Credit: Glendale Tribune

Seems like that ol’ cocktailhag Governor (!) of Arizona, Jan Brewer has been hitting the bottle again, this time when President Obama was visiting, and managed to make a little scene.  That happens to the best of us, admittedly, but judging by her babbling, incoherent performances every time she’s on television, the woman is never sober.  In a state (and political  party) known for its abundance of cocktailhags, Brewer is clearly the drinkingest one.    The funny thing is that the national media was surprised by this, or pretended to be, anyway.  Just as it’s considered unseemly for the news media to call a lying politician something so graphic as a liar,  it’s even more verboten to call a drunk a drunk.  Thus, people who repeatedly cry and blubber on the job can become, say, Speaker of the House, and a woman who took minutes of television time attempting to conjure up a few phrases of meaningless pablum is called, “Governor Brewer,” with a straight face.

Covering up for politicians who drink to excess has a sordid and bipartisan history; unless someone ends up dead, or perhaps in the Tidal Basin with a stripper, journalists have tended to avoid the subject, even when it is clearly interfering with the politician’s ability to do her job.  Worse, clowns like Brewer and Boehner, softened up by fancy lobbyist hooch, tend to give away the store to whomever paid the last bar tab.  As the temperance ladies knew, strong drink and loose morals go hand in hand.  This lesson seems to be lost on the news media, or more likely, just another thing they’ve decided that the public has no business knowing, particularly when it involves Republicans.

Thus, each bizarre and embarrassing episode, whether of crying, finger-wagging, shouting “You lie!” at the State of the Union or what have you is treated as some quirky expression of passion rather than a recurrent pattern of drunken buffoonery.  It could be said, and there’s plenty of evidence, that President Obama is literally driving Republicans to drink, even more than they already did; but if so that in itself is news.  Since all the arrests, unseemly outbursts, and slurred babbling seems to be on the Right lately, I suppose it will take a Democrat or two passing out in the punch bowl before the topic of pickled politicians becomes “fair and balanced” enough to cover in the media.

In the meantime, Obama’s handlers ought to make a note about meeting with the Cocktailhag of the Cactuses:

Breakfast only.  Too drunk by lunch.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” said the diplomat. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

Well, then.  The “diplomat,” who doesn’t sound particularly diplomatic to me, is Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to the EU.  Earlier, in response to Iran’s hardly surprising threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to even stiffer sanctions, he said this:

“The strait of Hormuz needs to remain open and we need to maintain this as an international passageway,” he told the BBC. “We will do what needs to be done to ensure that is the case.”

Of course, Daalder justifies such acts of war against Iran because of its still-hypothetical nuclear program, and the force of the related “Killin’ Habibs for Jesus” foreign policy from George Bush and Fox News that Obama has eagerly adopted for his own.  No matter the vast majorities of Americans opposed to any more wars, the Hope and Change campaign is in an election year, which means, ironically, no Hope and no Change, when it comes to chicken-hawkery.

Since no other American media figure will do so, with the notable exception of Glenn Greenwald and a few others, let’s look at this, just for a moment, from Iran’s perspective, if only hypothetically:

CHNN: So, Abdul, why do all you dusky-hued sand niggers want nukes?

ABDUL: So you fat whiteys won’t bomb us and steal our oil.

CHNN:  That couldn’t possibly be the reason.  Isn’t it really because you hate our freedoms?

ABDUL:  What freedoms?

CHNN:  Never mind about that.  Next, we go to Pamela Geller….

It’s useless.  Now that “American Exceptionalism” has become our national religion, even the ostensibly “liberal” politician pretending to be president must beat the war drums until we as a nation are left limbless and caterwauling like the guy in the Monty Python movie.  Unlike politicians, ordinary people can see that we never “win” wars, we just have them, and pay for them with our futures.  And unlike media stars who “cover” our overlords, we actually care if their ballooning expenses are bankrupting us.  Sadly, wars, like every other major decision we as a country make, have been moved upstairs, and nobody has any say in the matter except those who profit from them.  Democrat, Republican, it doesn’t matter; the latter will loudly demand more wars and more money for them, while the former will do so too, only more, uh, diplomatically.

One dreadful consequence of the current Republican disarray, for ordinary people anyway, is that it leaves Obama free to pick useless, unwinnable fights hither and yon while everyone’s busy snickering at his opponents.  The worst is that nobody cares, and why would they?

Orwell must be rolling over in his grave.

