Mea Culpas at the Sunset of the American Century

Welcome to Crawford. It is very much similar to Mexico without the Mexicans, when you come to grips with the comparison; just another pack of wild and corrupt public officials trying to rape the countryside. It is located in one of those land-that-time-forgot states - like Utah and Arkansas and Kentucky - that was originally established by fugitives, outlaws, degenerate gamblers, freakish white supremacists and wretched deviants who couldn't carve out a "civilized" existence in the former colonies because of criminal instincts or acquired diseases such as cholera, syphilis, scarlet fever, smallpox or a deranged sense of faith in the Lord Almighty.

The wild and turbulent plains were not just a place or an ideal of riches beyond the Mississippi River or past the crest of the Rocky Mountains or the grand Indian Wars slaughter in the hopes of cheap land and a never-ending supply of critters to extinguish in the name of American capitalism ... It took four generations of rednecks to realize that they had actually lost The Civil War and that the Confederate flag was highly offensive to some people. We apparently had purchased an enduring national unity at the cost of a federal income tax in 1861 for something like 3% on incomes above $800, and at the cost of $6.2 billion (US) through the issuance of bonds, while Lincoln - a Republican, mind you - was accused of unconstitutional federal taxation of personal incomes, corporate income, and inheritances, in addition to excises on manufactured goods, alcohol, and tobacco and the creation of the Internal Revenue Service in 1863.

It was not much longer, however, before a tidal wave of feeble-minded white trash hacks swarmed into the business of US Government and set up a manner of redistributing wealth that taxed everything from whale oil to whiskey to Winchesters to white slaves and prostitution and gambling and a needy Jesus and a boatload of non-existent gold mines just a stagecoach's passage through cannibalism and frontier debauchery.

A thriving economy rose from the ashes of the Civil War, done in large part through the federalized system - laws such as the Homestead Act of 1862, granting 160 acres of land virtually free to any citizen willing to occupy it for five years; and the National Bank Act of 1863, which created a national banking system and stabilized currency and reduced the confusing state bank note system; along with a host of other legislative efforts such as tariffs to protect Northern industries followed by the transcontinental railroad through federally chartered corporations receiving free public lands and generous loans. And with that, it was only a few days into the sunset for a new American Dream, not very far at all ...

Anyways ... it's a terribly long story, and any petty references to The Big Valley television series will erode this story to meaningless pulp. Now is not the time. Our task is to take a quick look at the heavy political traditions of these forgotten states. Some of our best congressional minds - and many of the worst - have materialized from the backwoods and rolling hills and open prairies and dark waters to become statesmen, principled citizens, senators, governors, supreme court justices and distinguished political leaders. The list ranges from John Marshall Harlan and John Thomas Scopes and Stanley Forman Reed to the immortal William Fulbright of Arkansas and the omnipotent Sam Rayburn of Texas.

These were real - and sometimes fire-breathing - giants of their day. They aspired to public service and fought the good fight, honorably. Voters went to the polls on Election Day to pull the lever for politicians like Fulbright and Rayburn and left the ballot booth stuffed with pride and even had a good word or two for their selection because they represented something larger than self-interest and took a monumental stand when righteousness was on their side. Sure there were party loyalties, and not everyone agreed in lock-step, but there was a majesty within the political process which made them formidable adversaries built on fairness, integrity and candor bringing respect from both sides of the aisle.

The 21st century process doesn't promote these same feelings today, and the hardcore constituency of Dubya and Cheney will never know the magic of Democracy in action - which is a terribly sad phenomenon, because it is a truly wonderful experience to get up early in the morning and march into your local polling place amongst friends and leave feeling proud of your decision at the moment of truth.

I've walked in that territory, Sparky, and the feeling's supreme when your conscience is clear. Even to this day, more than 30 years later, I still have friends in Massachusetts who feel vindicated for choosing Gerorge McGovern in 1972, instead of the terminal crook known as Richard Nixon ... The pathetic freaks who went with the majority that year have been bitch-slapped for eternity, while the only state to go for the challenger shares a sense of perverse glee for not having taken the bait. To them, it was a badge of honor to vote against Richard Nixon - and it will always be an honor to vote for a Democrat just to spite the GOP and everything it stands for. Say what you will about Massachusetts, but it is the birthplace of freedom, after all, and revolution and political discourse and excellent education is in the bloodstream. And that counts for something in my mind - good, bad or indifferent. Any politician who dumps on Massachusetts and what it represents is an imbecile of the highest order with no connection to anything American.

Now look at Dubya. He is a freak and a cheat and a miserable failure, and while not even working at it he has presided over the utter failure of the political process in a new century, having said that he was a compassionate conservative who wants to improve partisan relationships. He is a humorless stump of a being and has been a career incompetent at anything he has ever touched and will go down in history as having committed more crimes and treasonous behavior in and around the White House than Richard Nixon would have been convicted had he not resigned first ... Trickie Dick was a genetically engineered miscarriage of a preznut and so is Dubya. They both have come to personify what H.L. Mencken once described as "the art of running the circus from the monkey cage."

Of course, Dubya needs a lot of help. Even after the South Asian disasters of last week, he still thinks tsunamis are something you ask your attorney to do with Vietnamese immigrants seeking refugee status in America. Ho, ho, ha! A shot of oafish humor across the bow. Dubya wouldn't find amusement in it and neither would Dick Cheney, unless you had a wad of cash that you wanted to donate to the re-election petty cash fund. Both would give you that tough-guy, droopy-eyed stare while watching you drop the check on an aide, and wish you good luck at finding the polls on Election Day.

Stand up and face the music, Sparky. The single reason why most of us were motivated this time around was Dubya, and it was this way since he first used Jeb to spike the vote totals in Florida ... There was no other reason, just as there is no reason to be ashamed for the voting against him. The 48% of the electorate, if you believe 90% of what you see and more than half of what you hear, will find comfort in the notion that only one state (and, yes, the District of Columbia) in 1972 saw Nixon for what he was: a dangerous and borderline sociopath who spent his most of his adult life looking for alibis instead of an honest explanation, while trying to whisk under the rug the most divided and cancerous public display of faith-wrapped greed, under the guise of lame-brain rhetoric that has become the Sunset of the American Century - the tragic and inevitable collapse of an experiment once known as democracy brought down by low-rent preachers, treacherous lobbyists, corporate cronies and exurbian dope fiends with a never-ending prescription of ignorance. Dubya has no more faith in the future of the American Spirit than he does in the future of Prime Minister Allawi and a fractured Iraq, and in his soul he is beginning to wonder how much of this collapse will really be blamed on him, marking his stay in the Big House the worst since the days of Herbert Hoover. It is not strange these days to hear Congress speculate that events on the ground are not going well - either in the United States or Iraq, for that matter - and whether the preznut would be better off toning down his Middle East policy and starving the beast known as the federal budget.

The Democratic political machine has been openly wondering too. It was not some peculiar shift in policy or a matter of finding a national message that has caused the opposition to lay low while the Howard Dean's and Simon Rosenberg's are left sizing up the tatters they are sure to inherit ... Instead, there is an educated guess that the brewing shit-storm and the "blood-moon" in the sky are harbingers of a sickening new year, and whose highly compensated advisers believe it might be the smarter play to give the preznut enough rope and space to hang himself. Which may be the right strategy. Lyndon Johnson had the same idea in 1968, when he ducked the sucker punch that was his Vietnam policy and ran off like a wounded hyena.

Which brings back to mind an earlier point raised during the campaign, Dubya's appeal is time sensitive and highly tenuous. Winning the last election was a narrow escape for him, and he almost fell like his daddy ... so take it under advisement: Your rights as American citizens won't get you anything but a hard beat-down by this Administration. This gang of egregious crooks has no concept of mea culpa, because it feels it owes no explanation and views the idea of a free and open government as a major inconvenience. Martin Bormann would have felt at home with this crowd.

And I guess it was an old attorney friend of mine who once said that Dubya was a volatile mix of Richard Nixon and Rudolf Hess. Then again ... why goddamn it, Sparky. I think it was me who said it first.

Freaks in Toyland and a Transvestite Wails On

The political game dropped another few rungs in the ladder over the weekend, a gruesome clanging and screeching of raw steel being bent into pretzels - a terribly bad shreiking of metal against concrete that can't quite grip the edges or mesh with other steel beams, much less anything at all, as the Grand Pole of Deviance came crashing down in an oily pile of sludge. That is the one thing that most demogogues cling onto with a death grip as they reach frenetically for the surface, away from the long black pole leading down into the abyss - not like the shiny golden one around which most strippers swing purposefully for dollar tips from lunchtime degenerates.

But this metal shaft is different. It is flat black like a charred piece of metal and greasy from human remains, with deep and frantic scars and an assorted ballet of teeth marks holding on for dear life, leaving the observer with a heavy and nauseous feeling if left to gaze at them for very long. Many irrecoverable souls have fought gravity along this pole and slid off into nothingness, and only a few have ever made it back alive. It's like a drop into social purgatory with a long, dizzying ride off into the blackness.

The end. Instant closure. Where the freaks gather in sweatshop formation, blinded, and the damned moan and shout to no one in particular while enveloped by total darkness. Richard Nixon is down there greeting the contestants. So is Spiro Agnew and Roy Cohn, along with John and Martha Mitchell. Daddy Bush will join them soon enough ... There is also Wally George, Morton Downey Jr., Jim Bakker, Strom Thurmond and Joe McCarthy. And then there is the Hall of Fame wing, the hardcore purveyors of filth on a grand scale: Lee Atwater, Chairman Mao, Herman Goering, Boss Tweed, Lester Maddox, Vlad the Impaler and the Marquis De Sade, along with a sidecar cast of minions and incorporeal beings like Jesse Helms, Herbert Hoover and the unimaginable vileness of Josef Goebbels.

