The jaw-dropping lack of accountability prevalent among our elites, no matter how enormous and damaging their quite public failures, has led seemingly reasonable people who ought to know better to, virtually en masse,  unintentionally embrace the ludicrous farce that in my family we call the Gravy Boat Theory. Only with them, it’s a lot less funny.  Just about every day you hear that a billion or so dollars just up and walked away, a newfangled financial “instrument” turned out to be Three Card Monte, or a war was fraudulently peddled and lost, generally from someone with bulging pockets and/or a disturbingly large Tiffany’s account.  It’s a story as old as time, but always seems fresh, whether you’re hearing it from Ken Lay, Condi Rice, or,  just lately, Jon Corzine.

What does this have to do with gravy boats?  For me, anyway, more than you’d think.  You see, my mother, Joan, became increasingly obsessed with Christmas as she got older, and tended to begin shopping by at least March.  This led to some mixups, naturally, when she got around to wrapping presents, which was usually as soon as she’d put away the Halloween decorations.  One November, my brother Turd received the following panicked call:  (dialogue recreated from repeated, and possibly embellished,  repetition)

TURD: Hello?

JOAN: (with utmost urgency) I think someone broke into my house and stole one of your Christmas presents.

TURD: (skeptically) Really?  Anyway, Mom, it’s only November 1st.

JOAN:  (apologetically) I know.  But I got you a gravy boat to match your china last summer and now I can’t find it anywhere.  I think it’s gone.

TURD:  I think you should keep looking.  Then, if you find it, it’ll still be a surprise for me at Christmas.

Of course, Joan found the gravy boat a couple of days later, but because our family is the opposite of, say, David Gregory, we never let her forget it.  Any time someone wanted to escape blame for an obvious personal mistake or transgression, particularly when Joan was around,  we’d say (in Joan voice) “someone broke in.”  In this way, everything from a vanished bottle of booze, a booger or chewing gum stuck someplace, or a stinky bathroom could be blamed on a wily and elusive intruder.  We went so far with it that my hippie friend John even came up with an imagined dialogue between Joan and the police:

OFFICER: (with deep concern) We came as soon as we could.

JOAN: Oh, thank you.

OFFICER:  Was anything else missing?  Maybe a soup tureen or a turkey platter?

JOAN:  I hadn’t thought of that….

OFFICER: (gravely) Well, you should.  These people are ruthless.

Needless to say, when I hear the lame excuses from the many banksters, neocons, and other various grifters and charlatans bandied about in the news these days, I think they’d be better off just saying “Someone broke in and stole the (WMD’s, billions, surplus, or whatever)” and calling it a day.  In the end, it’s a little more plausible, and certainly more endearing, than, say, “no one could have predicted _______.”  The key difference, of course, is that Joan was doing something sweet and generous and made an honest mistake for which she was nonetheless relentlessly teased; the more prominent promoters of the Gravy Boat Theory these days were doing something selfish and heinous and got caught, but are getting away with it.

I’d like to invite then all over for Christmas; gravy will be served.  In style.

Well, even though Condi is still patting herself on the back for Iraq and whatnot as she runs around hawking her hilariously titled book,  No Higher Honor, it turns out that she does have a teensy regret or two, and Ferragamos and Hurricane Katrina are involved, not necessarily in that order.  I remember those days well; it was when I finally decided I liked Ed Schultz for his passionate, in-person coverage of the ordeal on his radio show, and the large numbers of callers it drew from the affected area, many of them black.  “So now she’s down in Missippippi and she went to church,” one memorable older lady intoned, “She’s not getting into Heaven in thousand dollar shoes.”  Maybe Condi heard her; the LATimes quotes her thusly:

“I didn’t think much about the dire warnings of an approaching hurricane called Katrina,” she wrote in the book, “No Higher Honor,” which hit stores Tuesday.

That Condi wasn’t, well,  paid to think is now quite well known, to everyone but her, apparently.

