One of the dumber storylines of the 2004 campaign, election campaigns being a nattering of silliness largely best left ignored (though never ignored — lest by me) instead toward the pursuit of the question of who bought the individual candidates (California offers a glimpse on how this matter will be resolved in the near future) — the demand to see Kerry’s records — has now been belatedly resolved.

The same major players that were documented to have engaged in a flip-flop in the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” were discovered to have … yes indeed, given Kerry high praise.

And Kerry was a mediocre student.

What does the latter one mean? Perhaps when you’re scheming world domination within the confines of Skull and Bones, the matter of academic achievement means nothing — you’re set, right?. The matter of the “Swift Boat” crapola remains what it is.

Perhaps you’re not aware of this controversy, in the Republican Primary Race for Governor of New Jersey, a candidate had this photograph on his website.

The problem with this photograph is twofold: (#1): It’s photoshopped from this photograph:

And #2: … Coming home from a vacation with my parents to Russia, my mother blew up a few photographs. One was of us and some hosts on a boat on the Ob River travelling past Kargasok. My parents peering in, and me sort of straddling out of the photograph a bit.

But they cropped me out of the photograph. I was deleted from the scene. Save one thing: my legs.

Here, Howard Dean keeps his thumb in the photograph…

I note this comment, found at the home of the Iraqi blogger “Raed in the Middle”, found here:

Uh, the letter says that the US was ramping up for a posssible war with Iraq by June of 2002. As I recall it was pretty clear after Sept. 11, 2001, 9 months earlier, that the shit was gonna hit the fan. It was only a matter of time after Saddam kicked out the UN inspection teams, and Iraq tried to play games when the US started demanding their reinstatement. What was kinda funny was that they counted on the French to keep the US from actually invading. Anyway, this is no smoking gun and Conyers is a hack politician with no widespread following.

There seemed to (and still seems to) be bizarre parallel storylines, some in alternate universes, about the War and the Run-up to War in Iraq. Bush said, in late 2002 or early 2003 to the press, “You say we’re headed to war. I don’t know why you suggested that. I’m the person who gets to decide, and not you.“… a statement that was full of bull on many counts, which was obvious bull at the time. (Beyond the lie aspect, and the faked incredulity toward the reporter who (gasp!) suggested that a war looks forthcoming — there’s the weird matter that the Constitution decrees that Congress declares war — a matter that was thrown to the wind during the Cold War with the new innovation of “War Authorization.”)

Anyway… Bush Administration finally has some kind of response to this story that’s … sort of overhyped in what accounts for the Liberal Media. (That’d be Nation and such magazines, Air America, a batch of blogs… and, really that’s about it.) It amounts to a joke.

Rasheed Wallace, after his Detroit Pistons lost to the Miami Heat in game 5 of a best of 7 series, said the following:

“It’s real damn tough. Y’all had to see that out there. It’s so blatant. I’m going to see out of y’all who really knows basketball by reading your columns and sports stories.”

“Oh, we’re going to win Game 6. They’re going to send some good people out there, and there’s going to be a Game 7. (Because) there’s no other series. If y’all can’t see that you’re crazy.”

Actually, you’re never terribly sure if that’s not the case with professional sports — that it’s, to some degree, akin to WWF wrestling… ie, when in a position to do so, subtley staged and manipulated.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. wins the big race, coming from behind, considered a “tribute” to his father.

Remember Phil Luckett? The official who botched a coin-flip call? And, that same season botched a touchdown that benefitted the New York Jets… the largest market in the nation.

You see such an attitude in national politics, ala:

Kerry lost because, as a Skull and Bones liberal, that’s his mission in
life. This was the most important election of his life, and he is proud to
plan to run again. And do his thing again. Lose.

Pave the way for Hillary Clinton, I suppose…

The Nixon apologists are telling us something.