It is an abominable wasteland for the special freaks of nature. They are a discordant chorus of hypocrisy and shame sung at light speed - a freakish Circle of Doom, those singular and festering public figures who come along every once in a while to remind us what decency is not, the grotesque monstrosities of the day who can waddle for so long in the slime that not even a genius like Albert Einstein could explain their being.

There is little hope for the redeemable - never mind the Larry Flynts and Hugh Hefners and Howard Sterns of the world - who will be invoked by these dedicated morons as a reason for their existence, to admonish what they secretly hold as a matter of petty jealousy because they cannot ever be original in anything they do. Being outrageous doesn't translate to audacity with a noble purpose, and it is difficult for the oridinary American to accept that a truly evil person, a ruthless cretin with the sense of a dung beetle and the soul of a rock lizard, is about to be sworn in as preznut for another four years ... And he will deliver another bizarre gang with him, a cruel network of attorneys and shucksters and pimps and fixers who will continue to loot the US Treasury, bend the rules, rewrite the laws in their own image, and pop enough Vivarin and jolt soda to stay awake for days at a time in the hopes of finding another reason to declare war, officially, on some new collection of brown people who don't buy into the American purpose or God's destructive plan.

To The People Of Islam: Just think: If we'd invaded your countries, killed your leaders and converted you to Christianity YOU'D ALL BE OPENING CHRISTMAS PRESENTS RIGHT ABOUT NOW!
Merry Christmas

Happy Giving Tree Festival To All, And To All A Good Night!

There are two Halloweens in America these days - the real one in October and every time Ann Coulter speaks, and a Hallmark moment for the beastly ice princess usually involves razor blades in apples served to inner city kids who could someday sell crack to addicted suburbanites. But the confirmation - with the sordid and grandiose thought process of an enraptured serial rapist at the park on Sunday - waged on from the tangle of stretch marks she calls a mouth, insisting that since the attacks of September 11, "we've won two wars, liberated millions of people from monstrous regimes, presided over one election in Afghanistan and are about to see elections in Iraq and among the Palestinian people. Focusing like a laser beam on the big picture, liberals are upset that, during this period, the Secretary of Defense used an autopen."

Indeed. Coulter deliberately added fuel to the fire, for no other reason to earn more rethug talking points time for being outrageous and loyal. Imagine Leni Riefenstahl without the Wagner soundtrack and a transvestite's flamboyant wardrobe - and with a protruding Adam's Apple in stereo - and you are left with the decrepit moral shell and rack of pestilence that is Ann Coulter on a good day. Spray her with a flat-black can of Rustoleum - the Dom Perignon of spraypaint cans - and the vapor would transform into chunks instantly. Ann Coulter and her ilk have become the classic example of what many reality based political thinkers are calling these days: The Golden Age of Treachery ... It is a terrible conceptual event, a miserable form of reality someplace between Donald "Redrum" Rumsfeld and Alberto "Little Il Duce" Gonzales.

No human being between Calexico, Washington and Wall Street has been accused of more fraud, outright lies and shameful legal proceedings than Redrum and Little Il Duce - but they are like folk heros for a new age of deranged politics: The Faith-based and Fraudulent 21st Century, The Golden Age of Treachery.

Both of these fools would be heavy favorites to win the Dunce of the Week award in any normal news week. They would rank right up there with Dubya, formerly of the Texas Governor Mansion and the rigged election or two, who is a firm enduring candidate for King of the Treacherous just for breathing.

But neither of these scumbags will walk off with the Dunce of the Week hardware this time ... That wondrous honor belongs to Ann Coulter, who waltzed off for the holiday season with one more gutter utterance for the damned, then probably retreated back to the same South Beach transvestite revue for a round of Una Paloma Blanca with the rest of the closeted rethug freaks still clutching their J. Edgar Hoover memoirs.

Until the electorate gets fed up with this cycle of stupidity and punishment, the Freaks in Toyland will rule the roost.

Yuletide Markings on The Beast

The word "antichrist" appears in just three passages in the Bible (in the New Testament letters known as 1 John and 2 John); it does not appear at all in the Book of Revelation. Nevertheless, the idea of an Antichrist is central to the apocalyptic world view that sees human history as a struggle between God and Satan for the fate of mankind.

According to most Christian prophesies of the End Time, the Antichrist will act as Satan's chief agent on earth during this period. The Antichrist - a sort of evil twin of Jesus in many ways, captured by many High Renaissance painters in cataclysmic tones and serving as a mnemonic to Dante's Inferno - will forge a one-world government through promises of peace. But when Jesus returns, he will expose the Antichrist as an impostor, defeat him in the battle of Armageddon, and reign with the Christian martyrs for a thousand years on earth.

Robert Fuller, in his book Naming the Antichrist, notes that modern apocalypticists believe the Book of Revelation "contains much information about the Antichrist - who will emerge as a 'beast from the sea' to be Satan's ally in a last, desperate assault on Christ and his church." This "parody and mirror opposite of Christ" will be identifiable in a number of ways:

1. Promising peace to those who follow him, he will rise to a position of great power.
2. With the help of his own false prophet, the Antichrist will gain control of the world economy, by forcing each person "to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name . . . six hundred and sixty-six."
3. One of the heads of the beast also "seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder."

Myths, hearsay, urban legends and delusions die hard in America the Beautiful. We depend on them for the extra magnitude they offer, the antidote to explaining the entire breadth of anything, only because we have no capacity to look beyond the narrow tunnels of most people's reality. Strange folk heros, freakish public figures and genius-level champions live on in our demented pantheon as living proof to the simple among us, because they need them to soothe the reality that the utter domination of the high-capitalist working model is not seen as the last exit to the ad-infinitum of American life. Look at O.J. Simpson, they admonish; he got away with a double homicide and beat the justice system like it was a poker tournament at The Sands. Or Dick Cheney, the Al Capone of our time. And the preznut - Dubya - who has played the part of vile demon and idiot at the brink of salvation so well, like a defrocked priest in some kind of degenerate tragedy, that even if he wasn't The Beast he couldn't quite turn down the role now because he has been marked Chimperor of the Damned. Some would even call him Amerikkka's Apocalypse Preznut - but these aren't the straight and narrow among his flock of degenerate lobbyist freaks and corporate zealots and frightened security moms, who instead have joined the ride for nothing less than sheer wonder if the anti-christ should ever show his or her face.

Most wingnuts take the question of survival at face value, a pretty sure bet these days, but it's becoming apparently clear as the GOP fills with more angry rednecks and faith worshippers, that there is just not enough good old radical puritanism to push the evangelical agenda further. A saving grace may come from a new fundamentalist cadre called the "Muggletonians," who have been termed "God's Pathetic Answer" of the American Theological Movement and the "inconspicuous freaks" of the Administration. The Muggles are typically young and completely brainwashed believers; they have been busy organizing christian based community centers, free income tax advice fellowships, free home schooling programs and pseudo-political indoctrination clinics designed to motivate support of right-wing candidates. They scour local communities heavily during the holiday season, preying on depressed and wayward citizens down on their luck, and ask for everything from spare change to day-old bread to canned goods to lumber and plumbing supplies. The Muggles' agenda is posted in every church fellowship center - often with a Third World child or shanty town pictured in black-and-white with a red question mark through it - asking for donations of clothing, hammers, screwdrivers, shoes, winter coats and anything else that vagrant fundamentalists could use to erect self-supporting right-wing communes.

The idea and mission statement spring from a pair of 17th century English counter-revolutionary groups, called the Muggletonians and Fifth Monarchists, who shared a number of disturbing parallels with today's morality play in national politics. Muggletonians had a two part history into the seventeenth century. From 1652-58, under the primary leadership of John Reeve (1608-1658), or Reeves, the "Prophet of God" and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton (1609-1698). The second period from 1658-98, under the general leadership of Lodowick Muggleton. According to the Book of Revelations, Chapter XI, in the latter days God would appoint "two witnesses" who will preach to an ungodly world in preparation for the beginning of the final days. Reeve and Muggleton were celebrated as the "two witnesses" according to their followers. The Millennium theme was a powerful biblical message during the Interregnum. The Fifth Monarchy Men or the Fifth Monarchists were a quasi-political religious movement which was prominent from 1649-1661. Based on a strong millennium message, they hoped to reform Parliament and the government for the imminent coming of Christ's' Kingdom on Earth. The movement was prominent throughout the Commonwealth and was organized. The "Fifth Monarchy" or the "Fifth Kingdom" is a biblical reference. The reference is based of the Old Testament (Daniel 2: 44) of a prophesy in a dream by King Nebuchadnezzar. He envisioned five kingdoms in history, and the last, or Fifth Kingdom would usher in a new kingdom on earth. Millenarianism was a popular message of the Interregnum (1649-1660). "The godly being in league with God ..." (1626) wrote Thomas Gataker.

* * *

Political and religious mumbo jumbo is not a purely American invention, unlike rhythm and blues and the zone blitz. But in only 228 years we have raised the bullshit meter to a place where the Richter Scale now could pick up the tremors along the West Coast. Day after day in email we are presented with the utterly meaningless assessment of the Democratic Party's current fact-finding endeavor and election recount efforts and future strategic positioning vis-a-vis the 2004 Presidential Selection operation, hoping that just one nugget of truth would win the soothsayer instant recognition in the Washington power circles responsible for the Semantics and Bullshit Hall of Fame.