After the storm had hit land, Rice called Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to ask if there was anything she could do.  Chertoff said the situation was “pretty bad,” and that he’d call if he needed anything.

So the first place you’d go, under such circumstances, is a place where cell phone use is specifically disallowed.  She cleverly never mentions that she was confronted by horrified theatergoers right there.
So Rice went to see the musical comedy “Spamalot.” The next morning, she went shopping at the designer shoe store Ferragamo.

Here, she also encountered impertinent rabble, undoubtedly both to her surprise and chagrin, given the venue.  She had them bounced, of course.  Fortunately for her delicate psyche,  dropping a few grand on hooker boots and such enabled her to put it all out of her mind:

When she returned to her hotel, “the airwaves were filled with devastating pictures from New Orleans,” Rice wrote. “And the faces of most of the people in distress were black. I knew right away that I should never have left Washington.”

Always on top of things, that girl….

Apparently Rice’s chief of staff and President Bush agreed.

“I’m coming home,” Rice told her chief of staff Brian Gunderson. “Yeah. You’d better do that,” he replied.

In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.

Bush had the same response after Rice called to tell him she was cutting her trip short.

“’Mr. President, I’m coming back. I don’t know how much I can do, but we clearly have a race problem,’” she recalls saying.

Ya think?  People are supposed to pay to read this tripe?

“Yeah. Why don’t you come on back?” Bush replied.

“I actually hadn’t expected that from the president,” Rice wrote. “That’s odd, I thought. He’d been so insistent that I go and get some rest. He’s really worried.”

He had every reason to be, turns out, but Condi was about the last thing he needed.

Shortly after, Rice saw that her “Spamalot” outing had become a headline on the Drudge Report.

And if you’ve lost Drudge, you’ve lost America.

“[I] sat there kicking myself for having been so tone-deaf,” she wrote. “I wasn’t just the secretary of State with responsibility for foreign affairs; I was the highest-ranking black in the administration and a key advisor to the president. What had I been thinking?”

We’ll never know, Dearie.

It seems that war profiteer and Pentagon shill Barry McCaffrey slithered into Little Beirut the other day, to talk about some things near and dear to his heart, like, well, war profits, and their indefinite continuation.  The Oregonian’s jaw-droppingly credulous and fawning interview  with this flagrant criminal contained some of the most blatantly authoritarian and imperially dismissive things I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying something.  All were transmitted without comment or correction, natch, by veteran Oregonian reporter Mike Francis.

Entitled, somewhat misleadingly, “Barry McCaffrey Speaks in Portland on PTSD, Mexican Drug Cartels, and Homeland Security” (a more appropriate headline would have been, “McCaffrey Seeks to Continue Cashing In On Climate of Fear He Helped Create”), the article contains so little news I would have learned more reading a three-year-old Pottery Barn catalog.  It’s considered “news” that what McCaffrey had to say about the first, most tedious subject, PTSD, when asked whether PTSD was “hard to diagnose” by the reporter, who would obviously believe anything, McCaffrey said the following:
A: It is. When you’re looking at somebody with physical injuries that are immense and sometimes TBI, which you can’t see, … That’s a population where PTSD is just another diagnosis. I mean it’s there. It’s automatic.

Kids coming out of combat, with multiple combat tours, have been under stress, they do act a little crazy. It takes them a little time to acclimatize.

But for some number, whether it’s for underlying mental health, pre-existing drug and alcohol abuse or other factors, some of them exhibit longer-term disorder. And therein lies the problem.

So PTSD a little bit tricky and in the middle of all it are some of the most awful phonies I have ever encountered in my life. It is beyond belief. I personally have run into professional PTSD patients. Just shameful beyond belief.

Spoken like the purest of chickenhawks; indifferent if not hostile to the needs of those their relentless warmongering has mauled, killed or driven insane, McCaffrey is ashamed, not of himself, but his victims.  Rather than being horrified to hear such an astonishingly callous remark from from such a transparent slimeball, Francis timidly continues:
Q: It certainly obscures the real issue for the rest of us.

