Welcome Liberators!

HEY, at least you all finally got the Anniversary Terrorist Attack you've been predicting for the last ten-and-a-half years.

I've seen that Saddam Statue Toppled video four times now, and it's just 8:30. No irony, no mention that the goddam thing was a fake, designed to help sell The Worst Product Of The Past Decade. I watched a panel on Morning Joe talk about "whether it was worth it". It was made up of people who were war cheerleaders a decade ago. There's a surprise. 

Got to watch them run a piece about how John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi were For the War Before They Were Against It, Neener Neener. No clips in there of MSNBC war flogging. No shots of Keith Olbermann in battle dress. 

Gee, I hope Slate's got the whole gang together to talk about how they got it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have said that without looking first. Happy Anniversary, you Fucking Fucks. 

9/12

WELL, I sure hope everyone enjoyed, if that's the right word, the first annual Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance, the extended mix of Patriot Day, now rebranded to more closely reflect the solemnity and self-reflection we used to have the good sense to observe without having to wait a decade before something resembling our senses returned. Decoration. Memorial. Armistice. Let's face it: it is only the Grace of the Almighty and the Already Brimming Federal Holiday Calendar (one more day off and bankers won't have the time for due diligence) which stand between us and 9/11 Day Sales. Don't you wish now that you'd'a had the presence of mind to have invested in red, white, and blue icing stocks in those frightening times?

Twice yesterday I was informed that 9/11, the Original, was The Day That Changed Everything. That's without my trying. Both times it was someone on teevee, where the only thing that had changed in eleven years was the identity of the person who was sounding out the platitudes, lies, and vacuities. It's Apple that changed everything, you twits, and you celebrate that every fucking day, in the only way anything really means anything in this country anymore.  In fact, if we'd kept Gitmo open just for everyone responsible for iTunes I'd be rethinking the staunchness of my civil libertarianism right now.

My favorite was the local who solemnly intoned about the need to educate "people who weren't even born yet". I guess that must be the horrible circumlocution of choice when "people who were unborn" sounds too political. He was accompanied by tape, sorry, video, everything's changed, of public school ninth-graders being taught their Nines and Elevens, apparently because they were more photogenic, and less hyperactive, than the eleven-year-old fifth and sixth graders who decidedly weren't even born then. Anyway, for fuck's sake, People Who Weren't Even Born Yet on 9/11 are yet People Who Can't Even Be Trusted With Boogers, so they aren't going to be taught so much as indoctrinated into a way of looking at those events that gratifies the generic teleprompter reader or wholesale American flag importer. I said to my Poor Wife, "Little fuckers don't know the first thing about World War II, either. And all the guy who just said that knows about it is that We Won! and Nazis were bad. He doesn't know any more than they do about the Reconstruction, and none of 'em knows the first thing about the Spanish Conquest, the Enlightenment, or Biology."

You probably already figured out I'd like the name returned to Patriot Day, to Honor and Remember just how fucking insane our public officials went, how easily "Patriot" "Flag" and "Freedom Fries" got tossed into the mix, without justification, and the remarkably inerrant roosting instincts of the patriotic headless chicken. "Patriot, Hyperpatriot, and Scoundrel Day, Including Remembrance, Service, Domestic Foodstuff Euphemisms, and Two Plastic Flags Flapping in the Breeze From Every Vehicle Day".  Unless Arizona already has one.

Slam Dunk, James Taranto!

James Taranto, "Obama the Unseemly". April 27

ONE of my recurring ideas--and one I'd be glad to discuss with Norman Ornstein--is that the American Right, not exactly the paragon of collating data from diverse sources to begin with--its modern fucking intellectuals claim to read three authors, fer chrissakes, fewer than your average fundamentalist--stopped talking to, listening to, or basically acknowledging the existence of, anybody who disagreed with it around the time that "Watergate was a third-rate burglary" became inoperable. And not to the good, just in case anyone had any delusions of Jesuitical competence:

There's been a lot of talk of late about how "cool" Barack Obama supposedly is. But people are starting to notice the man has no class. "Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing 'staycations' because they can't afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family's 17 lavish vacations around the world and don't want their tax dollars paying for the Obamas' holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters," reports the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard. 

