The photo question was applied this way. When are you going to stop helping the enemy and endangering the troops by releasing more damning photos after you released the torture memos which you never should have done? The implication, you released the torture memos and gave the world and al-Qaeda proof of how piss poor a job was done in applying legal, advanced interrogation techniques. We tried very hard to not break the law and as can happen, some guys went beyond the very specific guidance they were given. The interrogators did their best to serve the country under very trying circumstances because they just wanted to prevent another 9/11.

Gen. Odierno and President al-Maliki along with CIA boss Panetta all said the photos would inflame al-Qaeda and terrorists throughout the world and bring down a reign of terror in Iraq. On May 16, I posted an article on this blog that attempted to make a case that releasing the photos would be a framing blame disaster for Obama and if released, all subsequent violence in Iraq would be blamed on Obama- he would thus own the war and so what if it was entirely unnecessary in the first place. I did not say and did not believe that the photos would inflame the terrorists because they were more than sufficiently inflamed already thanks to the Bush Administration’s invasion and mistake after mistake in war operations. ESPECIALLY STUPID operations when instead of realizing from the beginning that winning the hearts and minds was more important than winning battles, we became an occupation force that deserved to be tossed out almost every time we went into the streets.

The most recent and egregious use of the “beat your wife” question occurred this week. According to McClatchy reporter Nancy A. Youssef, Defense Department officials are debating whether to ignore an earlier promise and squelch the release of an investigation into a U.S. air strike last month, out of fear that its findings would further enrage the Afghan public. The military promised to release the report shortly after the May 4 air attack, which killed dozens of Afghans, and the Pentagon reiterated that last week. Youssef reported, “Pentagon leaders are divided about whether releasing the report would reflect a renewed push for openness and transparency about civilian casualties or whether it would only fan Afghan outrage and become a Taliban recruiting tool just as Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal takes command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Any guess as to which option will be chosen? Not much chance the report will be released. Somehow, the truth doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as perception. That poor husband who wasn’t beating or cheating on his wife, finds the truth very inadequate as long as he accepts the question.

Just because the chief investigator has briefed Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the report, and other top defense officials, including Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, doesn’t mean the Afghan President and his citizens deserve the truth too. Youssef said, “The air strike, in western Farah province, has drawn the ire of local and national leaders angered that U.S. forces may have killed as many as 140 civilians in pursuit of a band of Taliban fighters. Shortly after the attack, U.S. military officials told McClatchy that they thought the death toll had been roughly 50, some of them militants.”

Two U.S. military officials told McClatchy that the video shows that no one checked to see whether any women or children were in the building before it was bombed. The report acknowledges that mistakes were made and that U.S. forces didn’t always follow proper procedures, but it does little to reassure Afghans that the U.S. has done enough to avoid repeating those mistakes. According to Youssef’s story, “Lacking sufficient forces to patrol the vast Afghan countryside, the U.S. has relied heavily on airstrikes. The seven-hour incident on May 4 began when Afghan police were ambushed while they were patrolling a road. Some officers were killed, prompting the police to call in the Afghan army. The army then came under attack, too, and the provincial governor called in U.S. forces. The U.S. forces eventually called in air support, military officials said, and after the airstrike began, the Taliban moved into two remote villages separated by poppy fields that were a source of heavy enemy fire, and the fight continued into the night. The U.S. dropped 13 bombs on some buildings, military officials in Afghanistan have said. The report found that an Air Force B-1 bomber had to circle overhead before dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on a site where suspected Taliban fighters had fled. While it was circling, civilians could’ve entered the building or Taliban could’ve left, but the military had no one in a position to observe that.”

It is beyond common sense to believe hiding the truth would be better than admitting and apologizing. Not only does the “beating your wife” question trap a president, it can do the same to SECDEF Gates and other military leaders. The old adage “tell the truth and you won’t have to remember what you said,” is the only solution to keep off the slippery slope of telling half-truths, lies or hiding the truth. It can trap both the question giver and the recipient.

