Aside from the bartender and us, the dozen or so others there were either Indian or middle eastern, and I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed when Obama stepped into the very imperial-looking East Room and, in a subtle but unmistakeable way, invoked the Bushian spirit of 9/11 vengeance, thus blandly trying to make our new version of Red Queen justice look reasonable and proper, at least for appearance’s sake.  What a difference ten years make.

If someone had told me back then that today I would be watching a Democratic President proudly announcing an international extrajudicial assassination, while we were involved in (so far) three wars and counting, I would have told them they were nuts.  Had they added that there would then be a vigorous debate about how great torture was, since it had already long been settled that wiretapping, eavesdropping, and every other form of government transom-peeping was accepted by all, I would have called them a cab home.  I’m not naive; I know that our post WWII national security/spook establishment has been running around doing all of these things for some time, but the openness, not to mention bipartisanship, about it these days is nothing short of alarming.

Maybe it was the huge screens in the bar, but Obama’s studied sobriety was somewhat belied by the scary intensity in his eyes, something I’d have liked to have seen earlier, when he was defending something, well, defensible.  He wasn’t wearing a silly costume, but it being the anniversary of Mission Accomplished, it was disappointingly evident that “change” was more a matter of style than substance.  Predictably, the large number of younger Americans who don’t remember America before 9/11 changed everything reacted as they were now conditioned to: as elated fans of their winning home team against a hated rival.  Unsurprisingly, but perhaps even more disturbingly, Obama later ratified this bloodlust with a promise to have a little ceremony at Ground Zero, where the head on a pike would be only implied as he looks toward a victorious year for 2012 as a War President.  USA, fuck yeah.  He even invited George W. to attend, but he declined.  Maybe Bill Kristol is free that day.  Or John Yoo.

The outright lies are always a little riskier, but not by all that much.  Take, for example, the idea that our Wall Street fellating, oil-driller coddling, war escalating President Obama is, somehow in his heart of hearts, a Kenyan anti-colonialist.  Lots of people, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were unembarrassed to pretend they believed such garbage, but Forbes Magazine, quite understandably, took quite a bit of heat for publishing Dinesh D’Souza’s execrable and delusional cover “story” about how Obama’s  (unfortunately nonexistent) “anger” stems from the sinister influence of his father, whom he barely knew and quite clearly doesn’t come within a mile of emulating.  Though even some conservatives quietly distanced themselves from such baffling nonsense, the Fox-addled, who pride themselves on never reading such elitist (and wordy, too…) publications as Forbes, undoubtedly nodded their jowly heads in hearty approval.  Ditto the horseshit about FEMA Camps, gun confiscations, reparations, and on and on.  So a few cops got killed here and there; the rich got their tax cuts, which was the important thing, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

The conjectural lies are by far the bigger problem.  From Mushroom Clouds to World Government, these cannot ever be exposed for what they are because, well, you never know, and no one in the media has the common sense and professional standards to come right out and say that whatever drastic and stupid action Republicans are about to take is based upon pure fantasy of things that will never, ever, happen.  After all, it’s conjecturally (if not exactly theoretically) possible that global warming is a myth, low taxes on the rich create prosperity, and “small” government means spending a trillion a year on “National Security,” so why not let a bunch of Republican charlatans so obviously beholden to those who profit from such ridiculous notions repeatedly say so, unchallenged, on television each day?  Fox went to court in the 90′s and won a landmark case that established that knowingly lying to one’s audience was protected under the First Amendment, and after that, Republicans were off to the races, as we’ve seen.

The best kind of conjectural lies (from the Republicans’ standpoint), and the ones that inevitably turn out to be the most damaging to Americans, are the “Opposite Day” conjectural lies, because they’re front-loaded to put Democrats into their seemingly favorite political dilemma: heads we lose, tails Republicans win.  These tend to turn out predictably, as they did when Sarah Palin, defending the current Death Panelists of the health insurance industry, said Democrats, sometime in a future of her own imaging, would cut off care to the gravely ill the way for-profit insurance companies do every day, facts be damned, and it worked.  To this day, a substantial number of people still think we have the best  health care in the world, when we’re 37th, and spend more than anybody else.