The Democrats' action script, all along, was to lay in the weeds and talk like Mighty Mouse on crack - just a great bunch of guys and former beauty queens who got punked by the gutter incompetence of Dubya B. Moron - and then emerge at the midterm elections with a boatload of real-world answers with a progressive slant and three or four rising stars from within the party establishment who could beat down the Rethug gates in 2008.

But now the preznut, often given to delegating his affairs to used-car salesmen from Houston with enough petty cash to feed the DC area's stripper population, had looked the other way while his Defense Secretary and civilian Pentagon authorities ran a War Crimes and Disinformation factory from the basement sector of the White House, and very few Democrats have sat up and taken notice while a general uneasiness and blinding culpability has ushered the holiday season.

The tone feels completely out of place, like Martha Stewart running for Congress or Larry King with his own show on the Food Network. Never mind that Dubya is too dumb and too guilty to duck the charges. In the face of general Democratic pessimism, there has been movement in the Vegas book numbers: the freaks in the numbers game and in the sacred halls of power in places like London, Beijing and Moscow are making serious adjustments in their early approaches to the preznut's failure to secure a January Iraqi election. Fresh events have already changed "the political landscape," as they say in the public opinion research business, and the names on the organization chart are more than rumbling on their pegs.

After all, Donald "Redrum" Rumsfeld cannot be explained away as God's inherent Plan, and he is not a Cuban burgular or even a rogue Marine lieutenant colonel, although his chances of seeing tax day in 2005 are getting very grim ... And all it would take is a quiet ceremony, like LBJ did with McNamara perhaps, with Dubya pinning the Medal of Freedom on his barrel chest and then whisking him off to another World Bank creation where he could never hurt a Humvee or an Iraqi citizen again. Now he's looking at a Sammy "The Bull" Gravano moment, and potentially utter disgrace or a prison term, once Redrum turns on him for federal immunity, and many gray-haired distinguished gentlemen with rodent-like features start pushing administration insiders off the cruise ship.

Perhaps Cheney should bow out first, so Dubya can invoke his own Gerald Ford model to whom he could hand off the duty roster - maybe John McCain or Dick Lugar - but don't overlook the truth, they should both resign due to the utter waste that has been our Iraqi excursion. This one is not going to get any better for Americans wanting a quick resolution to this mess, and Dubya should sneak out the back gate before the Democrats wake up and their new soldiers start smelling blood. In a holiday season filled with images of apocalypse and recollections of the beast, animal sacrifice seems like child's play and the media is starting to sharpen its knives.

Idiots Brought Weeping to Their Knees

Well ... the preznut broke into another of his gross motor stylings the other day, or at least that's what the opposition says when he busts a blood vessel or starts showing symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome on network television, and while the final conclusion is a bit hazy because of complications arising from an out-of-date drug test, it is safe to assume that his urological functions are normal. If problems arise, Dubya will be whisked off to Crawford for a long period of detoxification and given another chance to pass the annual drug screening test.

It's really not a big deal, and somewhat inevitable. There are a ton of strong narcotics being used in the White House these days leading up to Christmas, as always when a nation is at war and the entire Islamic world knows your preznut has a "Jesus Scare" in his heart, but Dubya will never be tested for these kinds of drugs. Traces of haldol or viagra or high dosage treatments of antibiotics may be revealed in the lab, but there would never be a hint of crystal meth, ecstacy or black tar heroin. The doctors at the Bethesda Naval Clinic would never allow the preznut's urine to be tested that way - and besides, just to keep matter clean there is always a CIA stand-in who could donate the sample for him.

The preznut would only admit to using legal drugs, the ones produced by a multi-billion-dollar industry that has in its glorious past hawked almost anything with a lethal side effect or low grade buzz, everything from Thalidomide in the 1960's because of birth defects like shorter limbs and an extra nose or two and Lotronex in 1997 for causing deadly intestinal conditions and the diabetes drug Rezulin in 2000 because it caused severe liver damage. There are now a series of designer growth hormones on the market today that would make Victor Conte blush with envy - by prescription only - that could beef up Jenna to the size of Andre the Giant in roughly two months, if she suddenly got the urge to join the ranks of Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Of course, everyone is doing a bit of Smackdown in Iraq this Christmas at Camp Speicher, just north of Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, and the WWE would never surrender the prime opportunity of joining Donald "Redrum" Rumsfeld for a little holiday cheer with some reluctant participants of "Operation Oil Ain't Free".

The emotional show featured heart-warming footage of troops telling their personal stories as well as video of the Superstars interacting with the soldiers. WWE visited more than 15 different bases while in Iraq, touching heroic troops who were defending some of the most dangerous outposts in the country. And the troops did see some nice wrestling action as well, led by Undertaker’s rematch with Heidenreich, the unstable monster who has twice cost Taker a shot at the WWE Championship. As usual, Heidenreich was unpredictable, deciding to leave the ring once Undertaker got the upper hand, eventually getting counted out.

All things are possible in the sordid worlds of professional wrestling and high stakes politics if you know the right doctors - or even a few wrong ones too, of course, like the whack-jobs who tested LSD-25 and super-hallucinogens such as BZ on combat troops to see if they could handle shock treatment and the psychological and physiological limitations of interrogation, or the twisted history of unethical quacks who worked over several state prison populations with enough mescaline and acid to make a petty shoplifter become a rabid sex offender, just to see what would happen with the brain chemistry, as it were. The walls of human equilibrium can be mighty narrow given the proper narcotics and intentions, if necessary ... An average sized Iraqi fruit stand vendor could be made to look and perform like Jevon Kearse of the Philadelphia Eagles with the right treatment plan and a crash course on the 4-3 defense.

Not everybody is in favor of these blind leaps of faith into the Iraqi countryside during the holiday season - but there are always the righteous believers in this doomed mission and they will push the limits of good common sense, in the name of the greater good and their governmental careers, and it is hard to keep them from pressing ahead. It would serve the hard pessimist to remember that they all laughed at the Wright Brothers, and for the better part of his adult life Ronald Reagan was regarded as a B-movie dunce with a memory problem who couldn't amount to anything in the world of politics.

It is also worth noting that Rumsfeld touched down about a stone's throw from the WWE to deliver his own holiday greetings amid tight security at an air base in northern Iraq where an insurgent’s attack killed 14 U.S. troops and eight other people earlier this week. Hoping to demonstrate a new level of compassion for the troops’ sacrifices - since tossing aside the rubber stamp he once used to sign his name on the condolence letters sent to military families - Redrum landed in darkness and bolted immediately from his plane to a combat surgical hospital where many of the bombing victims were treated after Tuesday’s lunchtime attack on a mess tent.

“The focus of the trip is to thank the troops and wish them a Merry Christmas,” he said.

Several high-profile rethug chickenhawks have publicly criticized Redrum, prompting the preznut to defend him Monday as a “good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes.” But Dubya is not really concerned with Redrum's longevity these days; he will be long gone from the Big House by the time the real shitstorm hits in Iraq, and the final National Intelligence Estimate on the fallout will be presumably left in the hands of nauseating, lesser known political banshees - like Bill Frist, Rudi Guilliani, or even Pat Robertson if he decides to throw his hat in the ring for another run with the infidels.

But so what? Dubya may even take a couple more whacks at the root right after Christmas. Perhaps a bombing campaign to honor Nixon's "rolling thunder" operation in Cambodia.. The entire length of the Potomac River will bubble like a stream of newly liberated lava when the child preznut takes his next dose of klonopin to control the shakes and tries to offer his simple theological rants back down in the bunkers of the Pentagon, which is now spending about a billion dollars a day to keep the elections on a crash course with widespread Jihad in the month of January.

Even John McCain and Stormin Norman Schwarzkopf are becoming as antsy, and they were there when this ride had training wheels. Asked about his confidence in the secretary’s leadership, McCain recalled fielding a similar question a couple weeks ago. “I said no. My answer is still no. No confidence,” McCain said.

Schwarzkopf, interviewed on MSNBC-TV’s Hardball, criticized Redrum for his reply to a soldier in Kuwait over the lack of armor on many military vehicles used in Iraq. “I was very, very disappointed — no, let me put it stronger — I was angry by the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, as the secretary of defense, didn’t have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up,” Schwarzkopf said. “In the final analysis, I think we are behind schedule in Iraq ... I don’t think we counted on it turning into jihad.”

If you think the current specter of violence in Iraq is horrific, wait until you see the Sunnis and Shiites and Iranian-sponsored factions do battle for control of the polls on a scale not seen since Beirut in the 1980s. It's even even scaring Tom Friedman of The New York Times, who has as much credibility on this topic as Kurt Waldheim's childhood dedication to Judiasm. "We may lose because of the defiantly wrong way that Donald Rumsfeld has managed this war," an outraged Friedman now states, "and the cynical manner in which Dick Cheney, George Bush and - with some honorable exceptions - the whole Republican right have tolerated it. Many conservatives would rather fail in Iraq than give liberals the satisfaction of seeing Mr. Rumsfeld sacked."

Then again, you could always see the right doctor or tune in for some WWE Smackdown in Iraq. In a land of laughter and forgetting, the pill pusher is king.

Dubya Was Such a Quiet Man, a Chronic Bed-Wetter Who Had a Problem with Pets

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier...just as long as I'm the dictator..."
- Dubya, Washington, DC, Dec 18, 2000

"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
- Dubya, Washington Post, Nov 19, 2002

The headline in tomorrow's New York Times says Dubya acknowledges "mixed success" in his personal hell hole known as Iraq, while clutching the memory of Donald "Redrum" Rumsfeld like a bad magician does with a rubber chicken. They suck eggs together for breakfast nowadays and wander back and forth through the Rose Garden, spitting frequently into the manicured lawn and brooding about the daily news from the front, even though they can't pronounce the names of the cities without phonetic cue cards ... Something about Najuddah and Saddamville outside of Bangladesh; those towel-wearing little buggers who are vaporizing kids with car bombs and shelling temples with RPG's, and now he has the ACLU ratcheting up the odds by a bunch of lefty commies who - in Dubya's own words - want "the justice system [to] affect the flow of capital."