President Karzai has said over and over, stop the air attacks. Yet, we don’t stop and then we make a colossal error and kill 140 innocents and now we are seriously considering refusing to admit our tactics are tragically flawed. Winning hearts and minds is the primary aim of a successful counterinsurgency. It is 8 years since we invaded Afghanistan and only this year, are we going to seriously apply proven counterinsurgency tactics. That is beyond incompetent.

Regardless of what you may think about Gen. McChrystal, who took over Monday as the top commander in Afghanistan, regarding his role in torture or covering up the death in Afghanistan of an NFL football star, he is an expert on counterinsurgency and indications are he understands the importance of winning hearts and minds. His beliefs on the value of truth can certainly be questioned. A WaPo story this week by Greg Jaffe said, “The general also said he wants to revamp the way U.S. forces investigate and respond to civilian casualties, which have produced a tremendous amount of resentment and anger throughout the country. He said he might assemble a team that would fly to an area on only a few hours’ notice to investigate allegations of civilian deaths. And he pledged that the United States will try to be more culturally sensitive in how it responded to mistakes.”

If he really believes his words, he should insist that the report be released immediately. That would put him on a very good footing for the rest of his tour in Afghanistan. If he doesn’t do that, his tour will be even longer and more arduous, and his chance of succeeding in his mission will be significantly diminished.

I’m trying to think of a place where American bombs have resulted in anything but an embarrassing disaster for those who financed it, usually on credit, and I can’t.  When the bill comes, it’s nicer to have at least the unaffordable purchase to comfort the unwise spender.  ”I can’t afford heat, so it’s a good thing I got this mink coat.”  ”I just lost my health insurance, but at least I have a TV so big that Bill O’Reilly’s mouth looks like Lake Erie.”  Instead, we have wingnuts previously and subsequently utterly hostile to such ideas suddenly turning into feminists for Afghani women, ACT UP activists for Iranian gays, and “Fair Election” zealots who nonetheless helped Bush steal two elections and govern as though he’d won a landslide.  Bombing is good for this bunch, since it minimizes American casualties, which are the only ones that even slightly matter, looks good on TV, and makes a lot of defense contractors generous come election time.  Still, its popularity with the public remains a mystery.

Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Mogadishu, Iraq, Afghanistan…..  the list is long of pointless bombing campaigns that cost us dearly in terms of both money and moral standing, and delivered the precise opposite of their many shifting “goals.”  The last two are still costing us billions, slaughtering (albeit unimportant) things a sane person might call “people,” and doing exactly jack shit to help us, even if our only goals are grabbing power and money, which of course they are.

What’s the answer to this dilemma?  Bomb Iran.  The neocons are bored with their old war porn and need something else; we all know the feeling, but is Bill Kristol’s boner really enough to start a war for?  Sadly, a lot of dimwitted and dehumanized people seem to think so, and maybe they have a point.

By spending all our money bombing things, we won’t have any money for schools, roads, clean water and air, healthcare, or prosperity, and that immigrant problem will be solved in a big hurry.  Hell, some of the places we bombed might start to look good.  Mission Accomplished.

That’s the best I can come up with.

Racism, once coded in terms like “states’ rights” and “inner-city crime,” are now openly turning to attacks on a broadening group of fellow humans, and when they sound too unseemly, reticence is cast aside in favor of calling the swarthy victims “racists.”  You’d think such a silly, insultingly dumb tactic had ever worked, given the strikingly overconfident way it’s been used, and continues to be.

You’d also think, given the thudding and inexorable demographic trends that show that bashing minorities, be they Muslim, Latino, or gay, is tantamount to shouting “Herpes” in a crowded orgy, politically at least, that the Repubs would want to be careful enough to at least phone Frank Luntz for a few synonyms.  Nah.  Too late for that.

Somewhere in the frantic money chase that consumed the Republicans and their supporters for the last decade, everybody got so busy stuffing their pockets that no one gave the vaguest thought to laying the groundwork to sell the same crap again, an omission which would have been even more disastrous had not the Democrats so quickly taken up the fight, with all the campaign contributions that brave stance entailed, and sidestepped any real and needed correction.  Trouble is, the pesky problems persist, and even have the temerity to get worse each day.