Health Care Reform lies, of course, are relatively minor in their harmful effects compared to much more insidious opposite day lies like, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”  Ever since those words were so repeatedly uttered, the wars they credulously cheered on have, not for nothing, radicalized a generation of Muslims around the globe, just as surely as the first Gulf War radicalized Osama bin Laden, and the resulting deadly spiral of violence inexorably worsens year after bloody year.  Never mind that it was the peaceniks, the Unserious hippies and civil-liberties absolutists who dismissed such war-mongering xenophobia as the contemptible proto-fascism it was who were right in the end; no one remembers any such helpful facts because all of them, from Ashleigh Banfield to Phil Donahue, were summarily hounded off the airwaves by the end of 2003, only to return when it was far too late.

The mother of all opposite day conjectural lies, of course, is being rolled out as we speak, in part I think to cover up for the rest of them, which is that Julian Assange of Wikileaks has “blood on his hands.”    Like most opposite day lies, this one attempts to paper over its absurdity by choosing a person who can be conveniently demonized, rather than the less-refutable principle they stand for, because that’s a lot easier.  You know the drill:  if Michael Moore/Al Gore/Insert Truth Teller Here are for it, I’m agin’.   And just like any other under-60 male (older if you’re Republican) Assange does have a sex life, which must be ripe for exploitation in some way or other, at least  if nothing better comes up.  As usual, creating comic book villains beats coming up with arguments to refute them, and thus the bloodiest hands around are now feverishly clutching their pearls at the horror of it all.

Why things that haven’t and probably will never happen are to be feared and prevented at any cost, while things that are happening, every day, are dismissed as the errant rantings of people who just don’t know any better is a question our media ought to answer, but for obvious reasons, won’t.   No one could have predicted, we’ve heard ad nauseam, what actually happened, but yet they predicted, with disastrous consequences, a lot of things that didn’t, but well, you never know.  Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but that’s still a considerably better record than most Republicans boast.

Someone ought to alert the media.

I don’t know how many Hag readers have access to “Savage Love,” Seattle Stranger editor Dan Savage’s excellent nationally syndicated sex advice column, but he has a favorite acronym he uses with writers in hopelessly doomed relationships: DTMFA, which, if you haven’t guessed, stands for Dump The Mother Fucker Already.  He only says it when he means it; the partner in question is so selfish, perverted, or malevolent that the only possible solution is to, well, hit the road, Jack.  Although no butt plugs, gender confusion, poop, or cuckoldry is involved, which makes my advice kind of boring compared to Savage’s, there’s one dysfunctional relationship that I can no longer leave alone.  With apologies to Dan, here’s the evidence for a big, fat DTMFA:

Dear Dan,

I’ve been in this BDSM relationship for a long time; it started out where I was the dom, since I’m the bigger and bossier one, but over time my squeeze has jumped into the driver’s seat and hit the gas. At first it was kind of hot; I got to get my kinks for rough play without everybody finding out about it, and he got to whip whoever he wanted, which usually were the same people I wanted to whip anyway.  Trouble is, over time he started going to the clubs without me and putting the bills on my VISA anyway, and worse, he got me into situations where I repeatedly got whipped back for his shit, when I wasn’t even there to enjoy it in the first place.  Now, I’m deep in hock and and 86′ed from all of our favorite haunts, and he’s still in the clubs a’whuppin,’ while I’m not getting so much as a reach-around.  Finally, I said something… not anything too bad, mind you, but just a little reminder of who’s paying the bills and dealing with all the fallout of his fun, and he totally went ballistic, and sent all his “friends” out to trash me.  What should I do?  If I dump him, I might get some of my old friends back, but the backlash from his buddies that always hated me anyway will rip me a new one, perhaps literally.  Your advice would be appreciated, because now if I want to keep the peace I’m going to have to let him do some stuff that even I’m uncomfortable with.

