UPDATE: Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down This Wall! (Let Krugman Speak)

FURTHER UPDATE: Steve Gilliard at The News Blog has also noticed something strange in Tierney and Brooks, as his title subtlety suggests.

Brad DeLong picks up from Krugman's column and adds this:

Say, rather, that five things are going on:

1. The rise of a very powerful, successful, exploitative upper class.
2. Further increases in inequality as the tax and transfer system becomes less progressive.
3. Increases in risk that threaten to move middle-class families sharply downward in the wealth distribution.
4. Skill-biased technical change that sharply raises the benefits to education.
5. Holes in the safety net--the fall in the value of the minimum wage, time-limited welfare, and so forth.

____________________________________________________________________

Mr. Sulzberger, Let Krugman be heard! In one sense, there is nothing particularly new in Krugman’s latest column, “Graduates Versus Oligarchs”, as it fits neatly with one of his central themes – the crushing and cruel concentration of wealth within the absolute pinnacle of American society. But the hard numbers tell such a harsh and unjust story that it stuns anew: “. . . . income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent”. Four-Niner-Seven ladies and gentlemen, Four-Niner-Seven. Really wraps a pretty little bow around the Bush and Republican tax polices, doesn’t it?

The column may well be Krugman’s 497th wake-up call, but how well can he be heard behind the New York Times’ subscription wall? Of course, progressive bloggers and even other columnists will pick up the call, but they lack Krugman’s command of the subject matter, his authority and his focus. Inevitably, others picking up Krugman’s column will not so much amplify as distort and dilute it, as they are much given to digressions and ad hominine and long-past relevant attacks on President Clinton. President Clinton may have been riding the rising wave of wealth inequity, but at least he tried to channel some of it off and his tenure was nothing if not prosperous for the country at large. The Republicans, in contrast, have set about pumping wealth ever higher, and are morbidly busy plugging any and all leaks – not one drop, not one cent, to be lost on the inexorable journey to the summit.

Not only does the Times wall-off Krugman behind their pricey and elitist Select scheme, they also drown out his message by continuing to put out and promote the drek that Brooks and Tierney pump out. Bread and circuses have given way to HDTVs and SUVs. Brooks and Tierney work the cultural smoker, fogging up and fouling the air that surrounds Krugman. Tierney today has another cultural fantasy piece, one of a series he and Brooks seem to be running wherein they shapeshift themselves into middle class working moms, explaining everything away in a kind of warmed over Madison Avenue of the Fifties version of momhood and family life for the common folk. It’s more than a little creepy. Brooks, at one point, seemed to edge dangerously close to a sick pathology, when he peeped in on the schoolgirl set’s chatroom banter in “Bondage and Bonding Online”. I’m not kidding, you can link it up. It’s not hard to fathom what motivated Brooks in that particularly disturbing column, but his larger mission is to distract and divide the country with cultural folderol. Brooks blithely explains away the unconscionable siphoning up and off of this country’s hard-earned wealth by attributing it all to the good study habits and clean living of his kind. Brooks’ people aren’t merely guys born on third base thinking they’ve hit a triple; they’re born like they’re white Jackie Robinsons, halfway home down the third-base line with the ball just barely at the release point in the pitcher’s hand.

Never mind the Oligarchy, be afraid of everything else in this world. Be morbidly obsessed with clumps of DNA in strange women’s wombs in every hamlet across America. Go to the Corporate Church of choice. Meanwhile, the working class, the middle class, even the marginally wealthy class are slipping. Everyone knows it and doesn’t want to think about it, no less talk about it. Each of or our ends ends in a bed with a drip, but for those below the Oligarchy, it is a lifetime’s work dripping away through our IVs. No matter no mind. Most Americans are being stalked by debt and healthcare costs and the dimming prospects of our sons and daughters. Boomers are increasingly facing a choice between a reasonably comfortable retirement, or giving the kids at least a puncher’s chance of approaching their parent’s standard of living. You can’t have both.