A: Absolutely. I want the VA to focus on the devastated veteran population I want to go through acute care and then chronic care. And where we’ve got long-term injuries, have an appropriate therapy program. But basically, people get better.

The best soldier I ever saw, he was a platoon sergeant at age 21, has never recovered from the war because he’s never found anything else at that level of excitement and value and importance.

American soldiers exposed to intense combat, generally speaking aren’t damaged by it. They’re made more powerful.

Now, upon hearing such arrogant, sociopathic claptrap, this is where you’d normally expect the reporter to fall off his chair, but this guy clearly wants to be David Gregory when he grows up. By now greedily eating out of McCaffrey’s bloodstained paw, he says this, and I’m not making this up:
Q: Oregon isn’t an active duty state, although we’ve had guys go multiple times. But our state National Guard has a higher-than-average toll of suicide. About half of those were people who never deployed. So I’m mystified by that. And I also wonder how meaningful it is to say they’re military suicides when they’re basically drilling once a month.

A: One of my friends is Dr. Sally Satel. One of her big deals as a psychiatrist is don’t ever set somebody up to think they’re permanently impaired. You don’t ever tell them that, for God’s sakes.

The Army to some extent has gone utterly sensitive on suicide. We’ve linked it in some ways, perhaps unintentionally, to soldiers being the victims of a war.

(A doctor at Walter Reed told me) “It doesn’t really matter to us if you’re a National Guard soldier and you’ve never deployed, you came in with a drug and alcohol problem, you came in with underlying health disorders, but we’ve got you now and you’re exhibiting symptoms of distress, we’ve got to listen to you and try to make you better.” What we don’t want to do is say it’s related in some way to this war, because, in many cases, it isn’t.

The primary cause of suicide in young soldiers is alcohol abuse, away from home, frequently tied to rejection by significant other and access to guns. And that drives our rate up.

THE ARMY HAS GONE UTTERLY SENSITIVE ON SUICIDE.  Yep, he said that, and the hapless lackey of a reporter was evidently so befuddled that he decided he’d better switch, but quick, to drugs and Mexicans before the men in white coats showed up to haul away his interviewee.  So he did, and after typing obediently that this paragon of virtue thinks we also need to militarize the border and throw lots more people in jail, Francis did manage to peep out a tiny question about stopping the drug war, a shocking affront to which the ever-loquacious McCaffrey babbled thusly:
A: The legalization argument amuses me. Usually it’s an intellectual argument that on cursory examination falls apart. Nobody in their right minds wants to legalize drugs. It absolutely doesn’t work……

Part of it is we know that if you make substances less available, and then more expensive, and if you stigmatize them by saying it’s criminal to sell them, drug use goes down. That’s the deal.

Not in the real world, of course, but I digress.  The fact that tawdry exemplars of corruption and amorality like Barry McCaffrey are running around loose saying such errant, self-serving nonsense and are treated as credible by ass-kissing reporters like this one is the cause of all of our problems.  Must be that Francis is hoping for an interview with Dick Cheney when he comes to town; he does have a book out and all, and like McCaffrey, loves those war profits, too.  This interview was quite an audition. 

First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one.  Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President.  Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.”  Well,  that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq.  He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague.  (Unlikely to happen…  Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…)  This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.

My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.”   You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you.  No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity.  Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)

Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”

She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook.  Who said there’s no honor among thieves?

As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting.  As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly.  That’s why they call it fiction.”  Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.

As though it weren’t enough that the American people have been forced to endure, post 2010, the worst episode of delusional Republican overreach since, well, the last time Presidential candidate (!) Newt Gingrich was in the news, this motley bunch of walking disasters have decided that everything Bush did was pure genius, and they’re loudly proclaiming this errant nonsense to a public which may be forgetful, but doesn’t have the late-stage Alzheimer’s required to swallow such horseshit.  To their addled minds, Americans ought to be proud of Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and tax cuts for the rich, forever.  Worse, they should surely thrill at the deceptive and questionable legal means necessary to achieve such murky, elitist goals in every state, not just in faraway Washington.

