Repubs: Lying or Just Stupid?

"Republicans, while not defending Libby, asserted that the lack of other indictments indicated there was no conspiracy in the White House to punish an administration critic by identifying his wife as a CIA operative." (link)

If that is their statement, then they are either too stupid or too mendacious--it's got to be one or the other--to be the elected representatives of American citizens, who deserve better and many of whom actually believe are as good as these politicians posture themselves to be. Legalistic sophistry designed to confuse rather than to educate the electorate is not acceptable, especially since you are bent on not allowing us little people to be decently educated to the point where we might be able to defend ourselves against your anti-intellectual propaganda, you chickenshits. Who think it's okay to make it harder for Joe Six-Pack Nascar-dad's kid to go to fucking junior college to say nothing of Enormous State.

Because they know damn well that there was a fucking conspiracy to do the nasty right there in Tricky Dick 2's conference room and these guys are facing decades in prison (unless you-know-who is going to pardon them all now and then let it all hang out in fronta God'n ever'body in Texas and around the world for the next three years).
So, these Republicans are being disingenuous at best. Not least because they know that much of the common wisdom is that Fitzgerald is just getting started--and why would Libby being doing this on his own or, if there are other people who are, say, doing the same kind of thing as Libby, how could they not know about each other and why would they not really be working together? In other words, how is it possible that there is no conspiracy?

O-o-o, as a matter of fact, I don't think I've heard the "c" word before that particular article, and it was floated by the Republicans! Sweet. (Cornyn: "I think what we found out this week is that any alleged wrongdoing is really confined to a single individual. Those who were expecting an indictment, indicating a broad conspiracy to out a covert CIA agent or - are going to be disappointed because there is no evidence to support that.") Looks like a road map to me. And what gentlemen (and ladies) these are, letting the loyal Scooter take one for the team.

And everybody else walks? As some blogger somewhere indicated, I think Mrs. Libby and children might want to have something to say about that, hm-m? Scooter does thirty years of solitude just so Karl Rove doesn't have to go to jail, or Dick Cheney? Somebody be singin' like Mahalia Jackson!

Another Libra

Oy.

Headline from Hell

Oh, my God! The headline!

"Bush fires Plamegate DA"

Ha ha, just kidding.

Michelle Malkin, Whiner

Michelle and others are angry that the Nobel Literature committee has picked (another) avowed "anti-American", British playwright Harold Pinter, to receive its 2005 prize. These prizes are all political, they claim, and the supposed practice of only recognizing liberal writers has become so egregious that even some Swedes (!) are up in arms.

Michelle posted Pinter's recent paean to shock-and-awe as a demonstration that he is an undeserving hack:

American Football

Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.


All I can say is, Get used to it, Michelle. In fact, I hope you feel the same way about Mr. al-Baradei getting the Peace Prize, too. Get used to having your warmongering imperialism thrown right back in your face, not just by writers and artists but also by the internationally renowned organizations who accord these people their highest honors. Not everybody thinks that war is cool and that America is the bestest and most peacefulest nation on earth.

Michelle Malkin has been shitting on writers for a while now. I wrote a letter to the editor a few years ago challenging a column by Ms. Malkin in which, as I recall, she castigated an American university (Temple?) that had had the temerity to give a teaching position to Amiri Baraka. What was Amiri Baraka's crime? I believe it probably had to do with his 2001 poem "Somebody Blew Up America", though I could be wrong. (Like an idiot, I can't put my fingers on either the article or my letter.) But the method is there, if memory serves. Baraka says blame America first, why do you let him teach? He's corrupting young minds! Universities are hotbeds of liberalism! They must be purged!

This is freedom? This is thought-crime.

Anyway, as I was scouring around Michelle's website looking for her anti-Baraka screed (not there), I found an interesting tidbit from 2000 entitled "My Impeachment Referendum", in which she reports that she's going to vote Democratic in the upcoming Congressional election. The reason? Her representative, Connie Morella, R-Md., had voted against the Clinton bills of impeachment in 1998.

