M.C. Rove

I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.



The token Negro in the background is what really makes it.


Update: Well this has been getting endless, excruciating play all day. Getting thumbs down, mostly. But Paul Slansky on The Huffington Post really nails it.

Where to begin? The repetitive joking about tearing off the heads of small animals by the chief advisor to the man who passed his childhood days blowing up frogs with firecrackers? The repulsive "comedian" making between-the-lines allusions to child molestation? The alleged journalist David Gregory crawling so far up Karl Rove's ass that you can see his head coming out of Rove's mouth?

Pooh-pooh the Bush/Hitler comparisons all you want, but this hideous display of otherworldly shamelessness on the part of EVERYONE ON THE STAGE AND EVERYONE WHO LAUGHED OR APPLAUDED evokes nothing so much as those home movies of Hitler, Goering and pals partying while millions were being annihilated. This clip will be referenced by future historians as a key moment in the ongoing progression of America's forfeiting all claims of moral superiority over any other nation.

Lame Duck? Try, Lame President.

Rose: It's time...to take a big trip across
the George Washington Bridge.

Celeste: No.

Rose: It's a good idea.

Celeste: It's a crutch. It's a crutch!

Rose: We'll do it this one last time, okay?

Celeste: All right, this once.

Rose: I'm ready. Are you?

Celeste: Yes.

Rose: Oh! Oh, look! Look, look!
Aren't you on that TV show? Oh, look!...

Who could forget that classic scene in "Soapdish" when Whoopi Goldberg escorts Sally Field to the mall for a little ego infusion. Imagine what would have happened if poor Celeste of "The Sun Also Sets" had made her way to the Paramus Park Mall only to be dissed by her core demographic. Well that's what happened to our President on a trip to the heartland.

On Tuesday, President Bush popped in for a surprise visit to the Sterling Family Restaurant, a homey diner in Peoria, Ill. It’s a scene that has been played out many times before by this White House and others: a president mingling among regular Americans, who, no matter what they might think of his policies, are usually humbled and shocked to see the leader of the free world standing 10 feet in front of them.

But on Tuesday, the surprise was on Bush. In town to deliver remarks on the economy, the president walked into the diner, where he was greeted with what can only be described as a sedate reception. No one rushed to shake his hand. There were no audible gasps or yelps of excitement that usually accompany visits like this. Last summer, a woman nearly fainted when Bush made an unscheduled visit for some donut holes at the legendary Lou Mitchell’s Restaurant in Chicago. In Peoria this week, many patrons found their pancakes more interesting. Except for the click of news cameras and the clang of a dish from the kitchen, the quiet was deafening.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” Bush said to a group of women, who were sitting in a booth with their young kids. “How’s the service?” As Bush signed a few autographs and shook hands, a man sitting at the counter lit a cigarette and asked for more coffee. Another woman, eyeing Bush and his entourage, sighed heavily and went back to her paper. She was reading the obituaries. “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” a White House aide told her. “No problem,” she huffed, in a not-so-friendly way. “Life goes on, I guess.”

Newsweek is giving this humiliation the gentlest of spin, chalking up the chilly reception to his lame duck status. Even now the mass media coddle this President and refuse to address the obvious. This is not a President with low poll numbers in a difficult war. This is a failed President, who has brought this nation to the precipice with one disastrous decision after another. The American people know it. They know it in Peoria and they know it from one corner of the country to the other. No one but the most die-hard members of Republican base and the money changers on Wall Street, as Newsweek takes pains to point out, can still exhibit enthusiasm for this President.

The mass media still try to portray this Presidency in the context of history and politics as usual. But we left normal long ago. That a sitting President would be dismissed and pointedly ignored in a midwestern diner is positively surreal. He is a hated man who has so disgraced the office of President that people can't even bring themselves to show respect the title in spite of the man. There is really nowhere to go but to impeachment.