For Democrats, who still have a lot of leeway to blame their predecessors, the situation isn’t that bad.  Hiding in the basement for seven years wasn’t exactly impressive, but in this case nothing was better than something.  For Republicans, though, they’re in something of a pickle.  Having made their careers in the glory of lies, lies, and more lies, they’re finding to their considerable chagrin that a lot of people who lost their futures, livelihoods, and cash money kind of think they suck, hence that 20% registration rate.   But rather than look to that other 80%, they’re looking to take that 20 down to fourteen by Sticking To Their Principles.  They know as well as I do that there’s a certain number of Americans who are either so rich, so dumb, or so full of hate that it doesn’t really matter how idiotic, bigoted, or crazy you sound, if you stand for Family Values, God himself cleans up after your parade.  What’s less clear is what, exactly, you plan to do with that little group.  Have potlucks?

On some level, you have to hand it to them.  It is undoubtedly tiresome having to answer questions, produce data, and effect results to prove you’re right, and if a quarter or so of America thinks that that’s just a bunch of commie propaganda anyway, why bother?  There’s still money to be made, even in exile.  Look at Murdoch.  Fox News “soared” in popularity after the 2008 election, but now has every viewer it will ever have, and each night another one hits 85.  We now know the absolute top number of reality-indifferent Americans, and every one of them is watching Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, who have adjusted their “message” accordingly.

We’ve reached a point where unless you’re a cop involved in a domestic dispute in a trailer park, a judge dealing with greedy heirs, or a psychologist dealing with deep sociopathologies, chances are you simply will never meet, much less be forced to listen to, a Republican, unless you’re watching television.

We ought to count our blessings for that, anyway; that’s why Al Gore invented the mute button.

What the Repug character, not true conservatives, have done to our nation and the world since Reagan is simply not elephantish. An elephant herd leader doesn’t thump around with a snarky smile and run for an underground bunker when jumped by mice. Then through lies and propaganda start a war with camels.

True elephants do have excellent memories, but I when I think of Repugs, I don’t see elephants living the attack daily and still bellowing about it eight years after the event. When I see fake smiling, selfish Repug NIMBYs who will destroy anything in their path and could care less what happens to others as long is they get theirs, I don’t envision elephants plodding along bothering no one. I do envision pigs feeding at a trough ignoring anything or anybody until they have sopped up as much dirty slop as possible. And, as one who fed a lot of farm pigs in my childhood, it seems to me, pigs are always smiling especially just before twice daily making their own trough their worst enemy. Their benevolent feeder, me, would have been trampled too if the pigs hadn’t been penned in and I could feed them without entering it.

I hereby initiate a one-man campaign to change the Repug party animal to a pig.

The inspiration came to me when I read this Alternet headline, Why Goldman Sachs Is the Greediest and Most Dastardly of the Wall Street Pigs. Had they used elephants vice pigs, it just wouldn’t have worked for me. I’ve never met any greedy and dastardly elephants. I have met many pigs that were very greedy. I can’t vouch for dastardly. If someone has a dastardly pig experience, please share it with us.

I realize that pigs are going to be very upset with me because pigs are only dirty due to the conditions they are raised in. It is not their fault that hereditary genes make them go crazy when feeding in a group. I don’t think Repugs have such a gene although their crazy view of the world and extreme selfishness does get passed from generation to generation, so possibly I am wrong.

Repugs really don’t have long term memory like elephants. How hard is it to remember how you have lived every day of your life? Anyone can daily observe with awe Repug leader memory loss when their candidates and congress critters totally contradict themselves, sometimes in only minutes. Lying doesn’t seem to be a part of any animal characteristic, although if we understood their sounds better, I might be proved wrong. So the fact that Repugs are such skilled and experienced liars is not relevant to the choice of an animal symbol.