And the Republican approach to all this is to accelerate the inequity by unconscionable tax breaks for the ultra rich and by trying to pull the plug on the New Deal’s life support. They seem intent on cut-pursing Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and whatever other safety net the rabble is seen clinging to. What moves them to all-hands-on-deck panic? Not Katrina. What kicks the machinery of Republican activism to adrenaline rush status? Not the prescription drug debacle. No, we’re not sweating those details. Instead, what lights their fire is the awful, unthinkable, nightmarish prospect that the UAE’s ruling Oligarchy might have to forego one small (by their standards) trinket to add to their vast horded wealth. This is what moves the movers and shakers of the Republican Party.

Full Port Press

The New York Times (and other misguided liberal columnists and bloggers) are engaged in a bizarre full-court press to ram the UAE-Ports deal through. Krugman is, as usual, the sensible, if skeptical outlier, but The Moustache of Understanding, Brooks, and Kristof are falling all over themselves trying to make the ports into a litmus test for Arab-bias. It all sounds very noble, very Grey Lady-ish, but it still makes no real-world sense. I have to assume that despite their world-traveling, these guys have never encountered a foreign-run corporation operating on American soil. Sure, the UAE will keep a lot of white, American faces visible, but the nuts and bolts of the operations will certainly be controlled from the UAE, and we will all have to take it on faith that things will be done in strict good-faith.

The UAE has a long history of complicated (to be generous about it) relations with radical, militant Islamists. Even when they are in a public stance of direct and forceful opposition, the back-channel monies and communications continue to flow. From their point-of-view, there is no inconsistency because that is simply the way they keep the lid on the powder keg they sit on at home. They will present, and perhaps even believe, they are completely committed to protecting US interests, but that will be subject to the same sort of hidden hedge-betting that is an integral part of their home rules.

What all this translates into is an unacceptable risk. Perhaps not a certainty of disaster, but certainly a significant and unnecessary risk. So until further notice, they do not get the keys to our ports, or our airports, chemical plants, etc.

I have a suggestion for the Times and like-minded liberals, straining to reach out to the Arab world. A better way of demonstrating a just and enlightened attitude toward Arabs would be to not elect to invade their countries on false pretenses, not kidnap, not hold-without-charge, not murder, not torture, not humiliate and not rape their citizens. And the best and most meaningful way these guys can do this is to not support the Administration’s ongoing efforts to make that sort of treatment a permanent part of our foreign and domestic policy.

The difficulty with this approach for this sort of liberal (leaving out Brooks and his ilk) is that it frustrates the subtext of this support – the straining, unforgivable need to reach out once again to the Bush Administration. After having been seal-clubbed to a bloody pulp over and over again over the last six years, they still are asking, bleating, “why can’t we be friends”? The Bush Administration club is not a surgical instrument. It is the bluntest and crudest of instruments. It is all about battering away for all their worth, never pausing a second to engage in the kind of nuanced reasoning that these back-sliding, gutless liberals return to like a compulsion.

There's Bear in the Woods and a Jackal on the Docks

There is a bear in the woods. For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who is right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear....

There's a jackal on the docks. For some people the jackal is easy to see. Others don't see it all. Some people say the jackal is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. (Everyone says the jackal is filthy rich) Since no one can be really sure who is right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the jackal? If there is a jackal . . . . Isn't it smart to at least close the damn kitchen screen-door?

"Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?"

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

David Brooks, Water-carrier, at your service, Mr. Bush. But the strain is starting to show. He's suddenly quite taken with a bleeding heart concern for Arabs, but of the tonier sort, of course. Sure the UAE has gotten US Security religion all of a sudden, but that's because they were in up to their eyeballs in terror-financing and facilitating previously.

I wonder if David Brooks has ever lived in the world? How else could he make such silly statements so consistently? "Nor would the deal radically alter the workplace. If the Dubai holding company does acquire the operating firm, the American longshoremen would stay on the job, the American unions would still be there to organize them, and most or all of the management would probably stay, too." Yeah, David, rest assured that Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed wont make a move unless he has Johnny Friendly's blessings. The UAE has first, last and always been about transparency.

