Contributing to the echo-chamber of Internet bloggery with the latest big “Check this Out” thingamajing: I notice a genre that crosses all media of sort of (heavily handed and somewhat cluelessly) youth-targeted low-budget Right wing agit-prop. It’s not quite as flooded as youth-marketed Fundamentalist Christian schtuff, but we’ll get there. Remember the comic book about how a cy-borg versions of Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North in a future Liberal Dystopia would kick Islamo-Fascist and Liberal Ass to save the world? Well… tear down the science-fiction motif and The Right Brothers provide the soundtrack. (And here I thought that all of the Country Music Industry provided the jingoistic tics to get us moving?)

The Right Brothers, a conservative music duo out of Nashville, has released a new song that does what needed to be done: it tells the TRUTH. Titled Bush Was Right, the song hits the listener with fact after fact after fact – but the tune is so catchy, and the music is so driving, you can’t help but sing along (especially on the chorus)!

WILL YOU HELP US? We’re putting together a “kickin'” music video right now, and we’re preparing a HUGE grassroots campaign to get hundreds of thousands of people to request Bush Was Right! on MTV’s “Total Request Live” show… leading to our demands for it to be played in regular rotation! If they DON’T – then we’ll hit the media in a BIG way, showing how MTV plays left-wing videos while CENSORING conservative videos!

The Chorus that you can’t help sing along with:

Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

added to that after subsequent verses:

Ted Kennedy – wrong!
Cindy Sheehan – wrong!
France – wrong!
Zell Miller – right!

This is actually their second “hit” single to strike (however negligibly) the public conciousness. If you’d surf through right-wing talk radio, you’d have stumbled upon their “Hey Hollywood” song… “We heard your message and it don’t sound good.” Other songs from the “Right Brothers” catalouge… “Somewhere in Baghdad”, about a woman and her child newly liberated in some Iraq that… maybe there is a science-fiction motif to these songs after all, because this song appears to take place in an alternate universe:

She can’t believe the changes that she’s seen
She’s got a new job, a TV and a kitchen full of food
She’ll be making lunches while the kids both sleep
‘Cause tomorrow’s the first day at their new school

Or the ode to Reaganomics, “Trickle Down”, which asks the question “When’s the last time a poor man gave you a job?”

Trickle down, trickle down let the money trickle down
It won’t do anybody good buried in the ground
Trickle down, trickle down let the money spread around
And one day it’ll be my turn and mine will trickle down

Nothing like dancing to the beat of Trickle Down Economics! Urm?…

They tried to stop “The Passion” but they think the truth is in “Farenheit 911”
They hate the Constitution but they love judges legislating from the bench
If Michael Moore became the president they’d think they’d died and gone to heaven
Can’t stand “fair and balanced” but can’t get enough of the U.N. and the French

Okay. Enough of this. Turn it out. Toss on the “American Idiot” Green Day album. Ayn Randians can throw on that goddamned awful Rush album, “2112”. The Neoconservatives will just have to wait a while longer for their soundtrack…

Some words from Charles Cook: At this point in their second terms, the Gallup poll showed President Eisenhower with a 58 percent approval rating, President Reagan was at 65 percent and President Clinton at 61 percent. President Nixon, shadowed by Watergate disclosures that would eventually force him to resign, was at 31 percent.
Indeed, in the entirety of their second terms, Eisenhower never dropped below 48 percent, Reagan never got below 43 percent and Clinton never dipped below 54 percent in Gallup polling. Clearly, we don’t have much experience with second-term presidents facing these kinds of numbers. There is no textbook telling someone in the position Bush finds himself in how to battle back and find success pushing his legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.

It has become a little too easy and has become a bit too easy a Conventional Wisdom cliche to say that Second Terms are Hell on the President. The reality is that — second terms can be quite successful. Reagan defeated Communism, right? Clinton continued his period of Economic Prosperity, and passed through his negligible minor-key agenda (he fancied himself the second coming of Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland, you see…). (Matthew Yglesias has a way to consider the Clinton Presidency, and what he accomplished when.) Are these not “successes”?

But today… we are in some mighty bizarre political waters here. Bush’s push-back strategy at the moment, to attack the Democrats for voting for his Iraq War Resolution in the first place… a conceit that makes me wonder why in 2002 he wasn’t out there campaigning on behalf of Senators Max Cleland, Mary Landrieu, Tim Johnson, and Jean Carnahan for their, (ahem) “Clear Eyed Realism”. (Yesterday, the Republican Party rebuked Bush on the Iraq War … sort of kind of… by stripping the Democratic Party bill to demand a timeline from Bush of any meaning and passing something of the sort. A cruious sign of how the political climate has changed drastically.)

