This Might Take Some Getting Used To:


That's a picture of President Barack Obama after signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act yesterday. It's now a law that tells corporations and the courts to not be dicks when it comes to women (and others) suing for pay discrimination. That's Lilly Ledbetter, who was royally fucked by the Supreme Court despite earning 40% less than male counterparts at Goodyear, receiving the pen from Obama. Most of the Republicans in Congress voted against it. This photo presents some cognitive dissonance for the Rude Pundit. He's used to a president sitting there and smiling as he signs a law that forces children to watch as Halliburton employees slash the throats of puppies or whatever cruel legislation was placed in front of the barely sentient George W. Bush. This Obama fella, he's signing something that is good for average people. Fuckin' weird, man.

Yesterday, Obama also pimp-slapped bailed-out Wall Street bankers who were paid over $18 billion in bonuses. Calling it "shameful," Obama said, "The American people understand that we've got a big hole that we've got to dig ourselves out of -- but they don't like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole even as they're being asked to fill it up." This is what happens when you elect someone who hasn't spent his years sucking filthy lucre from the corporate teat (yeah, yeah, except for campaign donations). You get someone who understands that the capitalist world needs to be kept in line or it'll run screaming crazy like a naked acid freak in Times Square.

In other "Well, isn't this different?" news, Democrats in Congress decided to act like the majority and took the immensely popular State Children's Health Insurance Programs expansion legislation that gone-but-not-forgotten President Bush vetoed and not only brought it up for a vote again, but added back in shit they had taken out to please their Republican masters. In a middle finger to the minority, Democrats put back in a provision that eliminates a five-year waiting period for the children of legal immigrants to get on SCHIP or Medicaid. Republicans, believing that it's good for some kids to not see doctors for half a decade, are predictably upset.

It seems, though, on this, at least, for there is still the stimulus package with which to wrestle, Democrats have reached deep and finally found a way to say, "You know, GOPpers? Go fuck yourselves."

They're Losing Their Fucking Minds, Part 2 (Arm(e)y of Dicks Edition):
Watching the video of Dick Armey, former Congressman and current douchebag head of a bullshit anti-government PAC called "FreedomWorks" (motto: "Keeping Dick Armey Off Unemployment Since 2003"), lose his shit on last night's My Balls Are Hard is not unlike watching a miserable, old, half-dead pit bull, ass full of scars, filthy from rolling in his own shit, go through the throes of canine dementia and try to eat his own leg while barking at phantoms.

Considering that he should have been banished from the airwaves and tarred and feathered and left to whimper over his burns a long time ago, saying that Dick Armey jumped the shark last night is to render the phrase useless. Before he even got to insulting Salon editor Joan Walsh, Armey had gone completely bugfuck, pissing himself mad. First he said that George W. Bush's tax cuts failed because of "income redistribution," and not just by those dirty Democrats: "The biggest income redistributionist at that time was a Republican senator." Pressed to name the senator, Armey balked, "I'm not going to get into that, because then we'll have the controversy. Dick Armey is assaulting somebody."

Now, there's a phrase for the ages. For what else has happened for the last couple of decades? We've been assaulted by an army of dicks. And now we're seeing what happens when the dicks are forced into retreat, crazily beaten by the citizens of the villages, running desperately into the cover of the thick woods and craggy mountains, hoping they can find enough fellow dicks to regroup into the mighty army they once were, but discovering that they may not be able to step beyond the tree line, out of the caves, and into the open anymore for fear of being pummeled once more. Sure, sure, they might try to mount an assault, but, really, when all you were to begin with was a dick army, well, there's only so long you can stand erect and ready for battle.

Dick Armey, the man, was a flailing, hopelessly pathetic being last night, the kind of syphilitic whore who is so covered in sores that only the most desperate and poorest johns would dare touch him. He grunted and snorted and babbled like Foghorn Leghorn trying to avoid the fryer. When he finally turned on Walsh and said, "I'm so damn glad that you can never be my wife, because I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day," you could hear the sizzle and smell the bubbling fat. The argument was over, even if Matthews attempted to keep it going. Armey looked like a bloated stegosaurus that glanced at the glowing sky and saw an asteroid heading his way. When your argument comes down to "Shut up," you have no argument at all.

Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist who has been asking why the fuck we're even listening to Republicans anymore, slapped down the entire dick army when he said, in Matthews' next segment, "I think Dick Armey was so far out of line in the last segment with his sexist comments, and he owes Joan Walsh and your viewers an apology." Not that there will be one. You can't be a real Dick Armey if you think you're ever wrong.

And, surely, he'll be invited back for another rousing "debate." That shit's gold, motherfuckers.

(By the way, the Republican senator Armey didn't want to assault was Charles Grassley. FreedomWorks has no problem doing Armey's work.)