A group of Republican pollsters conducted focus groups of swing-state swing voters, mostly Democrats and independents, and John McLaughlin "handled blue collar and Catholic voters" in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. He found that they tend to think Mitt Romney is "too rich," but "there is a start of resentment of the government." In Bedard's words, "voters were also lumping in the president's vacation spending in with the General Services Administration's Las Vegas scandal and federal spending for those who aren't looking for work."

Okay, so let's be charitable and assume that part of what grammarians call the "utter fucking incomprehensibility" above is the result of bad editing or balky cutting-and-pasting. Else, let us allow that, if your point is as flaccid as Taranto's, maybe incomprehensibility is a reasonable ploy. But, please, you base a conclusion on "an analysis of swing voters" in the Washington Examiner? You think the working poor are going to flock to the Republican party because the President stays in nice hotels? The results certainly are unassailable. But only in the sense that you can't argue with the reflection in the cracked Funhouse mirror of James Taranto's mind. Wait, it's going to get better. Count to twelve:

Obama is also notorious for his golf outings.

No, he isn't.

Blogress Ann Althouse,

I believe they prefer to be known as "blogerettes".

another swing voter

Notorious.

(she has admitted supporting Obama in 2008)

"Swing voters" have to admit supporting a candidate?

notes that George W. Bush was "savaged" for going golfing "when Americans were fighting and dying."

We are, as much as possible, going to leave the practice of using Ann Althouse as a source, let alone accepting the Choking Hazard-level ruse of Ann Althouse, independent political thinker, without comment. But, frankly, sometimes the broad side of the barn deserves hitting. George Bush wasn't "savaged" for golfing "when Americans were fighting and dying." He was savaged for golfing while, according to him, and his party, and his party's hacky mouthpieces, the fate of Civilization Herself hung in the balance. And for showing a Patrician insensitivity to it ("Watch this drive.") which makes Mitt Romney look like Helen Keller.

Michael Moore made hay of it in his 2004 agitprop film "Fahrenheit 9/11," notwithstanding that Bush had given up golf in 2003 on the ground that it was unseemly: "I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong message."

Y'know, it's too bad (for y'all) that he didn't think of this until after there was an uproar.

Althouse opens her post with a story about the latest casualties in Afghanistan.

I'm sure she does. Listen, this country's political situation would be improved considerably if "much of the distance between Ann Althouse and how far off the mark she is" was the new centrism. Which is not saying much for this country, I know.

This is highly reminiscent of the willful misunderstanding of the term "chickenhawk" from, not surprisingly, the same era, by, not surprisingly, the same people. Nobody expected, nor wanted, Jonah Goldberg to volunteer for the Marine Corps. No one expected George W. Bush to avoid golf, nor vacations altogether. In fact, the only people demanding a "serious" presidency are people who voted for Bush twice. Nobody ambushed George W. Bush. He was speaking to reporters; it's they he recommended admire his drive. At the time, the public had been subjected to a full year of fear mongering over 9/11, and twenty months of PR reassurances that George W. Bush, Commander-in-Chief, was not the overripe frat boy his every appearance suggested.

Context matters. If you don't understand this, then perhaps political punditatin' is not for you. If Barack Obama on the Jimmy Fallon show gives you the fantods, maybe you just don't like Barack Obama. Maybe you should work to raise the voting age to 65. Maybe you've forgotten that Nixon went on Laugh In, Clinton went on Arsenio, George W. Bush went to the Daytona 500, and Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg. If you're silent when your own do it, when Bush II breaks Reagan's vacation record, then could you at least be a little circumspect about your outrage? I got no problem with you being partisan; hell, what value would there be in measured responses from James Taranto or Ann Althouse? But constantly insulting everyone's intelligence just so you can fail to make a point? If that doesn't tell you anything, maybe it's time your friends did.

Six Cups Of Coffee And Four Shots Of Nyquil Later, I'm Back To Normal

Peter Baker, "A Phrase Sets Off Sniping After a Crisis". December 29

I'VE been fighting off a sore throat and cough the last three days, and arguing with my Poor Wife about whose holiday-convocated family is the source of the psycho-Nazi-elementary-school-warfare-germs hacked directly onto unprotected foodstuffs by a couthless, unmanaged, and by this point, frankly unmanageable brood one-third larger than the Monaco Olympic team (guess).

