The Moral Equivalence Game: Lewinsky vs. Libby:
So let's get this straight: The motherfucking Washington Post is calling bullshit on the whole Valerie Plame affair now that Richard "Oh, I Love the Feel of Scrotum on My Bald, Bald Head" Armitage has been outed as the gossipy bitch who told Bob "Behold My Permanently Sneering Lips" Novak that Plame was a CIA agent. Not only that, but the Post blames the victim and her husband, saying that Joseph Wilson was wrong when he said Iraq was not chompin' for tasty yellowcake from Niger, and he was faux-outraged about his wife's compromised identity as a way to divert "responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy."

Goddamn, Michelle Malkin has already rolled up yesterday's Post and is masturbating furiously with it. Jonah Goldberg has already fucked holes in three copies. One guesses that all over DC and Right Blogsylvania and talk radio there's such a gushing of solo-coital fluids that all the copies of the Post in the country couldn't soak it all up.

The funniest goddamn thing in the Post's editorial is its "oh, would Dicky had come out earlier to save Scooter" section: "The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago." And while Scooter is not "blameless," the Post sure is giving a pass to the potential commitment of perjury and the possibility that Libby perjured himself with the Vice President's stroke-victim-smirky nod of approval.

Seems like only yesterday that the Post was not so forgiving about perjury and conspiracy to commit perjury discovered in the course of an investigation where the actual reason for the investigation had little or nothing to do with the perjury and possible conspiracy. From the January 22, 1998 Post: "President Clinton also reportedly denied any improper relationship in his own sworn deposition testimony in the Paula Jones suit on Saturday. If the allegations -- which were brought to Mr. Starr by former White House aide Linda R. Tripp -- prove true, they are of a different magnitude from any of the other myriad charges Mr. Clinton has fought back since taking office." Of course, what this had to do with a land deal in Arkansas is up for debate, no?

If the failure of the Whitewater investigation to turn up anything having to do with, you know, Whitewater didn't exonerate Bill Clinton, Richard Armitage's pissy little whine of mea culpa doesn't do a goddamn thing for Scooter Libby.

Late Post Today:
Richard Armitage called. He says he wants to talk about who's dating who in the State Department's Treaty Affairs office. He's such a chatty cathy. And he loves having balls rubbed on his bare scalp.

Back later with more rudeness.

Bush Says We Better Beware of Enemies Because "They Believe Things":
It was one of those head-shaking, goddamned stupid statements that just makes you wanna disappear into a Bolivian village and tear up your guts with coca leaf moonshine and overcooked wild pig until you're so doubled over and shitting out your stomach lining that you don't give a fuck about anything but the sweet, slick kiss of death to take away the pain. Here's the President yesterday at a campaign dinner for Tennessee Republicans: "We face an enemy that has an ideology; they believe things." You got that? We're not facing a bunch of blank slates lashing out at all tabulas not rasa. They actually believe "things." What sorts of things, you may ask? George W. Bush has the answer: "The best way to describe their ideology is to relate to you the fact that they think the opposite of the way we think."

Now, a cynical person might respond, "Oh, really? So they don't think that it's okay to hold people without charge or access to genuine legal processes, to torture them to get any information no matter how outdated or worthless, to lie to their people about the progress of a war, to use force to impose an ideology on the population?" You get the idea.

A sarcastic person might say, "So, like they shit on plates and eat their dinners out of toilets? They marry their goats and milk their women? They call fucking their females 'jacking off' and yanking one out 'fucking'? They sit inside their televisions and watch the outside world through the screens? They screech words of love and whisper their curses?"

See, while the White House amps up the 9/11 rhetoric in the coming days (Bush mentioned it no less than five times in his speech; Cheney brought the 9/11 noise about a dozen times in his speech Tuesday at Offut Air Force Base), they're also amping up the demonizing propaganda: each of these things is like the other - al-Qaeda, Iraq, and, coming soon, Iran. There's no room for differentiation. Call it the Elision of Evil, the Axis of Yadda-Yadda-Yadda. When you're up against an ideology - when you're fighting theory and thought instead of people and nations - you don't have to worry about the niceties of reality like the lives of actual embodied people who bleed. You only need to worry about point A and point Z. B through Y are for non-believers. You only need to offer your own contrapuntal ideology.

And what is the ideology we're offering? Sure, sure, it's "hope" and "freedom" and all those gosh-darn-Miss-America's-pretty type words. But Bush lets you know who's in on it and who's out: "The United States of America must understand that freedom is universal, that there is an Almighty, and the great gift of that Almighty to each man and woman in this world is the desire to be free." You get that? The USA "must understand...that there is an Almighty." And that Almighty has, through its great and magical Almightiness, given every little non-almighty one of us a present. So, one might ask, like, does that mean, absent belief in an Almighty (or absent an Almighty altogether), we don't desire freedom? Atheism equals slavery? (And this doesn't even start to get into the clusterfuck of "what Almighty are you talkin' 'bout, Georgie?")

So our job, then, see, if we are capable of understanding the Almighty in the way the President apparently does, is only to reveal to all people of the world the gift of the Almighty. You might call it "evangelizing" democracy. It's not war, you see. We're just putting the missles into missionary work.

(For real fun, since the administration is doing its damndest to cast this war as a worthy successor to World War II, check out the vast array of details in FDR's fireside chat from two years into that war. Notice how he at least acted as if the people he was talking to were adults. Notice how he talks about fighting to stop "aggression." Oh, and by the way, now that we're all into the "Islamic fascist" name-calling, just so we can evoke WWII, let us remember that Mussolini actually founded the "Fascist Party" in Italy. When we fought fascists in the 1940s, it was because we were fighting people who called themselves by that name.)

New Orleans Has No Future:
Once he drove around and walked the haunted, empty streets of New Orleans, the Rude Pundit lost all hope for the city. When, just a couple of weeks ago, he went through two of the most devastated neighborhoods, Lakeview and the Lower Ninth Ward, he expected to see construction crews and clean-up crews and road crews every few blocks. What he saw was sporadic house-gutting and even more sporadic construction and only one actual city road crew.