Do I choose to believe the rumours emitting from The Washington Times. I’d become accustomed to these stories from the spurious website “Capital Hill Blues”. Now we have received them from a right-wing source… a Pravda. To read The Washington Times is an exercise in Sovietology, and I do not know what to make of this story. Oedipal or Nixon… Nixon or Oedipal? Can things really be falling apart like that? And why am I not feeling any schaudenfruede?

There oughta be a law. A president who cannot muster an approval rating over 40 percent for a month’s duration shall be removed. He shall be replaced by a member of the same party who has successfully positioned himself apart from the president. (The second part of this law will help clear up a wee bit the Woeful state of the Senate — where a party wraps themselves tightly around their man in the White House, Legislature becoming Parliament, political Independence Lost for fear of how a weakened Party figurehead will tear your political fortunes down. In the current climate… may I suggest Chuck Hagel (Soitenly not goddamned John McCain.) I’ll work out the mechinations of this new rule later.

The three most notable negative campaign ads for the 2005 off-off year elections… or, to enhance the amusement factor, the simple thrust of them… the core attack.

Jon Corzine’s ad against Doug Forrester. “Doug Forrester is George Bush’s Choice. Is he yours?” (Had Forrester used that ad in his 2002 Senate campaign, he just might be Senator today!)

Doug Forrester’s ad against Jon Corzine. Jon Corzine’s ex-wife is on the screen, and says “Jon Corzine let down the family. He’ll let down New Jersey too.”

Jerry Kilgore’s ad against Timothy Kaine. “Timothy Kaine opposes the Death Penalty. Even for Adolf Hitler!” (The pundits believe that this ad back-fired on Kilgore. I imagine that Kilgore should have gone for the jugular, and used the morphing motif — blending Kaine into Hitler. There‘s a commercial!)

I don’t know which one comes from the deepest part of the gutter. A contest is needed to decide such matters.

It was a pretty insane weekend in the NFL, and second only to the Chicago Bear’s Arena Football – like field goal botched deep in the endzone returned for a touchdown was the out-of-nowhere former Liberty University third-string running back Samkon Gado’s performance for the Packers. I mention Samkon Gado in this round-up because his college career (albeit he apparently barely played) was for Liberty University — a standby 16 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament, and a school founded by Jerry Falwell. But the NFL is packed to the brim with Fundamentalist Christians — to the point where the Trinity Broadcast Network chimes in every year with a weird Superbowl special /slash/ Revival Meeting amongst football players. Why shouldn’t the flash-in-the-pan star of last week not come from Jerry Falwell’s school?

Jerry Falwell is the partner of Pat Robertson on the 700 Club. While he didn’t give an “I concur” as he did after 9/11 to Pat Robertson’s latest comment “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city.” Actually, to be fair to Pat Robertson, I do concur. While turning to God would bring comfort to the afflicted, tangible results require tangible human doings.

I can debate whether Pat Robertson is repeating himself or not. What I do know is that over at UCLA, Daniel Lee has no new material.

AT UCLA today there was an open air Jewish preacher when I was walking back to eat that was screaming the “B WORD” for a female dog at some girl and I was stunned; So many people were gathered being more entertained than convicted; he also mentioned Hitler was right in killing the Jews or something like that and calling girls whores because they did not cover their head, etc…

He kept on preaching we need to keep the whole law of the TORAH and I could not believe it, and people were mocking him and Christianity….he had big lungs to project himself and I thought well, I’ve always wanted to be a street preacher and thought that I had the voice projection too and the Bible to respond to him.

I’m tempted to say something on this blog entry, but maybe I’d better not.

The Nation, that venerable organ of the Left, has come out with an editorial to the effect of…

We will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign. We urge all voters to join us in adopting this position.

I sigh. This is all good and well, but I’m not sure I believe them. I recall the 2004 Reason Magazine (unofficially at least, as in the blogging version of this libertarian magazine) probing the meaning of The Nation’s endorsement of John Kerry for president in 2004 and (a bit more stilted toward “in safe states, vote Nader) Al Gore in 2000 (in swing states). It’s a strange contrast from 1992, where the Nation magazine’s endorsement was non-existent — the magazine contemplated the “Left”‘s marginality in the face of Clinton’s frequent use of the “Left” as a campaign pivot point to work against, and acknowledged that the upcoming Clinton presidency would be marginally better than Reagan-Bush. (And to be honest, I’m not sure which stance is better or more intellectually “with it”.)

