No-Compete Friday

Gavin M. meets Goldberg Admiration Society treasurer Katie at Kaubki Village:

"But I waited…waited until I knew I would be in Manhattan for the day…a day when I could purchase it at the book store at Grand Central (making sure to ask the clerk where it was even though it was on a table in the center of the store…just because I knew it would drive the guy nuts) and could then carry it throughout my day of meetings."

Let’s look at this woman’s big day on the town. She created a multi-stage pageant out of buying a copy of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism — a book devised as though on the spot at a cocktail party, as an insouciant one-liner from a half-drunk Jonah to some cornball editor he was trying to impress (Adam Bellow, let’s imagine), which was then delivered only after years of flop sweat, excruciating mental gymnastics, and probably genuine debilitating mental depression, because as Jonah knew at the time (and as he probably knows still during certain late nights and lonely self-encounters), while its concept is guaran-freaking-teed to make liberals hop-hop-hoppingly mad, it cannot stand as a serious book because it is premised on an absurdity. So here she’s like, “Tee-hee, my plan begins by loudly asking for this book at Grand Central Station, just in case there’s a liberal nearby to whom I’d be sticking it.” It’s like those Mexican guys in Los Angeles with the bouncy cars: On the surface it just looks silly, but then you consider the industry and determination on display — step by step from concept to technical execution — in installing custom hydraulic systems in order to bounce up and down in their car all pocketa-pocketa while scowling at you at a random stoplight, and it’s genuinely sort of terrifying. What sort of people would do this, and by God, what else are they capable of?

WE would just like to add, as a Public Service, that You can observe a lot just by watching. Supposing you would avoid crapping your pants except under the most ungovernable of circumstances, you might also take this to suggest something about your driving habits or political pronouncements, absent any evidence to the contrary. I'm always struck that people (including the author, apparently) consider Being There an indictment of Television mindlessness (which is like indicting somebody who was hanged a half-century earlier, innit?) when it's the simple knowledge gained from gardening that propels Chance into prominence. Maybe that's because I'm a feeble-minded gardener myself, but anyway: the fact that "Reality" does not instantly punish every instance of complete and utter bullshit that comes down the pike owes everything to the quantity of bullshit out there, not its quality. Every time a traffic light saves us from being crushed to death by a speeding dump truck we see the utter refutation of modern Republican Libertoonianism. Certainly, we might make a lot of money producing something like Liberal Fascism, and we might even do so under a nom de plume, thus keeping our shame a secret. But even if we managed to do so, every one of us can see, just walking down the street, that dying in unspeakable poverty is preferable to living as Jonah Goldberg.

Most of us, even some Republicans whose favored form of religious observance does not involve water moccasins and flaming jerrycans of white gas, do our own shopping. We are therefore capable of observing the attitude of most service personnel to the asshole Americanus in a natural setting, since if you're third in line or lower there's bound to be at least one in front of you, and if you're standing patiently in some formless line, at the Deli, say, and they're all behind you, at least one is sure to step in front when it's your turn. We could simply extrapolate from here; the average cashier or counterman must encounter fifty complete assholes and double that in brain-damaged twits in the average shift, and that's assuming the place doesn't serve alcohol. This means it's about as likely they bother him as it is that stepping in cowshit irritates a dairy farmer.

But let's go ahead and continue our field observations. How do such folk, in the main, respond? They don't. They don't give a fuck about you; if they did we're hear about one or two going postal every single day.

And I don't know, but I would suspect that people working in a bookstore, which, by its very nature, suggests literacy on the part of both employee and patron, pretty much have you pegged if you find it necessary to march up first thing and ask them where such-and-such could be found, whether it's Liberal Fascism, A Thomas Kincade Chanukah, or To the Lighthouse. There are enormous fucking signs delineating each section, lady. You've just announced you're too lazy or stupid to look for them, or else you're too self-important not to have The Help do it for you. It's hardly surprising, under the circumstances, that you're looking for Goldberg's shit sandwich. Aisle Six, on the (snigger) Left. Can I help the next asshole in line?

Yes, we said something about Public Service, and it's not to suggest to these people that they curb the junior-high slumber party antics before they deal with anybody who handles their food. Frankly, we hope they don't. It's that it's well past time to put this tired crap to bed and find a new routine. We'd like to suggest entering liberal bastions like bookstores, libraries, and daycare centers and brandishing a weapon at the employees, just to show your Second amendment absolutism.

Ye Gods

Lisa: Doesn't the Bible teach us, "Judge not, lest ye be judged, And when you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men," Reverend Mr. Attorney General?

Lovejoy Steve Carter: [sullen] I think it may be somewhere towards the back.

"Blue State" News, courtesy The Indianapolis (1) Racist Star (2):

1)

‘BE GODS’ plate is OK, BMV says



By Jon Murray


The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles commissioner today backed off its denial of a woman’s request for a personalized license plate reading “BE GODS.”
The decision resulted from a lawsuit filed this week by Liz Ferris, who had that same plate on her car for eight or nine years but forgot to renew it on time for 2008. When she submitted a new personalized plate application, the BMV denied her request because of a recent policy change banning any references to religion or a deity on new personalized plates.

Mind you, now, this is the state where you are offered, when you renew your plates, the "In God We Trust" plate, the only state-sanctioned special-interest plate that doesn't cost you any extra money. This past Monday the Indiana Court of Religious Appeals and Marsupial Boxing Commission upheld the no-fee provision, on the same grounds it had earlier used to uphold the Constitutionality of using tax dollars to promote monotheism: that behaving otherwise would impinge on the First Amendment rights of people who are trying to violate the First Amendment.

But while it was proposed last year, that policy didn't take legal effect until this month. Commissioner Ron Stiver said in a statement released today that the BMV would give Ferris a new plate bearing her old message — which she intended to mean “Be God’s” or “belong to God.”