It is often said (at least on TV) that the first 24-48 hours after a crime are the most important in being able to solve a case. That after the initial rush of information, things slow to a trickle, other cases come in, evidence becomes harder to find. What about in the coming years after Hurricane Katrina? If the first year after the storm didn't become punctuated by a massive reconstruction operation, when will it happen? Or, as it seems, will it just be haphazard until someone Trump-like finally says, "Enough. Give it to me"?

Sheriff Jack Stephens of St. Bernard Parish probably spoke for most of America when he said this morning on CNN, "We feel like we've been let down again. That we think that Mobile, Alabama, Gulfport, Mississippi, Biloxi, Long Beach, Waveland, Ocean Spring, Slidell, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, New Orleans, Calcasieu, Cameron are all worth more than Baghdad."

Just like every visit to the Gulf Coast by President Bush stinks of flop sweat and desperation, of trying to overcompensate for his aloofness and absence early in the crisis, every year that passes after this one may have feints at making things better, but, like all those feckless visits, very little of worth will occur. Besides, inevitably, the next disaster will come along, perhaps the next war, and that initial momentum will be a distant memory as we try to learn to care about someplace else.

No, today's episode of bloggery is not a funny little monkey post. It's not even particularly insightful or rude. It's just sad. Because New Orleans is gone, man, gone, as are so many little towns around it. It's gone because of the bureaucratic nightmare and rank incompetence on every level of government, because of the war-tightened/tax-slashed purse strings of the federal government, because of groups of people in New Orleans who are clinging to a hope of renewal that won't come and are preventing progress even at the edge of a bulldozer, because no one wants to build on what's still there, because there is no genuine will in a government that sees private enterprise and charity as the leaders in rebuilding, entities that are, for the most part, unaccountable to anyone.

The anniversary is done. In the coming year, for New Orleans, more people will move away; opportunists, good and bad, will move in; those who can afford the contractors whose prices have skyrocketed past what meager insurance and federal assistance has offered will rebuild homes so that the best blocks will be checkerboard neighborhoods; crime will rise; the poor will be told to be happy in their trailers; water and electricity will still be unavailable to many places. At some point, someone in the EPA will admit that, yes, the ground, the water are contaminated.

None of these predictions is awfully daring. They're pretty mundane. But they're nauseatingly probable. If you've ever experienced the steady glare of the Louisiana sun, you know that despair is just a sweat drop's distance from hopelessness.

(Tomorrow: Back to the funny monkey posts.)

Katrina and the Federal Government - the Problem and the Solution:
Watching George Bush speak yesterday in front of one of the only rebuilt homes in a Biloxi, Mississippi neighborhood was something akin to watching that flaunting, flouncing prison video of Richard Speck, who killed 8 women, prancing around in his prison cell wearing only panties, sporting hormonally-induced tits, fucking a fellow inmate, and snorting coke, saying, "If they only knew how much fun I was having in here, they would turn me loose." It was creepy, depraved, and sadly unsurprising, and it left the Rude Pundit wondering why he had to see it at all.

For, as with so, so many things, Bush made the slow recovery of the Gulf Coast about himself, demonstrating nothing so much as the ability to bend that svelte body over and fellate himself, methodically, mechanically, with nary a grunt or pause to indicate that he blew a load into his own mouth other than a surrepititious twitch and lip wipe. The constant invocation of himself was sickening: "I'm glad" and "I want" and "Laura and I really care for the people whose lives have been affected," one of those so-obvious-it's-depressing sentiments.

Then he said, "We understand the trauma." And someone in that audience, maybe the "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney" guy if he was around, needed at that point to answer the President with, "Oh, fuckin' really? So you lost your house, your job, and your neighbors overnight last year and have sat around waiting for some government somewhere to stop paying everyone but you to get the fuckin' work really going on making something like a life again until the next Katrina or Camille comes around and blows us the fuck off the map again in a few years? Is that the kind of trauma you're talking about? Or maybe you're just talking about that time the servants didn't bring you seconds on ice cream fast enough that one Thanksgiving?"

The blissful ignorance and goddamned willful blinders of the President to the reality of the entire Gulf Coast post-Katrina gets to be so nauseating sometimes that you think that the entire region at some point ought to just descend into madness. The problem, of course, is the problem that affects every goddamned aspect of Bush administration policy: the refusal to believe that government can be an entity for public good in and of itself (other than, of course, in issues of morality). Here's Bush once again pushing private enterprise: "We want to help. We want to help that optimism succeed. And so I signed legislation that creates what's called the Gulf Opportunity Zones. That means if you invest in this part of the world, you get tax breaks. In other words, they're using the tax code to say, come and invest your capital here." All fine and dandy for some point in the future. Bush wants local solutions to local problems: "I said, you develop the plan. We're not going to do it for you because you know better the local needs, and Mississippi stepped up." However, this ain't a local issue, and treating it like one ghettoizes and isolates the region, cutting it off rhetorically from the rest of the nation, which is ponying up for the presumptive reconstruction of the region.

But the use of contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors for so much of the work is gonna suck that money dry or divert it enough to make a sad situation even more catastrophic. Says a report from Corpwatch, "The clearest instances of waste in Gulf Coast reconstruction are the contracting pyramids schemes – layers of subcontracting that turn an easy profit for the many middlemen. This layering creates distance between corporations such as Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and the subcontractor that ultimately performs the work. It allows KBR, for example, to plead ignorance when labor abuses are uncovered, as happened when a subcontractor was caught employing undocumented immigrants late last year and accused of mistreating them."

