Le Sequoit

Someone's Got Some Catching Up to Do

I assure you that, despite my recent non-reportage, I've been paying attention to the politics of politics. Others' minds may fog over the creepy crawl of murder and mayhem that passes for the Holy Crusade of Judeo-Christian Democracy, but I know that "wartime" American deaths have surpassed those of 9/11. And I caught that a study by fringe denizen Johns Hopkins University and funded by ultra radical MIT has placed the Iraqi death toll at least 400,000 but likely over 600,000.

Our President has termed the study "not credible". I think even he may have actually learned this term at Yale, where the scholarly study of scholarship is as well served by it's own brand of faith based underpinning as is the pursuit of the politics of greed. "We can't believe it" is where faith and other realities part ways. We know you can't, which is quite the point.

And then there's corruption. I haven't forgotten Abramoff and the slave labor trade of the American Pacific, the strong-arming of Indian tribes to buy unfavorable rulings on competitor's efforts, the outing of CIA agents with politically challenged intelligence findings, the murder of former dupes in off-shore Miami gambling interests, the congressional junkets to five star golf resorts in Scotland, on and on and on. Today's primary Republican scandal news is of the searches and seizures at the houses of a daughter and a friend of one Curt Weldon (R, PA), concerning the $500,000 half payment on a contract between the daughter and some important natural gas tycoons (Itera) in Russia. This contract was inked six days after the congressman, presumably at taxpayers' expense, threw a testimonial dinner for these hot shots at the Library of Congress. Officials at Itera had emailed the daughter that details of the contract would be worked out at the dinner. Just a coincidence, he says, he's never helped his daughter get anything. You could spend years following these.

But the real grabber has turned out to be Senator Foley's somewhat inappropriate inquiries to house pages as to whether they might be horny like him and such. "This says so much of our society," go the folk living mysteriously somewhere else, "that all the murder and larceny fade away while a juicy sex scandal rockets the polls into blue heaven."

"It's not about sex, it's about the hypocrisy of family values touting perverts and their conservative coalition enablers;" others say.

No, it's about sex. That's one cum stained blue dress on one side, and one pulsating pederast pole on the other. One set apiece. Love/love. Few are particularly interested in whether House leadership is a bunch of lying bastards in covering the whole mess up. I can't blame folk for not smelling any suspense here.

But, speaking of liars, My favorite of the political season is this :

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible ..."

"incomprehensible"? Here we go again! Everything is the defeatist, petulant childish "I can't" with these people, blissfully, yea, faithfully unaware of the universally adult translation "I won't". This one came from Condoleezza Rice, prior to the disclosure that the chief spook of the CIA himself had headlined an emergency meeting on July 10th, 2001, complete with PowerPoint presentation linking the dots pointing to an imminent Al Qaeda attack on US interests, Rice was a key invitee. And when September 11th happened, and someone had assumedly told her who the culprits were, did this brilliant scholar stop for a second and think, "Hey, weren't these the guys in Tenet's pretty slides in that meeting, oh, way back in July?" Guess not.

Lies, corruption, incompetence. Iraq and Afghanistan in freefall. North Korea accomplishing on one continent what we've spent a trillion dollars and three thousand soldiers' lives lying about preventing on another. The right is reeling. The House is probably turning, and maybe the Senate.

Republicans have had it all their way, while controlling all of the "oversight". In yielding that, the exposure will be astonishing.

Every cockroach for itself, when that switch is turned on.

posted by sequoit @ 11:06 PM