See, this is why I remain incessantly sunny in the face of all evidence to the contrary. God, or Her Facsimile, can control the BMV, but the Devil still owns the grammar texts (and Apostrophe is his most accommodating handmaiden, it goes without saying). Today Ms Ferris is happily motoring around, cutting off faster-moving vehicles in the passing lane, sleeping through changing stoplights, chattering on her cellphone, and neatly straddling two parking spaces at a time, if not four (here we are extrapolating from the behavior of the typical God Trusting motorist; supposing Ms Ferris to be, in fact, a safe, courteous, and considerate driver we offer both our apologies and our utter disbelief) while simultaneously, unknowingly, and with the calm confidence of the Christian holding four aces, actually urging people to practice paganism or drink peyote or something. You'd think it might have occurred to her that "Be Gods" sounds more like something the Serpent said in the Garden than what Ann Landers used to tell her readers.

Now, in case you're wondering why the BMV has dragged its feet on your request for that 8THST or 4NIK8R vanity plate, The Commish has your answer:

“Simply stated, if the BMV approves such pro-deity plates as ‘GOD CAN,’ the agency has no grounds to reject such plates as ‘GOD CANT,’ ‘GODLESS,’ or other more extreme anti-deity plates that have been requested and that most Hoosiers would find offensive,” Stiver said.

2)

Store ends inverted-flag Obama protest

Owner relents after objections from employees


Associated Press

DECATUR, Ind. -- A tire store owner has removed the American flag he flew upside down in protest of Barack Obama's election as president after complaints from his employees.
Greg Townsend said he had planned to keep the flag outside his business inverted until Obama left office but took it down Friday morning.
"My employees were all upset with me, and I can't replace my crew right now, I'm going on vacation," he said. "About six applicants came in and said they'd go to work for me, but it's pretty difficult to replace a crew when you're leaving on vacation."

I suppose that some of you have the impression that I'm posting this item to illustrate some point about the Proudly Uninformed and their impending battle with The Junior Antichrist from Illinois; maybe you think I was gonna say "So much for the argument that they don't fly the flag as a political statement", or that I'm about to suggest that the better course of action for offended employees would have been to egg the guy on, into putting Little Black Sambo prints on the walls or in the front window and playing Amos and Andy tapes all day instead of that Cassic Rock station. Maybe you suspect I'm about to make an impassioned defense of the First Amendment, even, perhaps especially, when it comes to brain-dead morons.

But no. I'm just a real fan of the Small Business Entrepreneur Whose Vacation Comes First genre, dating back to when that was used as an excuse in small claims court by a former landlord who'd seized our damage deposit. She lost, by the way, but probably not as much as Mr. Townsend lost the minute he jetted off after telling the AP he planned on getting rid of those Commie troublemakers of his as soon as he returned.

The Definitive Clip-n-Save Doghouse Riley Guide To People We Like

AS always, apologies that I don't generally get to comments right away.

When I redid the layout I discovered that The New Blogger, And This Time We Mean It! now allowed the posting of more than one picture. Then I discovered that it apparently allowed something approaching an infinite number of pictures. At roughly the same time I discovered that the three-column layout I'd appropriated did not include a separate background color for the far-left column (I should have known the far-left would get the shaft) as I wished, nor could I readily fix the CSS to create one, being that I don't know shit about CSS and I was trying to fix lots of other stuff. Part of that was creating the baseball masthead I wanted.

I should have sensed that storm clouds were gathering. I couldn't get a decent font/color combo to put Bats Left Throws Right over the masthead as a graphic (long story), and the available Blogger control method proved worthless. So I created a title graphic for the left-hand column, and I already had the "Contact Riley" one, which included my new picture. But that was two black squares sitting in a sea of #788778, and they rapidly scrolled from view on the off chance that anybody read more than two paragraphs of my stuff. So I brought back the much-beloved internet tradition of The Old Prospector who, I don't think I've explained this before, actually looks quite a bit like me. This opened the floodgates of a damn-near incontinent picture posting; at some point I hit on captioning things as though they were little personal slices of the Life O' Riley. And I had a bunch of pics of people I admire, mostly left over from wishing them Happy Birthday, and I started adding those without first establishing how they'd be worked into the "narrative".

So around this time I began to realize that this stuff slowed the loading of the page, athough--at least on my machines--the content loads first, so I wasn't too concerned, but it did stop me for a moment. And stopping me for a moment is like getting a sloth to slow down. So I never came up with any way to label those pics, except the obvious one, "I like this guy, and hope some of his accomplishments reflect on my miserable self". Which brings us all up to date.

Now, if you're still here, The List, beginning with the masthead, left to right (which reminds me, yes, all these guys bat left/ throw right. No switch hitters):

Ted Williams, The Splendid Splinter.
Arky Vaughan, second-best hitting shortstop in the Hall (after Honus Wagner)
Ernest Judson "Boojum" Wilson, career .351 hitter
"Shoeless Joe" Jackson, career .356 average, third-highest ever
Tris Speaker, 3514 hits, .345 career average
Edwin "Duke" Snider, at one time the best centerfielder in New York, even though the other two were Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.  career .295, 407 home runs
"Shoeless Joe" again, because he belongs in the Hall and because I thought that earlier picture was Eddie "Cocky" Collins
John Henry "Pop" Lloyd, greatest shortstop in Negro League history, career .337 average
Mel Ott, .304, 511 home runs
Ty Cobb, greatest ballplayer in history, probably no more racist than his contemporaries (he supported the integration of the major leagues), and, besides, he pretty much hated everybody. Highest career batting average (.366); career hits, runs, games, and stolen base marks all stood for more than fifty years.

[Late in his life a reporter asked Cobb what he thought he'd hit in the major leagues today. "Probably .320, .325," he said. "Is that because of night baseball, the travel, the lively ball?" the reporter asked. "Hell no," said Cobb. "It's because I'm 73 years old."]

