I’m Havin’ Me a Big ‘Ole Slice of Schadenfreude Pie

Here’s the recipe.

Get up off your ass and vote!

I just did. Felt good.

"Kafkaesque" Doesn’t Begin to Describe This

“Catch-22″, “The Stranger”, “The Trial” and “In The Penal Colony” were among my favorite novels when I was in high school. What I liked about them was that they were fiction. This is ridiculous.

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

That’s just the first paragraph. Unreal.

This made my morning

From Gareth at dKos:

I was sitting there watching the holo-vid with my granddaughter, when I saw a nightmare from years past flicker across the room.

“Grampa, who’s that man?” asked little Allie.

Oh Jesus, I thought. There the bastard is again. Bedraggled and long-haired, he looked like Ted Kozinski on a bad day. Withered, manacled, his smirk fossilized into a crazy glare, George Bush was being dragged from his cell at The Hague to trial. Again.

“Uh, sweetie, that’s George “Dubya” Bush.”

“Bush. Wait, we read about him in school. That’s the guy who did all those things, right?”

I still felt some residual fear, as if from his reduced condition, in his orange jumpsuit, Bush could reach out through the long-dismantled right-wing noise machine and tell us we had to “stay the course” and that prosecuting him meant “terrorism would win.”

“Yeah, sweetie. That’s him. Invaded Iraq. Tortured children. Gave the bomb plans to Iran. Bombed Iran.”

“He did so many bad things!”

“Yeah.” I sank into the unwelcome memory of those seven long years until his impeachment.

“Did anybody do more bad things?”

“Nobody who was president.”

“But anybody?”

“Sure. Hitler did.”

“Did he get arrested too?”

“No. Hitler killed himself.”

“Oh.”

I wondered for a moment why Bush hadn’t killed himself when the UN troops surrounded his Paraguay compound. I wondered if the religious delusions he entertained kept him from doing it, if, after being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, he thought killing himself would be the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent him to hell. He hadn’t. He’d come outside in a chambray shirt, jeans, and boots, smirking that goddamned smirk, just like when he used to pretend to “clear brush” at his estate in Texas. Like it was a media opportunity he could wriggle out of.

That day there had been celebrations the world over. The skies over every city in the Muslim world exploded with gunfire, all pointed upwards for once. It was like New Year’s Eve in every city in Europe. Muslims, Christians, and Jews danced in the streets together. In America everybody, Democrat and Republican, realized the national nightmare was over. Bush had finally become the unifier he had once promised to be. But the only way he had unified people was in despising him.

“Grampa?”

“Yeah?”

“How come people let him be President?”

How come indeed? I remembered back to the right-wing noise machine, back before Rush and O’Reilly went to jail for sex crimes, back before President Obama signed the Fair Media Act, before Murdoch was sent back to Australia.

“Well, sweetie, some people thought he would do a good job.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know exactly. He never did a good job at anything before that.”

“Why?”

“I think he was too mean-spirited, or too stupid, or too spoiled.”

“Why?”

“Well, he was born with a… heh, heh, with a silver spoon up his nose. His daddy coddled him when he was a boy.”

“What’s coddled, Grampa?”

“It’s when you don’t let kids do things on their own, when you just kind of hover over them and never let them fall down. It makes kids turn out spoiled.”

“I fell down, Grampa,” Allie said, pointing at her knee. “I’m not coddled.”

“I know you’re not, sweetie. You’re perfect. And you might grow up to be President someday. And you’ll be a great President.”

“I’m not going to be bad like that man. Bush.”

“No, you’re not, honey. Nobody is. Not anymore.”

It’s Scary

The talking points that the administration and the Republican Party are following insist that they are going to hold both houses of congress. Bush, Cheney, Snow, Rove, Mehlman, they are all reading the same script.

It reminds me of a video clip I saw of Bush taken on an airplane on election day in 2000. He had this arrogant, smug demeanor and was laughing and saying that he wasn’t worried, that they were going to win. It sickened me because that’s when I knew that they had stolen the election.

When I hear these liars chanting this mantra I can’t help but feel that sick, sinking feeling that I’ve felt in every election since 1994.

The Moral Good And Christianism

christianist/christianism

Put this together with John Dean’s “Conservatives Without Conscience” and you have the perfect picture of the right wing in America.