And it has come to this: "The oil-rich nations of the Middle East have plenty of places to invest their money and don't need to do favors for nations that kick them in the teeth." We have come to be dependent on the kindness of oil-rich strangers.


Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

"Report Suspicious Activity to 1-800-BE-ALERT"

If you mosey by the US Customs and Border Patrol website, you'll see that phrase "Report Suspicious Activity to 1-800-BE-ALERT", which should be familiar to anyone who's ever ridden I-95 down the Atlantic Corridor. When you're in your car buzzing by the Chesapeake Welcome Center, using your cruise control like a restrictor plate, thinking how right Jean Shepard was when he uttered the immortal ". . .God, I love I-95!", well then that admonishing phrase, in a whole continuing series of "South-of-the-Borderesque" signage, is a little out of place. Who can spot suspicious activity at 75-plus? And given the wastes that line the roadway, what would constitute suspicious activity? Someone harvesting Christmas trees from the decretory splendor that is I-95's landscaping?

But "Report Suspicious Activity to 1-800-BE-ALERT" definitely belongs on US Customs and Border Patrol websites and materials. It's not overdone, just persistently there on the left hand margin, floating over to each page you surf to.

Turning the ports over to UAE is, of course, a fantastically, almost an impossibly bad idea. Without the UAE's critical assistance, travel and lodging amenities, general facilitating and magnanimous financial support, there could not have been a 9/11.

If the Saudis rightfully claimed top billing for 9/11, UAE would have been up for Best Supporting. They provided OBL and the Taliban with an unfettered travel point of departure, virtually un-reviewed passporting and visa services, and was pretty much the ATM for the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 Commission Report is lousy with references to the UAE. One of those haunting missed opportunities to take OBL out before 9/11 prominently featured the UAE, and it's important to note that during this period the UAE was trying not to tick the US off, and that while it was still a few years before 9/11, we were then trying to take OBL out:

The Desert Camp, February 1999

During the winter of 1998-99, intelligence eported that Bin Ladin frequently visited a camp in the desert adjacent to a larger hunting camp in Helmand province of Afghanistan, used by visitors from a Gulf state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab Emirates. . . . National technical intelligence confirmed the description of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the UAE. The CIA received reports that Bin Ladin regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited with Emiratis. The location of this larger camp was confirmed by February 9, but the location of Bin Ladin’s quarters could not be pinned down so precisely. Preparations were made for a possible strike at least against the larger camp, perhaps to target Bin Ladin during one of his visits. No strike was launched.

According to CIA officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike might kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by. The lead CIA official in the field felt the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the UBL unit chief at the time agrees. The field official believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.

On February 10, Clarke reported that a top UAE official had vehemently denied that high-level UAE officials were in Afghanistan. Evidence subsequently confirmed that high-level UAE officials had been hunting there. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on and the immediate strike plans became moot. In March the entire camp complex was hurriedly disassembled.

Poor, Poor Pitiful Me (I shot a man in Texas just to watch him die)

UPDATE: I may never stop throwing up. Joe Klein has an incredible, gushing weeper of a Valentine to Cheney in the online edition of Time Magazine. It is impossible to come up with a more inappropriate analogy than the one Klien does, likening the unpleasantness accompanying Cheney's unbridled bird-blasting to the experience and countenance of veterans who have been subject to prolonged periods of live-fire combat. Kos has a commentary on Klein, and Charles Pierce at TAP lets Klien have it with both barrels. Sorry.

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Of course their first instincts were to try and spike or spin the story, but that damn Harry Whittington had gone and got himself shot, shot real good. Unless he had the decency to go crawl off under some scrub brush and die like a wounded animal, there was going to have to be hospitals and medics and such, and you show up with a face full of buckshot and people are bound to ask questions, like "Who the hell shot you in the face!" So they were faced with the inevitable disclosure, and a real beaut too, the type of incident where even Karl Rove would have to tell the Vice President, "Well there's no way to make it sound like an achievement".