Absolutely, folks ... What in the hell does Dubya expect the ACLU to do when confronted with evidence of prisoner abuse that was signed as an Executive Order by a sitting preznut? Pick a special prosecutor, start torturing the civilians in the Pentagon, put hoods on their heads, cut of an ear for good measure, then soak the bastards with gasoline and threaten to toss the match, like Michael Madson in Reservoir Dogs.

For crying out loud! How much more of this low rent chickenshit are we expected to take from this mindless little cretin? Who really gives a shit if he's got his balls in a vice over this Iraqi mess? If there was any semblance of true justice in America these days, his reeking carcass could be found somewhere at the end of an anchor in the Gulf of Mexico right about now, being torn apart by a Mako shark feeding frenzy.

But America is not so lucky tonight - he is sitting down there in his leather deskchair in the Oval Office, guarded by wild-eyed Secret Service agents and still trying to convince the rest of us that this idea of democracy and freedom in Iraq was a great adventure worth taking while burning every living thing between him and the encircling rounds of puff-ball, sycophant questions by press corps parasites ... and still fascinating the national media with the same homegrown stylings of a pie-faced inbred sowing his cumquat fields on a John Deere, which served him so well in the last weeks of his hijacked election ...

"Last month, Marines across the world broke out their dress blues to celebrate the 229th birthday of the Corps," he said two short weeks ago. "But the men and women of Camp Pendleton's 1st Marine Expeditionary Force marked the occasion a little differently - by fighting the enemies in Iraq."

Well ... hot damn. I might have been tempted to put my overactive mind at ease knowing that the preznut sees the problem in Iraq as not having enough good Marines to sacrifice in the name of God and Country ... but there is a constant suspicion that probably the gang of mean rednecks running the White House has already solved Dubya's problem for him. They are going to indict a few FBI agents for speaking to the ACLU, and then put them all of them on trial for treason.

Dubya already has the playbook on this fiasco. He is not the kind of executive you'd want reporting your earnings-per-share to the SEC, but the gravity of his Iraqi dilemna vis-à-vis the ACLU is so scandalous that even he is beginning to understand the potential danger to his presidency ... and this is the reason, it seems, for the more or less daily idiot-shot comments on cable television, revealing a half-mad and pathetically disturbed mental condition. In this manner Dubya is becoming a mini-carbon copy of Iron Mike Tyson before a big fight when the cameras suddenly capture him in the middle of a pseudo-breakdown - the same kind of two-fisted crazystorm between haldol injections that climaxed with the decision to lunge for Lennox Lewis and shout that he "wants to eat his children" - or the time he figured a way to pour the quicksand on the Abu Ghraib investigation by blaming the Pentagon and Lyndie England with some action photos.

"The methods that the Defense Department has adopted are illegal, immoral, and counterproductive," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "It is astounding that these methods appear to have been adopted as a matter of policy by the highest levels of government."

A two-page e-mail referencing an Executive Order states that the Chimperor directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantanamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."

Once you get past the duh, we knew it all along part, and actually get down to what does this all mean to his presidency, you realize that we are a nation full of scared little sluts who scream for blood at the first sign of hardship or discomfort, and that the hypocritical nature of everything amerikkkan probably means that this probably won't amount to a hill of shit amongst the 51% who voted for him in the first place (and that percentage is still worthy of debate if you believe the news coming out of Ohio these days). Now it's time to demonize the ACLU on the talking heads shows and next they'll be outlawed or called terrorists, or something even worse. Just imagine a crowd of people screaming for revenge outside a prison wall waiting for the execution of a borderline retard to begin in Huntsville, and you've got the Norman Rockwell postcard for Dubyaville ... shallow, vacant, victimized in only their minds because it's somebody else's fault that they live in a trailer and couldn't go to an Ivy League college, totally strung out on what other people tell them is God, and overcome with economic, sexual and personal oppression because no one bothered to teach them how to "think" and "feel" as opposed to "react with outrage," which they do like a bloodthirsty pack of idiot savants during the hours of Desperate Housewives and Judge Judy.

So ... what we could be looking at here, roughly a month before his final Inauguration for anything, is the potential of a multi-millionare ex-preznut and admitted felon; a congenital crook and sociopathic simp who spent ten years on the public dole and then quit suddenly, just before the cord was pulled on the guillotine ... leaving Dick Cheney at the controls all Al Haig-like for the next ten years, or until the pacemaker finally quits reminding his heart that he was still alive. If Dubya fights this one to the bitter end - as he will promise Daddy he will do "as long as the religious right sees it in its grace to forgive him" - he will risk the lifelong national endowment check and his personal security detail, ensuring that he can be seen in the same camera shot as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Dear Old Dad until the funeral procession finally catches up with him.

Most of this annual bonus-baby will arrive, in one shape or another, out of the pockets of American taxpayers. Every single taxpayer, friends. Even Al Gore and John Kerry will kick in a few cents to his retirement slush fund every year. And so will you and I, unless the Democrats rise up and get themselves a special prosecutor and nail the criminally insane filcher to the cross with enough felony counts to strip him not only of the right to vote, like Spiro Agnew, but also cut off his pipeline to the US Treasury - which is not very likely at all given that Cheney knows where all the bodies are buried, and that in itself means he would pull a Gerald Ford and pardon the freak out of sheer guilt by association.

We will hear reports that the soon-to-be ex-preznut gets down on his knees in front of the White House paintings with Condi begging God for strength and insight, and that Dubya frequently bursts into tears for no good reason ... except when the Oval Office runs out of Jim Beam, that he moans and lets out heart-pounding screams of regret every night in his sleep, and The Houston Chronicle will come upon "leaked" psychological evaluations from the Texas Air National Guard indicating that Dubya was "a chronic bed-wetter" and could be found "torturing neighborhood cats" when not hanging around the Officer's Club for free rounds of filth and backwash. And if Dubya still resists the inevitable, his wholesale removal from the office of preznut, the rest of the world will start seeing front-page exclusive photos in The National Enquirer of him alone on the ranch, drooling incoherently on a backyard hammock with alcoholic urine stains on his ranch overalls.

"The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs."
- Tricky Dick, Second Inaugural Address - Saturday, January 20, 1973

In the mean time, where is Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski when you need him? It's really starting to feel like Richard Milhous Nixon all over again.

Sanity Checked Out With the Concierge This Morning

A week-long investigation by our field forces and elements of Zogby International have determined a geomagnetic storm of delirium is gathering on the neo-religious horizon. This phenomenon has also been characterized as religious fundamentalism by the reality based community. Failure to take steps before this madness hits the mainland could inculpate the innocent among us - perhaps leading to the false imprisonment of a few activists, or even some unknowing kids singing the wrong words to Silent Night. During the next few days the world will be overrun, perhaps overwhelmed, by a suck-typhoon of detritus, nonsense, dementia, swill, psychotic apparitions and pseudo-spiritual bullshit of every kind and formula. There will be no relief until the new year is upon us. This problem will be apparent in several perilous forms - and the sane will have to deal with every one of them. Examples are among the following:

1.> The security detail is already paralyzed by wave after wave of GOP morality brochures, libel subpoenas, warning letters of impending doom, elevated levels of save your soul spam, and half-crazy attempts from actual persons or fundamentalists trying to cash in big on this ghastly movement. My team has already executed Plan B by establishing alternative office arrangements, so that the serious business of political opposition cannot be stopped during the holiday season.

2.> Local authorities are expecting major bottlenecks along the beachfront causeways, twenty-four seven, by collections of rabid fundamentalists attempting to drag heavy wooden crosses and other christian paraphernalia into the more public areas for display purposes. To combat this, we have called in private contractors to erect six foot high chain link and cyclone wire at the north face of the area with access validated upon every entry. Motion detectors criss-cross the beach entry portion of the compound and strobe lights with foghorns stand at the ready to alert us if a nighttime operation arrives unexpectedly. Armed guards will be on duty at all times.

3.> Communications technicians have warned us to expect the phone lines to be tied up for hours at a time by offshore christian call centers along with virulent Bible Freaks attempting to dial in with messages like "The Lord's Message for the Day" and "Save Yourself from Satan," and the like. Whenever possible, our custom calling features will intercept many of these attempts. But we do realize that many of our loyal followers will get an all circuits are busy message when trying to reach one of our agents. In the event that our adversaries use the new *38 feature once restricted to law enforcement and private investigators, our new IP-based phone bank can route these kinds of calls to a special queue, upon which they will be answered by voice activated response recordings using the new VXML software bundle that arrived by FedEx yesterday. Doctor Carlos Mongrel, the preeminent authority on deprogramming cult behavior, with a specialty in high tech surveillance from his years in the Air Force Security Agency, has scripted a series of auto-responses for every imaginable fundamentalist angle. In the event that these callers reject the front end defenses, these callers will be given the opportunity to leave their names and numbers on our wave-sampling deck, so Doctor Mongrel can work in depth with these lost souls - personally - between the hours of 3AM to 5AM, when they become sleep-deprived and more psychologically malleable.

These are but the most pressing threats that we will have to come to grips with in the coming days. There will, most certainly, be others - requiring quick reflexes and constant consideration - such as the gutless undermining and ruinous sabotage of our key ground forces. More than likely, some will have passed the character evaluation testing, but no measures are airtight and a few brainless scumbags may have shifted through our security checkpoints and will cave in - capitulating to the beast, as it were - to the dangerous lure of this new christian cult. We have planned for this extreme alternative, and when the organization takes a body blow or two, we will strike back with a series of sweeping countermeasures to seize the hearts and minds of our religious oppressors.