(By the way, the initial Armey/Walsh confrontation was over the shit that Rush Limbaugh has said. The Rude Pundit hasn't dealt with that because fuck Rush.)

Regarding Motherfuckers (Republican Edition):
Here's something one hopes the Obama administration has learned from the past couple of days: You need to expect that motherfuckers will fuck their mothers. It's just what motherfuckers do. They fuck their mothers. It's right there in the word. If you put John Boehner's mother in front of him, he will fuck her. Because he is a motherfucker. It's what he knows. It's what all Republicans know. It's their nature.

You can't just think that you'll walk into a group of 'em and say, "Aw, c'mon, stop fucking your mothers." They won't listen. You can appeal in any way you like - it's wrong, it's immoral, their mothers' asses are bleeding. It won't make a whit of difference. The motherfucking will continue, right in front of you. No, you just have to accept that a motherfucker will always fuck his or her mother every chance they can. That they live to fuck their mothers. To expect anything else is to be foolish. And once you accept that motherfuckers were, are, and will always be motherfuckers, you need to act accordingly. You need to treat motherfuckers like the motherfuckers they are.

We don't know what Barack Obama actually said to Republican members of Congress in his closed-door meetings with them yesterday regarding his stimulus plan. But we do know one thing for sure: it accomplished nothing. This is the way it's gonna go, and if you've paid attention at all, you know the steps: Obama will concede shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they already got more tax cuts than anyone fucking needs), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they're gonna get the family planning funding taken out), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more, and then when the vote comes, Republicans will vote against it, saying that no one listened to them and fuck that Obama for lying about bipartisanship. Yet the legislation will have passed in a watered down form from the deep infrastructure and other spending so desperately needed to, you know, create jobs, which will, you know, create taxable income, which will, you know, help actually pay for shit some day.

Obama better know a simple fact: they fucking hate him. Right now, Obama represents the fact that everything they believed was a complete failure. For making that clear to the American people, they fucking despise him. They hate his majority, they hate his coattails, they hate that all over the country people are supporting his ideas. Republicans have nothing right now, which means they have nothing to lose by trying to drag Obama into their pit of shit. They'll smile and say it was a good conversation, but they're waiting in the back halls of the Capitol to fuckin' shiv Obama and laugh while he bleeds. And try to force Americans back into their crooked arms.

That's the thing about motherfuckers. You can tell them, "Okay, you can fuck your mothers, but only for an hour a day." They might agree, but sure as you're reading this, the second they walk away, they will...well, by now, you know.

Later this week: Umm, Democrats, hello? Is anyone there?

Late Post Today:
Gotta get a horse re-shoed. Back in a bit.

Alberto Gonzales Emerges From Under His Bridge:
So yesterday, the Rude Pundit was driving along the gray streets of the Northeast, the remaining ice and snow dark and filth-speckled, the cars and trucks coated in salt dust. He was listening to the radio, the local NPR station, and the show Tell Me More came on with an exclusive: an extended interview with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. What wonders would he reveal? the Rude Pundit thought. What burdens would he unburden? Or what fuscations would obfuscate? For the next hour, Gonzales demonstrated that, when it comes to the art of self-fellatio, no one can contort his neck in quite the way that the former White House counsel can. Gonzo can gleefully gobble his own cock and smile a creepy smile at you when he comes, his semen-greased teeth glistening at you.

For what else can you say about a man who simply refuses, in any way that one might call "adult," to take responsibility for any of the fuck-ups of his tenure. Host Michel Martin tried, too gently, to get him to see that, if everyone points at your pants and shows you the shit stains back there, then you have shit yourself. To that, Gonzales would say, "Someone else shit in these pants. I just decided not to wash them before I put them on." Which is, you know, disgusting and disturbing on a whole other level.

Regarding the hospital bedside visit by him and Andrew Card to get a pre-surgical John Ashcroft to sign off on a spying program that Ashcroft's Deputy AG, James Comey, wouldn't? "I was sent there on behalf of the president of the United States. The chief of staff and the counsel of the president were - we went to the hospital on behalf of the president to make sure that General Ashcroft had this information. That's why we went to the hospital." He was there, he says, just to tell Ashcroft that congressional leaders (who were, you know, Republicans) wanted the program renewed, legality be damned.

Regarding the politicized firing of U.S. attorneys and hiring of others at the Justice Department when Gonzales was AG? "I deeply regret some of the decisions made by some of my staff in making hiring decisions. Those decisions were made without my knowledge. Certain questions asked - political questions asked of career employees should not have been asked. I condemn it. I wish I'd - I wish someone had told me that this was going on." See? He just didn't know. Poor Gonzales. Always a bridesmaid.

Most fascinating was Gonzales's reaction to AG nominee Eric Holder's simple statement that waterboarding is torture, as we have understood torture for, let's say, ever: "I think that one needs to be careful in making a blanket pronouncement like that if you don't have all the information because of the effect it may have, again, on the morale and the dedication of intelligence officials and lawyers throughout the administration."