You keep hearing about things like Marshall Plans or some such shit. You want a solution? Here's one straight from Franklin Roosevelt, who the right is constantly trying to co-op to prop up their causes. Use the Tennessee Valley Authority as a model. The federal government, under an ideology that believed that one region's problems were the problems of the entire nation, not to mention the need for jobs in one of the worst hit areas in the Great Depression, created the TVA to bring the Tennessee Valley into the 20th century, provide wholesale-priced electricity to the poorest people, and help with flood control. Man, what pissed off conservatives and private power companies most was that it worked. And it would take until Ronald Reagan came along for people to actually fully believe that the federal government works against its interests because, you know, Reagan made the federal government work against the interests of the people.

Is it idealistic or, heavens forfend, communistic to say that if you take out the profit motive by eliminating the contractors and subcontractors from the payroll and just using the departments that the government has, like after Hurricane Camille, that the $110 billion wouldn't stretch a whole fuck of a lot further? So be it then. How dare it be suggested that the Gulf Coast might be served better by an active (read: non-Bush) federal government than by Halliburton.

Tomorrow: On the President's return to New Orleans - you know it's gonna be embarassing and worthless.

Strom Thurmond's Zombie Wanders the Lower Ninth:
The zombie corpse of Strom Thurmond has a taste for dark meat. The legend going around is that the animated and surprisingly spry body of the dead Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Senator roams the abandoned streets of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, searching the houses endlessly for bodies he can dine on. Indeed, some believe that there are bodies that will never be found because zombie Strom Thurmond has thoroughly engorged on them and digested them in his rotting guts. Whenever former residents of the Lower Ninth, scattered to the whims of evacuation buses and relatives, in Houston, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, want to scare their children, they say that zombie Strom Thurmond is gonna get them.

It wasn't like this, of course, early on in the disaster. Surely, the cataclysmic destruction of the neighborhood awoke the two-year dead man. His body, so filled with chemicals to keep him alive for the last decade or so of his life, was amazingly well-preserved, stronger even, from the rest. But it was a long walk for a zombie from a grave in Edgefield, South Carolina to New Orleans. In the time it took him to dig himself out and creep across five Southern states, the pictures and stories of the poor and black created something of a second storm in the political landscape, where government officials and pundits alike were asking what can be done to help the destitute, old and new, what can be done to stop us from having to see all this dark impoverishment, that it might actually require more than just hoping they disappear again.

But then zombie Strom Thurmond arrived in the Lower Ninth, haunting the mold covered houses, digging through rubble, finding the bodies that didn't float up, wrestling alligators for particularly fat tasty women he can fuck before engorging, pulling out the limbs of children from under fallen roofs, eating delicious flesh of the men, hiding from the occasional recovery team, sometimes even dragging a corpse he found behind a crushed car. Zombie Strom Thurmond is covetous of his African American meals.

As zombie Strom Thurmond dined on his damp delicacies, he helped reduce the images, the stories, the number of times we all had to hear about bodies being found in some horrible circumstance. And once the bodies disappeared, the backlash began against all that caring, all that revelation of the pathetic abandonment of the poor and black. It was as if zombie Strom Thurmond willed it into being: we showed we cared for a little while; now we can be true to ourselves.

And thus. And thus. And thus. And thus. So it was, so it shall ever be.

Zombie Strom Thurmond is loose now. He's still picking through the ruins of the Lower Ninth. He's become a bit more brazen, stomping around in daylight, moaning that he wants more, his hunger never dying, his body never decaying.

Political Protest, Star Fucker Edition:
So when Ned Lamont came out to speak last night at Moveon.org's book launch soiree and Katrina benefit at Crobar in New York, the Rude Pundit finally realized why the dude is actually kind of appealing. Up until he saw Lamont live, he just thought the Lieberspoiler was an awkward geeky-lookin' guy who happened to be a millionaire, Bill Gates without the charm. But, plied with an open bar and forced to stand for two hours before the show started (what the fuck? Was Axl Rose gonna play?), when Lamont took the stage in the middle of a set by Moby, all of a sudden the Rude Pundit realized that Lamont is the perfect father figure for the net generation.

Yeah, he is awkward and geeky-lookin', but he's also passionate without being overbearing about it, smart, and authoritative without being punitive, just like Gens Y and X would like their fathers to be. No wonder he kicked Lieberman's ass. Lieberman comes across as a scolding, creepy uncle to Lamont's daddy charms. Sure, Lamont probably can't dance, and you wouldn't wanna see him try, but at least he was hip enough to show up.

The evening itself was devoted to the publication, by Moveon.org, of the book, It Takes a Nation, and, while the title's supposed to invoke Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village, for the Rude Pundit, he kept thinking of Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back." The book itself is about the tens of thousands of people and families, organized through Moveon.org's Hurricane Housing.org, who provided shelter for Katrina survivors. In photos and oral histories, the book tells the stories of the victims and the helpers. Throughout the evening, sections of the book were read by Rosie Perez (reading a Lower Ninth Ward resident's tale of survival in a community theatre Tennessee Williams production Southern accent that's got precious little to do with the people who lived in the Lower Ninth), Julia Stiles, and Black Thought of the Roots.

The music was awesome - the Roots kick more ass in ten minutes than most bands do in two hours, and they were backed by a funk brass band from Philadelphia. The people were significantly less annoying than usual at these types of things. There was the occasional moment of anger and passion on the stage, the bartenders didn't realize that Jack Daniels wasn't supposed to be in the open bar selection until three drinks in (when the bartender told the Rude Pundit that Jack was off the menu, he said, "Goddamn, liberals are cheap bastards," and proved it by switching to another drink rather than paying for more whiskey), and Moby wasn't nearly as annoying as he could have been.

Of course, when the Rude Pundit roamed the floor talking to people about why they were there, asking if it was the activism or the music, not a single person said it was the activism. In fact, everyone said, "The Roots." (When the occasional person would turn it around and ask the Rude Pundit why he was there, he would variously answer, "Julia Stiles' hot ass" or "Eli Pariser's manly nose." More often than not, it was a conversation stopper.)

