Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Driftglass reviews the Sunday talking heads and churns out another gem.

Anything short of an eternally open-ended "Yea!" to the campaign to Completely End Badness in the Cradle of Civilization = disater and failure.

Which, in a completely unintentional sense is true. Iraq is the Neocon’s Pickett’s Charge, and the Bush Administration’s Carthage. A complete and unqualified failure of every Neocon orthodoxy at every level.

And to admit their failure in Iraq would mean to admit that Neoconservativism -- the ideological framework which created PNAC; the disease for which Iraq is merely the most violent symptom – is also a failure.

And Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and the rest of the residents of the Neocon Jonestown will see America completely hollowed out and emptied into Iraq – our treasury gone and our army destroyed – before they admit that their National Socialism Lite has been the Father of the Iraqi Disaster, and not its savior.

[...]

One replacement, for example, was previously disbarred. One is the thrall of Don Karleone. All the USAGs who were kicked were done so for reasons of performance.

Which was, inarguably, a lie.

But of course Republicans lie as unselfconsciously and enthusiastically as my cat licks its ass.

It is their nature.

No, what is completely freaking them out is that they thought they had finally locked in that permanent One Party Christian State where all consideration of the “rule of law” – the very rhetoric they profligately lobbed around like Democratic daisycutters during the Clinton Years -- was behind them.

The Republican Party and its Base have proven time and time and time again that they do not give a shit about this country, it people or its principles. That they really believed they had finally picked all the locks and snuffed all the guards and could at last do what they have dreamed of doing for 30 years: loot and lie and torture and conquer without hindrance and no questions asked.

Ooops.

[...]

Stephanopoulos: Not a single fucking measure on your Big Benchmark Checklist has been met.


Hadley: The problem is Arbitrary Timelines. Just give us Forever and an Infinite amount of money and cannon fodder and this thing’ll fly like Shakes the Clown on twenty gallons of Red Bull!

Hadley: Any timeline is mandating failure!

[...]

Why are they so incompetent?

Why did they do this and do it so badly?

Ok, listen up Panel, because this is Really Simple.

They never thought they’d get caught.

They thought the game was rigged forever and the local sheriff would stay bought. From Brownie to Plame to the NSA to NASA to the EPA to the management of every fucking catastrophe and catastrophette in Iraq, the message from the Very Top has been crystal clear: Rape in all to death and then piss on the corpse, boys, ‘cause Judgment Day’ll never come!

They did it because they thought it was OK.

Because no one ever taught this generation of Republicans the meaning of honor, or that being sadistic, lying imbeciles was something to be ashamed of.

They thought it was a perk of the job.

[...]

At some point don’t people who have now been USDA-certified to be malignant douchbags and who have been utterly wrong about everything longer than many sea turtles have been alive have to have their license to use declarative sentences revoked?

Sestak: Tim, I spent 34 years in the service of our country, leading men and women into battle.

There is little point is describing the surgical precisions and laser-level tones taken by Messrs Sestak and Andrews during their masterful disassembly of the various….because you have heard it all before.

Perle and DeLay are interesting to watch not for their arguments – which are ridiculous – or their McCarthyesque pronouncement – which are trifling lies – but rather for the anthropological experience of seeing two perfect specimens of utterly failed, utterly corrupted wastes of meat and skin go thought their paces, gibbering and smiling away, completely impervious to reason or conscience.

Two moral corpses walking among the living, still raving out the same lies they have told for years. Lies that have caused the death and suffering of untold hundreds of thousand. Lies each now told as onelongjammedtogetheronrushingsentence. Each lie now just noise; a feverish, talismanic incantations – ritually enacted these days like Stations of the Neocon Cross, rather than spoken.

As if their old power to simply shut down reason and truth by bellowing “Traitor!” at anyone who looks at ‘em cross-eyed were still a hot and lively weapon in their clammy hands.

But those days are gone, and these true Enemies Within are now seen for what they are, naked and toothless in the noonday sun.

Because now, at last, the specific gravity of the sheer dead weight of the layer upon layer upon layer of bloodsoaked lies on which this Administration stands – centrifuged by time and events and simple facts -- has at least temporarily stratified the political world into divisions as distinct as the Permian-Triassic boundary.

On one side, Good and Light…

On the other, DeLay and Perle. Two slabs of ambulatory cultural cancer that are about as wholly, unsalvageably vile as creatures get who don’t literally burst into flames in direct sunlight or need to bathe in the blood of virgins to stay perky.

As I said, at one level, a simple exchange.

It was, at another level, quite remarkable. Like watched Ebola virus squirm and breed, and then storm and destroy healthy tissue under a microscope. Perle – who radiates the aura of something fangy and hairy and partially undigested that Dick Cheney had to have chiseled out of colon with a steam hammer -- belongs in perp-orange in a glass cage at the Hague.

DeLay, who belongs in non-remunerated Federal custody, continues to serve as a valuable, Poster Child-reminder that there are still millions of our fellow citizens who, every two years, yank themselves out of their sister’s bung long enough to jump fireman-style into their overalls and shitkickers and slouch off to the polls to vote straight fascist ticket.

Perhaps “Ta piss off the naygers”. Perhaps “Ta show them fags whose country this is!” Perhaps because, if they don’t, sweet baby Jebus will fuss and cry and cross them off the Champaign Room list in Heaven.

Their specific motives are irrelevant. They are simply Bad Americans – democracy’s failed men -- and they need to be loudly reminded at every opportunity that they are – personally and specifically -- what is wrong with this country.