And then, being the good ball-licking lackey he always has been, he offered, "Nonetheless, the very discussion about it is extremely discouraging. And I have talked to officials, senior officials at the CIA, for example, who tell me that agents at the CIA no longer have any interest at doing anything, anything remotely controversial, for fear that they are going to be investigated and that they have to go out and hire lawyers in order to do their job. And so, it has a very discouraging effect, and the net result of all of that is that people will not be doing what they need to be doing to gain intelligence that will help us connect the dots and protect our country from another attack."

Now there's a weaselly motherfucker desperately trying to stay out of prison now that the chance at a pardon has passed. If bad things happen, he says, it'll be because the Obama administration made Jack Bauer sad.

Here's the fuckin' deal: if, at any point, Gonzales thought what he was doing was wrong, he could have fuckin' left. He was a partner in a law firm, a Texas Supreme Court justice. He wouldn't have been out on the street. Honorable men do that. They throw themselves on their swords rather than live in disgrace. Hell, at this point, the streets should be littered with the bodies of suicides from the Bush administration.

Today there will be more snow. It will gently cover the oil and dog shit-coated remnants of the last storm. But it's there. It'll need to be cleaned up some day.

Why Does Conservative Spooge Bucket Kevin McCullough Hate Black People?:
Everyone needs a nemesis, someone you can have an almost absurd amount of animus towards, for no good reason other than that person is a total cock. The Rude Pundit has chosen, as one of his, Kevin McCullough, the barely-published columnist and mostly satellite radio talk show host (with the born-again Baldwin brother) of a homoerotic sojourn into the airwaves so intense that it threatens to coat the entire studio in an explosion of man goo. Mostly, he's just a total cock. Not a full human being. Not a cocksucker, for that would imply a mouth. No, just a cock.

In his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "abortion"), McCullough goes nigh on nutzoid over what a couple of rappers said during inauguration festivities, describing it as (and this is not a joke), "Foolishness so great that even the non-violent Dr. King would be likely to reconsider corporal punishment." What would drive Martin Luther King, who faced down white savagery without raising a fist, to ass-whoopin' rage?

Let's let McCullough describe the nightmare: "During the festivities in Washington DC this week, rappers Jay-Z and Young Jeezy took to the mic amongst a teeming DC crowd to assault all who were present with shrieks of racism, profanity, and anti-patriotic displays. These expressions were present only because Barack Obama had been elected to the office of President. Setting aside the rampant use of the 'N' word, the rappers, lacing their tirades with numerous F-bombs, hurled insults at white America with impunity." McCullough described the rappers as engaging in "animalistic, juvenile, and grossly hate-filled behavior." Oh, Mary, you're such a drama queen.

At this point, you may wonder, if you're someone who thinks, "Well, that sounds bad. What could those black fellows have said that would provoke such ire?" Well, plug your tender ears and staple your eyes. Young Jeezy said, "I know ya’ll thanking a lot of people right now. I want to thank two people. I want to thank the motherfucker overseas that threw two shoes at George Bush, and I want to thank the motherfuckers who helped them move they shit up out the White House. Get it moving bitch. My president is motherfucking black, nigga."

And Jay-Z? He rapped, "My president is black, in fact he’s half white. So even in a racist mind he’s half right. If you’ve got a racist mind it’s alright. My president is black, but his house is all white. My president is black, in fact he’s half white. So even in a racist mind he’s half right. If you’ve got a racist mind it’s alright. My president is black, but his house is all white. Never thought I’d say this shit, baby I’m good. You can keep your pussy because I don’t want no more Bush. No more war. No more Iraq. No more white lies, my president is black."

For McCullough (and Michelle Malkin and Bill O'Reilly and virtually every conservative wad of fuck able to sputter out fake rage), this outrage falls directly on Obama's lap: "In his silence, as it pertains to his invited guests who made public displays and attributions to his election, he has allowed the advancement of ideas that are more racist and unjust than many of the expressions of segregation that were pervasive in his childhood."

In other words, because a couple of black rap artists used the occasion to, well, rap, Barack Obama needs to apologize to the nation. Because the black dudes upset some (mostly white) people. Damn. They really have so little to grasp onto at this point, don't they?

McCullough's wallowing in anger belies, of course, his deep desire to be the meat in a Jay-Z/Young Jeezy sandwich. So much of what McCullough writes is just the unrequited moan of sexual denial, the need to be fucked by smack-talkin' black guys while Obama looks on, approvingly, and fondles himself. God, what night time fantasies, how this election has provided McCullough with new chapters for his masturbatory journeys, committed, of course, in the closet of his own making.