It is a widely held feeling within the walls of Team Gonzography that we are surrounded by a generation of failures, dingbats and parasites hiding within the shroud of secrecy known as the fundamentalist movement, and under no circumstances should these retards be allowed to disrupt our lines of communication or pollute our water supplies or food stuffs ... especially in a season when anyone with enough cash to buy a television station could start broadcasting the Lord's name and purpose in vain. This is not the year to be playing it safe or resisting the urge to insulate oneself from the onslaught - and particularly not in the age of Dubya, when all men are created equal is more of a suggestion than a right for all Americans.

Social prognosticators assume that the pressure will mount in geometric proportions leading up to Christmas Eve, and then become savage on the day itself. In the mean time, our surveillance experts will be monitoring the airwaves for the first sign of a holiday message from The 700 Club or Scarborough Country, which could signal the end of days for the blue states. It is wise to remember that Pat Robertson has already invoked the special stigma attached to "welfare queens driving around in Cadillacs" who really never existed, and the feeling in our compound is that this is the opening salvo of a Christmas invasion.

"There was a time when young teenage girls from poor families, essentially black families, thought that they had a duty to have babies in order to get on the welfare rolls," Robertson said recently. "Because each baby was being paid two or three hundred dollars a month or more, and so they'd help support the family that way."

Team Gonzography cryptologists and its traffic analysis desk will continue to examine this sample of text. And further warnings will be issued, once the fundamentalist forces start massing in the distance. Which they will. We are absolutely confident that our way of life is at stake, if nothing else. What's past is prologue, and what we are facing now is the culmination that's been gathering for the last four years of Dubya ... the very twisted, degenerate, evil, menacing, criminal de-evolution of an entire generation gone batshit over too many failures and a broke-ass state. It will feel like a gigantic Spanish Inquisition rolled up with a little Salem Witch Trial, Conquest of the Aztecs and Rape of Nanking for a little flavor and pure reference. Civilizations have become ancient in the name of vindictive philistines claiming a special relationship to the God du jour.

What we are facing here is nothing less than the meltdown of Western society as we knew it - the utter collapse of another Empire gone insane on its own perpetual illusion - which is more than likely due to its own gluttonous appetite and twisted priorities. This disintegration is already under way. Everything Dubya has ever touched, either in business or politics, is doomed or on its way to being doomed, sooner or later.

But it sure will be sooner if the best alternative that can be mounted is a party of revisionist lunatics who have given up on everything except coexistence and a pathetic revival of every political strategy that landed us in this position in the first place. What a tragedy it is when you consider all the great things that were accomplished in the 1990s - including, among other achievements, a budget surplus, an obedient Pentagon, stability in the world, people at work in a growing economy with higher paying jobs - would somehow lead down to the decaying, filthy and mindless tunnel that is Dubya, Incorporated and his den of corporate cronies.

That is why Team Gonzography is advocating extreme measures during this holiday season and insists that these crapheads must be combated at every turn. There is serious business to deal with in the coming months, and these fuckers must be beaten down now if we want to live for a better day.

Riding out the storm,
Team Gonzography

Memoirs of a Wretched Newsday in America

If I were a soldier overseas wanting to defend my country, I'd want to ask the Secretary of Defense the same question, and that is, are we getting the best we can get us?
- In his own unique fashion, Dubya empathizes with troops who have been without adequate armor for two years, Washington, D.C., Dec. 9, 2004

Slow news days are a depressing event in the business of mainstream media. These are the days - often reserved for Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and almost always Saturdays - when Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer reports from a college campus in prime time, and Joe Scarborough leads off with a story about military wives refusing to wash their matching sweatsuits - while a couple of well-placed fascists like RNC spokesman Jack Burkman or Senator John Kyl or free-lance freakazoid Pat Buchanan calls them un-American - until their loved ones are no longer vaporizing insurgents in Fallujah and Ramadi.

MSNBC will release an hour long special report featuring grim reminders of "The Power of Morality at the Polls." Racist Radical Cleric Jerry Falwell will suddenly appear to debate the evils of sodomy and gay sex, along with the rise of unwanted pregnancies leading to faux-late-term abortions ... and Peter Jennings can be seen dozing off, by the first commercial break, rambling furiously about cats infected with syphilis and treatments for skin cancer and the extreme flaws found in the administration's position on public transportation.

The early news feeds on the satellite dish had Fidel Castro standing off against Christmas, among his reasons for delaying the latest shipment of Havanas; a Greek bus hostage siege ended peacefully when all 23 passengers were freed and police revealed that the two armed gunmen were angry for being Albanian; and a popular item for holiday shoppers in Japan was reported to be the "lap pillow" - skin-colored polyurethene calves folded under soft thighs - a comfy cushion for napping, reading or watching television. The 9,429 yen ($90) pillow, which comes with one red and one black skirt, went on sale in late November and maker Trane Co Ltd says shipments have reached 3,000 in just a few weeks.

Even Bill O'Reilly was stunned, blubbering uncontrollably on FOX about his December 3rd remark to a caller to "go to Israel" if the caller didn't like Christmas celebrations in public schools. Responding to a letter written to O'Reilly finding great objection with his comments, Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) executive director Hannah Rosenthal discussed the issue with him on the December 14 broadcast of The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly. During their conversation, O'Reilly again falsely claimed that Media Matters for America had taken his comment "out of context" and also continued his attacks on Anti-Defamation League (ADL) president Abraham Foxman.

You picked it up from a website that exists only to smear this program. All right? It's sneaky -- it takes things out of context -- and you were used -- you and your fine organization. And I've raised millions of dollars for Israel, by the way. You oughta check that. But you and your fine organization was [sic] used by this far left, deceitful, disgusting website, which has tried to engender an anti-Jewish bias when none exists. And Foxman was used -- B'nai Brith were used -- they were all used. None of them heard it [O'Reilly's December 3 remark], and all of them jumped to the wrong conclusion.

The decomposing pig that is Bill O'Reilly should have killed it right there ... but a pig in a three piece suit is still a swine, and the rabid attack continued with all the false alarm of an enhanced bimbo losing her halter top at the Playboy Mansion, "You character assassins on the left wing websites. Can you hear me all right? Should I speak up a little for you? Speak slower so you can take my words outta context? You weasel! I mean you guys really are despicable weasels."

* * *

For a slow news cycle that should have been enough, even for a day when "Redrum" Rumsfeld was still not dangling from a cold noose in the West Wing - but as the hours crept along, there was more:

Wednesday was Alan Freed's birthday - the man who invented the concept of "payola" in the music business - and also Ludwig von Beethoven's; Walt Disney was put into suspended animation in a cryogenic tank in 1966; Rob Reiner decided to not take an ugly pass at the Califonia governor's mansion until 2010 [via Kos], at the earliest, or at least until the Gropinator blows a gasket with a female aide; and in New England, Bill Belichick was preparing his team to defend its Super Bowl title with or without Charlie Weis, his offensive coordinator set to take the reigns of the Fighting Irish in South Bend.

So much for the news of the day. Rumsfeld will be lucky to last another month, if he doesn't get fragged by angry Marines in Baghdad or find himself whacked by the Pentagon lifers. The names of Wolfowitz, Feith and Cheney are no small laughing matters in the vaunted chamber of horrors that is Dubya, Incorporated, which hijacked and humiliated the world's largest democracy with a gang of psychotic operatives hellbent on debauchery and destruction from the outskirts of Crawford. And on a lighter note: Zell Miller, also known as Senator Foghorn Leghorn when he's not challenging Chris Matthews to a duel or calling Maureen Dowd "a hussy" - the last vestige of the degenerate Dixiecrat plague - has accepted a job at FOX as a commentator, where he will offer heart warming stories on the state of delusions in the Old South, wrapped in a Confederate flag and sharing tales of down-home segregation.

In the land of Dubyaville, even the ignorant come armed with suitcases of cash.

Democalypse Now and Agents of Doom

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
- Edward Abbey

The world is flipping onto its side out here in the West. Against the backdrop of blazing hot questions and blood-red skies the talking heads are finishing with the elegant dissection of Agent Kerik and the hideous aftermath now known as the Democratic Party. Even Brother Wolcott knows "the Democrats are frozen at the steering wheel," sucking the tailpipe of the 18-wheeler that is victorious GOP think-tank, post-election spin - the likes of which would have made a fascist like John Mitchell dance in his grave and gave his wife Martha good enough reason to give up the sauce, had she made it past liver spots and cirrhosis.

But I fear no evil, for the Lord is swimming with the sharks. Yo, though I walk in the shadow of death - or something akin to Redrum Rumsfeld's next briefing from the Pentagon, which many have begun to sense is purgatory for the National Guard - I feel no evil, for the Lord is swimming right through me ...

Lord Jesus, hallelujah. Redrum remains our wild card now that Kerik was tossed out the door like yesterday's dishwater ... or maybe not. Perhaps Alberto Gonzales is the next savior. Who knows? Gonzales is the new lightning rod for the anti-Dubya crowd, but he's as dumb as a bag of rocks. He is something like a college roommate addicted to sex - keeping you awake at night for no other reason than pure voyeurism - just another atavistic creation as Attorney General of the Red States, a vindictive dimwit with an IQ of 72, with a cognizance somewhere between borderline idiot and brain-dead cyclops.