Like the craziest right-wingers of old who mistrusted Nixon until Watergate, a group determined by Bob Altemeyer’s exhaustive examination of right-wing authoritarianism to be a reliable quarter or so of the population, today’s mainstream Republicans just glory in the idea of taking up unpopular causes against the will of clear majorities, just for the joy of getting their way.  The more people they piss off, the better.  Such a strategy does wonders with the Fox News BarcaLounger set, but it obviously must also entail a lot of expensive and politically tricky misinformation, disenfranchisement, bribery, and myriad other unconstitutional behavior, since so few support the policies they want.  So far, they’ve been equal to the challenge; since the first post-Citizens (!) United election last November, all the KOCH-purchased states have quickly moved not just to make voting harder for Democratic-leaning groups, but have also moved aggressively against Democrats’ erstwhile funders while lavishing their own with government booty.  (Not that kind of booty, openly anyway, but I’m sure it’s involved, too…)

Basically, they’re admitting that they wouldn’t stand an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning if they had to play the game honestly, so they’re choosing the Rove/Bush playbook instead, since it’s all they have, but luckily, a lot of people still remember how things turned out with Bush and Rove.  Few of the much-discussed but seldom seen “Independents” recall all of the outrages of the Bush years, hence their nutty and stupid votes in 2004, but they do know that something went horribly wrong during 2001-2009, and that Condi, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al were clearly a part of it, as well as a power-grabbing, domineering executive branch that routinely treated overwhelmingly negative public opinion with a dismissive, “so what?”

We now have half a dozen states run by people that looked at the abysmal record of George W. Bush and decided that he wasn’t bold enough in ruining the country economically, socially, and morally, because he was too accommodating of his many opponents.  Basically we have a bunch of Fascist nutcases flexing their muscles who make The Decider look like Ghandi, so the media’s gotten suddenly nostalgic for the “adults” who worked for him, and started trotting them out to defend (lamely) his most revolting policies.  While this blatant journalistic failure does conveniently if momentarily  take the spotlight off of the most despised newly elected Republicans and their hijinks, it can only remind voters of the utter catastrophe of the Bush years, and its disturbingly mendacious and authoritarian tactics.

Good luck with that.  Maybe this proves once and for all that media really is liberal, and thus is cleverly playing eleven dimensional chess, but I doubt it.  They’re just dumb.

I was pleasantly surprised with President Obama’s speech today, and although by now I find myself reluctant to believe much of it will happen, for once he firmly laid the blame for the deficits and debt where it belongs, with the Republican Party.  Of course, the fact that he hasn’t been making this point in a thousand ways for a thousand days partially explains both his current weak political position and the loss of congress that created it, but better late than never, Mr Ivy League.  While I rejoiced at his admittedly belated willingness to talk about tax cuts for the wealthy in a more factual way, i.e. that money given to so few people who don’t need it blights the lives of millions who do, he still didn’t take a crack at the bonkers philosophy behind it; that such short-sighted and dumb-ass cruelty is supposedly good for us all.

Saddled with his bankster-sodden administration and, sadly, policies, Obama has put himself in a place where he always has to leave behind the biggest rhetorical tool in the shed, one that would bedazzle everyone from teabaggers to firebaggers*: Simply and plainly stating that rich people, when allowed to, will use their excess money to buy the government, and widespread poverty and suffering is the inevitable result.  Every Republican policy, every last one, shows this, and basically hands him a daily narrative of oligarchic plunder to exploit, were he so inclined.  We have thirty years of data to prove that, far from benefitting the economy, handouts to the rich invariably cause debt and repeated crises, and always result in a declining standard of living for everyone else.