Offered Bitch All My Ass and Couldn’t Orgasm

Dear OBAMA and CO:

DTMFA.

Unfortunately, international relations are, forgive the pun, stickier than sex columns and the “relations” of Obama and co. vis a vis Israel are necessarily more complicated.  I understand that having Israel around makes kicking Habib ass look, to some people, almost virtuous, and without them, Iran/Contra, the Iraq war(s), and 9/11 might never have happened, but would we really call any of those things good?  In short, the US/Israel “special relationship,” endlessly touted by the political right, Sarah Palin, and the Senator from Tel Aviv Joe Lieberman, is a lose/lose for both parties involved, but they just can’t quit each other, because they have their darkest traits in common: militarism, land stolen from indigenous people, and a bizarre desire to control everything in their path by force, since they are, in their own minds, the bestest ever.  Both use slaughter and human rights abuses against their chosen victims for political gain at home, and neither would be so successful at such a worthy endeavor without the other.  I don’t claim to have the influence that Savage Love has, but if this little missive from one of the Jewish lobby’s evidently less diplomatic spokesmen doesn’t persuade the Obama Administration to DTMFA, I honestly don’t know what will. (h/t HuffPo)

When it comes to tyrants who have dismantled their nation’s democracies and thrown their political opponents in jail, like Hugo Chavez, President Obama hugs them with both arms. And if you’re a Middle East dictator, like King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who brutally oppresses women and won’t even let them drive a car, for goodness sake, the President of the United States will bow down to you (you get the same treatment if you’re the Emperor of Japan). But if you’re the democratically elected Prime Minister of the Middle East’s only fully functioning democracy, and America’s most reliable ally, the President will sic his Secretary of State on you if you don’t follow everything he demands. Who does President Obama think the Israeli Prime Minister is? His poodle? (Would that he were; poodles, at least, can be put to sleep).

This is scandalous behavior, and over a non-incident. (1600 housing units?  That sort of thing probably won’t happen again in these parts as long as I live, and even in boom times would have been, well, newsy.)

Jews should be allowed to live anywhere in Jerusalem, as should Arabs. And had the Israeli government announced that it was preventing Arabs from living in any part of the Holy City that they choose, I would have written an equally scathing column criticizing that xenophobic decision. (That’s so flat out delusional that I’m literally and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Did Karl Rove write it?)

During Obama’s Presidential campaign, I was asked to serve as a national co-chair of Rabbis for Obama. I turned it down. First of all, I was amazed that the candidate wasn’t going to be on any calls with the Rabbis who signed up, with the campaign saying he was too busy. Ah, so you want to just use the Rabbis and not show them basic courtesy and respect? Second and more importantly, I had a strong inkling that President Obama would treat Israel this way. Bullying them, pushing them, pressuring them, into peace deals that compromised their security. (Never trust a clairvoyant; especially one who happens to be an asshole.)

And make no mistake about it. Splitting Jerusalem, as it had been split up until its unification during the Six-Day War, is the single gravest risk to Israel’s security. Just imagine a Palestinian capitol, with Palestinian forces only miles away from Israel’s Knesset and government buildings. The Palestinian Authority has very little control over its own security forces and especially its people, with huge numbers supporting Hamas over the PA. Would Israel really sign a suicide pact to put all the organs of its government within easy striking range of Palestinian rockets? Haven’t we seen this happen already with Sderot and Gaza? Can anyone even imagine the consequences if Sderot became Jerusalem? (More ridiculous pants-wetting, to feebly justify an international crime.  The entire world condemns the 1967 land grab this bloodthirsty nebbish calls “unification.”)

But all this is beside the point. Israel is not one of America’s 50 states. (Tell Joe Lieberman that; he and Connecticut would be duly surprised.)  It’s a sovereign nation. For President Obama and Secretary Clinton to treat Israel with such disdain, and handle its elected officials as if they are naughty school children, is disgusting. I would like to see a single other example of an international leader subjected to the kind of public berating that has taken place between Hilary and Bibi over the past few days. It’s beneath the office of the President and the Secretary of State.( You tell ‘em.)

