Darth Dribbles

Darth Cheney, edging ever closer to Becoming One with the birthers, the deathers, the teabaggers, and all the other far-fringers currently eating away at the corpse of the Republican Party, has decreed that President Barack Obama “doesn’t fully understand or have the same perception of the US role in the world that most Americans have.”

Obama’s a dim-bulb stumblebum traitorous Muslim Kneegrow, that what you’re sayin’, Darth?

Darth next darkly intimated that another nefarious Kneegrow, Attorney General Eric Holder, is some sort of febrile Manchurian prosecutor hell-bent on dragging terrorists up to New York so they can there propagate Evil.

“I can’t for the life of me figure out what Holder’s intent here is in having Khalid Sheikh Mohammad tried in civilian court other than to have some kind of show trial. They’ll simply use it as a platform to argue their case—it’ll be a place for them to stand up and spread the terrible ideology that they adhere to.”

Darth, who was okay with his hireling George II smooching Saudi princes, and prancing about with them hand in hand, also fulminated that Obama’s respectful bow last week to the Emperor of Japan was “fundamentally harmful” to the United States.

Dang, Darth! Sounds like mebbe you think somethin’ pretty darn drastic oughtta be done to that Kneegrow!

Darth’s bilge was spilled Monday morning on something called the Scott Hennen Show. Hennen is the smooth-talking smoothbrain assigned by the rightwing noise machine to organ-grind lies out the radio in the Fargo, North Dakota region. As evidenced in the photo to the right, Hennen is a hunter, so it is possible that at some point Darth may be compelled to shoot him in the face.

The Hyena In Winter

November 16, 2009

Karen says I need to keep speakin’ into this tape recorder, for the book she’ll write under my name, so I can get vindicated by history. So that’s what I’m doin’. At least till the Monday Night Football comes on. Then I need to go drink me some pretzels.

I see he’s over there in Japan now, the kid, Dumbo. Bowing to their emperor. Kid’s got no sense. Everywhere he goes, the bowing. It don’t look right. America don’t bow to nobody: and when he’s president, he’s America. Like I was. Hell, he even bowed to the Saudis, when anybody with any sense knows you’re supposed to hold their friggin’ hands. Have to—otherwise those hands’ll be squirrelin’ all around your pockets, filchin’ your money.

Me and Dad, we never bowed to no Japanese. Dad, he really knew how to handle ‘em—hell, he threw up on the prime minister. Sure: the story went out that it was because he was sick on them pills and that jet lag. But that was a fib. Really he did it on purpose. He’s a real card, Dad. People just don’t appreciate that.

I guess maybe I did screw up with them Japanese that one time. I was feelin’ kind of feisty, after drinkin’ a couple of pretzels, and I tried to do the hoedown-dance with the Japanese prime minister. Didn’t go so well. Dummy just stood there: guess he never heard of the hoedown. And Pootie-poot, he looked at me like he thought somebody oughta put me back in the crib.

Karen—make sure that picture don’t go in the book, will ya?

Checkered

William Safire wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Well, everybody has to have a job, I guess. But just because you have one, it doesn’t mean you should earn as reward column-space on the op-ed page of the New York Times. For 32 years.

Yet that’s what Safire received, for five years of crafting such snide and slashing culture-busting phrases as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” For both Agnew, who was routinely receiving cash bribes across his desk in the Vice President’s office, and Nixon, the most ethically depraved man to serve in the White House within the lifetime of any person currently present on this planet.

Safire passed today, at age 79, of pancreatic cancer. And that is sad, as it is sad when any creature shuffles off this mortal coil. But sad too is the story of how Safire came to occupy his post at the Times, where, for more than three decades, he was one of but a half-dozen people permitted to speak from the op-ed pulpit of the premier political newspaper in this country. Even sadder is that once Safire was let in, he was soon followed into the nation’s newspapers and TV studios by legions of other hard-right political partisans. Who today so dominate the national political discourse that a rational person is reduced to accessing news and opinion off in the backwaters, in order to avoid such people.

That story is found beyond the furthur. Or, as news guys like Safire and I would say, “on the jump.”

Congress Stands In Recess

He then set himself to throw off the restraints imposed by Congress. He loosed innumerable crabs and other vermin in both Houses. He had a corps of trained idiots who would rush in at a given signal and shit on the floor, and hecklers equipped with a brass band and fire hoses. He instituted continuous repairs. An army of workmen trooped through the Houses, slapping the solons in the face with boards, spilling hot tar down their necks, dropping tools on their feet, undermining them with air hammers; and finally he caused a steam shovel to be set up on the floors, so that the recalcitrant solons were either buried alive or drowned when the Houses flooded from broken water mains. The survivors attempted to carry on in the street, but were arrested for loitering and were sent to the workhouse like common bums. After release they were barred from office on the grounds of their police records.
                                                   —William Burroughs, Roosevelt After Inauguration

Puma Pellets

One of the more bizarre spectacles of the 2008 presidential campaign had to be the PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass)—Clinton II dead-enders who absolutely refused to accept that she had lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. Like those furtive, fugitive WWII Japanese soldiers who scurried for years around remote South Pacific atolls, declining to follow the Emperor into surrender, PUMAs could not concede when their Queen did. They left the party, claiming the party, in failing to crown Clinton II, had left them. Stubborn and ornery as unreconstructed Confederates, there were never that many of them, but they made a lot of noise: pounding their keyboards on renegade blogs, keening loudly on gossipy TV shows. Resembling those bullfrogs that swell up to intimidate potential predators, they managed to convince some people they were bigger and fiercer than they really were. In the end, they even encouraged Bomb McCain—when ordered by Karl Rove to eschew Joe Lieberman as his vice president—to shoot his own campaign right in the stomach, by choosing the moose-brained Sarah Palin as his running mate . . . on the theory she would stampede the PUMAs to the GOP, allowing him to ride them into the White House. Didn’t work out too good, that one, did it, John?