Slow News Day

Oh my God! I agree with Tony Snow. Saying that out loud makes me want to wash my mouth out with soap. But when he quipped that the DC press whores must be having a "slow news day," for all their fascination with Laura Bush's skin cancer lesion, I have to agree. Isn't there anything else going on in the world? Here's a little of the exchange, as reported in the New York Times Blog:

Q: Tony, can you tell us about Mrs. Bush’s skin cancer? How is she doing? And how was the decision reached not to disclose this publicly until questions were asked?

Mr. Snow: Yes, I talked to her a couple of minutes ago. She’s doing fine. And she said, “It’s no big deal, and we knew it was no big deal at the time.” Frankly I don’t think anybody thought it was the sort of thing that occasioned a need for a public disclosure. Furthermore, she’s got the same right to medical privacy that you do. She’s a private citizen; she’s not an elected official. So for that reason she didn’t disclose it. But she’s doing fine, and thank you for your concern.

Pressed as to whether Mrs. Bush would begin advocating for screening for skin cancers, Mr. Snow said:

“She’s also had colds, she’s had the flu, she’s had stomach aches –”

Q: But she could still — it could be a platform.

Mr. Snow: You guys are really stretching it. I mean, it is now officially a really slow news day.

Laura Bush's health concerns, either serious, or, as in this case, un-serious, are not my business. I don't want to know. I'm simply not afflicted with such voyeuristic tendencies.

One of my old college roommates used to quip that, "Every time the cat farts in the White House, it's 'news'." This fascination with the daily comings and goings in the halls of power comes at the expense of coverage of things the public actually does need to know. There are two overlapping and interrelated problems that have led to the perception of the nation's capital as the navel of the world. One is the very structure of news gathering. Gaye Tuchman used the term "news net" in her book "Making News: The Construction of Reality." She explains that news gathering relies heavily on a system of beats and bureaus. You can only catch fish where you throw your net, and the nets are thrown at public institutions which are deemed newsworthy and credible. If a public figure says it, it's a "fact" by virtue of conferred status. If a public figure does it, it's news, even if it's painfully boring and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.

The second half of the problem is the disappearance of those very beats and bureaus from all over the country. Thanks to the consolidation of mass media, local newspapers from across the nation have slipped quietly down the memory hole. Many have been bought out by competing papers and shut down. Others have been replaced by conglomerates which package tasty, little McNews bites and publish them under the mastheads of small "local" papers. The "Media Monopoly" as Ben Bagdikian calls it, now consists of 5 corporations which own the vast majority of newspapers, television outlets, radio, book publishing, and film. Five corporations own the entire info-tainment business. And their focus on the bottom-line has meant, among other things, that the beats covered by reporters have dwindled to a few major focal points. The result is a well-fed beltway press corps and metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing across the rest of the newsworthy world.

There is still another problem, exemplified by this type of reportage that I'm at pains to explain. That of the DC press corps itself, which elevates the trivial and minimizes the deadly serious, even in its given purview. Where was this aggressive questioning during the build-up to the Iraq war? Anyone with an ounce of sense could have driven a truck the gaps in logic provided by DC officials, in their ever-shifting rationales for bombing the hell out of a crippled nation. Where was it when a male prostitute was sitting among them, gaining unprecedented access to the aforementioned halls of power? Where was it when it fell to David Corn at the ever-vigilant Nation to point out that Bob Novack had no business knowing that Valarie Plame Wilson was in the CIA? Why does the press corps have to be clubbed over the head by the blogosphere to notice crimes and misdemeanors in their midst, but positively obsess over an in-office procedure, performed under local anesthetic. It would be funny if the net result for the public at large weren't so serious.

Editors Note: Both Ben Bagdikian's "New Media Monopoly" and Gaye Tuchman's "Making News" are available in Curmudgette's Reading Room, although the latter is currently out of print and available only from resellers. Still, highly recommended.

Reasoning with the Schoolyard Bully

Every smart kid learns at some point in his or her young life that you cannot reason with the schoolyard bully. The more sense you make the more he will hit you. This is the quandary Democrats, liberals, progressives, and all other opponents of the right wing juggernaut have been grappling with throughout the Bush years, and in the run-up to them that began around the time the first Bush presidency whimpered to its end.