Of course, that inconvenient truth would have gone over like a fart in church amongst the millionaire Villagers, who still say a prayer to St. Ronnie whenever their contracts come up, so in his typically wienie way, Obama wouldn’t go after either the idiocy of the Laffer Curve (in which evidently 100% or Republicans still believe) nor the resulting pernicious uses to which absurdly rich people put their newfound large excesses of cash, like buying elections, for instance.  Naw, he couldn’t say that, not when he’s got an election to buy for himself; too chancy to try and get it for free (which he would) by puncturing some of the right’s most successfully embedded Big Lies, so he is left to fight a squirmish** here and there, but against a narrative so stupid and discredited that he shouldn’t have to fight it at all.

Today Glenn Greenwald argued pretty persuasively what I’ve been thinking for a long time, that Obama isn’t really trying to reverse the rightist lurch because he never really wanted to; it’s disappointing but probably true.  After all, as we saw today, he is smart, and has gifts to which he could put to any goal he wanted.  And so far, those goals appear to differ only in style and presentation from his predecessor, the worst president America ever had, who seems an odd model for success for someone supposedly in the nominal opposition.

It’s infuriating enough to anyone to the left of say, Blanche Lincoln, to continually find that nearly all politicians of both parties, once they reach Washington, end up on the same self-serving team.   It’s doubly infuriating if you’re a Democrat, and naively thought that was exactly what you were ostensibly voting against. Obama made some welcome if predictably tentative steps back toward his repeatedly scorned “base” today, and went further than I expected in “educating,” as righty might put it, those listening.  But he again failed to aim his slingshot squarely at the Chicago School Goliath, that is, Voodoo Economics itself.  It was either a missed opportunity, or a simple and understandable desire to spend his twilight years at Burning Tree, resting assured that generations of his heirs won’t have to work.  Just like Bill Clinton, who compellingly showed all future Democrats that doing good for others should never get too much in the way of doing well for oneself.  Ideological purity is quite evidently a luxury only available to Republicans these days.

President Kennedy is reported to have once wondered aloud how much money it took to turn a Democrat into a Republican, but being rich himself, he was only talking about voters, not Presidents.  Those were the days, huh?

*When Firedoglake criticized, appropriately, some of Obama’s early caves, other lefty bloggers dropped them from their blog rolls and called them “firebaggers.”

**Thank heaven for Sarah Palin’s many Shakespearian contributions to the language….

The good part, though, is that as usual, Jim and Mike always accidentally include real information in their zeal to get every word right, and better yet, have to resort to such weak evidence to back up the inanities they’re propounding, that they do achieve a sort of low comedy.  In a breaking news article entitled, “The GOP’s Winning Streak,” we learn from Karl Rove himself, among many others, that the only thing standing in the way of his Permanent Republican Majority is a need for a little “education” targeted at unbelievers.  Remember when Condi Rice wanted to “educate” people about weapons of mass destruction?  Of course you did, because you aren’t Jim and Mike.

A few juicy tidbits:

—Deficits are all the rage on Capitol Hill, and will be until Congress wends its way through the debt limit fight and the next budget. The word “deficit” appeared in 470 documents in the Congressional Record between the beginning of January and the end of March, more than in any session’s opening since 1995, according to a review by POLITICO. And Americans listened: Asked by Gallup to identify the most important problem facing the nation, 13 percent said “federal debt” in March of this year, up from 8 percent a year ago.

Is it me, or is it pretty pathetic to claim that a rise from single to low double digits in the face of a 24/7 media barrage is something to crow about?  Thirteen percent?  Twice that many people, at least, think the moon landing was a fake.  Hint to Jim and Mike….  Don’t confuse us with the facts, as they tend to make the story fall apart.

—The broader budget debate is now fought on the tea party’s terms: It’s not whether to reduce government, it’s by how much. This helps explain why serious centrist commentators and even some liberals PRAISED a $6 trillion budget cut plan proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). Remember how a similar plan was received two years ago?

Yippee!  People have gotten stupider, which must mean more of them are reading Politico.