They're Losing Their Fucking Minds, Part 1:
So Barack Obama, openly pro-choice, openly pro-gay rights (not totally, but let's take it for now), and openly tossing the Bush administration onto the shitpile and setting it on fire, warming himself from the flames, has been in office nearly four days. And the right has lost its fucking mind. They don't know what to do. It's kind of hysterically pathetic, like watching a man driving a car that's grinding gears and squealing brakes and he turns up the radio so he can't hear the noise. Dude, the car's fucked.

For instance, the Family Research Council's Super-Duper Prayer Team has been called upon to pray so hard, with our eyes and assholes clenched tight, that Obama and Congress magically transform into something else, like they're just frogs that need a princess's soft lips to become princes of the Lord. The Rude Pundit joined the SDPT under a nom de rude and he receives weekly prayerilingus orders from the FRC's National Prayer Director, a title that is a little like "Chief Klingon Speaker." We've been ordered to bend over and give it up for God to stop Obama's policies on abortion: "May God miraculously change our new President's heart to abandon his abortion plans! May He give pro-life Congressmen supernatural will and effective political strategies to withstand and defeat these death-dealing plans!" And if God doesn't change Obama's heart, does that mean we should just chill? That our prayers are annoying the fuck out of him? Since you can make up any shit you like and say that God believes it, the Rude Pundit will answer his questions with a knowing nod.

Demonstrating the churchward drift of what was once called "mainstream conservatism," Kathryn Jean Lopez over at the National Review Online's blog gives a high-five to the desires of the SDPT, when, at the March for Life, she observes, "It’s a beautiful thing to see how many of this crowd — and so many pro-life religious folks I’ve encountered – are praying for Barack Obama. They love their country and want better for it than legal abortion. They know the power of prayer, and if anything could make him reconsider abortion..."

This is how bugfuck they're becoming (let's not even get into what's going on at the other nutzoid conservative blogs). All they have left is to pray to an invisible sky wizard to intercede on their behalf, that some godly hoodoo, some Jesus-y magic, will make it all better for them. And when you realize that most people in the country have told you and your party to shove it up your asses, all you can do is sit on your knees.

(Side note: One of the things the Rude Pundit's been loving about these first few days of the Obama presidency is how the President is saying, "Fuck you" to everyone who talked about how hard it would be to do the things that he's doing, how, if he saw what the Bush people saw, he'd change his mind. Nope. Full speed ahead.)

Bipartisanship For Dummies:
Well, of course Barack Obama took the oath of office again. The man knows who he's dealing with: the petulant little fucks of the right who will do anything they can to invalidate his presidency. The President's no idiot. Already, conservatives in Congress are lining up like drunks in a bar with a five buck a suck whore in the back, ready to shove what they can down their remaining supporters' throats and blow their loads to get ready for the midterms.

What we're gonna see for the next few months is a prolonged hissy fit, with Republicans throwing themselves on the floor of the supermarket and rolling around and crying until they get that fuckin' box of cookies they want. Democrats and the Obama administration need to be the firm parent, the one who yanks those little bastards out of the store and say, "You know what? No fucking sweets for four years." You can see it in the punk ass hold they've put on the Eric Holder nomination. It's a toddler's power play.

Yeah, yeah, we’re all supposed to bipartisan now. We’re supposed to reach across the aisle and work together. That’s what Obama wants. Democrats may have the presidency, the Congress, and the support of most of the country, but we gotta make sure that Republicans are loved, too. Like the deformed kid in the wheelchair at the Thanksgiving table: "No, no, let’s all stop talking and listen to what Johnny has to say through his breathing tube. What’s that? You wanna go to the amusement park? But you can’t ride any rides. Okay, okay, stop thrashing and drooling. You’ll yank out your feeding IV. We’ll go after dinner."

Fuck bipartisanship. Fuck them. For most of eight years, Democrats were stomped on, left out of decisions, ignored, lied to, and forced to lick the Republicans’ taints. And no matter what awful bullshit the Bush administration wanted Congress to rubber stamp, nearly every time, Democrats would come up with some way to go along. "Okay, White House, now, you promise, no fingers crossed, that if we let you listen to phone calls and tap computers without a warrant, that you won’t use it to keep a copy of our chats with our tranny whores we met met on Craigslist? You promise? Done."

Here’s what bipartisanship meant to Republicans: let’s say a Republican and a Democrat are stuck on a desert island. The Republican knows how to survive in the wild, the Democrat knows how to build a raft. They need each other, right? They’re stuck there, and while they may hate each other, they gotta work together or they’re gonna die on the island. While the Democrat is, you know, building the raft, the Republican is gathering coconuts, keeping the fire lit, you know, that kind of shit. It’s all nice and cooperative. And then, when the raft is done, the Republican slits the throat of the Democrat, eats his flesh, drinks his blood, and uses his bones and his clothes for a sail. Bye-bye, island.

