I Take It Back. George Eff Will's Bowtie Is The Smartest Thing At WaPo.

Richard Cohen, "Time for Obama to Act Like a President And, Preferably, Not The One He Campaigned To Be". September 29

Barbara Kellerman, "Uprooting Bad Leaders: Turn Your Total Indifference to Basic Facts and Unfamiliarity with Godwin's Law into a Lucrative Career on the Professional Lecture Circuit". September 29

John Pomfret, " Oil and Ideology Keep China From Joining Effort to Press Iran: Also, My Name Means 'French Fries'". September 30

Dana "Satire" Millbank, "The Latest From Michael Moore: 'Rocky and Me', The 'Me' in Question Being An Overweight Fellow". September 30

FIRST, For God's Sake: Don't read those! They're just there to serve as examples. They're meant to scare small children and the literate.

Yesterday I was buzzing around the History/Science neighborhood of my teevee menu while pedaling the exercise bike my knees have suddenly become adapted to more than five minute's riding of, and simultaneously basting a roasting chicken ("Poor Man's Alligator") every ten. And I was stopped by the second half of a thing on the Bygone Era of the Train-Traveling Circus. I'm not quite sure which exact channel it was on, but I know it wasn't the History Channel proper, since they didn't interview any Biblical archaeologists, and no one mentioned whether Nostradamus eerily foresaw Barnum hooking up with Bailey.

Now, I always hated the circus, even as a tyke (not quite as much as parades, but similarly), though I did marry the daughter of itinerant carnival laborers, and I have to admit that even I was taken in a bit by the forced nostalgia for the Romance of the Rails, the thundering Iron Horse nickering showers of hot cinders on the wooden dwellings either side of the tracks, the days of rolling packs of small-time grifters, grown men wearing makeup, and acres of the manure of captive beasts, many clad in tutus or funny hats, bringing the allure of an 18th century European art form, a sort of traveling opera but without the libretto, and played on bagpipes, to the credulous and the inbred. So, y'know, there's a sense in which I understand what they're going through at WaPo these final days. Excepting, of course, that the circus had integrity. At least by comparison. But then, what doesn't?

Is there a greater casualty of the Internets than The Washington Post? Exposed as a thieves' cabal of Media Whores, careerist fellators, and, worse, future Politico founders, then as war-mongering media whores, lying war-mongering media whores, perpetually-adolescent clowns, and, finally, as the prima-facie refutation of Intelligent Design.

Imagine what it would be like to turn up at the Cube Farm one morning and find you were now yoked to Bill Kristol, a man so remarkably free of one single decent idea, let alone the ability to convey one if he did stumble over it, that he had just been fired from a sinecure? Supposing at this point you had some microscopic jot of self-respect left? I believe you see my point. All these people are still eating, so far as we can tell. But no one can say why.

So I don't give a fuck what any of those people has to say, though I do think it's interesting that Cuban Missile Crisis pops up more than once as a cautionary tale, and not--after the forty-seven fucking years they've had to consider this--the propensity of hot-headed fuckwits to manufacture the opportunity for disaster using only the Smoke from their fevered imaginations and the Cracked Mirror America admires her self-image in every morning.* With the help of the Washington Post.

As for Millbank's "Fat Michael Moore is gonna start a Democratic Civil War", well, for one, So Fucking What? They've had three years. What's the slogan for 2010, by the way? "The Democratic Party: Because Republicans Would Have Defunded ACORN Without Some Ass-Clown in Jolson Makeup!" ? Moore and I are the same age, born four months apart. We've been lied to by the Democratic Party our entire adult lives. We're supposed to prefer being rabbit-punched while held in a theatrical embrace to the telegraphed jackboot to the groin from Republicans? Because to act otherwise offends Dana Millbank's complacency? What's the friendship of "moderate" Democrats ever done for the Left, huh, Dana? A filibuster-proof Senate?

Second, I was tempted to say, "Forget it, Michael. It's Chinatown." But it's not. It's D.C., where they eat an Owens Valley every morning, just to coat the gut for that first Bloody Mary.

Shit. Still more than 400 words.
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* Apparently this needs to be pointed out every October: what does Cuba do in 1962, with ten-thousand nuclear warheads? It launches them before a Soviet strike, thus tipping one off, and is annihilated instantaneously, while tipping one off, or the Soviets launch first and we annihilate Cuba in response without them firing a shot. Fast forward fifty years, only make it Cuba trying to acquire fifty-year-old technology on the open market while knowing full well we (or our non-nuclear chums in the region, wink wink) could wipe it off the map without exiting Google Earth first. And the people who believe in the plerophoric global domination of Judeo-Christianity, Inc., are the ones who fly off the handle quickest; a woman who lectures at the Kennedy School doesn't seem to understand where Mahmoudolph Ahmadinehitler fits on the Iranian flow chart (and whatever Kagan it is they have there, whom it is superfluous to link to, thinks the Supreme Leader has to stand for reelection); some other guy throws a tantrum because China is laughing at us instead of pitching in to help avoid whatever Armageddon it suits us to predict this week. Because they crave Oil! And Michael Moore could stand to lose a few pounds. For fuck's sake, didn't we just learn what going crazy at the least little sound in the night gets us?