To wit: "The message is loud and clear. It says to me that Morella cared more about focus groups than about the rule of law. It says she was more willing to stand by a Democrat president -- who lied under oath, lied to his family, lied to his Cabinet, lied to the nation, attempted to persuade his staff to lie under oath, and used the people’s house and resources to escape the consequences of lies piled upon lies -- than by her own fellow Republicans who performed their constitutional duty against the prevailing tide of moral relativism."

Ah, yes, Moral Relativism, the great boogeyman of the Right. In that spirit, I would ask Ms. Malkin what she thinks about our current administration, whose lies about, for example, weapons of mass destruction have been exposed for years (and let's just leave aside the Politics of Personal Destruction for the time being). Or does she really think Bush had it right all along that somehow Saddam Hussein was able to spirit one of the world's largest arsenals of conventional and unconventional weaponry out of the country under the nose of the world's most sophisticated satellite intelligence system, which can identify the proverbial car license plate from 200 miles into outer space? And nobody's found it to this day? Well, I guess it could be. Or maybe Michelle Malkin is just stupid.

(By the way, if Michelle is actually concerned about weapons that happen to be missing, she might ask what happened to the four-thousand Stinger missiles that turned up not to be where they were supposed to be a couple of years ago. And what about all those munition dumps that were looted in the early days of the Glorious War for the Independence of Iraq? Could some of those same munitions actually be in use against our own troops? I guess Michelle would agree with our Defense secretary that that's what can happen when "untidy" freedom-things like looting take place in brand-new democracies like Iraq.)

Stupid or no, Michelle is nevertheless a hyprocrite. Her own moral relativism is as plain as the nose on her face and would be an embarrassment to her if she weren't such a blockheaded ideologue. She is outraged over lies about fellatio by a Democratic president--in federal court, no less! And to his own wife!--but doesn't show the same sense of betrayal when it comes to "lies piled upon lies" of much more terrible effect being uttered by a fearmongering Republican administration and abetted by its craven allies in Congress.

As to the "rule of law" to which Michelle makes her required genuflection: Do we really have to go into detail over the contortions that Michelle and her fellows on the Right put themselves through in order to justify George Bush's violations of international laws to which we are a signatory? Do the words "Geneva Conventions" mean anything to her?

I guess it doesn't count if you're America.


Update, Oct 31 05
To finish, though, and bring this train back home, how then is Michelle Malkin a whining hypocrite as pertains to the Nobel literature award? Because if it were someone more of her political persuasion who had been selected (and I am enough of a pedestrian not to be able to name someone--Hitchens' friend Amis maybe? Who's as right wing as Malkin and writes books that college professors think their students should read?), you can bet your ass that Michelle would come up with the perfect opposites to cover that as she is to cover this. I'll expound on that in more detail later (after I've come up with examples), but now I have to go upstairs and be sociable. Waah.

Theater of the Absurd

It's a great day for democracy. Iraq is voting for a constitution! (Should that be capital C?) How happy we are!

Ten years ago you couldn't find thirty percent of this country who knew the difference between Eye-rak and Eye-ran and now we're supposed to get goose bumps whenever we see the Blue Fingertip of Freedom? Are you shitting me? Twelve years of U.S.-led sanctions rendered our former agent Saddam Hussein impotent as the regional Hitler (except for his domestic terror regime) while impoverishing his people and causing the deaths of a half-million children ... and the recently published ex-hostage "just an ole' country boy" truck driver on C-SPAN can feel grateful that American kids don't have to beg for food like Iraqi kids.

Americans as a people seem to have the worst kind of tunnel vision--it's like looking through the wrong end of a million kaleidoscopes, where you don't see the big picture but just a bunch of little pictures, all of which are inspiring or fearsome but none of which is connected to any of the others. Life as a series of disconnected vignettes, a theater of the absurd. No wonder people are so scared. Who wouldn't be if you had no rational explanation for how the world works?

Which brings us to the rejection of science. Thanks, Republicans!