Whereas media coverage of previous administrations focused on one or two of the preznut's indiscretions - Watergate and Monicagate, to name two - Dubya's skeptics have organized their approach into bizarre, little themes that seek to represent the tone of the adminstration; among the most richest veins to examine has been its reliance on secrecy and loyalty. The nomination of longtime Dubya associate and White House legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, a key designer of the preznut's vacant approach to the world over the last four years, suggests that the next four years will represent a move towards an even more extended sense of opaque wonder - like a heavy green cloud oozing above Pennsylvania Avenue, while the nominations keep getting meaner and dumber, leaving the folks-at-home to tolerate more and more of the gutter irregularities witnessed during the November election.

Gonzales' locking down of information - more or less on par with outgoing Pastor General John Ashcroft's - has been well-documented. A recent Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press report claims he's demonstrated "a penchant for strictly regulating access to government and executive-branch information." Meanwhile, the Project on Government Oversight has noted that Gonzales "played a leading role in attempting to chill whistleblowers who contact Congress with information about corporate fraud and abuse." The patterns go back years: The Houston Chronicle reported that Gonzales was crucial in getting then-Governor Bush excused from jury duty in 1996 - a strategy that allowed the governor to avoid revealing his 1976 drunken driving arrest.

So believe me when I tell you this ... The anal-compulsive freakazoid that is Alberto Gonzales is already known as the weirdest act in DC. I remember Ed Meese in his glorious prime and Little Il Duce Gonzales is going to make Deranged Ed - of the infamous Meese Report on Pornography during the salad days of the Reagan Administration - seem as affable and homespun as Wilfred Brimley with a bowl of Grapenuts. Meese may have been a treacherous slug - a low form of existence that sucked freedom into a cave where it was summarily beaten down and turned into a short stash of abject prostitution - but Gonzales is worse. He is beyond scum or pestilence. He is a Patriot Act plague that festers through the skin until the flesh transforms into chowder.

What Gonzales advocates - and continues to brandish like an instrument of death - is the malevolent and pervasive celebration of Mob-style omerta within the White House. There are rarely direct consequences for crossing the bridge on the administration, so to speak, but there now exists a trickle-down effect amongst its power players - leading to covert energy task force meetings, erosion of the Freedom of Information Act, expanding presidential authority to classify government documents. In the end, if Little Il Duce has his way, Americans will be kept in the dark about whatever their elected officials do in their good name, and also downstream how they ever got elected to begin with.

But that doesn't mean that questions aren't already hovering above Dubya's Attorney General nominee. Michael Isikoff of Newsweek offered on Hardball this week, ”It‘s raising some serious questions about the White House vetting operation, overseen by the White House Counsel‘s office, headed by Alberto Gonzales.  I think there‘s a lot of questions to be raised there.  One thing that was clear from the stories over the last week is, there was just a wealth of allegations that swirled around Kerik that were uncovered by reporters since he - immediately after he was nominated, yet somehow a lot of these were just simply not addressed in the vetting process.  So you‘ve got to wonder, where were the vetters?  How tough were the questions asked of Kerik?"

That is the nature of big-money, no-holds barred politics today. Many hear the voice in the distance calling them, but only a few survive the supreme moment of putting their nuts on the line - which appears to be surrounding a few of the new faces in the administration, and our own retarded child preznut these days ... and the witching hour continues, same as it ever was. Degenerate thieves always have ruled the planet with an iron fist and a purpose for knowing. We are just rodents in a Skinner Box searching for cheese.

Checking out of the human race.
Team Gonzography

The Nazi Belch-Tide Reaches Palm Beach

This has been a terrible week for the Amerikkkan Nation, and next week will be even worse as the beginnings of the first fundamentalist onslaught on Christmas begins. The fair and balanced cadre over at FOX is happily promoting the end of secular holiday displays that don't show the scene of a manger, and by next week the Mel Gibson version should transform it into a bloody sadomasochistic ritual of punditry approaching the final climactic scenes of Rosemary's Baby, not that many among the mainstream media have really noticed, or cared. Led by hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity - two pillars of acute decadence and bottomless debasement, no less - FOX News anchors have clearly gotten the Murdoch memo on reporting stories whose theme is the purported marginalization or persecution of christians during the holiday season.

The weekly review show, Inside the NFL, was barely over when I discovered to my horror that "Easy" Rush Limbaugh began chiming in with his own savage opinions from everything to thug-life in the NBA and Democrats wishing for more US deaths in Iraq. Limbaugh's entire broadcasting career - and in fact his very existence - is a crepuscular magnum opus to the notion that not even rabid schizophrenia or impregnable psychosis could prevent a demented retard from climbing to the top of the dung heap in this bizarre culture we have erected within this tiny, disturbed part of the world in the name of "entitlement" and "victim society" and "free trade." For the entire stretch of his demented life, the bottomless pit of Rush Limbaugh's regret and revisionist logic seems to arrive from a deep and perverted self-awareness that he was born stupid and at precisely the wrong time in American history - visions of ripe plantations, barnyard debauchery at the end of garden tools and a stable of under-age mulatto housegirls to ravage in the name of backwoods white supremacy should have been his moral summit. If "Easy" Rush had been born Hispanic, instead of white trash, he would probably have been a low-rent drug dealer instead of a talk show host, not just because many of his past stomping grounds would never have listened to a Hispanic host back in the 1980s, but simply because running a tiny street-based crowd of dope fiends and twenty-dollar suck and spin princesses would have been enough to fuel his maniacal need to be followed and absolutely adored no matter the demographic, political affiliation or reason ... which almost every talk show host craves - from Jerry Springer all the way down to Montel and Opie and Anthony.

On any given day, both the talk show host and the dope dealer come to the reality that by nightfall the trappings of their calling will force them to do inexplicable things that are better left unsaid, and the shadows are something into which the weak should never stare. The window dressing may be different, but the baseline instinct never changes for an instant. Both the talk show host and the dope dealer are condemned to live on like insane junkies looking for the next fix - sometimes crossing the line for ever-more - hooked on that heteroclite energy of their own unfathomable addictions.

With a heavy sense of regret, only because I find the collected works humorous, it is easy to agree with P.J. O'Rourke, a conservative who writes in The Atlantic that he tunes out "Easy" Rush because there's almost no room for debate: "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives." And when I read O'Rourke's piece several months ago I recall feeling angry that a former National Lampoon contributor made the conscious decision to retreat into the dark forays of gothic right-wing hurly-burly, making it okay for a generation of avid readers - of such monumental pieces like How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink - to vote Rethug and, specifically, elect Dubya to anything beyond the office of Town Crank.

It's an ugly prospect these days. How could a once-proud nation have changed so much in the last four years, so drastically that it doesn't look familiar anymore? In what feels like the time it takes to speed through a small West Texas town, Dubya has delivered us from a successful and prosperous nation at peace with the world to a savage nation of freaks and degenerates that are broke or suffocating with debt. And why - exactly - did we go halfway across the world to kill Iraqis with smart bombs and napalm and depleted uranium that is creating a generation of Lon Cheney look-alikes?

Indeed, there is something not right going on here, sports fans, and it's beginning to look like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind - plastic, in bad taste, fraudulent, paranoid, filled with down-low schlock, hallucinogenic, duplicitous and littered with cheap prizes for the terminally offensive. Insane asylums are filled with people who think they're Jesus or Satan. Very few have grand delusions of being a talk show host or dealing dope to crazed addicts and fiends.

Deep, Down and Dirty with Low-Rent Fanatics

Does the essence of reality exist within the jagged white hum of media coverage and political spin, separate, intransigent, foreign, not inclined to gutter fiction? Or could it be an authentic and important concurrence between what reality is and what becomes our perception? Or have we descended into self-fulfilling language that obliges us to use language only in an attempt to obscure and distort reality - to pervert what really happened - because we fear the furious alternative? The media wants us all to be cowards glued to television screens. We can't come to grip with death and sacrifice and what it all means. But we must face all of these possibilities because they have died in our name. And as a free people with informed minds, we must pay attention to all of the grim details - only because it has been done in our name.

It is a very nasty game that these live-wired, mean-spirited fanatics play. Dubya may be the most powerful man on the planet Earth, but the preznut is still petty enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to mess up his party, even by accidental means. And anyone who starts to become giddy with a marked-down version of true geo-political influence should get real familiar, right from jump street, with the definite knowledge that he is going to require some very cruel and ruthless players just to stand up in the morning.

The power of the preznut is so huge that it is perhaps best that the average citizen cannot truly understand the sense of biblical grandeur that arrives with the position - so, in retrospect, it is good that Americans couldn't come to gauge Dubya's true mental state during the campaign, which alternated between fits of addictive megalomania and strains of blood-thirsty, sociopathic desire. There were were moments in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania when even his closest friends and advisers were convinced that the preznut was so vertiginous with fury and vitamin-B shots and delusional splendor that he was two Jim Beam's from serendading Laura to Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl on Larry King and locking himself down in the bunker with Dick Cheney to make that last prophetic phone call to the career freaks in the Strategic Air Command out in Omaha, vaporizing 200 million souls or throwing the world off its axis and into universal freefall.

Would the analysts and assistant directors in the hallowed halls of CIA-central refuse a direct order from their commander-in-chief? And how long would it have taken George Tenet and Condi Rice to realize that Dubya has finally gone off the deep end of the ocean? The preznut had spent so much time out of Washington, by then, that nobody else in the administration would have noticed until he failed to show up on Fox and CNN and MSNBC for his nightly disinformation statement, and he would have had ample time to goad the Israelis and Pakastanis into settling a couple of disputes with the tip of a high-grade nuke.