Rove may be without peer when it comes to message massaging, but this Administration, with their Homeric, Titanic string of screw-ups, long ago outstripped his arts. Rove has only one speed really, and it is to tweak and tweak our biases, over and over again, so that they become self-reinforcing and amplifying to the point they drown out the details, the actuality. But there are some things, like doodlin' around on a guitar and cramming ice-cream cake into your gob while one of America's greatest cities drowns, that can not be obscured or disguised. Shootin' a guy in the face with a shotgun is also like that. More and more, what Rove does seems like dropping a dried-out turd on a fancy china plate and sprinkling a little sawdust on it, hitting the Old Triangle and yelling, Chow's On! I don't know how much more of this we can digest. Of course, there will always be those salivating at the sound of the Triangle, and this time, Brit Hume came loping up, eyes drooping and Basset Hound tail wagging, and afterwards "Please sir, I'd like some more".

So we come to Vice President Cheney's begrudging Fox interview. "And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life". I don't think Harry Whittington will be too fond of the day, either. What can you say about Brit Hume? Murrow during the Blitz he ain't:

Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of
his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.
Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.

Part of the post-blast spinning was to trivialize Whittington's injuries "It was almost like he was spending time with me in my living room," said hospital administrator Peter Banko, who visited Whittington." But it seems like the guy settin' a spell in that 'living room' was in pretty rough shape:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --
Q What did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him.

* * * * *

Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.

Cheney's cover blind for not informing the press – that they first had to await a prognosis – is ludicrous. Only Administration stooges like Brit Hume or David Brooks would buy such nonsense. Why not wait until Whittington's fully recovered (let's all hope he does)? That way the whole thing can be presented as an inspirational feel-good story of the year! Cheney was in secure-undisclosed-location lockdown, hunkered in until he could get a fix on how big a disaster he has wrought this time. Despite his lip-service about concern for the Whittington family, Cheney couldn't quite bring himself to bring it off convincingly:

Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the
ranch --
Q Right, what about his children?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made.

Harry was leaving the ranch alright, with his face and vital organs full of buckshot. His daughter was quoted as saying she didn't know whether they were taking him to the hospital or the mortuary. Back at "Ranch Headquarters", Vice President Cheney had moved on to more important considerations – whether it would advisable for him to venture back out for more firearms hijinx on Sunday:

Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt.
I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said
I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think
about it.

He's thinking about it? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Special note is taken today, for David Brooks' tear-stained hissy fit in which he laments the state of the Washington politics. What is this world coming to, when the Vice President can't blast his friend in the face with his fancy Italian shotgun, without everyone making a big deal about it? He chides the press and Democratic politicians for not letting Cheney have his little fun in private, but Brooks falls to pieces, all busted-up inside, just thinking about the toll this must be taking on Cheney:

On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.

"The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind," Dick Cheney told Brit Hume yesterday, adding, "It was ... one of the worst days of my life." Afterward, he looked back, relived the moment and took responsibility. "It was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else," Cheney said. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.

Unremarkable? I know this is Dick Cheney we're talking about, a guy with the blood of tens of thousands in his hands, but unremarkable? Whittington is gracious, but given his 'sloppiness' it’s the least he could do for his Shooter. I don't know, I just don't see anguish coming from Cheney. And decent? There's a word that seldom seems to work its way into a paragraph containing the word "Cheney". 'Normal' people will reserve their sympathy for Cheney. Whittington gets concern, but that's only because if he lingers or fails, it will only cause Cheney more political grief. Heavy sob.