With the ascendancy of right wing talk radio and the development of what David Brock would come to call the "right wing noise machine," Americans have been subjected to a level of pandering demagoguery that has often been understandably disregarded by people with triple digit IQs. People to the left of Rush Limbaugh have repeatedly made the grave error of not taking the threat posed by these juvenile tactics seriously enough. How exactly does one address political commentary that is often the rhetorical equivalent of, "I know you are but what am I?"

As we wend our way towards the mid-term elections, the name calling and stupidity are in high gear and right wing bullies are predictably beating the stuffing out of their favorite whipping boys, those weak-on-defense-liberal-weenies and the "librul" media.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter offers some advice on "How to Beat 'Cut and Run'" which includes some very insightful analysis of the tactics of that master demagogue Karl Rove.

For more than a quarter century, Karl Rove has employed a simple, brilliant, counterintuitive campaign tactic: instead of attacking his opponents at their weakest point, the conventional approach, he attacks their strength. He neutralizes that strength to the point that it begins to look like weakness.

As a strategy this amounts to hitting your opponent in his "center of gravity." In warfare it would be the equivalent of wiping out the Command Operations Center, communications hub, or some other pivotal installation. Once accomplished you leave your enemy scrambling and uncoordinated. In Karl Rove's hands its things like the "Swift-boating" of John Kerry; turning a war hero into a coward to the point where the same knuckle-dragging troglodytes, who normally lionize the military, take to sporting band-aids with purple hearts on them in mockery of valor. It's an astounding feat on many levels; a triumph of brutal illogic over fact that Rove and his cohorts accomplish again and again.

After escaping indictment, Rove is focused again on what he does best: ginning up the slime machine. Anyone who dares criticize President Bush's Iraq policy is a "cut-and-run" Democrat. The White House's object here is not to engage in a real debate about an exit strategy from Iraq; that would require acknowledging some complications, like the fact that Gen. George Casey, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, believes it's time to start bringing some troops home. The object is instead to either get the Democrats tangled up in Kerryesque complexities on Iraq—or intimidate them into changing the subject to other, less-potent issues for fear of looking like unpatriotic pansies.

Indeed "real debate" is never the object of the right wing noise machine. Put simply, they cannot win on facts; only by turning logic on its ear and inverting reality itself. Astonishingly they have been accomplishing just that for years, leaving those of us in the "reality based community" shaking our heads in wonderment... and getting pantsed.

As Frank Rich points out in today's New York Times, they are relying on that age old technique of tyrants: scapegoating. Just as Hitler blamed the Jews for every ill confronting post-WWI Germany, Bush's political machine is cleverly distracting from his collapsing foreign and domestic policies by vilifying the New York Times for its reportage.

The history of that scapegoating begins on the Friday morning, June 23, that The Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal all published accounts of the Swift program first posted on the Web the night before. In his press briefing that morning, Tony Snow fielded many questions about the program's legality. But revealingly, for all his opportunities, he never attacked the news media....

By Monday, the president had entered the fray and Mr. Snow was accusing The Times of putting the "public's right to know" over "somebody's right to live." What had happened over the weekend to prompt this escalation of hysteria? The same stuff that always happens when the White House scapegoats the press (or anyone else): bad and embarrassing news that the White House wants to drown out.

With the dramatic capture of the seven wannabe terrorists rapidly degenerating into slapstick comedy, General Casey drafting actual plans to "cut and run" from Iraq, and Lawrence Wilkinson testifying before Congress that his former boss Colin Powell's presentation in front of the UN in 2003 was "the perpetuation of a hoax," a political show of strength was urgently needed. For team Bush that means whipping it out in the locker room to show whose is bigger. And those pointy headed intellectuals at the New York Times were just asking for a wedgie.

As discussed here abusers abuse because they're abusers. It's really that simple. And fact based arguments alone won't disarm them. The only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. Or as Alter suggests:

We'll see this summer if Democrats begin to get up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, "This isn't about us. It's about them." We'll see if, when Karl Rove wants to talk about Iraq, the Democrats respond with three familiar words: "Bring it on."