A better example may lie with the magazine’s glowing cover feature on Hillary Clinton. I had previously commented on one part of it here, on the heels of commenting on the prospects of an actual Hillary Clinton presidency. The National Review link apparently has had a content-change, so that it no longer links to the Hillary Clinton article. Ah well… For my purposes here, the critical passage, paraphrased from memory (until I stumble upon it online — it’s not really worth taking time to dig for it):

The Nation and the Left apologizes for Hillary Clinton’s general hawkishness (the Nation piece posits that she is positioning herself for political gain) in a way they don’t do for Joseph Lieberman because Lieberman’s stands come from conviction and Hillary Clinton’s are political positioning.

When push comes to shove if some hawkish Lieberman-oid pushes the Democrats over the top in gaining control of the Senate in 2006… where will The Nation stand?

I think I’m required by law to point out that The Nation and National Review were both founded by members of Skull and Bones… meaning that the gate-keepers of the American Left and the American Right are… See… they have us coming and going every which way we turn!

Back when I was a young man, I remember many a wall was adorned with a picture of [Dwight D. Eisenhower] or Jack Kennedy. You didn’t have to be patriotic to show respect. Party affiliation didn’t obscure the honor of the presidency.

Today’s treatment of President Bush is appalling. Here is a man who could be kicking back enjoying his millions. Instead, he’s under the most concentrated and vile scrutiny any leader has ever endured. It makes me cringe when I see a man who is sacrificing so much be the source of so much ridicule.

This really hits home because I spent 365 days in Vietnam fighting a war under a president who makes Bush look like Abraham Lincoln.

That war also had little bearing on the future of our country, whereas the current conflict has huge implications. It’s cool, especially in the Northwest, to be anti-Bush right now. I’m just not cool.

MIKE DAVIS Brush Prairie, Wash.

It’s hip to be square, I suppose. I’m glad it’s now cool to be anti-Bush is Brush Prairie, Washington. I weep for Bush, knowing that he’s sacrificed so much. (Actually, I scratch my head trying to figure out what that is supposed to mean.) So very sad. And doesn’t the “You didn’t have to be patriotic to show respect. Party affiliation didn’t obscure the honor of the presidency.” rule wrap its way over to Lyndon “makes Bush look like Abraham Lincoln” Johnson?

Bush defended the War on Iraq by pointing to Democrat culpability. It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began. More than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Bush at the time said that this wasn’t necessarily a vote for war, and was a vote to “disarm Saddam”. Kerry chimed in saying that it was a vote for the process to “disarm Saddam”.

Kerry then famously went on to say “You bet I might have voted yes” when pressed on whether he would have voted for the War Resolution “if he knew now what he knows now”, trying to fall back on the nuances of “vote not for war, but for a process” without realizing the implications of “Knowing then what I know Now.” And thus the sucktitude of Kerry’s Primary Campaign reared its ugly head in the Skull and Bones contest for President.

More recently, we had Charles Schumer appearing on Meet the Press with this sorry exchange:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Schumer, there’s been a widespread discussion that this is bigger than just Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame and White House aides; that it really goes to the core of the Iraq War, what cases were made to the American people about weapons of mass destruction and other systems and other analyses and other intelligence data. Based on what you now know today, do you regret having voted for the war?

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, no, Tim, because my vote was seen and I still see it as a need to say we must fight a strong and active war on terror. But I would say this, Tim, and I would take your point in a slightly different direction. I think what we’ve seen in the last several months is a White House in some real degree of disarray: [and we move on to a litany against Bush]

It’s difficult to guage the House of Representatives, because there’s too damned many members. The Senate is easier to track, and I could go into a deeper analysis than I’m willing to do right now if pressed. Looking over the list of “yes” votes amongst the Democrats, and adding to them the handful of new members to the Senate… here’s a simple gut feeling looking at each “yes” vote.