Grace Under Fire

It's cheering isn’t it, the way the Administration reacted to Cheney's General Mapache turn over the weekend? They tried to put Jayson Williams in jail for this sort of thing. Jayson seemed to think his bedroom was a covey, but he had the better aim. Where Cheney has it all over Williams is in the proactive public relations campaign, alternatively yucking it up over the face-spraying with outright blaming of the victim. Apparently Cheney's "line" of fire is a 360 degree radius. Pretty soon they'll have worked themselves up to "he had it coming". But then these are the geniuses behind those witty "purple heart Band-Aids" at their nominating convention, the same crew that took down Senator Max Cleland, more of a blob than a man (when was the last time he was on a mountain bike?).

Steppin' Into Eden, Yea Brother

Weirdness today from the New York Times' John Tierney, "And on the Eighth Day, God Went Green", who takes off on the formation of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a group of Evangelical Christians advocating a proactive response to human-induced global warning, to riff dismissively on environmentalism generally. Tierney argues that Evangelical Christian's joining the global warming battle was predictable because "America has one truly national religion: environmentalism." At first blush, equating environmentalism, which is marked by a concern with global warming, with religion seems odd because the growing awareness of the threat from global warming is a product of the scientific community, a group which has a fair share of agnostics and atheists within its ranks.

But then, the Religion of Environmentalism is the favored Conservative meme in their attempt to stem the tide of growing awareness of global warming. Conservatives by nature are uncomfortable with the scientific process with its ceaseless prodding at established orthodoxy and its moral value-neutral logic. The Bush Conservatives also have a serious problem with the scientific community's reliance on facts. The Bush Administration is much more comfortable in dealing with arguments, as they ordinarily do in the political and policy realms, because arguments have emotional components which can be tweaked or twisted as the case requires. Global warming science is a particular thorn in Bush's side because consideration of the potential consequences leads in fairly short order to a re-examination of the role and unfettered primacy of the Oil Industry in our economy and our environment, and Bush is a creature of Big Oil. Chris Mooney's website is a virtual clearing house of information on what he terms "The Republican War on Science".

Tierney is a soldier in that war, and his column is engaged in the undermining of science by equating it with religious faith. Rather than answer the hard science behind global warming, Tierney (and Conservative Republicans) instead attempt to sweep up people who acknowledge scientific fact with those for whom environmentalism is a spiritual commitment (the tree-hugging, open-toed sandal crowd) and then to dismiss them all as a bunch of hippie dingbats.

It may be true that global warming appeals to the finger-wagging Calvinist scolds among us, but the fact that various groups, whether they are Calvinists or New Age Gaians, project their moral judgments onto empirical data does not say anything at all about the efficacy of the science produced that data. You do not need to have a bleak view of American capitalism to be able to read a thermometer. The world is getting hotter Mr. Tierney, and our industrial output is helping to make it so. That only becomes a moral condemnation if we fail to do anything about it.

Tierney ends his column with a classic false choice by setting climatic sciences in opposition to global efforts to combat disease and lack of drinking water. As if third world drinking water and sanitation would ever be a priority for this Administration! Why there would be Evian and Scotts Tissue for everyone everywhere, but for the enormous drain on the budget from this Administration's slavish commitment to slowing global warming.

Set Out Another Dessert Plate

UPDATE: Again with the death fantasies? Ann Coutler was apparently at it again today, as Max Blumenthal posts over at Huffington Post. Coutler was playing to her crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference today, so you can imagine each cheery thought was greeted by guffaws, foot-stomping and back-slapping.

Coulter on killing Bill Clinton:
(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemna) "There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'"

Coulter on the Supreme Court:
"If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?"

CNN announced the hiring of the reprehensible radio "personality" Glenn Beck with great fanfare, and he's since been straining at the bit to be zany and controversial to live up to the hype. Normally that would be enough for me to put him on permanent "ignore", but Media Matters is officially on his case. Media Matters does matter, because the Right Wing Noise Engine is a perpetual motion machine, continually churning out propaganda. The output volume alone requires the coordinated and intelligent response that Media Matters provides.