Yes, yes, it was a splendid time at the converted warehouse in the nowhere land between Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen (sorry...Clinton), with paparazzi doing their thing, with scenesters mixing with old hippies, music geeks mixing with drunk dancers. Partying where working people used to toil, remembering the dead and destroyed below a giant disco ball. But at least the Rude Pundit got three sets of digits out of the night.

A Follow-Up Fuck You To Ann Coulter Followers:
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit pointed out how seriously fucked it was that Ann Coulter screeched that all Gitmo detainees were caught on the "battlefield in Afghanistan," and thus deserved whatever treatment the U.S. thought was bad enough for them. Well, nothing takes a big ol' chomp o' ass like reality.

Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt, Part 3121 of an Endless Series:
Some days life hands you lemons. Yeah, you're supposed to make lemonade, but what if you've got no water or sugar? Then all you're left with are those sour fuckers with their skin shrivelling and tightening over the next couple of weeks. That's the kind of mood the Rude Pundit's in today. And when he's in that kind of mood and it's still too early to hit the bar for the pretend comforts of faux companionship, he just feels like beating the shit out of something. Or someone. And today, that's gotta be Ann Coulter.

For in her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the half-witted demi-scrawls of a hunched she-beast yowling from her dank cave where she feeds on the corpses of small Muslim children and uses their blood to ink her hooked claws"), Coulter once again props up fake liberal beliefs and humps those fuckers like they're diamond-studded gold dildos. This time around, she distills all the nutzoid bullshit tossed around by the right-wing media about how Democrats are allegedly "opposed" to fighting terrorists because they oppose some of the strategies.

One of the purest idiocies of Coulter's fans, including the begging-to-be face-fucked Sean Hannity, is that people attack Coulter personally (or point out her plagiarism) because they can't possibly have the rhetorical and intellectual acumen to actually take down her arguments. It's a little like saying Ann Coulter's male fans have to jack off to downloaded fake porn pics of Coulter because they can't get laid by real humans. So let the Rude Pundit address this well-worn comment thread that inevitably appears whenever anyone deigns to say something like "Attempting to find logic in Ann Coulter's writing is not unakin to trying to finger fuck a porcupine's asshole."

This week, Coulter says that Democrats "oppose the National Security Agency listening to people who are calling specific phone numbers found on al-Qaida cell phones and computers. Spying on al-Qaida terrorists is hampering our ability to fight the global war on terror!" Leaving aside the fact that exclamation points are pretty much the rhetorical equivalent of a backwards baseball cap, could Coulter or her supporters actually cite a single Democrat who believes that? 'Cause, see, "nuance" is to Coulter conservatives as germs are to the OCD sufferer. Let's say it again: most non-Lieberman Democrats believe that the FISA court should issue warrants, even retroactively, on domestic phone surveillance. It's not as fancy as "Democrats want Allah el-Omar to rape your daughters," but it's a great deal more accurate.

So that's why when, say, a blogger repeatedly calls Ann Coulter a "cunt," it's not because he doesn't want to "engage" with her "arguments." No, it's because there is no argument to engage with. Coulter is a messianic figure in this way: reality for her followers exists because she creates it for them. She writes, "The Guantanamo detainees are not innocent insurance salesmen imprisoned in some horrible mix-up like something out of a Perry Mason movie. The detainees were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan." Now, say you point out that, for example, Sami al Hajj was a cameraman working with Al-Jazeera and was "captured" in Pakistan and then sent to Gitmo. No matter what al Hajj is accused of (mostly just being Sudanese at the wrong place at the wrong time), ya gotta admit: the man wasn't captured firing guns at Americans on a "battlefield in Afghanistan."

No, it's just a waste of fucking time and energy to argue with Coulter. Like trying to keep a four-year old boy from yanking his crank constantly. Instead what we're left with is the image of Coulter's minions standing below her gigantic pussy while she laughingly pisses down on them as they gratefully lap it up, drinking it in, using it to lubricate themselves as they jack off and finger themselves madly, closing their eyes and nodding in an orgy of hateful glee as she says things like "the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as 'Iraqi civilians'...)"

Goddamnit, what scorn, what self-aggrandizement, what waste.

In Brief: Proof Positive That Hurricane Katrina Has Driven People Mad (Updated):
President Bush met today with Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who lost everything in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, and who drove a mock FEMA trailer to DC in order to talk with Bush about Katrina relief. Unlike, say, Cindy Sheehan, Bush invited Vaccarella into the White House and had coffee with him. And then, as if to prove that the hurricane had made him batshit insane, Vaccarella offered this while standing next to the President: "I just wish the president could have another term in Washington... You know, I wish you had another four years, man. If we had this president for another four years, I think we'd be great."

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a giant vomiting sound was heard as the thought was contemplated. Oh, and, what the hell, when informed of the idea, Jesus wept. Some more.

Update: The Rude Pundit already knew that Rockey Vaccarella was a publicity whore fronting for a documentary of his journey (see the second link above). But now we find out he's a Republican activist, too. Which means that he was inclined towards insanity even before the storm. Katrina just pushed him over the edge.

Late Post Today - But Enjoy the Breeze:
The Rude Pundit will be back later, but for now, enjoy the Ultimate Fart Soundboard and use it to pretend you are a young White House staffer meeting the Leader of the Free World.

Goddamn, we're fucked.

Dances With Corpses:
They always knew it was worth it to keep JonBenet Ramsey's mummified corpse in a back closet, locked in a padded case, like Charlie McCarthy or Howdy-Doody (who were also dead children, but that's a horrible story for another time). Greta Van Susteren brought the case with her from CNN to Fox "News," with the understanding that the dead child's body was community property among all the news networks. But Greta, oh, Greta was her guardian. It was Greta who decided what kind of puppet JonBenet should be. A marionette would be too obvious - everyone would expect JonBenet's corpse to have strings attached to it. And the thought of creating a hand puppet, while tempting, would have made the corpse too fragile.