Have you ever picked up a pig especially by their hind legs? They squeal and scream and fuss from the moment they leave the ground and will not stop until once again resting on terra firma. Isn’t that just like a Repug when somebody dares to try and change their world? The fact that the world could be better for everyone is dismissed as unpatriotic because it requires change. And just by threatening change, a governor pig might get so mad that he wants to secede from his own government that has allowed him to prosper greatly. Naw, not even a pig-in-the-air would be that crazy. Now if you promised to give that pig eleven million to fix up his pen, that pig might stop squealing long enough to get the money.

Greedy feeding pigs never seem to get enough. That has to be why pigs have been so maligned and why we use them as adjectives to describe behavior we don’t like. It is also why pig so aptly describes Repug behavior. Single payer is clearly the solution to provide the best and least expensive universal health care. Even Barack Obama said so when he was running for the senate. But when he came up with a campaign platform to run for president, he recognized that the drug and insurance industry had so many Repug congress critters feeding at their trough, that he dismissed it as impossible. Too many Democratic critters are making asses at the lobby trough as well. They use a variety of disguises and excuses, so it is harder to see through to their piggishness.

I thought of some other animals that might work for the Repugs. The zebra color scheme would remind us about how so many of these Repugs should be behind bars for the crimes they have done to truth, rule of law, international law, our constitution, civil liberties and the hundreds of millions of people suffering all over the world. The ostrich because the Repugs will stick their head either up their asses or in the sand so that they can keep their ears plugged and minds closed to any logic or humane actions. The octopus because they love to entangle their foes in their dirty deeds, throw a dark cloud around their minds and scoot away when threat approaches. I can’t think of any animal that is a coward or could possibly reach the level of cowardliness as The Dick has achieved. There are too many animal species who will screw everything in sight to set them apart from the other animals and do viagra extreme screwing at the quality level of The Dick.

Vampire bats, vulchers, a pack of hyenas, forked tongue snakes, sharks, maggots also come to mind when I envision Repugs. What comes to your mind? I’m sure it isn’t an elephant.

From: Overpaid Consultant

RE: “Talent”

Good seeing you the other night, Paunch.  The lighting in that restaurant did make you appear taller and less bald.  But let’s cut to the chase here.  Some of that dead wood on your OP/ED page is so petrified you guys don’t need an iceberg to sink.  The deck chairs alone will bring you down.  What are you doing, putting the Walrus and the Carpenter’s dream on TV all the time?  Are you nuts?  People go on TV all the time and say the stupidest things, but I have to tell you, your crowd ain’t delivering product like it should.  Not meaning to be shallow, but no flat-worlder should make such a big lump on Google Earth.  Doesn’t look right.

And no amateur psychologists should be so clearly crazy as that nut Dowd.  Nobody wants to spread out their paper and have their worst ex-wife come stomping into the room.  Unless she’s young and hot.  Bzzzzt!  Dowd goes.

Then there’s that Brooks.  He could actually work, if not for the unfortunate grease spots that keep befouling the set.  I have an ad in mind there, just to be safe, too.

See below….

(to be posted on Craigslist…  if response is weak, discuss the crushingly expensive option of “Week in Review.”  One week only.)

WANTED: OP/ED “Writers”

Position 1:

This column is a place for feminism without feminists, liberalism without anything to be liberal about, and places a snarky, annoying bulwark between real news and the gossip we prefer.

Owing to the Recent Unpleasantness, we ask that applicants submit their ghostwriters to rigorous standards, and avoid drinking to excess or being ostentatiously bony.  Jokes about Hillary’s coffee tables are no longer being considered.

Postion 2:

This space should be thought of as the Howdy Doody Show for globaloney.  Tossing in a thing or two about Polar Bears is just the spoonful of sugar that makes the sweatshops go down,  For obvious reasons, applicants should be Height/Weight proportional, and not display facial hair that suggests endangered sea mammals.  Access to cab drivers mandatory.

Position 3:

Every time Cheney goes on TV this position gets harder.  While Brooks seems to drip the right grade of condescension, he misses the point too often to be any good.  We need a Joe the Plumber with a bigger vocabulary for that spot.  I won’t write the ad until I get more input, Paunch.