Larry Doby, first African-American to play in the American League
Yogi Berra. Sorry, I don't know any stories about him.

Left column, top to bottom: rotating picture, currently Route 666 sign, from before the name was changed due to Bronze Age spiritual concerns; Donald Crisp; Ernest Torrence; 30's trunk murderess Winnie Ruth Judd; Stinky; Larry; Hooverville, Seattle; Bloggy buddy Lowflyin Lolana and friend; buoyant AV Idol Sora Aoi; fake cowboy; real racist; Asashōryū Akinori, the 68th yokozuna, throws Chiyotaikai; the great Jim Hurtubise, Terre Haute Action Track; Lowell George; Patsy Cline; Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller; Jorge Luis Borges; yes, Richard Thompson; James Thurber, speaking of autobiographies; Ian Dury; Doug Kenney; Marcel Duchamp; Emo Phillips; Jean "Django" Reinhardt; Bessie Smith; Dorothea Lange; Vladimir Nabokov with Roy Orbison's shades; Peter Sellers as himself, Captain Beefheart (Don van Vliet); Dan Hicks; Bill Hicks, no relation; Patty Smith; Richard Pryor; John Lydon; unidentified meercat.

Holy Corollaries

Really, I don't care if these idiots want to construct Reagan altars everywhere they go. I just wish they'd distort the facts to do so, instead of distorting the distortions.

--James "Doghouse" Riley

I AM not a Democrat. Never was. I was told that pretty explicitly in 1973, after a candidate they, not I, had nominated lost in a landslide to the most skillful politician of the second half of that benighted century. Or, rather, a caricature of their candidate lost in a landslide, after a caricature of a campaign. And yet, somehow, the grey men of the Democratic party did not seem to think they'd had a campaign stolen from them, or from "the people", whomever it is they think that is; they did not seem to feel the election had been wrongly decided on the basis of skillful distortion of the facts and easy, uncontested manipulation of the baser instincts of the electorate, nor that the election of a President in a time of dire national straits should have precluded, somehow, a media circus over trivialities; nor that Nixon was noxious enough to have been fought tooth and nail and regarded, after his re-election and before Woodstein made it unavoidable, as himself being the cancer growing on the Presidency, no. They decided the problem was me.

I've had a few decades to ponder this by now, between the time the grey old power brokers swore never again to nominate a raging Bolshevik like George Stanley McGovern and the time, earlier this very year, when their ironic Ché teeshirt-wearin' grandchildren explained the wisdom of the thing to me all over again. And, of course, in that time I've viewed the arc of the other party with revulsion and derision in pretty much equal measures. I don't have any better answer now than I did in 1973: Democrats tolerate Republican excesses in the hopes that they'll get their shot and will be tolerated in turn. The fact that the opposite is always the case never seems to occur to them. Bert Lance's financial dealings--for which he was later charged and acquitted--are an uproar; trading drugs for arms in order to circumvent the law is a matter for careful stepping lest one wake a sleeping (and popular) president. The investigation of Bill Casey and the Reagan administration's involvement in the curious timing of the release of Iranian hostages and Iranian funds conveniently runs aground until Casey is dead and Reagan has terminal brain bubbles; compare Reagan suggesting prosecuting Jesse Jackson (under the Logan Act!) for going to Cuba, and George W. leading the wingnut chorus in a round of "Nancy Pelosi is a Traitor" when the Speaker went to Syria. You know how this goes. Bush I runs slimiest Presidential campaign in fifty years, including not just racial overtones, but racism baldly denied; Dems say, "Gee, that Dukakis was a lousy candidate." Bush I pardons Iran/Contra henchmen; uproar over Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich includes two Congressional investigations. $40,000 land deal swindle--which four investigations find victimized the Clintons--is investigated a fifth time, on the grounds that you gotta roll a Seven at some point; Neil Bush personally accounts for $1.3 billion of $130 billion S & L dunning of taxpayers, pays a civil fine of 50 Gs. Clinton is impeached--despite overwhelming popularity and apodictic certainty of acquittal; Pelosi's first fucking act as Speaker, following long-overdue electoral denunciation of GOP, is to assure war criminal and serial Constitution shredder George W. Bush that his job is secure. And Harry Reid's first fucking official act upon Democrats kicking these criminals out of the White House, and capturing--thanks to Democratic voters, not their own political perspicacity, if it needs to be said--is to reward the slimy megalomaniac Lieberman who'd gone out of his way to dick them because he lost a primary.

I'm not a Democrat.  I am somebody who thinks that if we're going to be saddled with a two-party system it'd be nice if the distinction between them was something more than "one was dropped on its head in 1964 and has the Rage button stuck permanently On, while the other is its secret admirer". 

I'm not a Democrat. Were I a Republican, let's say of the religious bigot sort, I believe I'd have figured out by 1982 that I was being gulled. This, however, does not actually seem to have occurred to the average Republican religious bigot voter, nor his blue-collar Reagan Democrat or middle-management libertoonian cousins. Democratic voters, on the other hand, see it and convince themselves it's the natural order of things, or else that messing with the controls even slightly will cause a serious malfunction.  Supposing I were a Democrat, or at the very least a Democrat like Joe Lieberman, I would not favor stripping him of his chairmanship because he supported John McCain. Hell, I wish we'd see more of that sort of thing.  No, I'd favor stripping him of every privilege I could find, and any I could make up, for a decade of duplicitous behavior, and as the opening salvo of an investigation into both the current administration and Clinton Scandals, Inc.

But I'm not a Democrat. I don't view the re-elevation of Holy Joe as an aberration, or faulty political calculation--I'm sorry, but how old do you have to be to view a "filibuster-proof" Democratic Senate as the sickest political joke of all time?--I view it as the Democratic leadership being exactly what it is. I don't ask, "What th' fuck is wrong with them?" My question is, what all are they hiding, or hoping to hide?