Here’s the Rude Pundit's deal: we’ll be bipartisan if you apologize. Not just an eye-rolling “We’re sorry.” Not good enough. We each need to come up with a way for Republicans to apologize. For the Rude Pundit, it’s simple. Blow jobs. He wants to get blow jobs from Republicans. Every time he meets a Republican, he wants to just point at his cock and have them nod, get on their knees. And blow him. He walks into Mitch McConnell’s office, he wants an immediate appointment for him to suck it. If he heads over to the Republican Party Headquarters, he wants to leave there raw. He goes into the Fox News bureau, he wants Greta Van Susternen on him like a Hoover on deep pile. That’s how you’ll apologize. He doesn't know what everyone else wants. There might be a whole lot of sucking and licking going on. And would that be a bad thing after eight years of getting raped?

The United States, One More Time:

The crush of people in the Rude Pundit's area of the National Mall yesterday made us seem less like individuals than a single surging, gigantic organism. If someone five bodies behind you leaned forward, you leaned forward. Human heat made us warm on that almost sarcastically cold day. Yet there was virtually nothing but elation, a gathered nation ready to welcome an instantly transformative moment. Indeed, if you think about it, this was what this America was poised to become after September 11, 2001, had the former administration decided to harness the power of unity. But, then again, it was never very good with alternative forms of energy.

Everyone released purgative, cathartic boos at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The television coverage may have muted it, but it was there. A young woman half-heartedly said, "Oh, c'mon, ya'll, that's mean," but she cracked up when the Rude Pundit said, "Sometimes a man deserves to be booed by a couple of million people." The most touchingly surprising crowd reaction was the cheer that went up for Jimmy Carter. Most everything else was as expected: the too-respectful quiet for Rick Warren, tears as Aretha Franklin sang, the nearly unbearably joyful roar when Barack Obama took the oath of office, understanding that, however badly John Roberts screwed it up, it was real. People began to drift away as poet Elizabeth Alexander read her actually quite good poem, and they snapped back to attention when Rev. Joseph Lowery called out the old 1960s chant about the races. All a way of saying, "We've finished a chapter. Let's write the next one."

On the Metro ride into town, in the crowd itself, in the opened-up Smithsonian museums where you could sit on the floors next to exhibits and get warm, and in the streets afterward, the diversity of celebrants was kind of staggering: the family wearing "Filipinos for Obama" buttons (who, fortunately, looked Filipino), the older white guy wearing a Human Rights Campaign hat and Obama buttons with the rainbow flag across them, the two guys walking on Independence Avenue with scarves that had "Palestine" on them, so much disenfranchisement now thinking they were, at least, welcome in answer to one big "Thank you."

And the black people. So very many black people. The jubilant families on the Metro, the giddy students around the Rude Pundit at the Mall, the older men who simply said to each other, "I wasn't going to miss this." The Rude Pundit's been in large audiences of black people before, at gospel churches and festivals, but he's always sensed a divide, like, for some at whatever event, he was a kind of interloper, a spy, even. But not yesterday. He's never seen such a seamless connection between black and white, watching, for instance, white suburban women chatting up and laughing loudly with middle-aged black women. When Obama spoke, it was with the idea that we all did this, that it couldn't have been done any other way, and that we very much needed each other as we turn from the jubilation to the journey.

A young black woman and her mother were walking with the tide of humanity after the Inauguration was over. The young woman was talking about how some of her friends thought she was crazy to go out into the cold when she could have easily watched it on TV. "No way," she said, "I wanted to be there for my President. I wanted to answer him when he made that call to work."

All around the Capitol, after the event, increasingly desperate button hawkers were trying to sell their "I Was There" pins. Nah, the Rude Pundit thought. He knew where he was. He knows where he is.



Tomorrow: Back to your regularly scheduled rudeness.

A Brief Word About Today's Events:
Around the Rude Pundit, people really did boo George W. Bush. All of them. And they also yelled and booed at Cheney. It was a mass purging, a way of saying, "Hasta la vista, motherfuckers."

And then there was the joy after the storm.

Exhausted. More tomorrow, including a couple of pics.

Late Post Today:
'Cause, you know, the Rude Pundit's going to a thing. And he may just freeze to death doing it.

"What Was Yours Is Everyone's From Now On": Among the Americans (and Others) at the Lincoln Memorial:
The Rude Pundit's favorite moment yesterday at the We Are One concert for Barack Obama happened before anyone started up on the stage at Lincoln's feet. The Rude Pundit was at the south side of the reflecting pool, about halfway down, near one of the Jumbotrons playing what we could not see, and, having an hour to go, he told the people he was with that he wanted to see what it was like closer down. So he walked down the path, near the blue port-a-potties, to almost the limit of where those who didn't have tickets could go. He saw that it would have been one of those frustrating places to stand, being near enough to see tiny people on stage and far away from the screens. So he turned to walk, against the flow of people, back to where he had been.