—Thanks to a pickup of 675 legislative seats in 2010 – many because of these budget principles — the most sweeping work is getting done in states. Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana are now working, real-time labs for discovering how much the party can cut government – without cutting off the support of independents. A GOP senator told us the party studies what happens in these state showdowns to test the limits of what will work here. One early finding: Many think Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) went too far, too fast by gutting union power without first educating the public.

Ya think?  How did these guys get jobs?

“The country knows it’s in serious trouble,” Gingrich said. “You see this with Scott Walker, you see it with John Kasich [in Ohio], you see it with Rick Scott [in Florida], you see it with Chris Christie [in New Jersey], you see it with Mitch Daniels [in Indiana].”

Ah, the most hated politicians in America look popular to Newt Gingrich, and the Bambi-like reporter goes ahead and types.  Better yet, he doesn’t get the unintentional hilarity of this morsel from John Thune, and thus makes his irredeemably boring and hackish little puff piece funny (emphasis mine):

“If you overreach too far, you can get a backlash,” Thune cautioned. “We have to sound reasonable. But the reason the president moved so far is that he has recognized that the government has gotten much, much larger, and that most independents in the country are very uncomfortable with that.”

No follow-up question, natch.  After hearing from Karl Rove about how we can cut “trillions” later, easy, we get more choice blather from Newt Gingrich, and then another word about how people just need the be “educated,” from, improbably, Tim Pawlenty, to wrap the whole thing up with a bow:

Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and 2012 presidential candidate, said by phone from San Jose, Calif., that fiscal arguments have given the party a broader appeal as more people “became aware and educated that it’s not just a matter of political rhetoric – it’s a matter of sixth-grade math.”

No, in sixth grade they explain some of the crucial differences between a Family Budget and the Federal Budget, which is one reason Republicans are so hot on home schooling.  Later, you learn that everything Republicans say is the opposite of the truth.  But not at Politico, despite all evidence.

“We are in for a sustained period of structural reform,” Pawlenty said. “The country is prepared for the change. The public deserves the truth. They can handle the truth. … Given how deep the hole is, I’m not worried about overreach. I think we should try to be as bold and courageous as the American people will tolerate, and we need to lead them there.”

That sounds like rhetoric to me, and of a kind of scary sort…  Reminds me of this:

At the opening of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell describes Scarlett O’Hara thusly: “…she wasn’t beautiful, but everyone thought she was.” Now, before you start thinking I’m going to bring up the battle axe of the borealis, I’m not, because my argument isn’t really about beauty (or lack thereof).  It’s about the deep and abiding character flaws that develop when people are encouraged by those around them to think they have gifts they simply don’t have, and how such delusional self-confidence leads people like Scarlett to repeatedly make drastic and irreversible mistakes which harm others and ultimately, themselves.  The plot is hardly new; would somebody please alert the (liberal) media?

When you look at today’s Republican party, today coincidentally centered in Scarlett’s old Confederacy, they might as well all be wearing hoop skirts at Twelve Oaks, perhaps even showing their bosom before three o’clock, against Mammy’s sage advice.  As such, a sneering, self-entitled jackass saddled with a lifetime of failures big and small like George W. Bush could simply step onto the national stage and magically become a “moderate”  regular guy you could “have a beer with,” but even more implausibly, a man who would never deficit-spend and would also pursue a “humble” foreign policy.  When Condi Rice made the laughable assertion, repeatedly, that “no one could have predicted _______,” you have to admit she had a point, she just defined “no one” a little differently than most of us would, meaning “no one who matters.”  The media fell for it, after all, along with enough credulous Americans, and just went ahead and put an erratic, destructive ne’er-do-well into an office where he could do quite a bit of damage, which of course he did.  By that time, though, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could have seen this coming.