The Actual “Yea” Votes:
Baucus (D-MT): he sucks.
Bayh (D-IN): he sucks.
Biden (D-DE): he sucks.
Breaux (D-LA): he sucked.
Cantwell (D-WA): Dunno
Carnahan (D-MO): Political calculation to get through 2002 (unsuccessful). Dunno.
Carper (D-DE): Dunno.
Cleland (D-GA): Oh boy. The most celebrated over-rated Democrat. My guess is his conscience, particularly today, would bring him to a “no” vote today, but the political calcualtion in 2002 was heavy. (But he was probably able to rationalize it away.)
Clinton (D-NY): Harde Har Har.
Dodd (D-CT): The Connecticut Axis is probably as toxic in many ways as the New York Axis is.
Daschle (D-SD): For what it’s worth, there was this weird blog ad with his face and an urge for you to sign a petition to get us a Time table. But welcome to Hell…
Dorgan (D-ND): This is a disappointment to see that he voted “yes”. I’m surprised. He’d come around today.
Edwards (D-NC): He answered the question. He said it was a mistake. But this was after the 2004 run for vice-president.
Feinstein (D-CA): Hrm. Get back to me on that one.
Harkin (D-IA): As disappointing as seeing that Dorgan voted for it. I suppose it was a game of political chicken — even though he won the 2002 race by a huge margin, make sure there are no issues that could trip you up.
Hollings (D-SC): I liked his spunk, but it’s one of those Southern Conservative seats and bah on him.
Johnson (D-SD): Hee hee hee. As goes Daschle, so goes Johnson. His was the marquee fight in 2002 (and he did win), and you shrug and move on.
Kerry (D-MA): NEXT!
Kohl (D-WI): I hear he’s remarkably undistinguished.
Landrieu (D-LA): She was up for re-election in 2002, and her political instincts will hew her to that Iraq War every time.
Lieberman (D-CT): NEXT!
Lincoln (D-AR): With a name like Lincoln, how can we lose?
Miller (D-GA): The latest issue of the New Republic has a feature on a prominent Mega-Church preacher, and in it we have Zell Miller preaching to this god-awful Mega-Church.
Nelson (D-FL):
Nelson (D-NE): Merge the Nelsons and roll on.
Reid (D-NV): I’d like to think so. BUT…
Schumer (D-NY): I already did the Schumer quote. He sucks.
Torricelli (D-NJ): Corruption cubed, and nothing else matters.

The Class of 2002 and 2004, our newly elected Democrats and how they would have voted:
Pryor (D – Ark): He’d vote “yes” then. Now? He’d probably like to vote “yes”.
Lautenberg: Difficult, but gut says “no.”
Obama (D – Illinois): I’d hope he’d be on the side of good.
Salazar (D – Colorado): He voted for “yes” for Torture. He sucks.

I noticed the start of the current Republican counter-attack against the Democrats’ slow opposition to the War with Iraq a week ago with a well-travelled blog entry entitled “Harry Reid’s Lyndon LaRouche Moment”… that being a reference to the shutting down of the Senate in order to privately discuss Iraq War Intelligence, with a suggestion that it’s all based on Conspiracy Theory. (And, by the way, “The Project for a New American Century” is a conspiracy… and an open one at that. Nothing wrong with the concept: you have a batch of politicos who advocated a particular policy for the past decade and signed their name to that end… and that is what they carried out when they had the opportunity.)

Next, or perhaps concurrently with the conflating of Harry Reid with Lyndon LaRouche, we had an editorial from Norman Podhoretz, with the right-wing blogosphere cheering on “Check out how Norman Podhoretz DEBUNKS the claim that Bush LIED us into war.” I really didn’t need to read it… You saw the list on message boards and in emails. The “great debunking” is simply quotes from Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton (circa 1990s), Jacques Chirac, — now we’ll spotlight Hary Reid and his “yes” vote… and others that — oh boy check out Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction! (except probably not before the term was coined into popular use as a means to scare us all.)

It was a curious parlor game, and various members of the “opposition party” have different culpabilites of blame in this whole mess of a game (when they said it is key, what their political calculations were was key, parcing out words was key)… and to a great degree, the Official Line was a line that came out of Bravado pride. (Once you make out a tin-pot dictator into Hitler, there is nowhere to move.) For instance: Scott Ritter has no love lost for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and the rest of the Clinton Administration. (“The one thing I can say about them is they didn’t take us into war with Iraq.”)

To point out times during the run-up to the war with Iraq when Bush was clearly and demonstrably lying ON THE SPOT — that did no good… And thus, I shrug and move on.