Staring Into the Abyss

I adore Ron Suskind. I've been a major fan since he created shock waves with his profile of Karen Hughes in Esquire. Andy Card spilled his guts to the reporter and the most a madly backpedaling White House could do to discredit his reportage was complain that the color-blind Suskind had misrepresented the carpet as blue. I knew then that Suskind had a gift; an intangible quality that makes total strangers want to pour their hearts out to him. I have that knack myself, and avoid crowds for that reason, but I imagine for a reporter it's a major asset.

Public figures love to confess their fears and regrets to Suskind, and more than any other reporter, he has been able to part the curtains on the internal dynamics of the most shrouded White House in American history. From the tragic John DiIulio's pronouncement that the Administration was being run by the "Mayberry Machiavellis," to the inscrutable Paul O'Neill's tell-all-to-Suskind "The Price of Loyalty," to the cultish fervour of a White House that eschews the "reality based community," Suskind always gets the goods. So I am very much looking forward to reading "The One Percent Doctrine." More so after reading this review in Salon.

"License to Lie" by Gary Kamiya is worth reading as a stand-alone piece, even if it means sitting through the ad, just for insights like this:

Suskind's great achievement here is to reveal how the Bush administration short-circuited and ultimately corrupted the way America's government is supposed to work. Actual coups d'état are lurid and violent and attract attention. As Suskind reveals, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and Rove pulled off a much more sophisticated job: a bureaucratic coup d'état. Without firing a shot, they silenced critics, squelched unwanted facts, and created their own false but salable reality.

And this:

And if it is necessary to understand our enemy, it is also necessary to understand the risk that we could become the very thing we fear. Nietzsche wrote, "He who fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster himself. And when you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you." Secrecy and lies in the service of a higher good -- it has a Marxist, a fascist, a theocratic sound. Little by little, under the guise of "national security" -- since the birth of the republic, always the greatest threat to American values -- Cheney and his blustering, deeply devout accomplice have steered America away from its priceless legacy as a land governed by laws, debate and transparency, and toward something none of us would want to recognize.

Aaaannndd this:

Perhaps then we can ask how it happened that the government of the United States was hijacked by a bullying, fact-averse religious fanatic and his puppetmaster, an evil courtier out of Shakespeare. How we were plunged into a disastrous war simply because a cabal of ideologues and right-wing zealots, operating in autocratic secrecy, decided they wanted war. And how all of the normal workings of a democratic government -- objective analysis, checks and balances, transparency -- were simply trashed by an administration waving the bloody shirt of "terror."

But there is little reason for optimism that such a reckoning will take place anytime soon. The Democrats' failure to address the historic debacle that is the Bush presidency is so vast, so complete, that it must stem from reasons deeper than merely its pathetic fear of appearing to be weak on "national security" -- that meaningless shibboleth invoked by political consultants who would nervously triangulate if they were being devoured by a great white shark.

Sadly, I share Kamiya's pessimism. Works like Suskind's are revelatory to those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear. But nothing seems to pierce the bubble of illusion that keeps, the Bush White House, both houses of Congress, and the DC Press Corps, thoroughly insulated from the reality based community.

Fineman and the Beginner's Mind

One almost has to admire the Zen-like simplicity of Howard Fineman's mind. Surely each moment is new for him. He seems blissfully unencumbered by the travails of history, or even, of recent months. Fineman lives completely in the "now" of each dawning news event.

If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn't just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chainsaw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.

Those of us more attached to the events of the last few years would be more likely to mark the decline of the presidency by things like a war of escalating tragedy three years after Bush declared "Mission Accomplished," the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, a speech on immigration that managed to offend Republicans and Democrats alike, the collapse of his grand vision for converting Social Security to private accounts, the squandering of international good will after 9/11 to the extent that America is now reviled around the world, the David Copperfield-like magic trick that turned an inherited surplus into the largest projected deficit in US history which continues to be fed by endless tax cuts for the wealthy, etc. etc. etc... Americans have retained knowledge of these occurrences even if Fineman hasn't and the demonstration of their impact is the death spiral of Bush's poll numbers, which have wallowed in the 30s for months.