It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

UPDATE:  (4:00pm)

Reinforcements have been brought in from enlightened places like Salem, and the cops are really rolling up with rubber bullets, tear gas, and what not.  Another busload of cops is heading in.  More news later; the protesters are heading right here to Park Ave.

Bowing to the bleatings of The Oregonian and the same dozen or so cranky Dittoheads that fill their letters section, Mayor Sam Adams decided to, well, make a complete ass of himself.  Clearly taking cues from authoritarian Democrats in other cities, he went ahead and announced that Occupy Portland would have to vacate Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, located on either side of the elk statue above.  As elsewhere, Occupy had essentially become “home” to Portland’s legions of homeless youth, with all the disorder that entails, giving the city and the police all the excuse they needed to shut down the camp.  Of course, having an excuse to do something isn’t the same as having the ability, and even with the entire police force on hand, the task proved laughably impossible.

Though the camp had dwindled over the last few days to barely more than a hundred souls huddled in pelting rain by Saturday afternoon, when we arrived about fifteen minutes before the “deadline,” thousands of people filled not just the parks themselves, but the sidewalks on both sides of the surrounding streets.  Aside from a few drunken frat boy types jeering at the “hippies,” the mayor and police were clearly about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse.  It was so glaringly obvious that any attempt to reclaim the parks was doomed to failure, we could have left right then, but stayed because the whole thing was just so much fun.  Though the neighborhood bars were all (foolishly) closed for the evening, relinquishing what would have been land office business in favor of completely unfounded fear, the atmosphere was not unlike Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Clearly relishing playing  Bugs Bunny to Mayor Sam’s Elmer Fudd, we protesters quickly realized we weren’t protesting, but celebrating.  Circling motorists honked and waved their support as a hundred or so cyclists rode lazy circles around the parks on typical Portland tall bikes and fixies; a group of National Lawyers’ Guild representatives chatted and laughed amongst themselves, confident their services were wholly unnecessary, which they were.

Even the weather cooperated; heavy evening rain dwindled to barely a mist, all but inviting the less committed to take a stand with the stalwarts, and certainly diminishing somewhat the grumpiness of the cops.  Though two news choppers hovered uselessly overhead (the cover of trees made aerial shots all but impossible), it was abundantly clear they weren’t going to get any tape that would make it into the news. The “reporter” from the local Fox affiliate, a glamorous young thing in pancake and parka, looked both bored and disappointed, which naturally pleased me no end.

After an hour or so, more people were still arriving, so we felt like it was safe to slip away; this morning when I woke up the first thing I heard was choppers (don’t those things ever run out of gas?) and I knew that #Occupy’s victory was as complete as was Mayor Adams’ humiliation.  The Oregonian glumly confirmed it.  Well, boo f*cking hoo.  Yes, the grass looked like hell, but democracy survived to fight another day.

Please call 212-NEW-YORK (212-639-9675), and tell Mayor Bloomberg not to interfere with Occupy Wall Street tomorrow. Residents of New York City can call 311.  (H/T DailyKos)

UPDATE: (Friday) Occupy Wall Street will remain in Zuccotti Park.

Admittedly, it’s happened a little later than I expected, but it appears that over the next few days, the purported “liberals” who run the country have decided to go all Mubarak on our asses, and clear out this “Occupy” rabble once and for all.  Just days ago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was prepared to let OWS stay “indefinitely;” today he says the park just needs a good scrubbing.  Of course, the park in question is itself the product of just the sort of crony capitalism OWS deplores: out of some typically shady real estate deal where developers get to transfer air rights and receive other zoning variances for, generously, providing an adjacent sliver of green space, but still get to “own” it, Zuccotti Park turns out to have a well-connected landlord, and it obviously isn’t the people of New York.  All they had to do was send Bloomberg a sternly worded letter, and he folded like a Hamptons deck chair.

Here in Portland, the Oregonian has now decided that one week of protest was plenty; as usual, taking the opposite view of most of their readers.   Like in New York, they cite traffic and “no camping” ordinances, but really they’re channeling the same forces who just rolled Bloomberg, on a bit smaller scale.  Fortunately, we Portlanders are blessed with lame duck Mayor Sam Adams, who, finally free of fundraising pressures and understandably hurrying to paper over his rather skeezy reputation on Google before his term runs out, is standing firm with the Occupiers.  (I did, however, notice a lot of cute teenagers there, right across the street from his office, so maybe he has ulterior motives….)