The Rude One Rocks

The Rude Pundit:

11/3/2006
Sympathy For Mrs. Haggard’s Ass: A Haiku:

Gayle always wondered
Why Ted said, “Jesus enters
Us through our back doors.”

Defuse the Nov 5th Surprise

Glen Greenwald has an important post up today. The Bushies have timed the Saddam Hussein verdict to coincide with the election. We all need to begin talking about this to disarm the event.

Every halfway decent trial lawyer knows that if your adversary has some bombshell document or witness which packs such emotional punch that it can overwhelm all other facts, you don’t just sit around and passively wait for them to unleash it. You do the opposite.

Before they can use it, you take the document or witness and talk about it as much as possible, as aggressively as possible, and as early as possible, so that (a) the jury knows it’s coming and so you deny your opponent the dramatic shock value of it, (b) it is clear that you are not afraid of its impact, and (c) the jury hears about it from you first, rather than your adversary, so that you’re the one who defines it and, from the beginning, they view it from your perspective, not the other side’s. In sum, by preemptively seizing on and using the other side’s planned dramatic bombshell, it makes it a completely expected non-event when it finally happens.

[...]

I say all of that because the Bush administration, in one of the most shamelessly manipulative acts one can fathom, has ensured that the show trial of Saddam Hussein is scheduled to end with a guilty verdict and likely death sentence on November 5 — two days before the election. They are now openly acknowledging that they think this event should and will influence the outcome of our election.

There is no question that the media will cover this story intensely — they love singular, dramatic events; they love courtroom dramas; and it is not every day that a dictator who ruled for three decades is sentenced to death. While one can question how much Americans will care about this event, it is inevitable that it will dominate the news right before the election, with almost no time for Democrats to have their views about it heard.

It’s a real cause for concern that Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything about this other than sitting around and passively hoping that the damage isn’t too severe. That is the opposite of what they ought to be doing.

[...]

Democrats should be talking about the upcoming Saddam verdict, offensively in those terms, and they should be doing it constantly. And they should do so not only to deprive the news story of its dramatic impact once it happens — although that is an important benefit — but they also must use this event offensively to make arguments about the administration’s dishonesty and politically driven exploitation of this war.

The Bush administration induced Americans to support this war based on false pretenses, have mismanaged it to a degree unseen in our nation’s history, and in the process have destroyed that country and mired us hopelessly in a war that they have ensured we cannot win. The whole project is a failure, and all the administration can bring itself to do is to figure out how to squeeze some political advantage out of the war right before an election by scheduling this Saddam trial — which has dragged on endlessly, just like our occupation — two days before Americans decide whether to maintain one-party Republican rule.

[...]

Sitting around until the media explosion on November 5 and then hoping to say these things is a loser strategy. Even with their war oppoosition, Americans — for two decades now — have been conditioned to think of Saddam as the epitome of dangerous evil and his conviction and death sentence are going to pack some emotional punch. That emotional reaction will kick in with less than two days before they go to vote, which means there is no time for reasoned assessment to foster the realization that the event is actually meaningless. Each of these types of Bad Guy events — the capture of Saddam, the killing of his sons, the killing of Zarqawi — leads to a political boost for the administration which is always temporary because it is driven by emotion.

But a temporary boost that begins on November 5 is all they need and want. Democrats need a strategy to combat that — and it can’t just be defensive (“We are so happy to see Saddam convicted but that doesn’t change the fact that we are in a terrible position in Iraq”). It needs to use that corrupt scheduling offensively (“the administration has led us into the most strategically disastrous war in our nation’s history and has no way out, and all they can think about is how to stage show trials purely for political gain”), and that has to begin in full force now. The more this issue is talked about before November 5, the less impact it will have.

Let’s go spread the word.

Good job, John

From Steve Gilliard this morning:

Jesus, so many people are so nervous about what John Kerry said, like he’s lying.

John Kerry is telling the truth and everyone knows it. Rich kids do not join the military, college bound kids don’t join the military, only the poor and those who can’t get scholarships do. Acting like he was lying or insulting people is just bullshit.

Besides, his reply got far more play than the orignial statement.

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.
I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq . It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq .”

Now that’s the way to respond to these bastards.