Even though Fineman has chosen in the present moment to mark Bushco's demise by the happy event of Lay and Skilling's convictions, he wishes into the cornfield the enmeshment of this Administration with the machinations of Enron. Says Fineman:

First, caveats. There's no evidence that the president or anyone in his entourage knew about or benefited financially from the house of cards that Lay and Skilling built—and that a federal jury now has found to have been an edifice of fraud.

The Bush Crowd was old school in the energy bidness and viewed Lay & Co. as hustling parvenus who had no real interest in finding and pumping oil—what real men in Texas do.

Most of what Enron concocted was assembled in the go-go Clinton years. Bush's idea of an oilman was his old Bible-study buddy, the upright, clean-as-a-whistle Don Evans. As the Enron scam was falling apart, Lay frantically sought help from Evans—by then the Commerce secretary—among others (including Democrats such as former Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin). He got nowhere, and had the chutzpah to be bitter about it.

It must be lovely to enjoy a mind so untroubled by facts. For a record more grounded in reality, Robert Parry has a memory span longer than the single beat of a hummingbird's wing.

Contrary to the official story, the Bush administration did almost whatever it could to help Enron as the company desperately sought cash to cover mounting losses from its off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy and scandal.

As Enron's crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush's presidency, Lay secured Bush's help in three key ways:

--Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush's resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California's consumers.

--Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration's energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron's businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron's complex derivative-financing schemes.

--Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron's interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.

That's just the overview. For an article rich in detail on an effort on Dabhol that reached all the way the Vice President's office, Bush's complicity in extorting California, and Lay's involvement in the shaping of Federal energy policy, read the entire article here.

Good Morning Richard Cohen

Originally published: Friday, May 05, 2006

Lt. Steven Hauk: Sir, in my heart, I know I'm funny.
-- Good Morning Vietnam

"First, let me state my credentials," writes the Washington Post's Richard Cohen. "I am a funny guy." Such arrogance does not really invite further indulgence, but somehow I made it through the rest of his column. It only gets worse. Stephen Colbert, veteran of the legendary Second City and star of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," whose list of credits includes, "The Daily Show," "Strangers with Candy," "Exit 57," and Robert Smigel's "The Ambiguously Gay Duo"... not funny. And Cohen knows funny.

Not only wasn't the accomplished, comic actor, writer, and producer funny, he was "rude," and "a bully." Writes Cohen:

Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Riiiiight... A President who has exempted himself from over 750 laws, including a ban on torture; who has authorized wiretapping of private citizens without warrants; who lied this nation into a war that has now cost the lives of over 2400 service people and countless thousands of Iraqis; who entertained at this same event two years ago with his own comedic bit about looking under chairs, tables, and behind drapes for the non-existent WMD that were the pretext for that war... that President was held captive by rules of etiquette. Apparently we've been going about this thing all wrong. It's not Congress or due process of law we should be appealing to to rein this White House in. It's Miss Manners.

Lt. Steven Hauk: Sir, the man has got an irreverent tendency.
He did a very off-color parody of former VP Nixon.
General: I thought it was hilarious.
Lt. Steven Hauk: Respectfully, sir, the former VP
is a good man and a decent man.
General: Bullshit! I know Nixon personally.
He lugs a trainload of shit behind him that could
fertilize the Sinai. Why, I wouldn't buy an apple
from the son of a bitch and I consider him a
good, close, personal friend.

Cohen would have us know that there was nothing courageous about Stephen Colbert's performance.

His defenders -- and they are all over the blogosphere -- will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences -- maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or -- if you're at work -- take away your office.

What then, I wonder, is Cohen's excuse for reciting White House spin without question or scrutiny for the past five years? Cohen may consider himself the superior wit, but I for one think his drooling sycophant shtick is getting old.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush's Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" when he would have put it differently: "This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg." A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

I have a BA in English. That's my credential. Mr. Cohen, that's not a mixed metaphor.

Lt. Steven Hauk: "Good morning, Vietnam."
What the heck is that supposed to mean?
Private Abersold: I don't know, Lieutenant,
I guess it means good morning, Vietnam.