Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Oh, Dana. Honey. Let me expain the facts of life.

There are certain standards of credibility for your office, Dana. Indeed, minimal though they are, the standards are significant enough that it could be argued that the standards for holding the office are, in fact, incompatible with "serving at the pleasure of the President."

This is what you get under a Bushite view of Affirmative Action.

"Government Won't Save You" is of course a neoconservative mantra. And lo, people such as you are the means by which that assertion is made true. But in fact, government is like anything else; you can do it honestly, competently and well, or you can be George Bush and govern like the life-long fuckup and remittance man that he is.

A spokesperson who is not clinically insane really must, in order to speak on behalf of someone, have some idea of who they are and what they mean; so I suppose you ARE speaking with some accuracy when you said the following:

The Hill's Blog Briefing Room » White House: Reid 'Isn't Really Taken Seriously': "White House: Reid 'Isn't Really Taken Seriously'
@ 4:14 pm by Hill Staff

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino issued a terse response to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) suggestion that President Bush is the 'worst president we've ever had.'

'The Senate Majority Leader isn't really taken seriously,' Perino said.

Reid, on 'Meet the Press' on Sunday, defended his past remarks that Bush was the worst president and the the Iraq war had been lost.

'I think you just have to call things the way you see them,' Reid said. 'I really do believe President Bush is the worst president we've ever had.'"
Dana, your response causes me to simply dismiss anything you may say from this point on as irrelevant nonsense. To call George Bush "the worst president ever" is charitable, it's a standard that could be met without actively subverting the rule of law, abusing the constitution and killing thousands upon thousands of people for no good reason. Harry is stopping well short of the the sort of bitchslapping this administration deserves.

I'm quite certain that George Bush in particular and the White House in general does not take the Senate Majority Leader seriously. That is in no sense a virtue. Good government absolutely depends upon criticism. But then, since the Bushite view of criticism is indistinguishable from lies and slander, I suppose they must presume this is true of their critics.

This obviously applies to all critics. Not only do they not take the criticism seriously, it's my observation that the typical Bushite can't even comprehend the arguments that make much of the criticism accurate and compelling - even when "criticism" amounts to documented violations of domestic and international law.

Sane people would be concerned about criticism that amounts to accusations that for normal people would have to be proved or disproved in a court, with orange jumpsuits the penalty for poor performance in that arena. "Na Na, Boo Boo, I can't HEAR you" is not an appropriate response to situations of this gravity. It's delusional.

I say this in a fine, bi-partisan way. I'm not all that impressed by Harry myself. He's not the leader I would have hoped for in these times. He and Nancy Pelosi have been as guilty as have the Republicans of seeing this crisis in terms of purely political advantage and disadvantage. But even in those terms, neither is an inconsiderable force and only a fool dismisses them causally.

When you deliberately insult the Senate Majority leader, you insult ordinary Democrats and many independents for good reason. When you manage to craft that insult in a way that also insults the intelligence of voters actually connected to the issues at hand, you do so at your peril.

Let me be blunt. Not only has this President committed impeachable acts, he's actually bragged of doing so in terms clear enough to make a trial a pure formality, were it possible to have that trial in an objective court. There is simply no question about the facts. The only question is, WILL there be such a trial?

There is a book that makes a persuasive case that he is guilty of murder. It's a good enough case that anyone else would be under indictment. Dana, you aren't helping on that front, either.

And then there ARE the war crimes. Torture is a war crime and the fact is, the Bush Administration is not just guilty of it, they are proud of the policy. They have celebrated and institutionalized it, they brag of it; they champion it in the face of the fact that it has unarguably magnified our casualties and made the war even more un-winnable in practice than it was on paper. A conviction in any honest court would be a formality. Regardless of the politics of the judges or the the nature of the venue.

Now, war crimes are a matter of international law. The ONLY way that persons guilty of war crimes may escape prosecution is if they can be sure that subsequent administrations will have no compelling reason to turn them over for trial. Your boss presumes that it would be too politically costly to do that.

But that would require not pissing away political capital on stupid insults. Again, Dana; Heckuva job.

I've criticized Harry for not pressing for action on these fronts, for thinking that these things might be mistaken as being "purely political." No. They are crimes, war crimes, and impeachable acts; things that if allowed to go unaddressed will surely bring the legitimacy of the US Government - which is now widely doubted - into certain, manifest contempt. That will apply to all aspects of government, every treaty, every interaction between citizen and authority, it will play out between cops and criminals, bankers and billionaires and it will all boil down to whether the United States can be trusted to deal justly with it's own mistakes. I assure you, the US cannot survive being found wanting by the rest of the world in this matter.

But the very mildest of such criticisms are not "taken seriously." Well, I'll tell you what happens to people who dismiss such "criticisms" in the real world. If they are fortunate, they end up serving a long stretch in a crowbar motel.

And yet you are foolish enough to give Harry and Nancy political cover and emotional motivation to slam your boss in jail? Not exactly a brilliant move, Dana.

George clearly believes he is somehow immune to consequences. This delusion seems to have permeated his entire gang. My best advice to US Citizens is this: get as far away as you can from any place, any institution, any location that is controlled by Bushites. If your job depends upon their largess, it's time to cut your losses. Remember how suddenly there were no Nazis after the fall of Berlin?

Which brings us back to Dana. Dana is a poster child for the rat who will go down with the ship, because there's still a little cheese aboard. And here's the question Dana should have asked herself before going to the podium (or indeed, taking the job.)

"Who will take Dana Perino seriously after this?"

I assure you Bushies, at all levels; the veil of the temple has been torn across; everything that you have done is becoming known. Enough IS known and IS on the public record to put many of you at direct personal risk of personal, if not serious legal consequence. You have a little time left. Perhaps you might consider a new life in Paraguay, or Dubai.

We assume that you can afford it. I mean, that WAS what it was all about. Your greed. Your lust for power, and your willingness to do "whatever it takes" to steal as much money and power away from those who had it, and had a better grasp of how to not fuck up.

People in general are no longer depending on the media you control to find out what's going on. The marks are getting wise. The internet is, for the first time, the place where more people go to fact-find than newspapers. Among young people, television and internet are tied, and the trend lines suggest that TV will cease to be the overall leader in two to three years. This is the passive component. Activists and responsible citizens are already heavily invested in the Internet and using it as the amazing intelligence-gathering and co-ordination tool that it is.

That can't end well, can it? Well, not for you. But for the rest of us, being rid of the likes of you can only be a good thing.

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