Sunday follies

The Washington Post reports that the Doormatocrats dropped their pants and laid down on the porch for Bush again.

The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded weak on terrorism.“

Yea, wouldn’t want to be branded as weak for standing up for freedom against the biggest loser in American history. Strength is capitulation. The Doormatocrats have that branded on their backs as a footnote to their motto”Tread on Me.“

In other news we learn that Denis Kucinich was booed at the Daily Kos convention for suggesting that there isn’t that much difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Wherever would he get that idea? Could it have something to do with the fact that the Doormatocrats have laid down for Bush on every single issue? Naw. It took great strength to support Bush in all his failures. Kucinich is craaaazy. Wiretap the bastard!

The New York Times Magazine chips in with one of the more mysterious odes to power we’ve seen in awhile. They argue that Hitler invented vacations and the French like to take them, so Americans should shut up and work harder. Americans, you see, don’t need vacations because they have it all just down the block:

Grasping the truth about why more Americans are taking holidays from their vacations is as easy as stepping outside your workplace (the lushest of which tempt employees to stay inside by offering lap pools, massage rooms and the like) and seeing that the recuperative promises of the old-style extended getaway — the cleansing, amusing, soothing, stamina-raising therapeutic interludes that Eleanor Roosevelt once touted as a way for Americans “to build up health and resistance” — are redeemable everywhere, in every form and so close by that it’s a wonder thousand-mile drives in gear-packed station wagons still take place at all.

Yea all you whiners, just go across the street to the spa, get a massage and get back to work. Chop chop.

It also includs this gem:

...or, perhaps, a complicated bitterness over the fact that surpassing France’s economy will never help us surpass its egotisms, so why bother aping the gourmet loafing that even most Frenchmen must sense has made them poorer?

Are the French poorer? Statistics say otherwise. Do they sense they are poorer? Perhaps, but in my experience with the French, which is not insubstantial, they do not consider themselves poorer than Americans. They ridicule us for our poverty. They work a hell of a lot less and have considerably more.

Michael Moore made the interesting point in Sicko that our powers that be attack the French so relentlessly so that we Americans don’t ask ourselves why we can’t have the same quality of life as the French. The answer is that we choose to have more billionaires. Nyah nyah. We’ve got more billionaires! And our billionaires' health care rocks.

On a similar note, I walked through the living room this morning and caught a few minutes of the Republican presidential debate. One of the loonies says that the federal government does not guarantee cradle to the grave health care and then states categorically that government-run health care has been proven not to work. The crowd, which is dumb as rocks, erupts with raucous applause. Of course he was laughably wrong about effectiveness. The opposite is true. Government sponsored health care works best. It’s cheaper, more efficient, and more effective for far more people. In fact, it is our system of private health insurance that has been proven not to work. Unless of course you are a private health care professional pocketing lots of cash for keeping people sick, ruining them financial, and maybe even hastening their deaths. It also works quite well for politicians pocketing their bribes, I mean campaign contributions, to keep the profits flowing.

He was right though that the federal government does not guarantee health care for all citizens. It could though. Hey Doormatocrats, how bout some government health care?

Hundreds of Democratic bodies simultaneously thud on the porch. Republicans and lobbyists wipe their feet. Hillary stuffs some bills down her bra. The press reports admiringly on her neckline. France sucks.

Elsewhere, the nation’s infrastructure is falling apart. But that’s okay according to the NYT:

Bridges, and their major parts, are graded on a scale of 0 to 9, with 0 requiring a shutdown. If a critical part gets a grade of 4 or lower, the bridge will be judged deficient. The I35W bridge was rated a 4. Dennis W. Heckman, the state bridge engineer in Missouri, offered an example in an interview. “If the paint has peeled off and you get not just a light rust, but rust where you have less steel than originally,” then a bridge is judged structurally deficient, he said. Such a condition represents significant damage, though it is far short of what it would take to make a bridge collapse.

Far short of what it would take to make a bridge collapse? Tell that to the suckers in Minnesota. And not to worry. There are only 70.000 or so similarly structurally deficient bridges in county. I would tell you the percentage of structurally deficient bridges in France, but that information is classified by the office of the Vice President.

And finally, a prominent Democratic strategist writes an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that the Democrats should stick their naked asses in the air and like totally glue their chests to the porch on the question of high crimes and misdemeanors.

In one of the more bizarre arguments we’ve seen since, oh, earlier this morning, he concedes that the Bush administration is a gang of criminals:

...the bill of indictment goes far beyond Bush's grave lies about Iraq. There's also the arrest and detention without trial of U.S. citizens, the violation of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions at the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the "blatant violation" of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment "by secretly authorizing secret warrantless spying on thousands of American citizens by the National Security Agency."

...Bush and Cheney -- and conservatism in general -- have wrecked our civic institutions and darkened our civic impulses. Nothing is beyond politicization: not the Justice Department; not the worst terrorist attacks on our soil; not the scientists and nonpartisan experts who've been silenced or demoted because they didn't toe the right line; for goodness sake, not the National Park Service, which, in a sop to biblical literalists, was forced to offer pamphlets for sale at the Grand Canyon gift shop putting forth the "different view" that the great chasm was cut 4,500 years ago by Noah's flood, not 6 million years ago, as is the case here on Earth.

He then goes on to argue that the political case is another question entirely. Actually holding the Bushies accountable for their crimes would harm the Democrats’ chances in the next elections you see. Amusingly, he does a quick about face and makes the opposite argument, that when everything is subordinate to politics, civic institutions and impulses suffer. What should the Democrats do about it. Nothing. Subordinate everything to politics.

Yep, when everything is subordinate to politics, we suffer. So the Democrats need to subordinate everything to politics so they can win.

What the fuck?

Yea, what the fuck indeed.