Remember Newt Gingrich, the Historian and Intellectual?  How about Dick Cheney, the Statesman?  Colin Powell, the Incorruptible?  The New Nixon?  So confident that the media is as shallow and dumb as the Tarleton twins, for all of my adult life Republicans have built their success in getting people to believe they’re beautiful, against all evidence, and then screwing them over later, just like Scarlett.  Perhaps because he’s a fellow Georgian, Newt Gingrich even takes her fiddle-dee-dee a step further and marries someone better.  That always shows ‘em.

The competition for the new belle of the ball seems to be heating up of late: there’s the ravishing Scott Walker of Wisconsin (whose Mammy has unfortunately not suggested a hair piece yet… maybe she’s short); the elegant John Kasich of Ohio; the statuesque Paul LePage of Maine; the, well, striking Rick Scott of Florida; and pleasingly plump Chris Christie, who would no doubt benefit from some aggressive corset work.  As you’d expect, the media thinks they’re all so beautiful that it’s really too hard to decide, even as their regretful supporters have seen them once too often in curlers and cold cream to go there, even drunk.

The good news is that now there are a lot more profiteering Rhett Butlers to go around these days, and they have so much money they can afford a whole passel of Scarletts, so few of these worthies expect to be making any dresses out of the drapes anytime soon.  The bad news is that there’s a new Scarlett in town, out to avenge the burning of Atlanta and such, by the name of Paul Ryan, and with his prominent widow’s peak he even, disturbingly, looks the part.

The Kochs and their ilk  have already factored in a few millions lost here and there with their state-based “investments” that won’t pan out; when you’ve got $40 billion, that’s less than the dry cleaning.  The big goal was to grab the federal government, which is, as Willie Sutton put it, “where the money is,” and Paul Ryan and the Republican majority are the getaway vehicle.  Touted endlessly as “courageous” (even among Democrats), Ryan’s latest “plan” is the expected toxic combination of naked reverse Robin Hood horse shit, which is anything but “courageous” in our Foxified political environment.  Remember, the last time a President attempted to do anything but cut taxes was in 1993, and though that produced a surplus and unprecedented economic boom, to the media it was still the grave mistake they called it at the time because it resulted in Clinton losing Congress.

But in a way they may be right.  It is courageous to say, outright, that you plan to do away with Medicare while lowering taxes on wealthy corporations, just as it is equally courageous to say you are also going to do away with collective bargaining, give back direly needed federal transportation dollars, hand fancy jobs to unqualified cronies (and/or their predictably worthless children), rip art off the walls and call justices bitches (to their faces, to boot, not like Barbara Bush), and tell people to “kiss my butt.”   Few Republicans I can think of have ever been quite so courageous, especially with an election coming up, and I’m delighted to think they think it will work out for them.

What they’re saying is, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Even Scarlett got that message….  Will the voters?

CH: Kloppenburg/Prosser results tomorrow….  Keep your fingers crossed.

The CHNN eastern desk reported recently that Harlan Harrington, the network’s go-to international correspondent and expert on Mediterranean scandals of all sorts, was skiing in Switzerland, accompanied by Lois Farnsworth, a former Miss North Dakota, and largely unavailable.

Until this week.

Harlan said he’s been overwhelmed, not to mention overdone, by the tempest in Italian politics, and has not been able to mount a massive,  Guernica-size report on Berlusconi’s titanic struggle to hold onto power.  Occasional thousand word pieces fail to do this story justice, Harlan said, and since the CHNN flying boat is in winter storage in Bismarck, he’s also had some difficulty just hopping down to Milan, as he is wont to do, to examine court briefs against the PM.

Still, Harlan does have a snippet of news, small beer though it may be to those ravenous readers of all things bunga bunga in Rome.

The prime minister, according to Harlan, met this week with a select group of Vatican leaders, ostensibly to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Pact of 1929.  The Roman Catholic church struck a deal at that time with then Italian leader Benito Mussolini, providing for official state recognition of Vatican City and it’s core structures.  The church built a village and people came, long before the idea occurred to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The meeting between the clerics and the prime minister was described by observers as “correct,” as the church, itself embroiled in a worldwide institutional sexual abuse scandal, appeared to be sensitive to the need to reach out to the prime minister, somehow or other, without appearing to ignore or condone the colorful contours of the premier’s personal life.