The Mayor of Boston solemnly announced that “civil disobedience doesn’t work here,” which would certainly have come as a surprise to the original Tea Partiers, and, not to be outdone, Gov. Hickenlooper of Colorado has similarly declared that this whole protesting thing had worn out its brief and chilly welcome in his town, too.  In Washington, George Will all but cackled maniacally in a more than usually deranged column about how these hippies were going to be the death of the Democrats, just like in 1968, without realizing that things have changed a bit since then, thanks in no small part to the destructive policies promoted by useful idiots like himself.  You see, there was a secure middle class in 1968, and union members, pilots, public servants, and other working people could afford to quibble with the protesters over matters of style and culture, and be thus split politically by the oligarchic right.  No more.

Just in the weeks surrounding the OWS protests, the two supposedly warring political parties managed to agree that the Keystone XL pipeline should be built, more of the Arctic should be sacrificed to drilling, Ozone standards should remain higher than those proposed by Bush, trade “deals” should be passed with sweatshop and even union-murdering countries, the military budget must not be touched, and global conglomerates should be allowed to “repatriate” their ill-gotten billions at almost no tax.  As icing on the cake, the biggest banks announced unprecedented new fees on their long-suffering customers, and peanut butter prices will go up %30 due to global warming-caused drought and crop losses.  You can see why CNN felt the need to hire Erin Burnett.  You can also see why the 1% are getting jumpy.  This is their endgame, but since we all know that they aren’t such good players, they’re relying on crooked refs to win.

Why not?  It’s worked so far.

“Really?”  my friend Denise asked, “there’s only going to be 37 people?”  I assured her that for any lefty event, even in the crappiest weather, we always get at least 5000, but maybe we ought to head down anyway.  I grabbed my sign, which said “Let Them Eat Koch,” and we set out.  To kill a little time along the way, I took her over to the penthouse to check on the plants for the owners.  In the elevator there, we saw a dire warning the association had evidently posted about the dangers of the protesters, evidenced by the “violence” and “hundreds of arrests” in New York.  Please.  The warning was issued by “Clean and Safe Portland,” a public/private rent-a cop outfit whose spokespeople seem pretty Fox-addled, if this dire warning was any indication.  “Don’t want any respectable condo dwellers mixing with that scary bunch” was the obvious message, but at least on Denise and I, it had the opposite effect.

Walking along the waterfront, I thought the volume of people was about twice what it normally would be, but quite a few people seemed to be going in the opposite direction.  Two women explained that they had to get back to work, and perhaps the younger hipsters were just cruising back and forth to pass the time before things started.  When we got there, not long after the noon start time, there were already a lot of people, with more arriving steadily.   I was a typical Portland crowd; hipsters, geezers, and families, all jumbled together, with a few striking examples of why it’s entirely unnecessary for people to “Keep Portland Weird.”  It is weird, and that’s why we like it.   It was impossible to hear the speakers from where we arrived, so we proceeded to circle the perimeter, in hopes of at least some good wide views, to no avail, so we decided to get up on the Burnside Bridge, overhead, to estimate the size of the crowd.  Naturally, trees and structures blocked the view even from up there, but we did run into Teddy from FDL and his partner, Patrick, so the 2-block trek wasn’t a total loss.  More is always merrier when you’re doing the hippie thing.  By the time we got back, the crowd had grown considerably; and a large contingent was across Naito Parkway near the Skidmore Fountain, where there is a spacious open plaza for the Saturday Market.

As we began walking, it was immediately apparent that the crowd was much larger than it appeared in that segmented landscape, and I’m sure Naito was shut down for at least half an hour as the throngs poured across it diagonally.  As we moved west, I assumed we would turn left toward Pioneer Square, the announced destination, but instead we headed right toward Burnside, the only major east-west arterial through downtown.  Now we were blocking essentially all of the MAX trains and bus lines into downtown from the north, and we were just getting started.  As a polite Portland protester, I felt a little guilty blocking all those buses and trains, but when we turned onto Broadway I was heartened to see that we had a lot of support from the locals, particularly the girls at Mary’s Club, but also from office workers, many of whom popped their heads out windows to watch and wave, or even climbed on fire escapes to shoot pictures.  All along Broadway, sales clerks and store managers lined the sidewalks, along with subtle, suited security guards at Union Bank of California, where I mounted a landscape terrace to snap some shots of Broadway.   At that point, Burnside was still blocked, and by now Westbound MAX Trains were stopped as well. Both Denise and I were struck by how many in the crowd were busily taking pictures; the camera phone era seems to have turned all of us into a passel Japanese tourists.  After all, had I not been covering this event for CHNN, I’d have rather had a drink in my free hand.  (Someone did ask whether there would be a beer garden at Pioneer Square, and he had a point.) Denise had to get on the road to get back to Bend, but we did manage to make a loop around the square, where, quite inexplicably, there was sort of a beer garden occupying about a quarter of the square, but without the beer, just a fenced-off area preventing the square from filling up fully.  The Eastbound Max trains had been kept running throughout, and it appeared that Burnside had reopened by this time, so cops were lined up to keep the crowd from blocking he just-released northbound trains and buses. 