Like cancer cells beaten into remission, they glumly clung on through the general election. Then, not even President Obama’s selection of Clinton II as his Secretary of State mollified them. On blogs like No Quarter, a nut-bunker maintained by former CIA spook and fervent Islamophobe Larry Johnson, and The Confluence and Alegre’s Corner, a couple of shriek-shacks knocked together by refugees from Daily Kos, the PUMAs practiced a sort of political schizophrenia: damning or ignoring everything that could be said to come from Obama, while gushing over anything that could plausibly be linked to Clinton II. And they’re still at it.

There were also always closeted PUMAs in more high-profile positions, of course. These, however, were, from the convention on, generally well-behaved. Until this week. Now, for some reason, they’ve decided to commence the handwringing: the Queen is being Ignored.

Even The Governor Of South Carolina State Sometimes Must Have To Hike Naked

This cannot end well.

Last Thursday South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford left the Governor’s Mansion, climbed aboard a black Suburban SUV belonging to his security detail, and drove off, alone, without security personnel, or anyone else.  In the days since, his family and staff have issued various conflicting stories as to his whereabouts, but it is not at all certain that any of them have actually spoken to him.

One of the stories spun by staff to cover Sanford’s mysterious disappearance emerged Monday, and had him hiking the Appalachian Trail. This tale blew up like an exploding cigar when it was discovered that Sunday on the Trail was “Naked Hiking Day.”

Take Two

There are grumblings this morning that the United States should not accept the results of Friday’s presidential election in Iran, where incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the victor.

Appearing on Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden opined:

“It sure looks like the way they’re suppressing speech, the way they’re suppressing crowds, the way in which people are being treated, that there’s some real doubt.”

Maybe so, maybe so. Problem is that here, as in so many areas of human conduct, the US is precluded from objecting too loudly without prompting much of the world to snicker about American hypocrisy.

For in December of 2000, George W. Bush was selected as President of the United States, despite the fact that Albert Gore had won the election, if “winning” is defined, as it traditionally is, by receiving the most votes—which Gore did, in the disputed state of Florida, had every legitimate ballot cast actually been counted.

Those votes were not counted, however, because Bush operatives first forcibly shut down the counting of ballots, and then obtained a 5-4 ruling from the United States Supreme Court that permanently halted ballot-counting, effectively proclaiming Bush president.

Three of the five justices who installed Bush as president possessed conflicts that should have compelled them to recuse themselves from the case. Antonin Scalia’s son was a partner in the legal firm representing Bush before the high court. Clarence Thomas’ wife was busily processing applications for those seeking appointment to the yet-to-be Bush administration. Sandra Day O’Connor on election night had publicly exclaimed “this is terrible” upon learning that Gore had apparently won; she wished to retire from the bench, but would only do so under a Republican president.

Nonetheless, these folks, the supreme law of the land, declared Bush the victor, and so he was.

Now, in Iran, the supreme law of that land, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, has declared Ahmadinejad the victor. And so he is.

Both the United States Supreme Court and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini may boast of the word “supreme” in their titles. Both wear robes. Neither were elected by the people they govern to the positions they hold.

Meanwhile, from the safety of the tubes, voluble keyboard commandos are urging the Iranian people to resist recognizing Ahmadinejad’s re-election, decreeing: “If it comes down to a violent revolution, so be it.”

Maybe these people should reflect that it was a violent revolution, in 1979-80, that brought the current Iranian regime to power.

Elks Club

The factotums of Bomb McCain sound exceedingly silly in vowing that their man could not possibly have seized the opportunity to listen in on the questions that would be asked of him at Saturday’s Saddleback “faith forum.”

According to the New York Times, faith-forum ringmaster Rick Warren “seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building” when Warren posed the same questions to Barack Obama that he would later pose to McCain. Warren intended that during Obama’s oratorio McCain would be sequestered in some Saddleback cell, there shrouded in “a cone of silence.”

But McCain—no doubt “running late”—was not yet in the building: instead, he was en route, ensconced in his motorcade. Though the vehicle bearing the Bomb was certainly equipped with radio, television, computer, and all manner of texting devices, McCain spokesmouth Nicolle Wallace told the Times he “had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.”

Of course not. Monomaniacally pursuing the presidency, nursing an eight-year losing streak, desperate to reverse his luck, why would McCain take advantage of an opportunity to furtively peek at the cards . . . especially when no one but his own people would ever know?

If we know anything about the people who have recently attained the presidency, we know that, in all the important ways, they are at one with Chinatown’s Noah Cross. Who, when speaking of the child he sired upon his own daughter, observed: “I don’t blame myself.

“You see,” Cross explained, “most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time, the right place, they’re capable of anything.”