high times and misdemeanors

I do wonder where this mess of an administration will end up. So far it is a toss-up between whether Bush's will go down as more corrupt than Grant's or Harding's. Either way he is in rarified company corruption-wise.

It is really amazing to watch a misadministration implode. I watched Johnson's die its slow death. I watched as Nixon got tangled in the noose that he tried to lynch the Constitution with - and thanks to a Congress that really took its oath of office seriously - he got strangled himself.

It is a cliche I know but it is like watching a slow-mo train wreck. And every day brings a new more bizarre twist to this plot.

The latest is centered at the Watergate (I guess we have to draw up a topology. This would just be one more local minimum) and at last this cess-pool of an administration (for a second time after having required a -gate after every scandalous whiff we have a -gate that really is a watergate -gate.) now finally includes SEX. At long last the extended Bush administration has a SEX SCANDAL. Of course it is too little too late for Boy George. I expect with his polls in 30's (soon to be 20's?), about now he is wishing someone liked him enough to give him a blowjob.

It is like this GOP in its "Republican-error" of one party government is determined to taste every mode of corruption available to the human psyche. I wouldn't be suprised if a Republican congressman was found eating roasted human flesh at a rest stop in suburban MD. OK I would be suprised but not in the "Oh my God how could anyone..." sense.

But in a way, it is kinda heartening this watergate/callgirl/cuban contraband cigar/whatever scandal.

And we owe it to the Dukestir. While the President and his mob actively piss on the Constitution and Hastert, Delay, Frist, and Roberts all do pee-pee on the Constitution at his behest we get Cunningham and the CIA overseers all getting laid and bribed apparently out of simple greed. It is almost quaint and quite like a breath of fresh (incredibly stinkie but fresh) air.

So thank you Duke and all the others soon to be implicated (present and former Congressmen included) in this latest aspect of the Bush rot for restoring my faith in the ability of Washington to do just good old fashioned corruption.

To you all a toast.

I report... you decide

It's spring. Time to clear the brush?

Yeah well, Bush is cleaning house... Andy Card is gone and George has a new appointment czar in Bolten who is as has been noted an insider.

Now Mouthpiece McClellan is gone - Bush is obviously soul searching. Rove has been "demoted". When Rasputin was demoted it took cyanide, several bullets and a club (here).

But Karl isn't being left to the tender mercies of his own numerous enemies. Instead this so-called demotion is 1) a chance for him to work on defending himself against the ample evidence that he is a traitor, like Veep's aide Libby, to his country and 2) a chance to work whatever mojo he has left in salvaging the rapidly collapsing Generation of the Republican Majority(tm).

But all that begs the question: how would we know when the Bush housecleaning is a real Spring cleaning and not just re-arranging the deck chairs to get a better look at the icebergs?

Well in short, if someone has to be confirmed - my bet - it ain't gonna happen.

I mean what candidate could go before Congress - even this rubber stamp bunch of racketeers (when does RICO kick in?) that might otherwise be laughingly called the Republican Leadership - and not get hosed by the sins of his/her predecessor?

SecDef? Obviously not. It would be wall-to-wall Iraq fuckup for weeks.

Interior - Say, Norton leaves. The question? How do you intend to reclaim the department from being the wholly owned subsidiary of Jack inc?

Treasury? Um can you spell "trillions in debt"?

Homeland Security - a department that should have never seen the light of day. Will you promise not to sell the ports to terrorist financiers? What happens if it rains in the south again? Wiretaps anyone?

You get my point. Any office that requires Bush to have his nominee confirmed by the Senate would be an invitation to (further) disaster to the fool-in-chief.

I mean even at this point should the entire Supreme Court succumb to the plague (even one not instigated by Ann Coulter), Bush would be very hard pressed to get a quorum seated.

So what is poor Boy George to do?

The beauty of nationhood is that we are all in this together.

At this writing there are 1006 days left in the misadministration.

The downside of nationhood is that for the next 1006 days we are all in this together.

The entire Kennedy era lasted that long.

So don't count on any real change. Any change for George at this point is bad change. At worse it would open the seepage to impeachment (note: not floodgate - it is the Republican rubber stamp after all) that even Karl with all his new found free time - let alone George - couldn't control.

Even if the Democrats win big in November expect a very slow death of a thousand cuts for this disastrous epoch in out national life. It will take a new dem majority a long time to overcome its battered spouse syndrome. At best they will tie Bush in knots. At worse that will cause Bush to go off the deep end and do something - I was going to say "stupid" but he has already raised the bar too high for my feeble imagination - so fill in the blank.

what happens the day after Bush attacks Iran?

George Bush is going to take us to war again. This time in Iran. Do I know for certain? No. But I am certain enough to enter an office pool on naming the date and time for it too start.