Send me your ideas before I post these….

Kaiser approaches his history with a no doubt agent-generated “narrative,” which requires him to attempt to encapsulate  a dreary, money-driven descent into a politics that disfavors informed consent over a one dollar/one vote system based on focused-grouped, bread-and-circuses deceit, into the career arc of a single man, Gerry Cassidy, and his eponymous, nominally liberal lobbying firm, in a story largely told by the man himself and insiders there.  This works in a literary sense, drawing the reader into a winding saga of compromised altruism,  but is somewhat less successful, and I think blinkered, as a work of journalism.  After all, the process Kaiser is describing has inexorably led to the greatest upward transfer of wealth and the deepest global crash in nearly a century, and yet he bothers to interview multiple sources to document and reconstruct a drink-throwing incident in CSI-level  detail.  The strains of Nero’s fiddle waft in the night air;  not an unusual occurrence at the WaPoo.

The story Kaiser has tapped, that of the gradual corruption of a pair of boomer liberals and their subsequent decline from a couple of idealistic twenty-somethings working on federal nutrition programs to obscenely wealthy political fixers hitching their wagons to Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay is indeed the stuff of which a more than usually interesting opera could be concocted, but the story it tells is woefully incomplete.  The levels of corruption, and the flagrant favoritism toward wealthy and powerful interests specifically operating against the public interest was a new phenomenon, along with the sudden and complete abolition of truth in budgeting, brought to us by the Republican Revolution, quite openly, but clearly Kaiser finds that glaring, partisan-y fact unmentionable.  Those FOX watchers can make or break book sales, you know.  Democrats like Cassidy did dutifully tag along, of course, to their everlasting regret, and not solely because the money was so good;  they’d passed the Kennedy threshold of income that turns liberals into conservatives.  Kaiser turns this human failing into a bipartisan tide that washed over an unsuspecting Washington, seeing Cassidy’s corruption, like his own, in the same forgiving light.  Too bad his timing was about as good as Dennis Miller’s, and his studied nonpartisanship blinded him to the real story.

In the end, though, as events had clearly already began to press a sell date on his opus, Kaiser couldn’t help but sort of outline what’s happened since the drink-throwing, and it kind of makes you wish he’d started over.  He was an obviously smart guy, very close to an astonishing story, and he seems to pretend that it sailed over his head.  As I’m sure it did a lot of his readers at the WaPoo and its far-too-numerous regurgitators.  That’s another story for another day, evidently.

In the not so distant past, grippingly engrossing and startlingly raw analyses of government and corporate meltdowns were an inevitable byproduct of having good reporters cover beats and cultivate sources for years…  the primary employer, the newspaper, essentially subsidized the research for the book.  This happy equation has now been turned upside down, as Kaiser’s book illustrates.  The lazy, rolodexed insiderdom of the Village reporter is marketed to the “content” industry as a “story,” and the tidy returns from a noncontroversial, miniseries-like “book” helps subsidize the failed newspaper’s “staff,” while furthering corporate goals like the endless replay of Condi’s “No One Could Have Predicted…”

Nice work if you can get it, but kind of a disappointing airplane read, even for someone already enamored of Ignatius, Hiatt, Marcus, Cohen, Broder, Krauthammer, Murray, and on and on.  Kaiser’s been at the Wapoo since 1963, and I suggest he take a buyout.  Maybe then he could write something good; or at least worthy of a cross-country flight,.

You see, the ACLU is even slightly less influential in the UAE than it is here, and so over there they can just let their freak flags fly.  Imagine the small but insistent tent in Yoo’s pants as he sweatily marveled at sand-boarding, (water is just so 2003) beating with nail-studded boards, and full-on cattle prods not just here and there, but eventually right where the sun doesn’t shine.  That DVD would never leave the player, which would be especially handy if any Supreme Court justices he knows ever drop by, and they’re tired of “24″ reruns and Saving Private Ryan.  This is real blood, dudes.   And, if Bybee thought bugs were inventive, lighter fluid on the ol’ teabag is about a hundred times more awesome, especially at night, and the salt in the wounds, though kind of shopworn, still produces great screams and stuff.