Beck, in a bid for up-to-the- minute, cutting edge topicality, has dragged President Carter's tired old bones back into the public square for flogging: "Beck rants: Jimmy Carter biggest "waste of skin"". Media Matters provides a taste:

BECK: Is there a day that God ever says, "What was I thinking?" Here's what I mean: Do you think God ever says, "I could've used that skin making somebody of value, you know? I could have used that skin in such a -- just a better way." You know? And its not -- the reason why I bring this up is: Is there a bigger waste of skin than Jimmy Carter? Ya know, I don't mean to, you know, I don't mean to look the maker in the eyes and say, "Eh, kind of a waste," but I'm asking, do you think he ever thinks, "I don't know, man, I could've used that skin someplace else." You know?

The above certainly captures Beck's erudite wit and charm, but the more offensive and more explicit part of Beck's rant tries to draw a roadmap for motivated listeners:

BECK: I think Jimmy Carter is the luckiest man on earth, because he's still walking around. And he was president of the short-term memory country, you know what I mean? . . . . You know, maybe, Jimmy, we wouldn't be in this problem if, I don't know, you didn't have the helicopters burn in the middle of the desert. If you wouldn't have let the whole Islamic revolution thing happen in the first place. What do you say, James? Is there a bigger waste of skin than Jimmy Carter?

When you put the idea that Carter aught not be allowed to be "walking around" together with scapegoating him for all of our troubles in the Middle East, and then repeatedly bray that he's a waste of skin, you are certainly in Coutler Country, and I don't for a minute think Beck strayed there unawares. Set out another plate of cream brulee. CNN should pull the plug on Beck immediately.

NY Times: In Service to the Cause

The New York Times throws a one-two combo-punch at the Democrats again today, with the front page jab "Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities" and an Op-Ed shot to the labonze by Maureen Dowd in "Who's Hormonal? Hillary or Dick?" with her new and ground-breaking innovation of analogizing politics to adolescent dating, a first for Miss MoDoDo.

In the front page story, the Times has already called the Congressional elections, still some months beyond a year off, for the Republicans. The entire article drips with contempt for the mealy-mouthed Democrats who, despite President F.U.B.A.R.'s spectacular misadventures, still have managed to screw the pooch. Read it if you must, but I'll spare you by providing the operative terms used to describe the Democrats: ". . . .weaker than they hoped for . . . . failed . . . . worse . . . . [W]e seem to be losing our voice . . . . frustrations afflicting Democrats . . . . largely marginalized . . . . flawed messengers . . . . fellow citizens have doubts about us . . . . Do you get the picture? Bush = Action Hero President; Democrats = clueless, wishy-washy mopes. Sensing? What a weak-o word! They should have titled the piece "Jellyfish Democrats Sensing Abject Defeat!"

Of course, there have been a few Democrats who have not lost their spines, and who seem to have found their voices and a moral imperative, a calling, to challenge this abysmal and un-American Administration. Al Gore has delivered a series of thunderous and thoughtful broadsides against the Bush Administration's grossest abuses, and John Kerry, freed (at least for now) from the temporal immediacy of campaigning, has recovered himself and re-learned to not equivocate and to stand firm. John Edwards has remained positive and proactive ever since the 2004 election.

This is where Dowd comes in. She deals with the "problem" of Democrats who do not fit the Times' and Republican conception of Democrats as the Party of quivering, cowering worry-worts, in typical fashion, by tarting up Republican talking points into her usual Zoey 101-speak. She 'femanizes' Gore into a "Beta Tree-Hugger", characterizes Kerry as a "Waffling War Wimp with Hectoring Wife", and Kerry is swishy in the bargain, because Edwards is "his true bride, the Breck Girl". Why, the entire Democratic ticket in 2004 was light in the loafers! Hillary Clinton, in Dowd's view, is . . . . well Dowd is all over the place. Hillary is either too butch or too timid, too calculating, something, you tell me . . . . just plain wrong! Howard Dean "The Scream"? Enough said.

