could make him speak about.

Tim Russert was a journalist like Hulk Hogan is a wrestler. I hope they bury him in DC, because I'll be taking a sixer out there soon. I'll make it Genesee, in honor of his Buffalo blue-collar roots.

It's now apparent that John McSame, just like Bush, cannot step to a microphone without lying through his teeth. His heinous new ad (which Chirs Matthews obligingly played free and without comment last night on Lardball), foregrounding his misfortune in Vietnam, tosses out this whopper:

Listent to the man, "I hate war." LOL. That's a good one, Maverick. He hates them so much he'll limit them, Plantagenet-style, to 100 Years, or so.

So which is it John: "fool," as you put it, "or fraud"? Or can it be both?

History Lesson

It was the custom, in the England of the third King George,
(the hideous dictator deplored by our forefathers with such warlike
oratory) that no man had to surrender the road to the king
or his entourage; his beery, bad-teeth people would have strung
him up for such presumption. I think of this considerate king
whenever the cops stop traffic on Constitution so the Underflunky

of Something Or Other can have the whole eight-lane avenue
to roar by importantly in a racket of sirens and snarling Harleys,
his wasp-eyed Praetorian morons scowling down the barrels
of their burp-guns, twitching their trigger fingers at the sheepish
polite people to whom they will never, ever have to answer.