The names of Pat Buchanan, Ben Stein, G Gordon Liddy, and Chuck Colson. They stand out because they worked for Nixon… in some cases, were actually intimately involved in the Watergate crime. The others — the partisan hacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin — push them aside.

The puzzling thing about G Gordon Liddy: why is he a voice reverberating on the airwaves with an occasional jab on cable news? In the end, isn’t he just an incompetent burglar?

Chuck Colson: was he really re-habilitated in prison?

It’s almost a cliche to say that Bush’s level of corruption is worst than Nixon’s. That may miss the point altogether. Nixon, and his sidekick Spiro Agnew, didn’t have the smoke and mirror contraptions that the RNC-machinery of today possesses. There’s something about G Gordon Liddy’s presence on the radio that tells ua half the story.

Or the idea of Oliver North holding forth with a Fox News tv show.

I mention Spiro Agnew because of his diatribes against the “liberal media”. Here is the great coup of the “Conservative Movement”. Notice the last cover of the National Review. A picture of a toilet. Caption “Insert Mainstream Media’s Reputation Here.” The reference to the Newsweek article, and retraction on the dumping of Koran into a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. Never mind that the US has now admitted, at the very least, urine has been splashed onto Korans (and mind you, of the troubles at Guantanamo, this is the least of the problems), a significant part of the electorate believes Newsweek is greatly off-based, and are currently hemming and hawing to a position of needle-work: “They splashed urine on them… they didn’t place it in a toilet!”

“Where is today’s Deep Throat?”, the proverbial “some” are now asking. The answer to that question is immediately trashed in the right-wing echo chamber upon entry into the public sphere. Scott Ritter is a child molester. Joseph Wilson is a partisan hack. And if it’s an anonimous source: (a) considered “rumour mongering”, (b) liable to be politicl trickery working for the powers that be, ala the inner-workings of the Koran in Toilet story (the Pentagon let it be published, mind you) or, quite possibly, Bush’s National Guard memos. (The effect is so fogged up, if you place yourself into a particular political corner, that you’re going to cry “Fake!” when memos regarding the political opportunities of the Terri Schiavo case are released to the public… thus enjoy the stupdified blogosphere!)

Rumours? The weight given to rumours depends entirely on what channels they come out of. Drudge reports on them — they must have some weight to them!

And PBS is a liberal media machine that needs to be balanced out. Never mind you can’t really find any examples except for Bill Moyers… who, incidentally, was the closest thing we had to what Woodward and Bernstein were if you chose to believe the hype.

# of news references to Linda Lovelace, via Google News: Too. Damned. Many.
(Hyuk. Hyuk. Our news writers, and more importantly bloggers, are comedians.)

Amazon.com Sales rank for the DVD of “All the President’s Men”: 15.
For “Deep Throat”: 9,208

For the book “All the President’s Men”: #34.

Um… Barry: Wear a goddamned pair of dress pants.

This is part stage-craft and image manipulation… To what degree it might be authentic, I do not know. I suppose if he were to ever run for president, he won’t have the anti-“folksy” dribble going against him, as Al Gore did. (A section of the chattering class, the pestering and annoying part, couldn’t help themselves when it was revealed that Al Gore … dressed up in some occassions, dressed down in other occassions, and had hired a consultant to help him. Gasp! Earth-tone Gore! Alpha-Male! Whatnot.)

As for Barry… some more stupid posturing:

“But were Montanans outraged at the same level as folks in New York City or in other vulnerable cities? Frankly, is al-Qaida coming to Montana? It would be a bad idea for them to come here. To start with, if they show up here and start making some trouble, somebody’s just going to shoot their asses and ask questions later.”

ooh… Mr. Macho Man, aren’t he? This is pure claptrap, of course. Nay… international terrorists don’t know Montana exists. And, nay, I doubt firing rifles at the a Montana land-mark while terrorists are driving planes into it is going to solve anything.

None of it is as revolting as Bush parading in front of toddlers to argure against stem-cell research, of course, but nonetheless…

On a hot night, window open, and sound travels better in the heat.