At that moment, Wilco's song "What Light" started playing over the speakers, a generously hopeful shuffle of a tune, lyrics tinged with realism about ultimately giving oneself over to what's good inside. With his back to the stage, facing the people, the Rude Pundit noticed that everyone passing by was, truly, blissful. Blissful in that silent, almost beatific way that one only sees in babies who have just nursed or grown-ups who have just had an orgasm. As if trying to accept that this was all really happening. Sure, of course, we each read a situation in the ways that grow from our own frames of reference. The Rude Pundit had expected happiness and celebration. But this was way, way different from the raucous party he had thought might happen.

And he just smiled, in the gray, cold but not too cold day, dirt and dust covering his shoes, Lincoln Memorial behind him, Washington Monument in front, Wilco echoing throughout the Mall. A small smile of recognition, a feeling that at this moment, even just for now, things were different. Nothing definable, just, you know, "things." Then he fairly sauntered, hands in his coat pockets, through the people passing him by, and every face he met just smiled and nodded back. Like we knew. Just knew.

You can read about the concert itself elsewhere. There was good and bad and ugly in the performances and readings. But the Rude Pundit's never been in a crowd as attentive and respectful as this one, as quiet when it needed to be - really, there were times no one around him was doing anything but watching and listening. And if you're in as racially and geographically diverse as a huge group can be and everyone is singing with Mary J. Blige and John Mellencamp, and dancing when Garth Brooks did "Shout," waving their hands in the air like it was the best wedding they've ever been to, why critique it? Besides, when Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen are leading everyone in a big, sloppy singalong of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and the Lebanese immigrant standing behind the Rude Pundit is singing, in a deep voice, "America the Beautiful" with Beyonce' on stage, then we're kind of beyond criticism.

When Obama spoke, he didn't tell us to blindly celebrate. He didn't simply thank us for being there. No, he reminded us that we were there to work. That we were on the Mall to start a seriously difficult time. That we were in this together. That we had to rebuild and renew this America. And, just for that few hours, at least, if not beyond, we believed we could do it.

The Rude Pundit in DC:
After the big concert on Sunday, you'll wanna come on up to Adams Morgan to check out the Rude Pundit, the Obama Girls of Comedy, and more at Jeff Kreisler's Comedy Against Evil show at 7:30 at the District of Columbia Arts Center.

Get your tix for $15 at Brown Paper Tickets. If we sell this fucker out, we'll add a second show.

Gone, Bushes, Gone:
There’s one final myth about this President that the Rude Pundit would like to put to rest: George W. Bush is not a man you would want to have a beer with. No, not because if you saw him in a bar, you'd react like you had gone on the sex offender registry in Dallas and discovering that a guy who fucked babies in his basement was now living in the downstairs apartment. It's that, despite any feints at finding him charming, he is not, in his soul, a kind or decent person.

Check out this exchange from his interview with Larry King the other night:
KING: Did you read any of Obama's books?

G. BUSH: No.

KING: I want to get to something --

G. BUSH: Trying to figure out this line of questioning?

KING: Well, I have been told --

G. BUSH: My favorite color is blue and I love enchiladas.

Watching Bush beat up on a 400 year-old man for not getting to the point is like watching a teenager drown kittens for being cute. The Rude Pundit doesn't drink with irredeemable dickheads, with self-righteous balls of fuck who think their very existence demands your respect and attention, with privileged cockmongers who can't manage even a moment of self-awareness.

And he will not drink with crazed, mad sons of bitches who can't be reasoned with when they're half a fifth in the bag, the kind of angry drunk who'll fight you for stepping on his shoes, who'll show up at your house with a group of shithead drunk friends, kick your dog, try to finger your wife's asshole, break your lamps while falling into your houseplants, shit on your front yard, set your porch on fire trying to light your barbecue, puke in your fishtank, read your diary to your whole family, and then demand that you give him a bed so he can just sleep it off, but when you won't, he threatens to cut your kids' throats and jack off in the wounds. Fuck him. He can drink alone for all eternity.

His shitty little farewell speech was the pathetic capper, a generic "Kiss my ass, America" that he could barely act conscious enough to make interesting. To a room filled with stinking corpses, Bush went through a rote recitation of one or two things that might be called accomplishments, including bringing the dying back to life and that he stood on rubble after 9/11. Everything else was the obligatory attempt at justification, but, like an actor in a role he despises and for which he was never suited in the first place, he couldn't even manage to act like he believed what he was saying.

It's over. It's done. It is, yes, finally, history. Yet we can't just bury this presidency alive in the cold, cold ground and have a picnic on the earth above it, joyously toasting as it screams and claws and tries to get free before it inhales dirt, gags, vomits, and dies horribly, not knowing why it deserved such an awful fate. No, alas, no.

Because the reason I will unreasonably hate this man, these men, these women, as human beings, and not just for ideologies and actions, is because neither I nor most of you will live to see the day that all their hurt is healed.