So Greta, in her infinite artistic wisdom, decided to go with bunraku style. For in a bunraku puppet, unlike the marionette or the hand puppet, the performance doesn't attempt to hide the puppeteer. No, the manipulating hands, bodies, and even faces of the often several performers are nearly always visible. True, the puppet itself is in front of them, but, damnit, the men and women moving the rods and joints are as much a part of the show as the puppet itself. Yes, Greta thought, bunraku it shall be.

And she worked for years on the body, snapping at people like Nancy Grace or Dan Abrams who would dare to offer assistance. No, this was hers and hers alone, her art, her grand goal. For, in her heart of hearts, Greta Van Susteren knew that the day would come when the JonBenet Ramsey bunraku puppet would make its debut and its glory would shine so brightly that it would outglow every other corpse around it. How could it not? With its porcelain glaze, bright blonde hair, and outfit of sequins and spangles. Greta revised the little girl's bloodied, garroted, assaulted corpse so that it would properly reflect back whatever light was shone on it.

Now, now, at long last, ten years later after she first received the surreptitiously sent body bag, Greta, working with Nancy and Larry and Tucker and Sean and all the puppeteers who had been honing their skills, could make that little beauty queen do the catwalk once again. At home, Dan Abrams weeps a silent tear that he cannot offer his manly hands to even make small adjustments to the puppet's head.

In heaven, JonBenet Ramsey, who, although her body stopped growing, has acquired the wisdom of ten years of soul-living, wonders why everyone is so excited to see her puppet dance, thinks it's grotesque and even a little embarassing for the same pictures to be trotted out. She asks, to no one in particular, how making her corpse dance, however prettied up it might be, can be so entertaining for hour upon hour, even if the image of her puppet body is interwoven with the immobile features of her alleged killer.

Two Marines and one sailor walk by her and hear the question. They are still trying to accept where they are. In the distance, they see a crowd of other soldiers who are waving them over. They pause behind JonBenet and watch the television she has on for a moment, and, it being heaven, a moment can be anywhere from a split second to four weeks. In that time, they see nary a mention of themselves. Finally one of the Marines tells her, "It's easier to make one single porcelain little girl dance than it is to make puppets out of three thousand grown-ups."

Random Thoughts About the Press Conference Du Jour (Regarding Iraq Only):
Did you know that what's at stake in Iraq is our soul? In his latest press conference, President Bush said just that, that (all quotes are approximate because, well, the Rude Pundit ain't a fuckin' transcribin' service and he was probably drunk), "If we lose in Iraq, we lose our soul." Now, the Rude Pundit doesn't recall anyone asking him to ante up his soul for this "cause." In fact, he bets that if Bush had held a whistlestop tour, with Dick Cheney asking every American to give their souls for, what?, well, fuck, for the sake of argument let's say, "democracy in Iraq," that Cheney would have struck out. For surely, unless there's money or pussy/cock or some combination of them, most people ain't gonna sign on that dotted line that says, "Sure, what the fuck? Throw my soul into the bubbling pot." Not even the demonic charm of the slithering, sweating, huskily breathing Cheney could convince the most self-righteous neocon to bet his soul on Iraq.

But there was something good to come at this latest example of Bush's ability to veer with whiplash speed from joking endlessly about a reporter's seersucker suit to pounding the podium about "freedom" in Iraq. (Indeed, some might call that "compartmentalization," but the rest of us in the real world would call that "fucking insane.") The DNC should put together a ten or fifteen-second spot that consists solely of the reporter asking, "What did Iraq have to do with the attacks of September 11?" and Bush answering, firmly, decisively, "Nothing." And air that motherfucker on every station where the election is even within pissing distance for the Democrats.

And a blast from the past got brought up when Bush was asked if the U.S. invasion of Iraq caused more problems than it solved, with Bush asking us to imagine a world where "Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction." That's not unlike imagining a world where hot human-feeling robots will service your every crazed fuck fantasy, from the simple, but eloquent blow-job to the upside-down biting tiger with a monkey tail twist. Sure, some day it might happen, but it's so goddamn far in the future that it ain't worth thinkin' about. Hell, the Iraqis might just like to imagine a world where they're not worried about constant car and suicide bombings, roving death squads, and civil war. But, shit, then we're really talkin' fantasy land.

There's always the unintentionally ironic things Bush says, like "We owe it to our children and grandchildren" to fight the war or, regarding the insurgents, "They want to achieve their objectives." And there was the constant refrain of "I understand that" or just "I understand." And the depressing statement of "Damage to innocent people bothers me." And the promise to send more American soldiers to their deaths with "We'll complete the mission in Iraq" and other words to that effect.

Really, though, in the end, when Bush said, for the umpteenth time about the Iraqi government, "We're gonna give them the tools," all the Rude Pundit could think was, Oh, so like when are you and the rest of your administration gettin' on Air Force One for that long flight to Baghdad?

Katrina Plus One Year, Part 5 - Outside the Renaissance:


The Rude Pundit was not allowed into Renaissance Village. Not that he expected to be able to. But, he figured, what the hell. He drove up to the gate of one of the largest FEMAvilles in the country post-Katrina, a small patch of dirt with nearly 600 small white trailers and 2000 residents in the far northeastern part of Baton Rouge. The Rude Pundit knew he was doomed when the Catholic Services van was stopped and thoroughly checked. The security men at the gate, with the "No Trespassing" sign in front of it, were polite, simply saying that they weren't allowed, FEMA rules, blah, blah, blah. These guys are paid by the subcontractor to the Shaw Group that more accurately runs Renaissance Village. There was no use trying any further just for the sake of an entry on a blog that reads, "The Rude Pundit was beaten by security guards..."

Not that East Baton Rouge was much to write home about before Katrina, but when you drive around the area near Renaissance Village, you get a glimpse of the careful planning of where to put so many people being asked to rebuild their lives. It's close to the Ronaldson Landfill, where construction debris is piled. It's just a little ways from the ExxonMobil Chemical and Plastics plants. Pretty close to a juvenile prison with razor wire on its fences. And its hard to tell what there's more of around there: churches or payday loan places. All of this, of course, is in the middle of what was a residential area pre-Katrina.