I had the radio on. I guess I fell asleep listening to Mike Malloy. Ordinarily I have the radio clicked to turn off in 59 minutes. I guess I didn’t this night.

I know my neighbor largely as a guy who’s watched a lot of Star Wars lately, on a large enough decimal level that I know that he’s watched a lot of Star Wars lately.

This night Mike Malloy ended, with me asleep, and turned into the rerun of the Randi Rhodes Show. Somewhere in the middle of the night I heard my neighbor yell: “Balderdash!”

I do not know what Randi Rhodes was saying — I was largely asleep. But my neighbor started rambling about Saddam Hussein.

I clicked the am-fm switch — a dealy-do that takes us with no turn of the radio dial to 94.7 NRK — An Enterscum Station. I turned the radio up a wee bit to drown out the end of my neighbor’s ranting (to me or to someone else?), and within a couple songs, turned the radio off.

I suppose I could have engaged in a quick political discussion, and shouted “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy!”, but really — I wanted some sleep.

“Ted Kennedy” has the punchline to every fucking joke that even tangentially mentions booze for the past three decades, and you can’t take one fucking quip on a TV police drama? Fucking pussies the whole lot of them. GODDAMNIT, WHY CAN’T WE BEAT THEM? JESUS CHRIST, WHY DO THE THIN-SKINNED, PRUDISH NANCYBOYS KEEP WINNING?

Because a lot of people who vote for them are themselves thin-skinned, prudish nancyboys. As Exhibit A, I cite the ratio of eligible enlistees to Bush voters: it should be a lot closer than 1:1 than it actually is.

The Tom DeLay reference from Law and Order is as follows:

“Maybe we should put out an APB (all-points-bulletin) for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-shirt.”

The court case involved the murder of a judge and his family, suspects being perhaps right-wing extremists.

I rather like Law and Order. Occasionally. The stories are “ripped from today’s headlines” and all that “riveting” fling into “relevance”. The last episode I saw involved the lawyer having to go against his conscience and his attorney general’s politics to get the courts to define marriage away from gays so as to get a murder conviction. Another episode played on the Jayson Blair case.

In this case, Tom DeLay knows full well what prompted the jab… his comments following the Terri Schiavo case. He says so in his letter:

This manipulation of my name and trivialization of the sensitive issue of judicial security represents a reckless disregard for the suffering initiated by recent tragedies and a great disservice to public discourse.
I can only assume last night’s slur was in response to comments I have made in the past about the need for Congress to closely monitor the federal judiciary, as prescribed in our constitutional system of checks and balances. I have explained all such comments – even those inartfully made and taken out of context – on numerous occasions, including with representatives of your network. When a responsible journalist like Brit Hume made an inquiry into such comments, he quickly understood them to be limited to Congress’s oversight responsibilities and nothing more.

There’s a lot there. Brit Hume (and by extension) Fox News as emempliers of fair and balanced journalism. I will note that the White House’s new liason to PBS (who spent a while reaching the conclusion that PBS is liberally biased because Bill Moyer’s show is liberally biased) wanted Brit Hume to come in to teach public broadcasting how to be (ahem) “Fair and Balanced”.

And I must note the curious signs of RNC identifiers that Fox News really can’t help themselves to avoid.

Other than that, I must remind everyone of the rhetoric that was flying around after the Terri Schiavo Affair.:

Exemplified by Senator John Cornyn, of (naturally) Texas musing in a speech: “I wonder whether there may be the some connection in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions but are unaccountable to the public that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence.”

Actually, if Tom DeLay wants to remind everyone of the Terri Schiavo Political Circus, he’s more than welcome to. It wasn’t terribly popular.

Tom DeLay finished his letter with:

Last night’s brazen lack of judgment represents a failure of stewardship of our public airwaves and as much evidence as anyone needs for the embarrassing state of the mainstream media’s credibility.