Back to the small beer.

Italian reporters helped Harlan out a bit with some details of the meeting, pointing out that church leaders still see Berlusconi as an ally on right to life issues, and as a possible source of money – direct, or, if need be, indirect.

A bill now before the Italian parliament,  and favored by the church, would include a one euro ($1.36) tax hike on commercial movie tickets.  Church-owned “family friendly” theaters would be exempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGkuyc2OmY

As picayune as such a negotiating point might appear to the uninformed, non-Italian political observer, Harlan emphasized the Machiavellian quality to the church-state dance now underway between Vatican leaders and Berlusconi.

Observers said Berlusconi, sitting in a large, blood-red upholstered, gold-leaf wing chair, appeared to wince slightly as the ticket issue was raised in whispered tones by a cleric assigned to the task.  The Leader then nodded as if in assent, conveying a confessional demeanor.

Harlan ended his report to the CHNN eastern desk with this quote from an Italian legislator:  “The church has an enormous influence on politics still,” says Italo Bocchino, a lawmaker who defected from Mr. Berlusconi’s party  last year (the political party, not the one at his Sicilian retreat with Vladimir Putin).  “If the church had said Berlusconi was incompatible with governing, he would have fallen.  But they didn’t.”

Catholic reporter Andrea Gagliarducci observed:  “It is diplomacy.  You take everything you can.  You make agreements even with people you don’t trust.”

Harlan told the eastern desk  he’s thinking of bringing that message personally – along with a large shipment of The Prince in paperback – to activists and leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, and maybe Ohio, as soon as he packs his skis and can get himself and Lois on a plane back to Bismarck.

It would be nicer, of course, if America’s courts would do the job, but being previously occupied declaring health care reform unconstitutional, they left it to Old Europe to point out that George Bush, by his own admission, behaved something like Idi Amin and Augusto Pinochet, put together.   But with his cowardly withdrawal from a routine Israel First conference in Switzerland that he thought he could waltz right into, Bush finally felt the whip hand he so routinely and proudly brandished for others; in effect, he’s now on a no-fly list, without ever having to fly commercial.  Better yet, he’s afraid of an honest trial, not the sort of medieval, tyrannical punishments he wreaked upon others.

This mute gesture speaks volumes about the man who in eight dreadful years wrecked a relatively prosperous and powerful nation for, essentially, nothing, except perhaps his own Daddy issues.  He recognizes, on some level, the fact that many of those imprisoned, tortured, and even killed under his administration could never be convicted in a court of law, and he could, even with all the king’s money and all the king’s lawyers that would surely stand behind him, distinctly unlike his many victims.   If you’re Bush, you just say, “Fuck Switzerland…  The weather’s better in Dallas, anyway.”   Well, usually.

In his new book Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, writes that even he questioned the wisdom (if not the motivation, unfortunately), of Bush’s immediate post-9/11 Iraq fixation, and also states he should have quit after the first torture revelations at Abu Ghraib.  Revealingly, both statements directly distance him from Bush’s most controversial policies, and clearly indicate that perhaps Rummy and the Missus have a favorite restaurant in Paris that they’d rather not say au revoir to just yet.  Rats by the dozens have left Bush’s sinking ship, and this is only the latest, but certainly not the last, example.

Bush’s Legacy Project is still beginning, and if it’s anything like Reagan’s it will be disturbingly effective, but only at home, as we will no doubt see again and again, if his storied dumbness overtakes his famous bravado.  Those Swiss, and the rest of the civilized world, are just too danged fussy.

“International law?  I better call my lawyer,” an earlier Bush once infamously blustered.  This time, the lawyer must have called him back, and given a somewhat different answer.  Mr. “Bring it on” suddenly becomes Miss “Never mind.”

Makes me want to yodel.