The Power and The Glory

... of driftglass. Drifty tosses off gems like the following as he savages his favourite foil, David Brooks, who has written another execrable column in the NYTimes, this time praising GWB for commuting Libby's sentence as "exactly right".

Which, first and foremost, considering that Brooks is not so much a boil on the ass of journalism, but an ingrown zit just inside the rim of journalism’s right nostril, is terribly, terribly funny.

Because this pathetic little fraction of a journalist has one and only one schtick: Defender of the Faith.

[...]

Over every fake protestation they want to register over how terrible the partisanship has become, Conservative Kingmaker Grover Glenn “bipartisanship is just another word for date rape” Norquist looms.

Rumbling just below the surface of every reckless demand for “More War!” when we have no more troops to send anywhere is the conspicuous absence of Republican cowards ages 18-45 that are staying away from the war they demanded in their millions.

And ringing in the air are voices of millions of Dirty Hippies. Those who have spent the last 30 years begging, pleading, warning and lecturing the Party of God not to please-please-please not tear down our vital institutions and erect a labyrinth of barbed wire, nitroglycerine and hate.

That the day would come when you may actually need to solve genuine problems, and the machinery you are giddily smashing today for narrow, short-term, partisan gain is the very machinery you will need to solve those problems tomorrow.

Well, that day has now come.

What was foretold has come to pass, and the very best regime dead-enders like Bobo can do now is mill around, take the occasional potshot at a Clinton, and every so often freak out at their confinement and beat their faces against the invisible bars of this prison of their own making.

[...]

Those who think poorly of a White House willing to sanction burning an undercover agent as part of a larger, pre-cooked plot to panic America into the war Neocons wanted all along are full of "fevered vapors and gleeful rage”.

The Plame Story “pretended to be about the outing of an undercover C.I.A. agent.”

Anyone in the media who wss genuinely pissed at how far into the cesspit the Bush Regime had sunk was merely “artificially appalled”. Fitzgerald was “throwing journalists in jail” and the whole of it was “like watching a city of Ahabs getting deliriously close to the great white whale.”


Libby was “the only normal person in the asylum.” “People who knew him thought him discreet, honest and admirable.”

Translation: I knew him. We had lunch, and he paid for his own salmon! And such a sweet-sweet smell of English Leather coming off of that man! This is not some swarthy cutpurse; Libby is a friend to inbred D.C. establishmentarians, and a dog-loyal thrall to his demon master. What higher virtues can there be?

Then:

“Fitzgerald, having lost all perspective, demanded Libby get a harsh sentence as punishment for crimes he had not been convicted of. The judge, casting himself as David against Goliath, demonstrated an impressive capacity for talking about himself.”

Translation: The Republican-appointed prosecutor asked the Republican-appointed judge to use the Republican-approved sentencing guidelines to determine the amount of time Libby would do in Club Fed. But jail is for little people, brown people and Democrats.

And those who are outraged are simple acting out their “assigned posture in this drama.”

So let’s cut through the fog and the moss and the carnival mirrors, and to the marrow.

As sure as the shitty Greek place that goes up in a convenient fireball one night, what happened to gin up a war with Iraq is case of arson.

A case of something destroyed by bad men for criminal ends, that has now leaped far past the original boundaries envisioned by the match-flicking, gas-spreading Neocon sociopaths.

Something that has grown from an insurance scam to a Dresden, but however complex the story, it is still a group of conspirators acting in secret to the detriment of society. Still a crime to be solved.

And if the crime of lying the nation into a war and discrediting anyone who stood in the way is arson, Patrick Fitzgerald’s team are the firemen,


trying first to put the conflagration out, then trying to sift the crime scene for evidence of who did this and why.

Libby, then, was the faithful rat, in charge of blocking the hydrants


and slitting the hoses so that the firemen could not do their jobs.

And what appalls Bobo is the simple fact that Libby -- a loyal “Cheney’s Cheney” Conservative -- was actually tried, convicted and sentenced in open court.

The terrifying reality that, however weakly, oversight has returned, and the reckless, arrogant, treasonous activities of his friends and sponsors in this Administration may now actually start coming with price-tags that cannot be ducked, dodged, draft-deferred or bribed away. (Pardoned and commuted, yes.)

And the worst nightmare of members of the Party of Personal Responsibility is actually being held personally responsible for anything they say or do.