Beyond Belief

Newsweek

"Because I'm not sayin' that he is or anything, but some Evangelicals think he is, and so does some religious crank who wasn't even funny when she was on Saturday Night Live, which is now so long ago that she's the only one who remembers it. But just in case you might think Evangelicals are some organization of Bronze Age nutjobs who talk to invisible Jews, there's also one who doesn't believe it, although he is collecting all the evidence so that people can make informed decisions on their own."

Y'know, the Third of the ten amendments which constitute our Bill of Rights guarantees that soldiers shall not be quartered in private property in peacetime without the consent of the property owner.  This somehow is not taken as an excuse for major "news" magazines to print the pathological ravings of some guy who thinks Obama's gonna teleport undead zombie Redcoats into his attic while he's asleep. 

Joementum

Helene Cooper and Scott L. Malcomson,"Welcome to My World, Barack". November 16

WE'RE only gonna say this once. Okay, we're probably gonna say it a few hundred times, but this is the only time we're gonna say we're only saying it once. You cannot bi-partisan your way out of partisanship. I know, I know, its sounds a bit formulaic, doesn't it? If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right. It-- It's-- The Centrist Democrat playbook is as tattered and out of date as the Bush playbook, but without the diversion of pitchforks and torchlight. You don't lead by tacking to the Center; you lead by leading, and expecting the Center to come to you. This is the same default position--rudderless--the Obama campaign fell into time and again over the past two years, the same one that's held steady for the Democratic party for thirty-five years.  I remind you that during that time the two two-term Republican Presidents we or our Courts elected were hailed as geniuses, at least for a time, despite evincing no evidence of intellectual curiosity, familiarity with discourse, or higher cortical event, while the one-point-five moderate Democratic Presidents were hunted like tundra wolves, or gays. People did not vote for Barack Obama because they thought that was the best way to get Colin Powell back into the cabinet, or return Joe Lieberman to his chair. Nobody gives a fuck about Joe Lieberman except the people who will hate him forever. Give him a gold fucking watch or something, a comfy pillow and a 10 volume set of Six Day War footage, and let him pass away in his sleep.

I mean, you're on notice; the script is being prepared right in front of you, from the Bush retrospectives which attempt--against the bounds of sanity, let alone decency--to find positive things to say about him, through the post-election Dancin' With the Stars Palin coverage, to the inevitable "How Will Obama Satisfy the Left?" (like he intends to try) stemwinders, the stage isn't exactly being set quite yet, but somebody's sure going around with the fluorescent orange paint marking boundary lines. Digby:

Tweety and other gasbags, including Christopher Hitchens(an extremely thoughtful critic as always) are all wringing their hands about Obama's possible choice of Clinton as Secretary of State because he promised change and this is so not it. He's destroying his mandate before our very eyes.

In other news, Obama is also known to be considering keeping Bush administration cabinet member Robert Gates as secretary of defense, and former secretary of State and war architect Colin Powell is breathlessly mentioned being on the short list for a number of posts. This strikes everyone as being a perfect example of how Obama is bringing change to Washington.

That Times Magazine cover story Sunday looked to be the cake topper. Condi Rice's advice to the next President! The mind does not reel. The mind intuitively recognizes the insufficiency of reeling and goes ahead and throws up in its own mouth, in hopes of speeding up the process a bit. Newt Gingrich's Tips for a Successful Marriage comes to mind. Or Paris Hilton's 100 Books That Changed The World! Then the mind throws up again.

In the event the goddam thing reads like a failed attempt at that 20 Questions deal, except Deborah Solomon was busy interviewing Karl Rove for the same issue. (Karl Rove? Please. I'm not about to suggest that the spoils should go to the Victor, but could you at least find someone to talk to you who had something to do with the Loss, aside from being its model of assholicity? Anybody who wants Rove's opinion can tune in FAUX News and, at any rate, isn't likely to be looking for it in the Times.) Maybe Condi's depressed; she should be grateful if that's all she is. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she just dislikes Helene Cooper as much as I do. Nah, that's not possible. Anyway, if this thing represents an accurate portrayal, or even a mostly un-blurry snapshot, of her mental processes the world has dodged a bullet (we are, by the way, approximating the Times' actual typography, believe it or not):

WHAT ALL THOSE ELECTIONS IN IRAQ AND UKRAINE AND LEBANON MEANT.

It’s not that you deliver on it tomorrow. Maybe 2005 was a bit deceptive in that way because you had the Iraqi elections, the Cedar Revolution, the Orange Revolution, the Rose Revolution and the Palestinian election. So maybe people came to expect too much too soon.

Really, this is like the Amway salesman telling you you shouldn't have expected that detergent he sold you wouldn't dissolve fabric.

WHAT ELECTIONS COULD MEAN FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T TEND TO HAVE THEM.

I’ve seen too many peoples dismissed as not ready for self-government. First it was Asians, and then Latin Americans and Africans were there for a while. I know for a while black Americans were, too.

Th' fuck? "I know for a while black Americans were dismissed as not ready for self-government"? What exactly is your definition of "a while", lady?

THE PROBLEM RUSSIA HAS.


They’ve got problems, and the basis of this is that the legitimacy of the Russian government is not ideology; it is not a pretension to a different route for human development as Communism was. It is the ability of Russians to, if they can’t afford those Cartier shops near Tverskaya, to be able instead to go to the Ikea store that now completely dominates the Tank Trap Monument that celebrates the repulsion of the final push of the Germans into Moscow.

I'm sorry, really. I'm sure there's something in there somewhere to be snarky about, but I can't figure out what th' fuck any of it is supposed to mean. Is it a good thing that Russians can shop their brains out while ignoring the defeat of the German armies at the Gates of Moscow in 1941? Or a bad thing that they don't remember it? "The basis of [the problems] of the Russian government is that [its legitimacy]...is the ability of Russians to...shop at Ikea". I've read that through eight times and I still haven't got a clue as to what the fuck it might possibly be turned into in an effort to make some sense out of it. I'm not even sure that parse is correct. And the room is spinning again. Maybe she was trying to tell Scooter Libby when the aspens would start turning.