Today the liberal blogosphere is quoting Bush, circa the run-up to the War with Iraq and his then-facetious speeches that “This is not a vote for War.” I sigh and shrug. We’re stuck in a Twilight Zone of post-modernism… Kerry caught himself in the trap that he could parce out words and phrases said and done. (Actually, Christopher Hitchens wrote the editorial about Kerry when the “Bush Lied to Me” meme was tossed up that summed up the problem “Vote for Me — I’m Easily Fooled.” That is the problem with the current Democratic positioning — and sadly it may be their best bet toward a coherent narrative that meshes with growing political opposition to a stupid choice in war.

………………………….

From the Clyde Lewis message board, I offer up something odd from Bush’s speech today:

I have yet to find a complete audio or video of Bush’s speech at Tobyhanna Army Depot today. If you have sound of the portion quoted below, please PM me.

But what’s being applauded…and do they even know what they’re applauding?…is not only a Muslim extremist concept but a truly Hitlerian sentiment. Victory over the human race. Leaders all want it, and we all know it.
…………………..

For a short time about a year ago, the election that was at the heart of blogging through an election season being over, despite having a full awareness of the shining bright spots hiding in what looked like a horrible election (and right at this very moment, there are events unfolding before our eyes… it appears that ANWR has been spared due to the Republican melt-down, and all of a sudden the iron-clad Republican whipping ability of jamming every piece of legislation they care to through… has fallen apart) and not particularly wanting to dwell on the re-election of Bush or the stupid campaign of Kerry (who did not inspire me to vote for him)…

I converted the blog to an activist blog whose sole aim was to launch a concerted attack at destroying Christmas. Because… someone has to act as a foil to allow Bill O’Rielly and Sean Hannity (and Pat Buchannan) make sense.

Well, the murmurs are up on Fox News yet again. Christmas is right on the verge on being banned! Thus… I WILL BURY YOU AND THIS CHRISTMAS OF YOURS!!!

I never got around to mentioning this last year:

As a child, I was always baffled by the song, not strictly a Christmas Carol but has sort of thematically moved into the genre, “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things”.

Maybe it was a lack of empathy and understanding of the human race… but these were not my favorite things, and I didn’t understand whose favorite things tthese were (that nun’s, I presume) or how they could be somebody’s favorite things. (Are these the favorite things of Nuns in general, or just this one nun?)

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Leaving aside the admiration for the natural, here’s what I don’t understand:

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Mittens. MITTENS. I hated mittens. One minute you have ten fingers, you put on mittens, and all of a sudden you now have FOUR fingers. You just chopped off Six fingers! (AND Jeebus, that is one huge finger.) Today, I can admire mittens as useful in taking food out of the oven, but at the age of seven — the loss of six finges and the subsequent loss of a certain amount of dexterity bothered me. I was a fan of gloves… still am, I suppose. And gloves were more grown-up than mittens (which had a way of creeping into childhood siloquoys — I guess because it rhymes with “kittens”, and is thus an easy out) — the Nun in The Sound of Music was, presumably, grown-up… why the heck did she like Mittens and not gloves? It… made no sense to me.

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
With “Cream colored ponies” I could at least saddle it off as a “girl” thing.

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Doorbells? Doorbells are a favorite thing? Huh?

Never mind.

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad.

I guess. I’d just have to come up with a completely different list, and the Nun’s list leaves me cold. At this point in time, I can shrug it off and say “To each their own. Feel free to enjoy your doorbells and mittens!”

You know… I had forgotten that Jeff Gannon had a blog. In the vein of psuedo-professional hacks for specious agendas who upon their downfall get themselves blogs… we now have the Judith Miller Blog.

Two different animals, to be sure. I don’t believe Jeff Gannon was ever believed to have had credibility, and in the end he was just a bizarre curiosity — an easy escape valve for Scott McClellan in the asinine rituals of the Press Corps, to be sure, but mostly he just a small cog in the online right-wing echo chamber. (It is believed that he played a part in the defeat of Senator Tom Daschle, and for that Democrats are secretly grateful.) Judith Miller caused more harm — and I’ve repeated a highly simplified mantra of her much larger and more damaging place in a more specific agenda. (Gannon = “Conservative Movement”. Miller = “War with Iraq”.)

Sorry about what happened to Jeff Gannon’s dog. If Judith Miller’s dog dies too, I’ll offer my condolences for her as well.