The real question is not "if" George Bush will once again make himself an international war criminal and make the American people complicit in his crimes. No, the question is what will we the American People do about it. I don't mean what will we do to stop him. We can't. As in Iraq, George Bush wants a war and George Bush will have his war. Call it GW II.

I mean what will the American people do the after it starts. With wall-to-wall coverage of an air war full of flash and fire (fka shock and awe) on CNN and FOX. With the usual band of coconspirators talking about how important it is to attack Iran. With the whole GW War Noise Machine in full throat, what will we do? Will we be awed ourselves like we were at the start of the Iraq debacle? Will we be cowed by the calls to stand behind our President in a "Time of War"(tm).

Will we take to the streets in free speech zones?

I don't know the answer. As sure I am that George Bush is going to attack Iran and I do think it is more than possible (bordering likely) that he will use tactical nukes to do it, I have no idea what the reaction of the American People will be.

As George Bush himself once said, "Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice - won't get fooled again." We must wait for after the bombs start falling on Iran before we know if he was/is speaking for the American People.

tom delay goes on the lam

He's out. He wants to spend more time away from Ronnie Earle, I guess. Naturally he is cloaking his slime in his normal smarmy sleeze (do you get the idea that my respect for the man knows limits?). He is leaving Texas to move to his residence in Va so he can vacate his candidacy and give the next Texas Republican felon-to-be a chance.

You can tell how much shit he thinks he's in. He's moving from his place on a gold course. And you know he loves him some golf by-jeebus. I guess it ain't the same without jack coming anymore by to pick up the drink tab. Ah those were the days, eh Tommie boy. But wipe your eye. You still got Jesus and besides, they're closing in, it's time to flee.

So long Tom, you gave us hours of fun and excitement, But I gotta tell you, America will be better off without you, Texas will be better off without you and soon enough Allentown will be better with you,

Ciao, Babe. Don't let the bed bugs bite,

back from the brink

I've been wondering what it might take to take this nation back from its current bout of acute psychosis.

People can become bipolar - they become manic; they become depressed. They swing like a pendulum from one state to the other. States too can become bipolar. For states though the manifestations are named differently. States swing between self-aggrandizing on one end to paranoid on the other.

I think that the manic/self-aggrandizement and depression/paranoia equate generally well enough to make "people bipolar" and "state bipolar" close analogs if not isomorphic.

Given that, it is clear to me that despite the chest thumping that the Bush administration and its willing executioners like to display exhibits depression. Now chest thumping and depression are not usually equated. Neither is chest thumping and paranoia I suppose. But consider that when one is in greatest fear, one can choose to run or one can chose to fight. If you feel you are dealing from weakness and you decide to fight the only tool you have is the bluff. Said another way, all you can do is thump your chest and hope your opponent is impressed enough to back down.

If one is deeply paranoid (and won't run) all one can do is chest-thumping. I obviously have a big definition of chest thumping here. Sending American troops into Iraq s a valid manifestation of chest-thumping. You see, chest thumping doesn't actually do anything significant. What it does is it attempts to make your adversary believe that you COULD do something significant. And that describes the Iraq invasion. It did not solve any particular problem. It only tried to demonstrate that we could do such a thing to our adversary if we wanted to.

I don't believe for a second that the neo-cons see it this way. I think that they thought they were solving a problem. Saddam had become a serious boogey-man for them, He kept them from sleep and stuff. But the real actor here is George Bush. What did he see? I am convinced that he saw it as chest thumping. We could show North Korea and Iran. And we could show Al Qaeda too. They would see how powerful we are (were) and decide that they better get with program.

He followed all that up with the incipient Constitutional crisis of illegal wiretaps, Constitutional crime, and neo-McCarthyism that is so bad we have no "-gate" name for it. We just call it "politics."

George Bush put this nation into a serious paranoia. Does he feel it as a personal paranoia? I don't know. That is not a necessary pre-condition I think for the nation to be in such a state. I don't think it is even necessary for his machine to believe it. Their job is by definition a machiavellian one. They must manipulate events to support the narrative they want to embed in the national consciousness.

So the question again, how to get the nation back from not only this state of paranoia but from its general psychosis? One can say that this nation has always been thusly psychotic. Our Manifest Destiny is manifest enough. Our adherence since the Civil War of a nearly-wahhabist strain of capitalism has always been at odds with the principals of our founding documents.

But before this Bush Administration we were able to find a rough equilibrium. It lasted from between the mid-fifties until September 11, 2001. And yes, I am including Nixon and Reagan in their. Through all that time the pendulum swung but it didn't move really all that far from its center. And really I don't believe that even McCarthy was that much of a Constitutional problem. For the proper bookend we would have to go back to FDR and his ramming through of his Depression-era programs and his subsequent Japanese internment order.

Somehow we survived that. Now the question is, how do we survive this?