They're out to eats us, but they can make your celebrity dreams come true.

So which side are you on?

Today a Very Large bill that I was not expecting crashed into my life. And upon sitting down to catch my breathe, panic a little and read it in detail, I discovered that the castle feline had decided (for her own, inscrutable reasons) that today was the day she would take random revenge on my favorite spot on the couch, and that I was now seated in my suit and tie in a little puddle of cat pee.

And after a moment of pure, scalding, self-pitying rage, I abruptly found I could only smile and tip my hat with great respect and admiration to the Great Comic in the Sky.

Because that, ladies 'n gemmin, is low humor of the very highest order.

All your cryin don't do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood
Come on up to the house...

In which I apologize to all those nice people I may have inadvertently pissed off.

There are a lot of things that warp the orbits of our lives that we never got to voted on.

For example, I don’t remember ever holding a national election on the question of whether or not we should massively de-industrialize the United States, shutter our factories, ship millions of middle-class jobs overseas, eviscerate whole regions of the country, turn the American economy into a feudal state and the American workforce into WalMart greeters...all to radically enrich a fraction of one percent of the population.

But that’s what we did.

We also never held a referendum on whether or not an adult American citizen has to have a credit card; we just made it inconvenient-to-the-point-of-impossible for adult American citizens to function without them. I know. I tried. If you ever wanted to be treated like a Unibomber suspect, try telling the company you work for that you can’t just charge your trip to Albuquerque and they can reimburse you later because you don’t have a credit card.

We never voted to make cellphones mandatory. Like credit cards, they are a theoretically fine idea that has become a pestilence in practice, turning us into a nation of Pavlovian droolers for whom the siren's song of the ringtone trumps everything else.

Virtually every oblivious asswipe who nearly (or actually) rammed me on Lake Shore Drive, or tried to kill me in a crosswalk, was yap-yap-yapping away. Every trivial morning-meeting-muffin-misdelivery gets escalated into a frenzied round of phone-and-Blackberry tag. Every tinpot dictator boss with a sense of absolute entitlement to your time whenever and wherever the mood strikes them has turned a benevolent technology into a leash that stretches all the way around the world, and a siphon to steal away the precious days of your life.

And if you want to be looked at like a sex offender making your court-mandated neighborhood notification of your arrival in Mayberry, try telling that boss, "No, I do not have a cell phone and have no plans to get one just so you can interrupt my personal life when you can’t find the 'Any' key on your girlfriend’s computer."

Which brings me to Facebook.

Some months ago a certain bastid fellow blogger (who virtually never posts anymore, which I realize now sadly covers about 4/5 of all the bloggers I have ever met) sent me an innocent-seeming email.

See, there were these pictures…

But they were on his Facebook page…

So, being a credulous idjit, I clicked on the link provided, which jumped me to a friendly screen, which informed me that I had to sign up with Facebook in order to see the pictures which, at this point, I’m thinking better be really spectacular.

And so, discovering that someone out there had already taken the appellation “driftglass”, I chose another variation of my nom-du-blog and waded in up to my ankles, intending only to flip through a few photographs this pal of mine wanted to share with me.


11 minutes later…and I have 53 “friend” requests.

WTF?

Suddenly I have a home page. or at least I think I do. I have a “wall”. Or maybe I am part of a wall. Or I'm another brick in the wall.

I discover that the someone who took the appellation “driftglass” has been uploading my posts to Facebook wholesale. Trying to be helpful? I haven’t a clue.

I start getting little bursts of traffic from various islands far out in the Great Facebook Ocean.

Inquiries.

Invitations.

As a happily private person who can barely keep up with his email, this is one of my favorite, little nightmares come true: finding myself down a Kafka-scented rabbit hole where “friend” is a verb and I am suddenly a member of a club aggressively geared towards share-share-sharing pictures and poems and personal details; a club I never had any intention of joining, with mores, widgets, protocols, norms, duties, obligations I never asked for, have any desire to learn, or was even dimly aware existed.

I realize that millions of people feast on Facebook (and then clean the table with a crumb sweeper called Twitter) and jolly good for them, and if my inattention to the medium into which I was softly press-ganged has caused anyone insult, I apologize. Believe me, I always try to make sure that my insults are clear, direct and full-frontal.