But the finale, a ritual squishing of what’s left of the victim by being driven over repeatedly with a tasteful Mercedes SUV, complete with boffo bone-break sound effects, is the kind of torture-palooza that might even warm the cockles of Dick Cheney’s partially electronic heart.  And you can bet that the flattened, pulpy mess that remains is pretty unlikely to “hit” us, or much else, after that.  Just think how safe we could be.  Those guys really know how to say Dubai-bye, and aren’t so chickenhearted as we stubbornly can be about showing it.  It’s easy to see why Cheney just picked Halliburton up, paying homage in equal parts to Torquemada and Jed Clampett, and left.  What does that say about America?

Sadly, not unlike when the wife finds the secret porno, this once-treasured videotape has irritatingly fallen into the wrong hands.  Despite the vigorous efforts of Sheikh Issa’s lawyers, who were pretty successful with other righteous causes like Bush’s 2000 recount efforts, somehow the wily commies at ABC news got a hold of it, and now you just know a bunch of spoilsport hippies are going to get all in a snit.  Like Peggy Noonan says, this stuff is supposed to be (hic) m-mysterious, and now the magic’s all spoiled.  Worse, the obvious inferiority and clinically boring lameness of our own relatively half-ass torture program will be vividly on display; outdone as we were by a bunch of treacherous Ay-rabs, yet again.

Even when it comes to torture, America can’t compete.  Too bad we try.

Failing in AM/FM

I’ve lived in central Portland all of my life, and downtown much of that, and during that time, I’ve attended innumerable rallies, protests, and whatnot.  I still remember last fall, when a friend and I were contemplating going to the Obama rally, hours hence, and from my balcony noticed a line forming below.  It took two hours to get to Tom McCall Waterfront Park, ten blocks away.  I also fondly recall the Peace Rally, the largest in the country, before Gulf War I, just after our Republican Senior Senator, Mark Hatfield, had spoken forcefully in the Senate as the lonely voice in his party that wanted to give peace a chance.  That day flagged us for eternity on the right as the treacherous residents of “Little Beirut, a circumstance in which I repeatedly take pride, like I did today.  The teabaggers, unfortunately for them, picked the same spot, and the difference was palpable.  In a bad way, natch.

Walking down the park, where the Duomo-like rows of elms that I consider my front yard are just leafing into their corridor-like canopy, it seemed  a bit surreal that I was going to a rally.  Where were the people?  Where was the traffic?  More disturbingly, given some of the peculiarities of the teabaggers themselves, where were the cops?  A block away, I finally began to hear the canned sound and responses.  Pioneer square, reclaimed by the city after the gorgeous Victorian Portland Hotel had been felled for a parking garage that blighted downtown for thirty years, is the site of many gatherings, big (real) and small (fake).  This was one of the small ones, and fake as the day is long, and its weak, lackadaisical attempt to disguise the fact was drearily apparent.  Like any contest or promotion, this one had a strong presence of corporate sponsorship, in this case KPAM, which is the furthest right of the Clear Channel “family” that dominates local radio as the media component, and something called “clear,” which I have every reason to believe is that same company’s bid to dominate the internet, too.  Clear.com.  Hmmm.

The small, rather listless crowd, which was nonetheless spurred to yell on cue, had a hapless, otherwordly feel; they were in hostile territory, but somehow disappointed that the experience wasn’t scarier.  The speaker I first heard was talking about God’s wrath, and after a few others it wasn’t readily apparent things were going uphill from there.  It isn’t easy, in a place that considers a 50,000 crowd average, to look big and consequential when there’s about fifteen hundred of you.  They bravely held up their signs, “Barack Obama is the Black Jimmy Carter, Honk if I’m paying your Mortgage, and, Atlas is Gonna Shrug,” my personal favorite, but the whole thing felt so, well, sad. Normal people walked the perimeter, eyed and eyeing warily.  The media/ observer vs. participant ratio would have astonished me had it been greater than 1/1.