Outside the fence of Renaissance Village, you can see row after row after row of the omnipresent FEMA trailers, the ones that have high formaldehyde levels, the ones that can all be opened with one key (until recently). In the nearly 100 degree Louisiana heat, hardly anyone was outside because, hell, the trailers reflect the light endlessly. A few people had decorated the outside of the tiny homes with something akin to patios. Most, though, were plain. The white of the trailers and the gravel is only broken up by the occasional blue of a dumpster. The trailers themselves were on strips of green "lawn." Somewhere in there is a playground that the regional Rotary Club and others helped build.

The Rude Pundit's not gonna come to any kind of conclusions or grand pronouncements here (other than, "Well, at least the U.S. can point to places like Renaissance Village and say that we treat our displaced people better than, say, the Sudan"). While the intention may have been to create a gated community, what is there is not unlike a prison, both physically and mentally.

Katrina Plus One Year, Part 4 - A Brief Conversation With a Garden District Resident:
The upper middle class, nearly wealthy, family the Rude Pundit stayed with in New Orleans lived in an apartment in Baton Rouge for a couple of months after Katrina before moving back to their huge, virtually untouched Garden District home. They know they were extraordinarily lucky. They feel, as many in New Orleans do, that too much emphasis has been put on the Lower Ninth Ward and the city's black residents. They don't want to diminish the suffering of others. They just want to make sure that the suffering of all of New Orleans isn't washed away in the images of the battered black bodies after the storm. Surviving Katrina is a long-term proposition, and it affects everyone, they say. Even them.

Sure, the wife said to the Rude Pundit, they can easily live in a bubble where she and her husband can go from the Garden District to the Central Business District without seeing nary a bit of destruction. But vary a bit from that path, and it's just ubiquitous. She described the day-to-day life of those for whom Katrina didn't mean the ultimate sacrifices of homes, jobs, and lives. For instance, her kids' pediatrician moved his office to Metairie, and that which took only a half-hour or so to do now is a half-day excursion, with the neverending traffic on I-10. They're lucky. The pediatrician's group broke up with one doctor, the head of the group, committing suicide in depression over the storm, and the rest moving far and wide. New Orleans is bereft of medical care. There's other things. Sixty percent of the dry cleaners are gone, she said. And when she brought clothes to be dry cleaned, she was told by several that they had more clothes than they could handle and couldn't take hers.

And then there's the friends and family that have simply left. Every week, she said, someone in her office receives a job offer. "And if someone's asking you to move to San Diego or Atlanta, you think, 'You mean I can go to the supermarket or go out to eat without it being an ordeal?'" she said. And they move on.

Our conversation was cut short by her kids demanding her attention. It is a lovely home. They are kind and generous people. Yes, they have money and are luckier than so, so many others. They're not looking for pity. But to have faith in the city means pasting a collage life together from the pieces that are left, no matter who you are.

Later today: Beyond New Orleans - FEMAville.

Katrina Plus One Year, Part 3 - The Lifeless Lower Ninth:


At least the barge is gone. When the Rude Pundit was in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans this past December, a huge barge sat in the middle of the street closest to the levee. It had destroyed every house it had swept across, smashing them to piles of torn wood and drywall. Now the barge was gone. The wreckage was also absent, with only the foundations and front steps left behind of an entire block of homes. But at least the barge was gone.



In one of those so-ironic-you-wanna-throw-up moments, two white guys were digging through the rubble of a house on Claiborne, pulling out different wires and cables, looking for copper ones, perhaps. The Rude Pundit said to his companion, "Look, looters." His companion begged to differ. They were, she said, just searching through an abandoned house for garbage, not plasma screen TVs. "Or bread," the Rude Pundit responded. The pair found what they were looking for, coiling up some wire, picking up a framed picture, a spice rack, but deciding to leave it. Neither of them was on lookout. They didn't care if the cops came. And then they tossed the wires in their Camaro's trunk and sped off.

Throughout the Lower Ninth, more houses are gutted, but there is little, if any, reconstruction. The crushed cars that had been under fallen houses are piled in small stacks of four or five. And, like Lakeview, the streets are passable. But the only real life here is found in the cars of tourists weaving around, dumbfounded faces, photo taking fingers, and one or two city utility crews and a van of white teenage workers from an activist group.


We stopped outside a gutted church (what a word, "gutted," your insides ripped out) and went in. The Rude Pundit's companion pointed to a stack of dishes and said that she heard story after story about people who lost nearly everything but great grandma's china, which somehow became gently encased in mud. "Like Pompeii," the Rude Pundit offered. The church was hollow, but someone had propped up a painting in the corner of Jesus standing in a river. Or a flood. The decadent air was barely breathable as we wandered around that dark and fetid space. No cross, no altar, no seats, just echoes.

Katrina Plus One Year, Part 2 - The Lakeview Water Line:


On most of the homes of Lakeview, a large middle-class "neighborhood" that is in the north part of New Orleans, bordering Lake Pontchartrain, as well as on the gorgeous, old homes that line Canal Boulevard heading south, there is a conspicuous line, like in the bowl of an unclean toilet. Chances are, if you are standing on the ground next to a lined house, that line is above your head, whoever you are, however tall you are. Because, see, when the eastern levee wall of the 17th Street Canal gave way, water poured in. A few blocks away, the western levee wall of the Loudon Avenue Canal, which borders Gentilly, gave way, too. The coursing waters of the lake flowed out of the funnels, heading towards each other and then south. By the time all was said and done, Lakeview was the lake, under at least ten feet of water.