An embattled career spook who found himself in the Director's chair of the CIA, at the time, with over 20 years of fanatical service to God and country alike would chop of his own legs and eat them with fried zucchini tatter tots rather than reject the preznut's direct order to send the missles skyward with streams of vapor trails arching to the heavens - even if he thought that Dubya was a raving lunatic.

Yeah, you see Tenet was playing a double game. He was trying to be all things to all people ... So when he realized that all this hype about Iraq seeking Uranium from Niger, was based, was false on its face number one, it couldn’t happen, and number two it was based on a forgery, he succeeded in getting that out of the president’s speech on October the 7th, the key one that antedated the vote for war by three or four days. He succeeded in that, but at the very same time, he permitted it to be put in [the National Intelligence Estimate] ... he permitted sections in there, several paragraphs which repeated this charade, this crazy story that Iraq was getting Uranium. So he was indirectly responsible for that appearing in the president’s state of the union address. Why? Well because the White House simply called from the estimate. What the White House didn’t realize perhaps, is that the estimate had already been prostituted, had already been corrupted. It’s usually possible to take an estimate, which is the most authoritative view of the director of central intelligence and say, well this is the last word. Well it wasn’t Tenet’s last word. His last word was saying to the president, please don’t say that, it’s spurious. And yet the estimate prepared at precisely the same time and given to the president over George Tenet’s signature, said just the opposite.

The key to this long-winded rationale is a concept that anyone who ever changed identities at the behest of their goverment soon forgets: "The marbel entrance at Langley might say 'The Truth Shall Set You Free,' but don't be on the wrong side of the political fence." Once you've been given over to the beast, you're a spook - and spooks don't go into underground caves for their country without having somebody on the other side who won't cut the rope. If Dubya's warped brain had been bent far enough to let him think he could save his own political future by conjuring up a dead-on-balls air-land invasion of Guatemala, he would not have given the Shock-and-Awe decree to some neo-pacifist intelligence official who might have taken the extra step of checking with Colin Powell for conclusive evidence that the preznut had not leveled off into a spell of psychotic ideation.

No intelligence insider with enough sense to know that the forests of Virginia are pockmarked with the forgotten memories of defiant wonders would take that kind of risk with his life or limb. By the time that the word got out to the White House press corps - or to Powell, for that matter - that Dubya had given the order to attack Guatemala, the entire Central American rainforest would be a firestorm; Panama, Honduras and El Salvador would already have surrendered not knowing what to expect next, and the blistering orange skies above the Gulf of Mexico would be streaked to the ends of the Earth with strategic bombers and fighter jet support looking for the final kill shot.

Well ... that's enough rationale, I suppose. George Tenet was sworn in as the Director of Central Intelligence on July 11, 1997, "following a unanimous vote by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the full Senate. In this position he headed the Intelligence Community (all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States) and directs the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)." He served as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (confirmed July 1995). In December 1996, following the departure of John Mark Deutch as DCI, Tenet served as Acting Director.

Tenet's government career includes having previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he "coordinated Presidential Decision Directives on Intelligence Priorities, Security Policy Coordination, US Counterintelligence Effectiveness, and US Policy on Remote Sensing Space Capabilities. He also was responsible for coordinating all interagency activities concerning covert action.

Prior to serving at the NSC, Tenet served on President Bill Clinton's national security transition team, where he coordinated the evaluation of the US Intelligence Community. Tenet also served as Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for over four years under the chairmanship of Senator David Boren. "In this capacity he was responsible for coordinating all of the Committee's oversight and legislative activities including the strengthening of covert action reporting requirements, the creation of a statutory Inspector General at CIA, and the introduction of comprehensive legislation to reorganize US intelligence."

Prior to being appointed Staff Director, Tenet "directed the Committee's oversight of all arms control negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States, culminating in the preparation of a report to the US Senate on The Ability of US Intelligence to Monitor the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty." In August 1985, Tenet came to the Committee as designee to the Vice Chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy following three years on the staff of Senator John Heinz "as both a legislative assistant covering national security and energy issues and as legislative director."

So when the word came down tonight that the former DCI had struck a $4 million book deal with Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House, Inc.) to write his memoirs, everybody even vaguely connected to the Iraqi business began cleaning out their drawers and recalling names as the CIA is about to be publicly flogged once again at all ends of its franchise domain ... while Tenet begins defending the case for connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which most of the red states believe, to this day, to be solid gold truth. That appears to be the central point of his long-awaited book, and the talking heads shows are already speculating. Books by former CIA officials have to be cleared by the agency, but Tenet's former spokesman at the CIA, Bill Harlow, said he was "confident that the director will be able to be candid, without running into any difficulties with the clearance process."

The Truth Shall Set You Free. Right.

Family Values from the Mouth of Lunacy

"A good tree can't produce evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree produce good fruit."
- Matthew 7:18

The market kept gaining ground last week. Even the pig-headed preachers were feeling full of themselves, and there was talk on Kudlow and Cramer about the execution and filleting of wild animals for fun and profit. Gas prices retreated a bit, insurance rates kept soaring, and reports of GOP debauchery and duplicity are coming to the surface in the shadow of its most recent New York Coronation along with some homosexual revelations about the wonderfully androgynous boy-wonder himself, Representative David Dreier.

It was another bad week for the Jesus and values crowd. They had already been smacked down once by Frank Rich in The New York Times by pointing out the hypocrisy of red state viewership rates for racy television programming - and now they were going to get smaked yet again, with new revelations about misleading accounts of Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan, which now contradicts earlier military press releases found to be deliberately distorted and incomplete.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said: "I think it would have been helpful to have at least their suspicions known" before he elevated the former NFL star to the status of sainthood. Even more, he added, "the family deserved some kind of heads-up that there would be questions."

During several weeks of memorials and commemorations that followed Tillman's death, commanders at his 75th Ranger Regiment and their superiors hid the truth about friendly fire from Tillman's brother Kevin, who had fought with Pat in the same platoon, but was not involved in the firing incident and did not know the cause of his brother's death. Commanders also withheld the facts from Tillman's widow, his parents, national politicians and the public, according to records and interviews with sources involved in the case.

Short of manslaughter, the most common charge leveled in fratricide is dereliction of duty, or what the military code calls "culpable inefficiency" in the performance of duty, according to military law specialists. This violation is defined in the Pentagon's official Manual for Courts-Martial as "inefficiency for which there is no reasonable or just excuse."

Whatever the cause of death, McCain said, "you may have at least a subconscious desire here to portray the situation in the best light, which may not have been totally justified."

Needless to say, things are not all wine and roses for the Rethugs. Let's face the facts, and then the hypocrisy: Dubya's campaign, a sleazy collection of preachers, lawyers, moralists and crackerjack punishment whackos, had spent the better part of 2004 criss-crossing the country with tales of alleged Democratic atheism and rumors of hedonists committing criminal sodomy with same-sex partners in places like Tupelo and Salt Lake City. The idea was to establish the opposition as some kind of deviant political party that endorsed such heinous things as burning the Bible, relentless violence and child molesting - but in the end there was no concensus on any of these charges, except the high price of call girls willing to do anything in New York City.

“At a bowling party for [closeted] California Congressman David Dreier… a blonde in a fishnet body stocking hung from the ceiling on a turquoise scarf, twirling and contorting,” an observer noted. “Two nights later, at a honky-tonk salute to Texas Congressman Joe Barton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce … a little girl rode an electric bucking bull in an inflatable farm pen, and 20-foot black cowboy boots decorated in purple and gold stood over the room.”

Such contributions pay off in the end: In 1999 Barton pushed a bill to deregulate the entire $220-billion U.S. electrical industry, laying the groundwork and leading to widescale energy piracy leading to the 2001 California energy crisis.

There is only written and spoken evidence at this point, but two reporters thus far have handed over their story to - none other than - Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, charging that the fundamentalist zealots who descended upon New York last August were treacherous mutants worse than Hugh Hefner or the Marquis de Sade, and had spent much of their investigative efforts stalking public urinals and downtown bukkake clinics. Only blabbering and unsubstantiated delusional ramblings could be gathered from the herd of pimps, preachers, crooked security details and flesh merchants.

The final story by the Flynt Publishing people will apparently be an important guide to everything ever documented or photographed in the history of the sex business - tons of pull out color photos, thousands of adulturers and copies of the mailing lists, forums and blogs of every gutter kink, crime, and twisted perversion since Caligula and the Kama Sutra. The new coffee table book, due out in time for the Christmas season, is already guaranteed to peak at number one on Amazon.

"It will rake in more units sold than Kitty Kelly's The Family," said one online sales analyst. "If I was the father of a hot looking little woman when the GOP comes to town, I chain her down in the closet and shave off her hair and break her fingers into a pile of rubble so she couldn't get ten feet from driving into town. The last time one of these conventions came to the city I was a night editor of a major newspaper when Reagan was the king, and it cost me my first wife who was turned into a dirty little freak by conservative sex fiends. She finally found herself a preacher in Oklahoma, and they started their own live sex and sermon shows over the internet."

I know, it's a hard pill to swallow - especially for you folks in the red states. Many of you think the GOP (Good Old Pleasure) convention is all about family values, country music, Jesus in a coal mine, square dancing and near-beer and Tucker Carlson bow ties and glorious renditions of Reaganomics gone supercharged. But it's also the party of hardline capitalism and guns for all and military spending and big oil and repressed sexuality - no matter the flavor - and trips down misogyny lane while driving the Viagra pace car for the Dixieland 500. Take any 10,000 GOP boys and put them in a room with Kinsey and you'll soon find a bucketload of deep-seated anxieties and the most extensive gay-porn collections on the planet. Cut these guys loose amongst their own kind in the wild brush of a big city like New York, and it's like putting a pedophile priest in a schoolyard.

Buy a ticket, take the ride.