THE BIGGER PROBLEM RUSSIA HAS


Russia has an aging population that’s not being replaced and unfortunately a sickly population, and an economy that did not take advantage of higher oil prices to diversify. It’s still an infrastructural nightmare if you get outside of major cities and certainly if you start going toward the Far East. So I think we should be calm.

Look, Lady, either you can be Secretary of State or you can tell us to be calm. You can't do both.

SOMETIMES EUROPEANS ALSO COME FROM MARS.


I remember telling my European colleagues that I know they always think that America is going to be more aggressive on fighting extremism than they. But you know, we could never, within our context, have passed the law like the basic incitement laws that the British have passed.

Wow, funny thing...Great Britain has different libel laws from us! It's a funny, funny old world. Not that we've paid any heed to our own laws.  But it's still funny.

Bonus Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Friedism:

RUSSIA AND US — THE MORAL DIFFERENCE.


The West does not go out and conquer countries by using force, try to deprive countries of a choice. It didn’t insist that Poland join NATO. Poland wanted to join NATO. It didn’t impose NATO membership or E.U. membership on Estonia; Estonia chose it. That’s a difference, and it’s a moral difference as well. . . . If you validate the assumptions of Russians who believe that the only proper relationship between Russia and its neighbors is one of subordination and intimidation, then how do you expect a more cooperative Russia to emerge in the future? The United States has learned that it is in our interest that our neighbors, Mexico for example, be prosperous, successful and free. And Russia needs to develop a normal set of relations with its neighbors. The notions of privileged relations or its sphere of influence . . . which the Russians demand is not the formula for greater stability; it’s the formula for greater tension. I’m not stating these things as a fiat; I’m suggesting that the next administration will have to think this through.

Got that, Mexico? Make with the prosperity. Pronto.  Just because we've never used force before...

Y'know, I keep telling myself these people have done everything they can to surprise me, and yet, every time I read them I find myself taking renewed interest in those jet contrails and refusing to eat at Church's Fried Chicken in black neighborhoods.

Good News/ Even Worse News

Post-Election Product Roll-Outs Of The Week, courtesy Indianapolis Racist Star:

President? No thanks, Daniels says

Post-election chatter that Gov. Mitch Daniels could lead the national party back to the White House in 2012 hasn't changed Daniels' stance that governor is the only position he's interested in.

"How many ways are there to say no?" Daniels asked reporters this past week while in Washington to accept an award from Governing magazine for his achievements as governor. "We've just been hired for a job we're very serious about. We have a lot left to do. That will have our full attention."

GOP strategist Ed Rollins has predicted the Republican standard-bearer for 2012 will be one of the nation's governors, and he singled out Daniels as one of his favorites.

Wow, Ed Rollins fearlessly predicts the next Republican nominee will be a governor! It's like the old saying: if you need somebody to check a pulse, who better than a dead man?

Revenge? Not just yet

Sen. Evan Bayh thinks Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman should apologize for his attacks on President-elect Barack Obama during the presidential campaign but should keep his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"We ought to maximize our chances of getting good things done for the American people rather than focus on score settling," Bayh told reporters last week....

Bayh said Lieberman's gavel can always be taken away in the future if he "behaves in ways that are hostile to the administration."
"Why not try reconciliation first and see if that can be made to work in a positive way?" Bayh asked. "We can always resort to revenge later."

Y'know, we take pride hereabouts in Indiana's contribution to humor: George Ade, Kin Hubbard, Johnny Appleseed, Don Herold, Eugene V. Debs, Will Cuppy, Herb Shriner, Kurt Vonnegut, Jean Shepherd, Dan Greenberg, Alvy Moore, David Letterman, Dan Quayle, Fuzzy Zoeller, and Jim Gaffigan, just to name all the ones I can think of, and yet none of these, to my way of thinking, could ever have invented Evan Bayh.

(Thanks to pyzam.com for the countdown clock. We loooove the internets!)

Rest Easy

Indianapolis Racist Star:

Butler bulldog mascot costumes found; 4 men arrested

4 arrested in theft and abuse of Butler's bulldog costumes

By Kevin O'Neal
Posted: November 15, 2008

The battered remains of Butler University's pilfered bulldog costumes have been found, a mess of foam and fabric damaged beyond repair.

A team of investigators from three police agencies broke the case this week, and the four men they say are behind the mascot crimes face felony charges of burglary and theft....

Butler police, led by Sgt. Alan Criswell and assisted by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and the Indiana Department of Homeland Security's Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, a consortium of law enforcement agencies, eventually cracked the case.

Emphasis mine, in case you were wondering.

William E. Miller With Tits

FIRST, I'm a bad blog administrator, and deserve to be spanked, and my goddam neighbor with OCD is using her leaf blower or shop vac again, which is how she spends every Friday, hours of every Friday, including yesterday, and the incessant high-pitched whine is probably going to come through in the next few paragraphs, probably in the shape of a few additional "fucks", although you'd hardly notice. Fuck. It's really interesting being surrounded by three lawn-care fanatics and one guy five times slobbier than myself, especially during late fall, because the fanatics can't be bothered to rake leaves before they blow all over the neighborhood, but they've spent the last seven-and-a-half months mowing every time the grass grows 1/8 inch. Even Lady MacBeth next door will watch the leaves befoul the pacific verdure of her front yard without picking up a rake. I'm guessing that the introduction of a popularly-priced gasoline-powered rake would change these matters entirely.