So if anyone is interested what I have to say on any given day, come to the blog: it’s one mouse-click away. If you want to sound off, that’s why I leave comments open, and why I sometimes reply, although y’all do just fine without me. If you want to drop me a note, I have email, and am also on Twitter (although I haven’t used it weeks, can’t belch in fewer than 140 characters, and in my most narcissistic fever dreams could not imagine that anyone would give a titmouse’s taint what I’m planning to have for dinner, or how many step there are between me an the local “el” station.)

But no Facebook: for now, the conveniences I already use are surfeit enough for me.

That vexing "content" problem.

Regular readers of this site will remember that, earlier this week, my massive slant-mining operation into the seedy, web-extra side of "Meet the Press" uncovered this bit of soulful introspection on the task of writing by Our Mr. Brooks:

Brooks: No, for me it's pure desperation. I, uh, find it actually extremely hard -- I tell college students, imagine having a paper due in three days and that's the rest of your life.

Yes, to maintain the lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed, poor Bobo (Sorry, commenter Robert-who-used-to-be-called-Bob-o, but this "Bobo" is derived from "Bobos In Paradise"; our Mr. Brooks' venture into long-form writing in which he streeeetches his writing muscles by mediating on the lives of overprivileged suburban White people. And I'm keeping it) is required to crank out Two!Count!Em!Two! new columns every week.

Except for those weeks when he isn't.

So how does the occupant of one of the world's most sought-after pieces of editorial real estate bulldog his Sisyphean millstone up that mountain every week?

Well, one trick which seems to lighten that awful burden considerably is Brooks' habit of regularly manufacturing entire columns out of the fawning transcription of the curriculum vitae of Attractive Republican Men.

Just like he did today in "Meet John Thune", from which the following snippets are honest-to-God directly taken.

Read on, if you dare:

"Meet John Thune"

November 13, 2009

By DAVID BROOKS

...
But deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations. ... And now as they look to the future of their party, and who might lead it in 2012, the name John Thune keeps popping up.

The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome
...

The second thing people say about him is that he is unfailingly genial, modest and nice.

He grew up in Murdo, S.D., population 612. His father was a Naval aviator in World War II and a genuine war hero.

He was called back home after the war to work in the family hardware store and went on to become an educator, as did his wife.
...

John was a high school basketball star and possesses idyllic small-town manners...

He appears to be untouched by cynicism.
...

...he is straightforward, intelligent and earnest. He sometimes seems to have emerged straight into the 21st century from a more wholesome time.

After high school, he attended Biola University, a small Christian college outside of Los Angeles. ...

He then got an M.B.A. from the University of South Dakota ...
...

He is a gracious and ecumenical legislator...

...nobody can question Thune’s conservative bona fides.
...

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government.

His populism is not angry.

... a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

It goes on like that. A farrago of unattributed, saccharine "everybody knows", "people say" and Third Person Omniscient declaratives.

On.

And on.

And on.

And yet consider all the other, awesome stuff that David Fucking Brooks left out of his obsequious Thuneology:

Brooks failed to mention that Thune speaks fluent COBOL and his shadow heals colicky kittens.

That he secretly give his old suits to mall Santas after he personally stuff the pockets with Bible verses.

That when he played "Charlie X" on the original "Star Trek"

he learned all about Big City Folk and their strange ways.

That he once changed the course of American politics when he wrote a very nice note to Rudy Giuliani (on paper he made with his own, two, handsome hands) telling him to lose the comb-over.

That in 1988 he ate a bug on a bet and won enough money to take his best gal to the picture show AND run for the Senate!

That he can play the "Mississippi Mud" on a Jew's harp like the Devil himself,

but tactfully refers to it as an "Ozark harp".

Bobo also skipped right over the fact that, when shaken very lightly, Thune gives off a pleasant, grain-elevator-at-dusk aroma.

That it was his ideas on marginal tax rate reform that led directly to the invention of the swively thing on the hand-drier, but he is just to darn Midwest-modest to mention it.

And that he can sing, sing, sing!