And please don’t give me the tired arguments about how much America does for Israel. America gives Egypt billions in aid each year. Yet, Obama showed Hosni Mubarak extensive courtesy when he visited Cairo, even though Mubarak is a dictator who has for decades rejected America’s call for democratic reforms.

I could print this execrable and lengthy screed by Rabbi (!) Schmuley Boteach in its entirety, but will refrain from doing so because the DTMFA buzzer went off before the first paragraph was over.  Your country and mine thank you, Rabbi Boteach, for finally giving us something even the hag, and if he were here, Dan Savage, couldn’t overlook.  Time to hit Craigslist, Israel, you’ll have to get your kinks elsewhere.

UPDATE: The right’s former darling, Gen. David Petraeus, has really stepped in something lately, first with his dismissal of the arguments against DADT, but worse, with the Israel lobby, when he had the temerity to call the sky blue; i.e., that Israel’s apartheid policies aren’t so great for American security.  To wit:

The assumptions Gen. Petraeus presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee wrongly attribute “insufficient progress” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and “a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel” as significantly impeding the U.S. military mission in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and in dealing with the Iranian influences in the region. It is that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and hero.

The General’s assertions lead to the illusory conclusion that if only there was a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S. could successfully complete its mission in the region.

Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel. This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive.

Whenever the Israeli-Arab conflict is made a focal point, Israel comes to be seen as the problem. If only Israel would stop settlements, if only Israel would talk with Hamas, if only Israel would make concessions on refugees, if only it would share Jerusalem, everything in the region would then fall into line.

DTMFA!

The reason for this curious obsession with the past in a culture that can’t remember what happened yesterday is that “The War on Terror” was never anything more than a business plan, and its investors set it up to be a long-term thing.  The much feared “Peace Dividend”  after the collapse of our only conceivably threatening “enemy,” the Soviet Union, simply had to be eliminated, if the prerogatives of the Imperial Presidency were to remain….  secrecy, ever-expanding government power, black budgets, and a lot  taxpayer money to spend as one wished.  In peacetime, people do expect that they taxes they pay to the government will return as benefits, they are uncomfortable with the secrecy and violent tendencies of an overbearing government, and worse, they also might even respect the patriotism of dissent and stand for constitutional principles on occasion.  What righty could put up with that?  The Soviet Evil Empire had to be replaced with something grossly inflated to become “Islamofascism,” and in their more lurid fantasies, a “Caliphate’” in which Ay-rabs would screw all of our dames and then make ‘em wear head scarves.  Really.  A lot of Fox News watchers believe this to this day.  Turbans are much scarier than those fur things those Russkies wore, too, so what the hell?

The absurd thinness of the arguments that support treating September 11 as though it were the Holocaust (except in this holocaust, the Jews won afterward and spent their lives putting a can of whoop-ass on anybody who looked like a Nazi…) ought to discredit them so thoroughly that they would have no place in public discourse, but there they are, nine long and miserable years later.   The same people that led us into our current losing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan now have their greedy eyes on Iran, and the gasbags on television just sit there, listen, and pretend that these people aren’t crazy.  Of course, since almost all of the gasbags cheered for the wars themselves, this is easier to do for them than it is for you, the viewer, who thought they were all nuts the whole time.

FOX has found its niche in all of this; Nixon once calculated that he had 30% of America no matter what he did…  the “don’t confuse me with the facts” crowd was his “base,”  and now his former campaigner, Roger Ailes, sells them dentures, gold, and golf estates as the ratings skyrocket.  The rest of the MSM, not so much.  You see, some, not all, news watchers might want to watch something that isn’t utter horseshit, for which they would obviously choose FOX anyway, but no media outlet wanted to be the only one so doing, so all of the TV Networks and newspapers except Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) seem to have tossed up their hands, donned their flak jackets and said, “Let’s go with the horseshit.”