Fuck that whine. Anyway, I don't generally reap blog comments until I sit down late in the PM and check the day's email. So I don't frequently appear in my own comments section. Besides which, out of some odd quirk of the cosmos, every single one of you is smarter than I am, which makes no sense to me, but there you are. And so, for example, kentropic says, "David Brock, not David Brooks, generously leaving out "you moron", to which we reply 1) never mind, then; 2) now you have some sense of what it must be like to be married to me; and 3) you still don't get the t-shirt, because we consider the development of an allergic reaction to right-wing slime over the course of a decade to be less a matter of ideology than public health.

Now, as to Davis X. (who, in case we've never said it on this blog, though we know we've said it elsewhere, was our favorite commentator in the old Table Talk days), and Scott: we do actually try not to go too far on most occasions, right up to the point where we'd have to re-read our own stuff an', y'know, edit it an' shit. We meant no insult to Harvey Weir Cook, American flying ace. We meant to insult the people who appropriated him in the continuing battle to militarize everything. We knew it was hydrogen; we were just riffing on the Tethered Child's Toy bit. We know that flying in the Great War was more dangerous even than being in the infantry, which is saying something, and we suspect, though can't prove, that just flying the things was more dangerous in WWI than combat flying was in WWII. British pilots were denied parachutes, on the grounds that this might cause them to actually bail out (which, by the way, reminds us that while P.J. O'Rourke thinks no one this side of sanity could be a Leftist after the 20th century, we think anyone with the potential of learning from WWI, which pretty much kicked the century off, and particularly, but not limited to, the actions of the British High Command, and yet remains a crypto-monarchist and 9/11 martinet has no room to talk). Millions died between 1914-1918 for antiquated notions of glory; the worst possible way to memorialize them is to append them to latter-day attempts to revive it.

What I really wanted to do this morning was simply thank Sarah Palin for taking the weekend off, while encouraging her to take right back up where she left off next Monday. It's truly heartening to see the Mass Media following up on a story it allowed her to refuse to tell back when it might have informed the electorate. Special thanks to my local teleprompterites keeping me informed of the goings-on at the Republican Governors' Association; we've had a fucking Republican governor for the last four years and I can't remember them ever saying anything about it. Please, keep this up. I think most of us expected the Republican party to behave classlessly post-election; and what better spokespirana could they ask for?

Last Kiss

Potted maple shows off (for forty-eight hours).

Hostas are not usually part of the fall show, so we're grading on a curve.

Vines and the baby-shoe windchimes somebody thought was funny.

Autum-blooming clematis gone to seed.

Why We Fight

• This isn't a news blog, and the only reason it's anything even slightly close to timely is that I find something every day to piss me off, not to mention that I then go on about it interminably, so even if there were news items they'd wind up five page scrolls down in short order. So I didn't mention the Frontline piece on Lee Atwater ahead of time, but I did set the DVR, and it's well worth your time to check local listings or hunt it down somewheres (Here's the PBS page link). It's remarkable what the addition of Joe Conason and/or Eric Alterman can do for teevee coverage of political issues. Maybe they should be on more, and veteran confidence men like Howard Fineman less not at all. Mary Matalin will be the very definition of a useful idiot once somebody discovers a use for her. Tucker Eskew sounds out words as he reads. Seriously. I mean, maybe he's dyslexic. But the thing about it is, every time you hear that, "All y'all Northerners thinks we's scuggins, but that's just when we gitcha," it either comes from, or is said about, someone who by every objective standard available sounds like a fifth-grade remedial reader. I agree, people are quick to judge, but that is just as natural as, and generally more understandable than, the speech patterns of people born below the Ohio (or, in Indiana, south of US 40). But in the aftermath (protects self from Evil Eye) of George W. Bush it's time at least some of the onus travelled back to the other side. I treasure Southern English. But the glories of regionalism are not an excuse for someone in the communications business to act as if there are no rules about speaking clearly which prohibit the actual taking of naps between syllables. My Poor Wife watches that Paula Deen--if by "watches" one means "occasionally lights on for more than her customary 0.6 seconds"--quite possibly just to annoy me. "Naoh-uh whee-ur a'go-an-uh t'aad-duh sum-uh gahhhlic." It's a fucking half-hour show, lady! Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time understanding someone when, by the middle of every sentence, I've begun to keep count of how many extra syllables they've added minus the ones they threw away out of spite, caprice, or pernicious whimsey. 

Anyway, a remarkable document, and even if you lived through it the first time an inducer of nausea (Reagan says of Michael Dukakis, "I won't make fun of an invalid"; Press Corps chuckles). Anyone prattling about bi-partisanship in 2008 ought to be required to view it in its entirety, and write an essay, before he opens his mouth again. O'Rourke thinks Americans love liars because April 15 comes around every year; I suggest that the casual immoralities of daily American life, while instructive of our national and international behavior, in fact fall so far short of the utter amorality of these people--the Bush Crime Family particularly--that the latter is a different, and unexpected, species, and they'd all be tarred and feathered if the public really knew, and could afford tar and feathers anymore. Atwater shived Ed Rollins in the prison shower to get his job; the Finemans of the world then allowed him to pretend he didn't know anything about the Willie Horton ads, even though everyone knew. This is not padding your deductions; this is padding your deductions while indulging in posterior intimacies with the examiner's wife, in his office, with the door open. Some people are gratified by Atwater's supposed Death Bed apologies; I'm just grateful he fittingly remained a Drama Queen to the end. Ed Rollins' story about Atwater's Bible, which the producers were too sensitive to let end the piece as it should've (compounding the error by letting Howard Fucking Fineman spew platitudes), is absolutely worth the price of admission, and the time spent looking it up.