Westbound trains, as you can see, still weren’t going anywhere for awhile.  Now, a couple of hours later, the news choppers that eagerly plied the skies hoping to catch the mayhem they were wishing for, seem to have finally gone away disappointed.  Portland does protests, even really big ones, peacefully, despite what the media might wish.  Certainly there were many masked young would-be anarchists in this younger-than usual group, but what I mostly found, as I always do, was the same mixture of earnestness, civility, and easy fellowship.  Portlanders aren’t, typically, window-smashers, and we also know who the real criminals are, or at least this guy did.

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.

Delighted as I am by the relentlessly cascading developments surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s beleaguered empire, I don’t share the optimism of worthies such as Eliot Spitzer who think  Foxworld ought to now be investigated by the DOJ under FCPA, the pretty straightforward Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that News Corp has evidently repeatedly violated.  For a lot of reasons, that sort of obviously reasonable thing could never bear fruit here, in the unlikely event that it even happened in the first place.  You see, despite the paranoid rantings of water carriers like Tucker Carlson who blame the Liberal Media for Rupert’s woes, News Corp, with FOX as its ruthless enforcer, has effectively cowed that same Liberal Media into acquiescence, if not outright emulation, of both its shoddy journalism and corrupt relationships with politicians.  Just as in the UK, politicians from both sides of the aisle are well accustomed to the ritual ring-kissing of Master Rupert, the Clintons being just one especially egregious example, and with few exceptions, the purportedly legitimate media supinely and routinely embrace FOX as one of their own; a self-destructive and aberrant choice that redounds only to the benefit of FOX at considerable expense to their already tattered credibility.

Like it or not, America is now invested in FOX, and though the investment is thoroughly underwater, we’re still unwilling to just turn it over to the bank.  For years, utter BS sold mercilessly on FOX, about everything from Clinton’s many murders to weapons of mass destruction and the climate change “hoax” have been soberly presented as “one side” of a supposedly insoluble political argument, never mind the facts.  Proven falsehoods about matters great and small are now “out there” in the bloodstream of American politics, and the dumb and shameless media stars who promoted them, despite their counterfactuality, fear the wrath of FOX far more than they fear the wrath of their deceived audiences.  After all, if nothing else FOX serves as an employer of last resort for the journalistically disgraced, a fact of which, say, Fred Hiatt couldn’t possibly be unaware.

All this creates a serious conundrum for anyone who might deign to go up against Murdoch’s empire…..  First, one can expect a ferocious onslaught of contemptuous smears from FOX itself as a matter of course; then, a tut-tutting, insidery dismissal from Howie Kurtz et al; this followed by synthesized roars out of the Professional Right from Limbaugh on down; and finally capped by the Obama DOJ or FCC giving Rupert everything he wants anyway.  Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, they used to say, and ol’ Rupert has figured out a way to once again prove this truism well into the digital era.  Amazing what money by the bucketload can buy, isn’t it?

So, despite the lurid revelations and widespread public disgust with News Corp and its erstwhile acolytes across the pond, it would be foolish to hope such a mass awakening could ever happen here; it would simply embarrass too many Serious people in the media who have, out of either cravenness or stupidity, swallowed the FOX ethos hook, line, and sinker, and aren’t about to admit their mistakes because of some petty whining about bribery and whatnot.  Those few in the position to meaningfully challenge what News Corp has wrought through its lies and slipshod hackery have, by and large, embraced or at least not forthrightly countered its post-reality notions about the world, from President Obama on down, and therefore are and will continue to take the Fifth.

Rupert may have lost a few billion here and there, but as long as he has FOX, he still has America.

More’s the pity.