History, unlike television careers, is important, and it moves along.  If Roger Ailes’ repulsive mug belching tinny Bushisms and shopworn fearmongering doesn’t shame the rest of the MSM to start calling such vermin out on their lies, nothing else will.  His comments were worse than mere lies, they were old, tired lies that got voted off the island in 2005, as even the stupidest bobblehead ought to have seen that.  Lies are like ties; you shouldn’t be caught in an old one.  But caught they were, and although they’d looked smashing in “everybody else was fooled, too,” and even “that’s old news ” looked good in the right lighting, “Gee, look at this crazy person we’ve been believing all this time; let’s go to commercial” wasn’t very flattering at all.

The crisis of the News Media, and the resulting crisis of our democracy, is that there is no competing with FOX, and because the rest of our media missed this fact at a pretty crucial moment, Osama can worry about glaciers melting now, which is a good thing, because we can’t be bothered.  Too many other problems.

As usual, the right has pulled another bait and switch on its bible-thumping “base,” trumpeting family values when all they really cared about was drowning whatever vestigial remains of Democracy we still thought we had in a flood of corporate money.  Perhaps he’ll even include that recently so fashionable retroactive immunity for ol’ Tom DeLay on that pesky illegal corporate donation front, since the laws he’s fixin’ to change would create an environment where even Texas’ famously lax election laws, which nonetheless were enough to finally nail The Hammer, would be decreed an unconstitutional violation of corporate “Free Speech.”  The one thing we’ve all learned about freedom here lately is that it certainly isn’t free.  In an unprecedented but pretty unsurprising move, Roberts sent the narrower  case back, declaring it too confining for this “strict constructionist,” who saw a rare chance to turn back 100-odd years of anti-corruption case law, and even urgently beseeched none other than Ted Olson, who has been sort of at loose ends since the Lewinsky/Whitewater days, (and of course since his loudmouthed harridan of a wife, Barbara, was fortuitously eliminated on Sept. 11th…)  to bring forth a new, broader case in favor of corporate dominance of “Free Speech” that would set about essentially declaring Theodore Roosevelt a damned commie.  You see, Roberts and his Republican posse have been continually bedeviled by the fact that poor little Nike, Disney, Halliburton, and their other marginalized pals are currently cruelly silenced under our Draconian campaign finance laws, while a nobody like, say,  Aunt Bea is allowed to imperiously dominate public discourse with her $25 donation.  Who, pray tell, is pulling the plug on Granny now?

Perhaps this was Karl Rove’s “math,” and therefore he wasn’t so crazy when he predicted a “permanent Republican majority.”  Once the floodgates open, conveniently boosting the bottom lines of the struggling corporate media, citizen activism and individual donations from ordinary Americans will be utterly irrelevant, once and for all.  The astonishing upward transfer of wealth and the dramatic shifting of the tax burden from corporations and the rich to working people that has taken place over the last thirty years turns out to have had a purpose;  what good is all that money when someone else owns the government, at least according to the Constitution?  All those vacation homes, airplanes, and yachts can be an awful burden when you can’t find good help, and worse, constantly risk having some of it taken away just because a bunch of grabby lowlifes outnumber you 100,000 to 1.

As though it weren’t enough that the wealthiest among us pay less of their grotesquely outsized booty in taxes than the lowliest janitor pays from his meager wages, now these “Economic Royalists,” as Franklin Roosevelt so aptly called them, want to turn Democracy itself into nothing more than a semiannual miniseries, brought to you by Big Money, in which the end is nothing more than another foregone conclusion, so no one need be bothered to watch the whole thing, much less participate.  Win win.  In the world they’re busily creating, every modest effort to improve the lives of working people, clean up the environment, or even be granted a day in court when maimed, poisoned or killed by Corporate America, will henceforth amount to pissing up a rope.

In a more innocent time, it was said that you can’t fight City Hall.  Try it when City Hall, and every other government building on up to the Capitol and the White House, are wholly owned subsidiaries of General Electric, Goldman Sachs, or ExxonMobil.

As Ted Olson dons his swallowtail coat tomorrow, he’ll no doubt be singing a happy tune.  And the rest of us can go Cheney ourselves.