The Rude Pundit hadn't seen Lakeview the last time he visited, stopping then at the ghost town that was/is Mid-City. A year after the hurricane, the woman driving the Rude Pundit around told him, "At least the streets are passable," and that was true. We could drive up and down the miles and miles of streets where the storm's wreckage was still blatantly obvious. Yes, many homes were gutted, many more were for sale whatever state they were in, about one out of every twenty was rebuilt or in some stage of rebuilding, and so, so many were untouched since the storm, with a year of lawn overgrowth in the neverending Louisiana heat. Outside one home, the front lawn was filled with piles of pill bottles and packages, obviously tossed for lack of refrigeration. And across the street a small bulldozer flattened the earth around a plot of land where the home had been completely torn down. (They do not have basements in New Orleans.) There was one crew working to clean the streets this Saturday.


"There's rats everywhere," said the woman, as the Rude Pundit insisted that he cross one of the lawn jungles to look inside a house. A machete would not have been inappropriate. The door had obviously been hacked open by an axe, although the visible outside of the house bore none of the fluorescent spray paint marks that told you whether or not there was a body there. Even up the steps of the porch, the feces-colored water line was up to his chest.


Inside, the house looked like the waters had only just receded, except, of course, for the tell-tale mold and mildew that infects so many of the homes here. The Rude Pundit pulled up his shirt over his nose so he could breathe. The furniture, which was senior citizen-chic, was tipped over or shoved aside, mud was still caked in corners, and on the walls of the living room, the water line stopped less than a foot from the ceiling. If someone stayed behind in the that house for the storm, they got to endure that submarine film horror of the water rising and rising, wondering if it would stop before the breathing space ended. Flyers strewn on the floor and stuck to the door offered services for gutting it, hauling it all away, rebuilding. The flyers were being overtaken by mold.


"How was it?" asked the woman driving.

"It was someone's home," the Rude Pundit sighed, trying not to sound melodramatic, but wondering how one could help it since, for many, many thousands of New Orleans residents, it was.

Brief Interruption Regarding "Macaca":
As long as we're tossin' pictures around here:

The covers of the series of Spanish books about "Paca, la macaca" show a happy monkey engaged in various human activities, like cooking and going to market. Perhaps George Allen was making a reference, a tribute, even, to the joy monkeys seem to take in their anthropomorphization. Of course, put a little red hat on that fucker and nail his feet to a tricycle, and a monkey is still, you know, a monkey.

Coming up: More New Orleans.

Katrina Plus One Year, Part 1 - Everywhere a Sign:
The last time the Rude Pundit visited New Orleans, back in December of 2005 (chronicled in five parts in January of this year), he saw a place that simply wasn't a real city anymore. It was small islands of life in the middle of miles and miles of utter destruction and decimation. Ghost towns in a wasteland. The worst thing that one can say now about New Orleans, almost a year after the big storm and the broken levees, is that it looks a hell of a lot better than it did. If nothing else, you can get through the streets.

Over the next couple of days, the Rude Pundit will show you some places you've seen before and some you haven't, and he'll take you to the outside of one of the largest FEMAvilles in the country.

For now, some of the signs from around the devastated areas of New Orleans:


Outside a gutted house in the Lakeview area, where the 17th Street Canal's levee wall broke. In case you can't see it, the "Before" is of the house in its pre-Katrina state.


A just re-built house about a block away from the other one in Lakeview.


Outside a gutted church in the Lower Ninth Ward.


A "house" in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Tomorrow: Lakeview and the waterline.

Bush and Cheney: Not Part of the Conversation Anymore, Just Like They Want:
For so long, George Bush and Dick Cheney have isolated themselves like paranoid neighbors in their backyard bomb shelter, telling the clawing outsiders they don't have enough food or air for everyone. They have spoken, for the vast part of the last five years, only to audiences that are handpicked by lackeys or screened at the events themselves (and this doesn't include those who get to pay for the "privilege" at fundraisers). If you even get into a Bush or Cheney speech with a dissenting or bumper sticker, you will get the bum's rush. And that's been quite the success.

They've treated over half the country like parents who ignore their children, only breaking the silence to discipline the kids when they knock a vase over or refuse to eat their peas, and who are surprised when the kids get older and don't give a shit what their parents have to say. Because right now, when Bush and Cheney speak, they're only talking to thirty percent or so of the country, with the rest of the nation either saying, "Fuck them" or wondering, "Hey, who's the old guys and why are they so mad?"

So debased is the pile of vaguely humanoid slime that is Dick Cheney that Hillary Clinton can say of Cheney's slurping words of condemnation of Connecticut Democrats, "I don't take anything he says seriously anymore. I think that he has been a very counterproductive, even destructive force in our country." A writer with the Washington Post can say, "I'm afraid to say his utterances are losing their news value." And most of us can only nod, a bit sadly, a bit wisely, and say, "So true, so true."

Then the President, who has gone unchallenged by everything except reality, in his radio address this weekend actually said, "Unfortunately, some have suggested recently that the terrorist threat is being used for partisan political advantage. We can have legitimate disagreements about the best way to fight the terrorists, yet there should be no disagreement about the dangers we face." One could argue this or that, things like, "Umm, when RNC chair Ken 'Elastic Cheeks' Mehlman said on Sunday that 'the focus now is going to be who’s on the ballot? What are the choices? And I don’t believe Americans, in the middle of a tough war, as they see these plots, want to weaken the tools and surrender the tools that are critical to keeping Americans safe. I don’t think they want to weaken how we interrogate potential terrorists. I don’t think they want to weaken the surveillance. I don’t think they want to kill the Patriot Act, and I certainly don’t want to think that they give the enemy the kind of victory that the 9/11 Commission had said they would have if we cut and run from Iraq,' had he gotten the memo not to use the threat for political advantage?"

But that's useless. When the goddamn President can say, as he did on Saturday, "On September the 11th, 2001, they used box cutters to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of innocent people," well, what's supposed to be our reaction? Motherfucker's right. They did. Thanks for the fuckin' reminder. We could throw all kinds of crap at his bullshit statement that "Because of the measures we've taken to protect the American people, our Nation is safer than it was prior to September the 11th." We could ask about the attempt to cut money from explosive detection technology. We could ask about how the White House pressured the British to make the arrests early, so it could conveniently come right after primary day.