• Kentropic, in comments yesterday, proposes--jokingly--David Brooks as the second American to switch ends of the American political spectrum, which reminds me of a couple of things. An earlier draft of that thing yesterday mentioned Brooks by name, and asked exactly what Liberal credentials he might dig up for us. He was old enough to vote in 1980--how'd that go? And I realize that's not confirmable, but is anything in his past? Maybe he tells the tale in one of those books I'm always intending to read just as soon as one washes up on an island I've been deserted on. He spouts that "parody" of William Fuhbuckley like a Freak Flag, though it seems (okay, reluctantly, it's here, complete with "Hilarious" in the head so you'll be prepared. Do not click.) mostly to demonstrate that Brooks somehow remained a sophomore until 1983, and I mean high school sophomore. Those of us who tenant the slums of political blog comments are, of course, quite familiar with the Youstabee Liberal who cannot seem to come up with a single believable sample of his former belief system, as though your later embarrassment at having been an REO Speedwagon groupie would cause you to forget what a guitar sounds like. But Brooks never gets called on this, though I can't imagine who it's supposed to impress. And this gave me the thought that there might be some sort of Lord Raglan Hero Pattern for Former Liberals, though it would have to account for the milquetoast Brookeses and the retired radical dope smokers.

• The new phone books are here, and they only cost a billion dollars! Hoosiers had barely had enough time to stop gawking at the retractable ceiling of our billion-dollar Football Barn before we opened our new billion-dollar Airport Terminal Barn, and the teleprompter readers couldn't be more excited, let me tell you. They kept reminding The Folks At Home that this was the first new terminal since 2001, which tells you something, namely, that if no real city needed a new terminal in that period, Indianapolis sure didn't. The goddam thing's been in the planning stages for thirty-five years, which tells you a couple more things: it's probably 8.2 times even worse than the new Football Barn, and the graft trail would require a team of archaeologists and a baying of bloodhounds to begin uncovering.

We mentioned some time ago--you don't expect us to keep track of this stuff, right?--that an organization had turned up trying to change the name of the Indianapolis Airquotes International Airquotes Airport back to the original Weir Cook Airport, which yours truly enthusiastically supported for as long as it took him to learn (not long) that what these people were up to was not the elimination of the bloated, risible, Bureaucratic Megalomaniacese of its current moniker, nor the simple nostalgia that might help glue Place to Time, but Yet Another Glorification of All Things War. Col. Harvey Weir Cook was a WWI flyboy with the Hat-in-the-Ring squadron who is credited with seven kills, four of them balloons. (I am, by the way, trying to get the Airport Authority to give my Poor Wife's students some wall space to paint a mural depicting one of those heroic triumphs over Helium.  Or was it Hydrogen? I'll let you know how it goes.) There was no more chance that the Board was going to take "Indianapolis" out of the name of the place than they were going to ban price-gouging in the food court, but this gang realized that playing up the Honor our Veterans routine got 'em plenty of airtime, and in the end--after several loudly thumped stories from local "news" organizations which had ignored the name change the previous thirty years--the Board agreed to name the new terminal after the hero of the Battle of Tethered Child's Toy Alley.

This, of course, proved to Not Be Enough Wargasm; it never is. The next step was to delay the fucking opening of our badly-needed luggage-claims upgrade until Veteran's Day. And then they tried to fix it so the first arrival would be a planeload of Indiana Guardsmen returning from Afghanistan, but the timing broke down. Are we not, really, the last nation on earth which needs nearly unrestricted access to firearms?

It's Thursday. This thing has been the lead story on every local "news" program since last Friday. ("In a little over 48 hours the first plane will arrive at the New H. Weir Cook Terminal!" Could you, reader, even spit those words out, let alone while pretending they were important?) I swear to god I actually turned on the nets at 8PM Tuesday to see if they'd cut to a live shot of the first plane landing. And I was amazed to find they didn't.

And the culmination, make that nadir, came when one (or at least one) actually sent a reporter to Philadelphia so she could turn around and fly back and tell us what it was like. Just keep that in mind should you feel the need to use "Indiana is now a Blue State!" in conversation.

I Am Really, Truly, Sorry That Despite My Obviously Superior Shotmaking That Last Stroke Was Poor Enough To Force Me To Take This Mulligan.

P.J. O'Rourke, "We Blew It: A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered". November 17

HERE'S the thing: I never trusted P.J. O'Rourke's schtick, that is, his I'm-a-Republican-because-I-grew-up-from-being-a-hippie routine. To begin with, I've never trusted anyone who claims to've have some political epiphany after the age of majority. Religion, sure, because religious conversion after adulthood is generally a measure of personal despondency or the severity of one's legal fuck-ups. Politics aren't, at least generally. A polar transposition of political beliefs in adulthood, absent any evidence of massive head trauma, suggests either that one is being disingenuous, or that one was formerly so devoid of sense that measuring one's current level of ingenuousness isn't worth the effort. Sure, this may be well within the range of human possibilities, but it's notable that we don't exactly see it happening all that often when there's no money on the line, and rarely do we find anyone moving from the popular camp to the loser's hangout, which we'd expect to find in close to equal numbers if it were a real, meaning honest, phenomenon. I challenge you to name two, and I'll spot you Kevin Phillips.

For another, y'know, I hope this doesn't fuck with his income or anything, but long-haired casual Leftist dope smokers were not exactly a rare breed in 1968, and I'm pretty sure they grew up to be all sorts of things, Yuppies included, but the vast majority never had the opportunity, or the need, to justify it in print. There's Mitch Daniels, fer instance, though I doubt he was ever much of a leftist, especially once his draft commitment was up. Nobody says "Wow, Mitch overcame Liberalism.  That makes him especially knowledgeable." and you don't hear nearly enough people say, "Gee, Mitch used to be a drug dealer, now he's an ill-tempered autocrat." Mitch has a taste for power as well as money, but he, too, found delivering encomiums to private enterprise to be a lucrative career path. Of course, dealing a little weed as a youthful indiscretion is not just forgivable in the eyes of your modern Captain of Industry or Baron of Real Estate; it shows a healthy, nascent respect for The System, especially if it was mostly shake. Cracking wise about the Tuskegee Experiment when you're in your mid-twenties, on the other hand, may require some 'splainin'.