A Brief Comment on Tonight's Brief Comments:
If one can sum up one's last eight years as President in a dozen minutes, one just hasn't tried. It ain't humble. It's called, "Get me the fuck outta here already."

Shorter version: "Well, there ya go."

More tomorrow.

Late Post Today:


The Rude Pundit's on his way to DC for a couple of reasons. He'll be in the streets during the inauguration orgy.

There's no real reason to post a photo of Tony Blair and George Bush just after Bush gave Blair the Medal of Freedom, other than that it's sort of like watching a rapist give an award for best rape assist to another rapist. And calling the award "The Grand and Glorious Trophy o' Love."

Back later with something. Fill your time with the only year in review that matters, the Buffalo Beast's "50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2008."

Tomorrow: The Rude Pundit's farewell to George W. Bush.

Because We Won't Have Him to Kick Around Much Longer, Part 7 (Alibi Edition):
You been watching these exit interviews with Bush and Cheney? These fuckers are scared. Something's got them worried and they're acting like low-rent hit men captured by the FBI, coming up with alibis and excuses faster than ex-guards at Auschwitz. The Rude Pundit can't figure out exactly what it is, but there's something spooking these two so that when anyone asks them about torture or Gitmo, they do a justification dance that's like Express Yourself Day at the spastic children's home.

Look at them go: here's Cheney, as ever, breathing and grunting like he's fucking a trussed up adolescent Thai boy who'll be killed after the Vice President blows his load on the boy's back, talking to the drippy pile of dogshit that is Bill Bennett about our Cuban day spa: "The other key thing that people forget is that we've got a couple hundred very bad actors down there. We've been through, several times, a scrub of the population in Guantanamo. And a good many more have been returned than we still hold, have been returned to their home countries. Now, out of that group, some number has, in fact, gone back onto the battlefield against us." That number, by the way, is 18, according to the Pentagon, with 43 "suspected" of returning to terrorism. And let us ponder, and why not, how many of those were transformed into "terrorists" by their experience with American justice.

Dick continued, "So we've not been, I think, especially harsh in terms of the judgments we've made. We have let some people go, and we erred a bit on the side obviously of -- in letting the wrong people go on a few occasions. But now what's left, that is the hardcore." Now all we have is the 250 hardcore. Before? Bunch of pussies. But now? Hard fuckin' core. Except for the 50 detainees who, you know, are cleared but have no country to take them. And then there's always the ones who've been tortured into madness. But, no, they're all hardcore.

By the way, for contextual fun, here's Cheney in a June 2005 interview regarding Gitmo: "Now, the key here to remember is that the 520 we've got down there, these are -- hardcore terrorists is the only way to describe them." Except for the 270 we released between then and now. But hardcore, motherfuckers, hardcore.

With President Bush, it's all about the torture. 'Cause, you know, now that a Bush-appointed judge has declared that a Gitmo detainee can't be put on trial even by the bullshit military tribunals, because information was tortured out of him, well, then it oughta be time for George and Laura to gas up the jet and tell Dubai they're comin' to stay. On last night's Larry King Undead, Bush offered the defense of scoundrels on his orders on torture: "I got legal opinions that said whatever we're going to do is legal." Don't tell him he broke the law: his lawyers said he didn't. It's like a another badly written episode of Law and Order.

A quick aside here: what the fuck is it with panties and bras in our torture of detainees? While far worse was done to him, why the fuck did we do this: "Qahtani 'was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation' and 'was told that his mother and sister were whores.' With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room 'and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,' the report shows"? What it sounds like is that the interrogators at Gitmo were fucking bored and thought, "Let's make Haji wear thong ear muffs and dance while we furiously masturbate."

Another quick aside: Mohammed al-Qahtani apparently was a really dangerous dude. It might have been nice to charge him with some kind of crime, like conspiracy or something that would have, you know, put him in jail instead of this disgraceful purgatory.

For so very long, torture had stayed out of the mainstream media. Once John McCain and Barack Obama declared they would both close Guantanamo, the issue was off the table for the duration of the campaign. Now that the Obama administration is coming in and members of the House and the Senate are threatening to investigate the Bush White House's actions, now that Obama had to put up or shut up on Gitmo, all of a sudden the media is treating the issue like it matters, like somewhere, hidden in a deep, dark place is this curled up, frightened little American soul and we're trying to figure out how to coax it out of the corner, wondering if we have earned the right to hold out our hands and say, "Come on out. It'll be okay."