The choppers that had darkened the skies and made life downtown feel like Vietnam for hours were already gone by 6:35, when I, too, fled for wetter pastures.  I hope they all find their way home.  A rough and disappointing night for everyone but me…  It was about the easiest and least time-consuming event I’d ever attended.

Pictures to come; my computer stupidity would have held off this report for hours had I put them in first.

Then, taking a closer look at the viewpoints they’ve expressed and people they’ve been courting all these years, FreedomWorks suddenly saw fit to warn against another taboo, sure to be treacherously exploited by “them,” as well.  These ACORN infiltrators, wily commie fascist elitists that they are,  might also try to “bait” you God-fearing teabaggers into saying something that makes you seem “racist… uneducated and ignorant.”  Ahem.

Gotta watch out for that.  I don’t know which is worse; that they lie to their enemies, or that they care so little for their supporters that they lie to them, too, all the while recognizing that the monster they’ve  created is anything but potty-trained, and must therefore be dealt with on a need-to-know basis.  

Here in Little Beirut, CHNN correspondent Cocktailhag will be covering the teabaggers, whose demonstration, of what I haven’t the vaguest idea, will be taking place at the curious hour of 6:00 pm to 8:10, information I was helpfully provided by my local FOX affiliate.  They 8:10 seems a bit odd.  Is “24″ on at nine?  The stupidest part is how long they think it’s going to be.  This revolution will be over by 6:23, or I’ll eat my hat.  More later on this CHNN station.

At least a dozen years ago, a string of hateful, anti-sex (whether abortion or gays were the target, I don’t recall) ballot initiatives here in Oregon were simultaneously going down to ignominious defeat in both courts and public opinion, and a more than usually scary trailer park state legislator, Marylin Shannon, darkly intoned that soon, all the judges, voters, trees, and fire hydrants that stood in the way of her righteous jihad would lay bleeding on the battlefield, and Oregon would become the fascistic theocracy she envisioned.  Since God was on her side, this just must be true.  Her bizarre overconfidence kind of scared me at the time.  Did she know something I didn’t?

No.  Today, Oregon’s Republicans have been turned out of every statewide office and could pretty much meet in a phone booth.  But you have to hand it to the righties for their loyalty to the team, and as Glenn Beck put it, believing in something, even if it isn’t true.  Personally, I find humor in this.  Witness the reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s “threat” to leave New York.  Gov. Paterson regretted not doing it sooner.  Jon Stewart offering his EZPass.  Ed Schultz, who just got his own show on MSNBC a scant few weeks after Bill O’Reilly’s noxious radio show was cancelled, being offered Rush’s apartment, which was laughed off in a torrent of jokes about fumigation and drug-sniffing dogs.  Comedy gold, if you’re not an idiot.

Like Wile E. Coyote, these righties just pop open an umbrella as the anvil hurtles toward their head, secure in the knowledge that the next ACME gadget is going to turn things around, once and for all.  You have to hand it to them.  They really know how to make lemonade out of lemons.

Back when Bush’s razor-thin and probably manipulated “victory” over John Kerry by a point or two was hallowed as an historic mandate, cracks were already forming in the Power of Positive Thinking on the right.  Did that stop them?  Noooo.  Wall Street was going to swoop in and save Social Security, not. Gov. Blanco singlehandedly drowned New Orleans, not.  Karl Rove’s inscrutable “math” would relegate Democrats, and all opposition, toast in 2006, not.  These laughable ideas, needless to say, were treated with utmost Seriousness amongst the pancaked gasbags, even after the fact, a bizarre tradition that continues to this day.

Now we’re told that Obama’s victory was actually a vindication of Bush, because Bush and McCain weren’t really “conservative.” and unfortunately Obama has not done enough to push back against such idiocy, and more disturbingly, let a lot of it stand. 

One wonders what, if anything, would ever look like defeat to a righty.  Sadly, no one has the guts to tell them, and nobody, but nobody, will ever show them.  Maybe they do know something I don’t know.