And as we see on an ever-widening basis these days, the problem with these guys is not their acceptance of, nor their proselytizing for, free-market economies and private enterprise. It's that through cupidity, stupidity, or in certain cases frankly unnatural shortness they, and many others, came to imagine that the people most in need of economic defense and protective legislation were, in fact, the the largest of the breed, who, it turns out, were also the most likely to part with considerable wads of cash in return for services rendered. O'Rourke speaks at The Cato Institute, not the North Platte Jaycees. Daniels junkets to Asia, having funded the semi-annual exercises by raising enough "private" "donations" to give a leg up to every aspiring entrepreneur minority student at Ivy Tech. I mean, I'm sure they're both nice to their barbers, too, but it doesn't seem like either party gets much out of that.

The short answer, if it's not already too late for that, is that having been a dope-smoking pseudo-leftist up until you needed a job does not particularly qualify one as an expert on Nancy Pelosi. It just qualifies you to impress a roomful of well-born idiots and associated toadies who only wish they could have spent 1967 thru 1974 smoking hash with braless nubile bareback riders. It's like a gig selling backwoods Jesus aficionados on the utter depravity of your smack addict/boy prostitute days before you were Saved. It doesn't make you a liar, but a little evidence to the contrary would be nice. And there's the fact that O'Rourke has wrung the neck of this particular chicken longer now than Erma Bombeck made a living off the length of teenagers' phone calls.

But nothing lasts for ever, as Ozzy Mandus said to Wavy Gravy, and now O'Rourke finds himself telling the Weekly Standard audience, "We blew it, man." His is, actually, my favorite Wha' Happen? piece of the whole glorious sennight [Warning: contains excessive scenes of passive-voice pooch sex]:

Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

Bummer, dude. Maybe you should have thought about implementing it before last Tuesday.

No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Okay, I think we'll be getting back to that inner-city school remark, but meanwhile, what sort of "education" about "freedom" mitigates the fact that the second consecutive two-term laissez-faire Republican administration closes with the nation's financial institutions having been plundered, and the Little Guy footing the bill? And considering you had an eight-year Revolution with an effective control of Congress, followed by four years of Get Saddam, Get Noriega, Get Willie Horton! stewardship, followed by eight years of hunting a President because he was more moderate than you (his dick will yet appear today! If the whole Clenis™ thing was disgusting before, there's the added hint of necrophilia to reverse our gorges now), a practice which was shepherded by a group of Republican officials so personally and professionally repugnant that any normal person, male or female, straight, gay, or none of the above, would have gladly blown Bill Clinton just for the promise that he'd help you cross to the other side of the street to avoid them. This was accompanied by Republican Revolution II. Then, thanks for making us remember, came 2001-2008. Th' fuck, really, was stopping you? Assuming the entire electorate to be made up of programmable Randian zombies over the last three decades, what more would you have gotten out of it?

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

"An admirable stance on States' Rights which was unfortunately wrong?" P.J., man, stop bogartin'.

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people....

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail.

We pause here to remind you that this is a guy who keeps insisting he's smarter than you, or at least knows better, in part through the moral superiority of his positions, and who has just suggested that killin' a person is a minor quibble compared to coalition-building.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th.

Pooches were screwed! Look, goddamit, by the time you impeached Bill Clinton everybody in the country, including even the pathetic gang of House "managers" who would soon, to a man, be enjoying the freedom to earn their livings off the private enterprise system, knew that Clinton wasn't going to be convicted. And everybody in the country knew you'd been on a seven-year witch hunt, or, more accurately, a ten-year series of witch hunts. You fucking couldn't stop yourselves then; you want absolution now?  And by the way, I don't recall you spending the decade lecturing on Hayek rather than sniffing Clinton's crotch with the rest of the hounds.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Again, 1) what sort of theoretical climate must we enjoy for this not to be the case, and 2) why should the rest of the nation be consigned to looking for it for you?

For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

Frankly, some of us expected you to. And to bring along your own WMDs for good measure.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration  .  .  .  )

See, it's funny because Bill Clinton has a dick!

Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Then why were you just griping about taxes?

Look, let's try this again: it's been twenty fucking years since the Reagan presidency ended. It's been twenty fucking years since a man who'd spent sixteen years running for President on the single issue of the evils of the National Debt left office having nearly quadrupled it. And not just that; "conservatives" cheered while he was doing it, and then they tried to excuse it by claiming he'd single-handedly spent the Soviets into bankruptcy when we knew in the 70s they were about to crash. Then, like, two days later these same fucking "conservatives" hit the roof because the Clinton administration dared to take a pair of manicure scissors to the edges of the Defense budget! Twenty fucking years. That was certainly long enough for you to go from first taste of sweet sweet hemp to Professional Grown-up. Maybe it's long enough to drop the pretense of Republican fiscal conservatism. By the way, did you know Bill Clinton got a blow job?

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)
If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

Where were You on Kosovo? Easy--sniffing Clinton's crotch, right where You were the rest of the decade, and trying to make political hay out of the situation once he acted.  

As for the rest, y'know, we can indict the US government's humanitarianism and amoral foreign policy beginning with the 18th century, but the idea that the American Right is somehow ethically exempt? What th' fuck are you smokin' now?

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Ri-iight. What is founding a major international criminal cartel or two compared to expecting to eat a few crumbs off the table?

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.' " Ask a Katrina survivor.

See, that's funny, since at the time you were busy blaming Liberals for creating an underclass that was insufficiently buoyant. And blaming the Carter administration for creating FEMA. No, I'm not making that up.

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

Here's the thing about that: I'm happy to learn, now that its collapse has taken the rest of the country down with it, that we all lost our savings to faulty bathroom scales and not a cult. That would have been devastating. And I'm assuming this means y'all have managed to hide all the evidence that you've been selling the Free Market as a Miracle Solution To Everything, Guaranteed! ever since you started wearing ties.

We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Damn! And y'all were so vigilant about it, too.