In Brief: Because We Won't Have Him to Kick Around Much Longer, Part 6 (Final Press Conference Edition):
Watching and listening to President George W. Bush at yesterday's ultimate press conference was not unlike being in a room with a tweaking meth head who's trying to roll a cigarette, with the sudden shifts and jerks in movement, the delusions of grandeur, the inability to just shut the fuck up, and even after he pisses himself, he just won't stop talking, and then he comments on shit that he has absolutely no idea about, vacillating between shaky threats and half-witted jokes because his hole-filled brain can barely articulate a demi-thought, let alone a full thing that we might call a sentence, between not giving a shit what you have to say to taking everything you say as a deeply personal insult, like you just said that you fucked his mom in the ass and she shit on your dick, between hating your fucking guts and desperately craving your approval, while standing over an anorexic meth whore's corpse and denying that he had anything to do with her, that he was just pulling that knife he's holding out of her and he doesn't know how her intestines became a necklace for him, and, hey, by the way, he tells you, "Did you see how I dragged that dead whore into an alley so no one has to look at her?"

And you just sit there, staring, thinking that he doesn't know what the fuck he's saying, he doesn't know how the fuck to say it, and isn't it just time that he cleans up the tobacco he's dropped and shuts the fuck up?

Just Another Sunday in What Is Still Gitmo America:
So yesterday, while getting his taint licked clean by Fox "news" host Brit "My Chin and Neck Are One" Hume, President George W. Bush said he authorized the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He chose the tortures off a menu of tortures like he was ordering a steak at Outback: "So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him, and they gave me a list of tools." And then he asked how they were cooked: "And I said, are these tools deemed to be legal." They worked, he claimed, in filling his belly with information that, he says, saved American lives. But he can't tell you what or how.

Over on the CNN, Wolf Blitzer was a little less generous with his tongue on Dick Cheney, only tugging the Vice President's nipple rings a little with his teeth. When Blitzer asked Cheney about the treatment of prisoners, Cheney, as is his way, took the moral high ground and scabbily oozed, "Now you don't go in and pull out somebody's toenails in order to get them to talk. This is not torture. We don't do torture." In regards to how the torture that we don't do was done, Cheney giggled like Peter Lorre on nitrous oxide, "I have no reason to believe anybody out at the agency violated any tenet of the obligations and responsibilities we have in terms of statutes or our treaty obligations. I think it was done very professionally." Because you don't want unprofessional torturers doing the job.

Over on the ABC, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos's Hair, President-elect Barack Obama declared, "Vice President Cheney I think continues to defend what he calls extraordinary measures or procedures when it comes to interrogations and from my view waterboarding is torture. I have said that under my administration we will not torture." But as for investigating the torture that both Bush and Cheney have said they approved of, Obama said, "[O]bviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." This was just after he had said that he's not sure Gitmo will close in 100 days because he has to figure out how to detain people who may be guilty but were tortured and that their testimony from torture can't be used in what is usually referred to as "court."

(Brief note: Anything assumed about what Obama is going to do when he's actually president contains a certain amount of bullshit because we don't know what he'll do in office. See, for instance, George W. Bush, who all your punditry was saying was going to be some kind of shiny "compassionate conservative," which we learned, once he was in office, meant, "I won't rape you in public." Still...)

No, someone needs to tell Obama, one of the greatest faults of the Bush administration is its failure to look backwards, its refusal to understand what happened and why. Fuck this whole "move forwards" horseshit. That was the mantra of this White House. It's why they didn't even want a 9/11 commission. It's why they didn't want any real accounting of the Iraq War. When you're investigating crimes, you are always looking backwards. Stop damning us to repeat. You can be sure that, when they're no longer in office, there's a lot of White House officials who are gonna avoid going to most of Europe for fear of arrest.

And you can’t close Gitmo as fast as you wanted to? Jesus, could we just stop buying into the right’s political paradigm. You try the prisoners under the evidence that's allowed in court. Let the chips fall where they may. Sorry - if we fucked it up, then we fucked it up. That shouldn't change our fundamental beliefs about justice. No, instead, Democrats have to talk like Republicans because that's what "bipartisan" means.

Democrats have to learn to stop being so goddamned self-loathing. It’s like saying that, if you’re a woman, you dated a guy who wouldn’t go down on you because he thought vaginas are unclean, and you ended up believing that your pussy is nasty. Then, when some new man comes along and wants to eat you out like a fat vegetarian at an all night salad bar, you say, because you’ve been conditioned to do so, "No, I don’t like that." But anyone you ask for advice will tell you: spread your legs and show your lips and get down to business so you can enjoy your life.

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Double Check the Planes Flying Overhead:


That's President George W. Bush, looking nervous while surrounded by children's books yesterday at an elementary school in Philadelphia.

Why does he seem so worried? Is he praying that there's no sequel to My Pet Goat that they'll ask him to read to the kids? Things ended badly last time, if you'll recall. Does he think he's in a dream? Deja-vu? Or is it just a general anxiety that afflicts him?

Or is he just thinking, like the rest of us, "Less than two weeks, less than two weeks, how much can I fuck things up in less than two weeks?" Maybe the real issue is whether that question is, for him, a hope or a fear.