Regular readers have probably already tumbled onto the fact that my health had nothing to do with the fact that I missed the tragic appearance of Janet Napolitano on CNN's State of the Union Sunday with Candy Crowley, Substituting For John King, which, for the record, can be explained, in decreasing order of repugnance, by: 1) Candy Crowley; 2) The network that employs Candy Crowley; 3) Sunday "News" programs in general which, as recently as this past Sunday, announced they consider Newt Fucking Gingrich a "newsmaker" ("Former Speaker of the House" said the promo; "Didn't they leave out 'Disgraced'?" said my Poor Wife); 4) The idea that we need a timely explanation from the Secretary of the Biggest, Most Ill-Conceived Boondoggle of a Department Washington Could, or Ever Will, Rush Into Existence as to How, and Why, some lunatic set his pants on fire on an airplane despite the fact that we employ an entire category of individuals whose job it is to simply wait and watch for the next lunatic on an airplane story and shit bricks about it, that category being "News people", and What She's Going To Do About It.

Which job she apparently failed, and which has sparked the biggest crisis in Washington since the last time the Right went apeshit about something, which I believe was last Thursday. So I'm doubly grateful to Peter Baker for bringing me up to speed on all this.

To the list of phrases it may be best for political leaders to avoid after a major security incident, add “the system worked” right after “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Just as the public did not really share President George W. Bush’s assessment of how things were going after Hurricane Katrina, so too was there a good deal of skepticism when President Obama’s homeland security secretary declared faith in a system that failed to stop a guy who tried to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day.

In both instances, the statements were meant to reassure a skittish public but seemed disconnected from the reality they were describing. Even Mr. Bush ultimately concluded that Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was not in fact doing a heck of a job; Mr. Brown was soon out. And in this case, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, does not think the system worked across the board, only that it worked in terms of the response after the attempted bombing took place.

And look, I'm not even interested enough in this to look for whatever context this was taken out of, not that I don't expect one could be found, but because it Doesn't Matter. Because when someone has to dig for "there's a good deal of skepticism" to equate some Wingnut Gaffe Outrage with the Bush administration's Katrina response, that person is lying. Even if that person accidentally happens to be telling the truth.

Is this the sort of thing you went to college for, Mr. Baker? Is it the sort of government who think we deserve, and one you'd like to contribute your full measure to preserving? Is it? Government where the tiniest extemporanea uttered, or flubbed, by public officials are picked up by a group of people giving a convincing performance of half-literacy, and pummeled about the head and shoulders? And captured for YouTube? Thereby instituting a crisis?

Fuck it, this is not about Janet Napolitano, a high-rising political functionary tasked with running a bloated bureaucratic brand that owes its existence to deep political thinker Joe Lieberman, and which we'd be better off spinning back into its constituent parts. (If we could find someone fit to run the thing it would be no one we ought to give anything resembling that sort of power, not to mention that we'd wind up fifty years later with another century-and-a-half's worth of profound embarrassment on the order of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.) It's about the Press acting as though Gerald Ford whiffing on a line about Eastern Europe, or George H. W. Bush barfing on the Japanese Prime Minister, had real-world rather than sitcom-world consequences. Did Ford really not understand Soviet domination of Poland? Does Napolitano really think someone setting his pants on fire on an airliner is okeh so long as the passengers tackle him and the plane manages to land? Is that the message either was conveying?

And, goddam it, who thought "Heck of a job, Brownie" was the worst of the Katrina mess? Bush could'a said "Brownie, kiss me on the mouth, you beautiful beast" if his administration had been doing its job. The point was, first, that the public soon became aware that "Brownie" was a political hack who had as much business running FEMA as Joe the Plumber would've--and, again, which no one would have cared a fig about if the job had been done--and, second, that the benign neglect visited on Nawlins, and the rest of the Gulf, was a Republican feature, not a bug, and being cheered on the sidelines by a Starship of Jonahs. There aren't any Democrats cheering for terrorists, except in the perpetually fevered imagination; hell, you can't even get the President to keep his word on civil liberties. The only real connection between Katrina and Flaming Pantsgate is the one you're trying, and failing, to make. And again, assuming you really think all this is as serious as you say, you ought'a be the first one to volunteer to shut up about it, for the sake of Civilization Herself.