There’s a politically charged psychosis at work here. It’s a defensive mechanism. But it does look pathetic.

Curiously, someone chimed in with three jokes concering Hamid Karzai with the punchline “Poppy Cock”.

Did you hear those Afganies have gone off their heads. sounds like a load of poppy cock to me.

Maybe he has just being playing with his poppy…

I doubt I’d come up with anything decent if someone tossed a punchline at me and asked me to come up with a set-up.

Perhaps you have seen the following on another blog or website. Or perhaps in your email box. Anyways… Names are easily changed to fit any other politico.

While walking down the street one day, George W. Bush is shot and killed by a disgruntled NRA member. His soul arrives in heaven and he is met by St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.

“Welcome to Heaven,” says St. Peter. “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem: We seldom know what to do with a Republican in these parts, and this goes double for you.”

“No problem – just let me in. I’m a believer,” says Gee Dubya.

“I’d like to just let you in, but I have orders from the Man Himself: He says you have to spend one day in Hell and one day in Heaven, then you can choose where you’ll live for eternity.”

“But, I’ve already made up my mind; I want to be in Heaven.”

“I’m sorry, but we have our rules.” So Peter escorts George to an elevator and he goes down, down, down, all the way to Hell. The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a lush golf course, the sun is shining in a cloudless sky, and the temperature is a perfect 72 degrees. In the distance is a beautiful clubhouse. Standing in front of it is his dad, and thousands of other Republicans who had helped him out over the years:…Richard Perle, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Jerry Falwell … the whole of the “Right” was there …everyone laughing … happy … casually but expensively dressed. They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times they had getting rich at expense of the “suckers and peasants.” They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar. The Devil himself comes up to Bush with a frosty drink, “Have a margarita and relax, George!”

“Uh no, I can’t drink no more, I took the pledge,” says Junior dejectedly.

“This is Hell, son — you can drink and eat all you want and not worry, and it just gets better from there!”

Dubya takes the drink and finds himself liking the Devil, who he thinks is a really very friendly guy who tells funny jokes and pulls hilarious nasty pranks, kind of like a Yale Skull and Bones brother with real horns. They are having such a great time that, before he realizes it, it’s time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves as Georgie steps on the elevator and heads upward. When the elevator door reopens, he is in Heaven again and St. Peter is waiting for him. “Now it’s time to visit Heaven,” the old man says, opening the gate.

So for 24 hours George Bush is made to hang out with a bunch of honest, good-natured people who enjoy each other’s company, talk about things other than money, and treat each other decently. Not a nasty prank or frat-boy joke among them; no fancy country clubs and, while the food tastes great, it’s not caviar or lobster. These people are all poor, he doesn’t see anybody he knows, and he isn’ t even treated like someone special. Worst of all, to Dubya, Jesus turns out to be some kind of Jewish hippie with his endless “peace” and “do unto others” jive.

“Whoa,” he says uncomfortably to himself, “Pat Robertson never prepared me for this!” The day done, St. Peter returns and says, “Well, then, you’ve spent a day in Hell and a day in Heaven. Now you must choose where you want to live for eternity.”

With the ‘Jeopardy’ theme playing softly in the background, Dubya reflects for a minute, then answers: “Well, I would never have thought I’d say this-I mean, Heaven has been delightful and all, but I really think I belong in Hell with my friends.”

So Saint Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down, all the way to Hell. The doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren scorched earth covered with garbage and toxic industrial waste … kind of like Houston. He is horrified to see all of his friends, dressed in rags and chained together, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. They are groaning and moaning in pain, faces and hands black with grime. The Devil comes over to Dubya and puts an arm around his shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” stammers a shocked Dubya, “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a clubhouse and we drank and ate caviar… I drank booze. We screwed around and had a great time. Now there’s just a wasteland, full of garbage and everybody looks miserable!”

The Devil looks at him, smiles slyly, and purrs, “Yesterday we were campaigning; today you voted for us.”