Naked and Alone in Maryland; A Tale of Self-Loathing

December 5, 2004
Oceanic Terraces
Hermosa Beach, California

Dear Mistress Michelle,
You may not see this e-mail. Probably you will not read it for a while longer. I will be sure to follow up with another one just to be sure that you have the proper frame of reference, explaining what will have occurred between now and then to keep the story straight. By the time you have the proper time to analyze, the person who wrote it will be underground again beneath the surface of the person you appear to think I am. I am taking the time to explain things further to show you that another person exists - just like you did with those terrible eschatonians, challenging you with their liberal hatred of minority conservatives and your feelings about ethnic heritage - but I'm going to hold onto my cards for the time being because, like a certain character from The Fountainhead, I shall remain true to the iconoclast's mission no matter the outcome. So far so good - and it's made me the tantalizing object of affection for journalism students across this purple nation of Enquiring minds.

I don't know why I bother to answer your e-mails so promptly, given your recent failures. Maybe you are just setting a good example for the holidays. Anyways, it's very noble of you.

Your last response was most interesting at the point where you say in the same breath that you don't want to return to California, but that you "would enjoy very much the pleasure of being near me," if only to run away from a suppressed imagination and that Montgomery County tax assessment debt due by the end of the year. This dilemna, I gather, epitomizes your present state of affairs. Something about burning the candles at both ends and ... poof, it's gone before it got started. What I sense is lurking within you - probably without ever realizing it - is that you are wondering if I could fit into the low-rent lifestyle that you have managed to carve out for yourself. You write you "don't really know what [you] want to make out of [your] life," but I'm gathering that you're simply stuck in awe-struck fascination about my latest offer to come West and begin anew. Not knowing what to do next is itself a pattern of denial, perhaps the most stubborn decision of all possibilities. To take it a step further it's easily the leading social paradigm in the country today, and just another tragic label when we look back at it, for what has become the American lifestyle in the 21st Century. So take it from a studied observer when I say that you are adrift in a very large and jam-packed ocean liner, just meandering around the planet in a fit of aimless parties and introductions in a soon-to-be menacing sea.

There are times when I clearly regret having divorced myself from your cycle of admiration, but it's only because I have maintained a clear and consistent paradigm to life. Things are much simpler this way, and always much more diplomatic. I'm sorry, in a general way, that you were not brought up to believe in such things. I also regret, even moreso, that I have lost the taste for rigatoni quattro formaggi and pan-fried pesto chicken.

It is clear that not much good would result from another visit to the sandy beaches of the Left Coast, only because I don't have the feeling that you would tempt your inner self with my point of view wholeheartedly. It may take a couple more tax payments - and maybe, some more time. (By the way: did you have a chance to view The Last Tango in Paris like I recommended?) I'm in the uneviable position, nonetheless, of hoping that you will reconsider my last offer of substantial journalistic awakening while knowing almost certainly where it would lead us - a veritable nirvana reaching deep into total and revolutionary enlightenment. Of course, it's a blessing and a curse, and it leaves me doubly burdened because of the fact that realize this. I am devoid of any illusions about our association, and sadly I miss them more than anything else.

As for what's in store for you, I guess I am at a loss in explaining what it is about me that attracks you to my way of life, but I'm not careless enough to reciprocate because I think it's based on escapist reality (yours more than mine). It frees the mind, on more than one occassion, to think that we could actually make this work once we get past your tax problem in Maryland. Lord knows we don't want to you to suffer the same fate of Andrew Sullivan this close to the season of yuletide cheer. And every time I think that there is no hope for us, a new piece of information comes across my desk that temporarily convinces me that I may have you pegged all wrong.

Even then, in spite of all that separates truth from diversion, it will come down to how we handle the summer arrangement we have planned. Only fate knows how exactly it will happen - or why, for that matter - but almost anything can happen if you press hard enough, and I may decide to press along with you. It could be interesting, but pleasant. I guess we'll have to see.

If you are at odds about some of the things I've wondered here, just drop me another e-mail to let me know. Clearly, this is one complicated situation, and it pains me greatly to be correct with my conclusions. In the mean time, I don't have much else to do except flogging the administration. It's all good, clean fun anyhow.

Your Starmate Out West,
Team Gonzography

Treachery and the Rush of Mad Darkness

Jesus Christ, when will this finally end? This morning I turned on my TV set - hungry for some decent upbeat reporting of world events - and here was a U.S. military spokesman announcing another round of insurgent attacks beneath the backdrop of escalating violence that elections in Iraq were going according to plan because he thought the White House had more or less determined the timeline for democracy. Gunmen in 11 cars assaulted a police station with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. He said a U.S. military Humvee was also damaged. There were no American casualties. There was no word on the insurgents' casualties.

In Mosul, fighting began when insurgents fired several mortar rounds at a U.S. base, causing no damage or casualties. Iraqi and American forces went out to find the source of those attacks and came under fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. Some of the gunmen took cover in a mosque that Iraqi commanders then cleared, finding stores of weapons, another U.S. military spokesman said later in the newsday.

Indeed, we are stuck in a serious dung heap in Iraq - and the for the next five or six years to be sure, if you believe all the revisionist muck coming out of Tom Friedman's mouth - losing a public relations battle in the Islamic street to blood-thirsty freakazoids sawing the heads off Muslims and relief workers.

Even a blind rodent finds an overflowing trash can now and then. Friedman's voice just belched out of the TiVo, demanding that we get to the bottom of this Iraqi mess, but meanwhile we have to make sure that Americans understand that this is a long term effort, and that the Ruskies, French and Germans better come to grips that we're firmly behind the preznut on this.

But the first rule of cooking and warfare is: Never take the lid off a boiling pot unless you also have a strategy for turning down the heat. President Bush had a lid-removing strategy only. He's been improvising on the heat part ever since.

Right. Step away from the cooking sherry, Tom, and get out of the kitchen as soon as possible. Get your coat and get in the meat wagon and don't speak to anybody on the way out. If GOP powers-that-want-to-be like John McCain and Dick Lugar are comfort to the party's loyalty barometer for the pigeon-hearted, unprincipled little wretch they were calling - when they nominated him "Amerikkka's Savior" three months ago in New York - "a man of solid principles" and "an important [preznut] for a challenging time in American History." I hope somebody keeps those tapes for posterity's sake because we are unlikely to hear such praise ever again for the Chimperor - from Rudi, McCain, the Gropinator, Tommie Franks, Lynn Cheney, Senator Frist or anyone else in Rethug green room. Soon, not even Dick Cheney will join the Oval Office foursome with the ginned-up, smiling moron in charge. The hallways to the West Wing will no longer echo with the sound of happy impatience or bouncing golf balls. Or tennis balls or footballs either ... or any other sign of giddy power taking a break.

The tough-minded politicos and foreign policy ideologues the preznut selected to run his affairs will eventually turn on each other like cockroaches in a flood when the first signs of terrorism strike the Iraqi election in January. What we have begun to see in the past few weeks is the bizarre pageant of a defacto President of the United States either removing or being hastily abandoned by many of his hired guns and cronies - most of the people who put him where he is today, in fact, and now that they're gone he seems more helpless than he did when reading My Pet Goat in that infamous classroom. A few of his closest advisers will soon head for the golden parachute of Simon and Schuster, Viking Books or Free Press, his party's majority status is being torn apart from within, and his painful march towards presidential legacy is being scribbled down in invisible ink by angry historians begging for one final shot across the bow.

About a month ago he was king of the world, dictating that he now had a mandate while calling for the firebombs and crap storms down on friend and foe alike - being the most powerful man since Gengis Khan can do that to the ego - but all of that seems to have disappeared and nothing he does now will ever return him to the mountain top. Dubya's next crisis in January will be his last. Even he knows it. He will be plumped right down next to Nixon and Harding as one of America's most terminally noxious presidents.

The slow-burning central horror of Iraq is not that it might wind up at the feet of a special prosecutor investigating a spiteful thug of a preznut whose entire political career has been a how-to book on the same kind of cheap shots and insidiousness that will be his undoing, but that the rest of us will somehow fail to learn anything from the painful exercise.

To date - with the worst news yet to come - there is a vindictive tide of public opinion that says whatever the preznut and his tight gang of delusional comrades and political mercenaries might have have done, it was probably no worse than what every preznut has done since the days of Ulysses S. Grant, and will continue to do so.

Anyone who really sticks a fork in this piece of truth is a fool - but a lot of people have, and that little taste of evidence is extremely hard to overlook. What almost happened in America - and what was only avoided because the devious powers who made the Dubya and who were running amok in his name knew deep in their hearts that they were all cruel, hypocritical little maggots who couldn't risk imprisonment by turning on each other - was an utter takeover and a total upheaval of the American modus operandi by a coalition of whorish fixers and degenerate profiteers so bankrupt on principle that they couldn't even stick to the same story when it came to rationalizing an invasion in the first place ... which appears to explain, among other things, why 1,200 young American kids died for no reason in the Middle East while Dubya and his truth caterers are still trying to find a way out of this mess without having to admit that it was a mistake.

In the Middle East - and in many parts of the world, for that matter - there are no civil societies just waiting to break free of totalitarian rule, becoming united and democratic in principle and in process just because an occupying power says it worked for them. Only a butcher like Saddam could have kept that country from imploding given the religious and tribal differences held in contempt and conspiracy amongst the warring factions for decades. If Dubya and his temple of doom at the Pentagon thought Saddam to be an artificial or transparent must-have, they should be boiled alive immediately in the Library of Congress and kept conscious long enough so that the families who lost a loved one can spit in their direction knowing that it stuck, before raging heat forces the body to succumb to the ghoulish soup.