Dowd, having lined up and knocked over the most prominent Democrats (for the 115th time), then casts her girlish gaze about, looking for any new threats to the Republican orthodoxy, and lights on Barrack Obama. She is a little late to the party, as Josh Marshall has already identified Obama as the new target of opportunity for Republican Media. Obama hasn't really opened himself up to attack, so Maur-Maur stretches and strains to recast Obama's recent dust-up with Maverick McCain (in which Obama has come off quite well) as "snide and bitchy, more like an angry missive of a spurned lover to an ex-boyfriend than a note from a respected senior senator to a respected junior one." Dowd's whole column is cross-dressed today. Maybe the strain of being over 40, single and fabulous is getting to her. The one positive note (and I will restrain from drawing analogies as to what kind of note it is) the lonely Dowd pens is to Condi Rice, whom she describes as "hyperarticulate and bristly when she gets mad, but not bitchy." In the eyes of the Beholder.

Thomas L. Friedman and the Unbreakable Shovel

Navigator, Navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
Yes to shift a few tons of this earthly delight

In my youth, there was a phrase my father sometimes used against me that never failed to cut me to the core, "You broke your shovel". The rebuke was deployed when I had fouled up some task beyond fixing, and more than that, demonstrated that I could not be counted on due to a lack of trustworthiness and character. Though there was work to be done, and my father in need of assistance, and I otherwise capable of lending a hand, so shabby was my performance as to render myself useless. An altogether ignominious sending to the showers. Think of the imagery, a mountain of earthly delight to be shifted, and me, standing hapless with only a handle in my hand. You don't get a badge of dishonor like that through mere negligence or accident, you earn it.

Thomas L. Friedman has given President Bush an unbreakable shovel. Its like's Friedman's that robotic kid from "The Polar Express", squeezing closed his eyes, praying to himself, "I do believe! I do believe!" and presto! he is still able to hear the magic bell! No amount of lying, corruption, incompetence and disaster can break Freidman's will to believe that this Administration operates in good faith.

Things have gotten bad enough for Thomas L. that in his latest column, "Will Pigs Fly?", he preempts the field and gets the drop on everyone by calling himself "weak in the knees", in need of some spine, and, of course, a "moron". Now, "Moron" that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. And also, uh Dude, Moron is not the preferred nomenclature, uh "Idiot", please. Friedman's words have become like silver iodide seeded onto cumulus clouds, always producing a downpour of ridicule and laughter. Still, there's something pathetic in the spectacle of the man trying to beat everyone to the punch.

In the face of all that has happened over the last few years, the endless rounds of empty Administration promises and outright lies, and in full knowledge of who George W.T.F. Bush is, and the oily spring from whence he sprung, Friedman is, in his own words, giving Bush "a new reputation to live up to". This new Friedmanified Bush is an environmental progressive, someone suddenly in absolute earnest and concerned about global warming and the state of American education. There's not a moment to lose! Crank up the windmills! Get Willie Nelson with his Crisco-fueled car on the horn!

And this new Bush, sanctified and transformed by the munificence of the Mustache of Understanding, well for this Bush, words have actual meaning beyond their power to fool the rubes for another day. I have come to expect so much from Friedman, but even so, he has the capacity to astound. Friedman's blumpy gullibility produces this bizarrely insane sentence:

"When the president changes language on an issue like this - in a sustained manner (and we still have to see if it will be sustained), the whole country and bureaucracy starts to talk differently. "

Whatever can he mean? No one believes a thing this guy says. Even Peggy Noonan is tuning him out: "The president's State of the Union Address will be little noted and not long remembered. There was a sense that he was talking at, not to, the country. . . . It went through a reported 30 drafts, was touched by many hands, and seemed it. Not precisely a pudding without a theme, but a thin porridge." But even Friedman may be becoming dimly aware that Bush is long on promise, short on delivery. After issuing Bush his 115th Free Pass, Friedman includes this ominous warning shot: "And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip for it". I foresee many sleepless nights at the White House, "Karl, drop everything you're doing and get on this energy addiction thing right away. There's not a moment to lose! Friedman's on our case!"

The Laughing Stock climbs ever higher.