It's useless because Bush ain't talkin' to us anymore. He's only talking to those who could get into his public appearances, an increasingly small number. You wanna talk about the "polarization" of the nation? There's your bifurcation: those who can see their President speak in person and those who can not. Sure, sure, we can all watch him on the TV, but not when there's all those episodes of Laguna Beach on the Tivo.

The White House knows this - it's Karl Rove's modus operandi: fuck those who disagree. And it's what they want. By so diminishing the value of the public roles of the President and Vice President, they can go about their business in deeper secrecy. Nothing to see here. And we're just gonna keep sayin' the same bullshit, over and over, because you don't matter.

Pro-War Politicians Have Written a Check Their Asses Can't Cash, Part 3 - Wherein We Witness the Implosion of the Right Wing:
Pro-war conservatives have become the guys with tiny dicks who feel the need to compensate in some other way. You know the type: generally, you will know them by their accessories - the black Hummer, the diamond-studded grill, the big wad of cash. Anything shiny or expensive to take the focus off their shame over their wee peckers. It's a pretty damn strong rule: the bigger the bling, the smaller the cock. If you happen to pick up someone at the bar, well, the truth will be revealed soon enough. (And do not worry, dear small-phallused readers; this is only a condemnation of those who try to hide the truth.)

If the volume and viciousness of attacks by the right over Joe Lieberman's public de-pantsing in Connecticut are any indication, the cock of crazed conservativism is actually withdrawing into its torso.

Sure, sure, fer big laughs, you can look at Sean Hannity grinding his manly jaw in full-bore hysterical mode as Democratic consultant Bob Beckel stares at Hannity like he's watching the Wicked Witch dissolve into a puddle (and the disturbing Kellyanne Conway keeps trying to blow Hannity). Or even Bill O'Reilly's attack on the tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who voted for Ned Lamont (O'Reilly is infinitely more idiotic when he's attempting to sound "rational"). You could waste all kinds of valuable time over at that rhetorical shitcan known as Townhall.com. And you'll get the same bizarro statement: Democrats don't want to fight the "war on terror" because they want to get out of Iraq. Even though the opposite is true: Democrats want to fight the "war on terror" because they want to get out of Iraq.

Of course, they're all, all just toeing the White House line because the loss of Lieberman means that, if Lamont wins, the Bush administration loses one of its opportunities to say it's got "bipartisan" support for its policies. How pathetic does the Republican running for the Senate in Connecticut have to be for Dick Cheney to mourn for Lieberman's loss. Of course, Lieberman's sad slog to insignificance is just an excuse to accuse the Democrats of believing, as Cheney said, "that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home." (Again, it needs to be pointed out that oceans didn't really protect the Indians or the colonists or, fuck, Pearl Harbor.)

Beyond Lieberman, there's the near-hysteria by the right over the arrest of the terror suspects in England. Spinning like a spastic third-grader on the playground, President Bush said that the arrests are "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom." Beyond the completely erroneous use of "fascist," which is going to be part of the new right wing rhetoric so that it elevates Bin Laden even more to Hitler supervillain status, did anyone actually forget that America is "at war"? Did we need a "reminder"?

And right there is the problem that Republicans (and Democratic enablers) have going into the midterm elections. It's the reason that Karl Rove is done for - motherfucker ought to be getting his affairs in order and learning how to tie his own noose. Because, finally, at long last, Republicans have lost the frame. See, it doesn't matter if you lose an argument or if the facts go against you as long as you control the terms of the argument. To go all Lieberman, we could use a sports analogy: call it "the home team advantage." And once you lose the frame, everything you say is now interpreted through the new frame, and that which once worked for you will now be turned against you.

See, the Rove-cultivated Republican playbook is still fear and terror, but it doesn't play anymore because it's been played out. What happened yesterday at America's airports? Sure, there were long-ass delays, aggravations, and more. But any major freak-outs? Nope: everyone just sort of sighed, dumped out their mouthwash, and cursed. And that's because we've gotten used to this. So the reaction of the citizenry now to terror alerts and colorifically raised warning levels is, "Yeah, we know. What else ya got?" People actually took the Bush administration's words to heart: we have gone about our daily lives, just incorporating the "life in the time of terror" adjustment to our routines. Republicans have been framing everything for the last five years based on one big event. It ain't gonna work anymore. The 9/11 justification is gonna be met with comical eye rolls around the country.

So now when Bush or Cheney or whoever keep hammering away with "Democrats don't want to fight terror," it doesn't fucking play. Because, really, in the results column for the Bush administration, what do we have on terrorism? A few pathetic losers rounded up and disappeared. Arguments over what laws we don't need anymore. A great big fuckin' war that nobody fuckin' wants anymore. What? Fuckin' nothing. (And don't fall into the conservative trap of thinking that "Well, sure, they've accomplished shit we haven't even heard about because it's all classified and shit." Do you think that if American authorities made a real, major arrest that Bush would be shy about it?)

Republicans have lost the frame, and they ain't gonna get it back, not now. Because they have nothing else to run on. Ask senior citizens. Ask the unions. Ask the soccer moms. And even ask the NASCAR dads. It's done. It's not going too far out on a limb to think that more people on those security lines at airports were wondering why we're spendin' all that money in Iraq than were thinking, "Thank God fer George Bush keepin' us safe." That's Karl Rove's greatest loss and it's gonna wreck the Republicans in November with all the disproportionate force of a grizzly bear chewin' a bunny.

'Cause, see, the guys with the big dicks, they don't need to show off. Some guy with a giant johnson can ride up to the club in a beat-up old Ford Festiva, saunter over to the bar, order a Budweiser, toss his cock on the counter, and that guy is gonna get all the action he can handle barely sayin' a word.