So why would Bobo choose to omit all of this other cool, valuable intel? What would cause him to so abruptly end his full-Thune-body-body-soapy-massage at the sternum?

For many minutes I was stumped, until I thought to do a word count and realized that, having done his contractually-obligated 800 words, there was simply no rational reason for him to continue.

This paean to his latest, mighty-thewed GOP man-crush had obviously drained him, and he has another masterpiece of insightful analysis due in just three days, so he wisely chose to put his pen aside, ration his genius and sleep off his exertions.

After all, you don't maintain your position as the Mainstream Media's most sought-after piece of Conservative tail by just giving gold like this away.

From CNN/Money:

Banker's bonuses: 40% bigger this year
Global financial firms are planning to increase bonus payments as strong financial markets propel banks back to profitability.
By Ben Rooney

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Bonuses at financial firms worldwide will increase by an average of 40% this year, according to an annual report released Monday.

Options Group, a New York-based executive search and compensation consultancy, said near-record revenues from fixed-income, commodities and foreign exchange trading will help push bankers' bonuses back up after a slump in 2008.

The report, which was based on data from 300,000 industry professionals worldwide, also showed that bonuses are increasingly being offered in the form of multi-year stock options.
...

Of course, what happened last year was not so much a "slump" as it was a hostage situation. A handful of billionaires who had already gotten richer that the dreams of Avarice from bonuses they awarded themselves for looting the economy...put a gun to our collective heads and demanded trillions more in cheap taxpayer money to prop up their global three-card Monte scam.

And they succeeded. We paid their ransom, and as we starve they divvy up the money they stole from us right before our very eyes. "Laughing all the way to the bank" I would say, were it not for the fact that they are the fucking bank.

In a more civilized time, these people's heads would be on pikes and happy children would be making up rope-skipping songs about the day the banksters went away (cashes, cashes, all fall down...) But we live in the lengthening shadows of a barbarous age, and so instead of pikes in the public square, their smiling faces grace the cover of Money Fetish Porn magazines.

And so we cue Wilco covering Woody Guthrie

and hope for the best.

"Realistic Hope for America" Agenda

Having just spent many, many months (mostly) resisting the temptation to chug-a-lug several gallons of sweet-sweet "Maybe if you hadn't fucked this guy over so badly he could have saved you" schadenfreude, I found myself too weak to resist the funny in this story from "The Torontoist" (h/t Whet Moser at the Chicago Reader) about an editor who took a flamethrower to the crappy writing...in a memo from the corporate office announcing the layoffs...of 100 editors.

They obviously kept the million monkeys and their typewriters.

Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort..."
...

Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration.
...

Read the rest here, and take to heart this Important Life Lesson:

Do not, do not, do not gratuitously piss off people who can hone a sentence down to a 30 nanometer edge and then use it to

bisect you like a banana split.

*(More-or-less from this quote by Voltaire: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.")

In which, based on the fact that for some reason Ed Asner

was appearing on every channel to talk about the anniversary of the Fall of the House of Krenz, I assumed there was a Very Special “Lou Grant Show” reunion on somewhere.

I looked and looked but sadly, no.

There is, however, apparently a remake of the 1980s science fiction series “V” slugging it out for audience share with a remake of 1960s science fiction series “The Prisoner”, proving once again that, other than within a few, carefully-tended creativity preserves, teevee has long since officially given up on doing anything but turning its underpants inside out every few years and calling it re-imagining.

Speaking of which...

On “Face the Nation” Lindsey Graham warned “the public option will destroy private insurance.”

Just as public parks and gyms have destroyed for-profit fitness clubs, public beaches have destroyed private seaside resorts, public transit has destroyed the car, Segue, motorcycle, bike and scooter industries, public libraries have driven Amazon into bankruptcy, taxpayer-funded police departments have wiped out the market for private security firms, the US Armed Forces have put Blackwater out of business, community colleges have killed the Ivy League, public playgrounds have destroyed private sports franchises, public washrooms have people turning their bathrooms into extra closet space, public housing has destroyed the housing market, public drinking fountains have crushed Evian and Ice Mountain.

And so forth.
And so on.
And so forth.

Of course, even if you accept Graham’s bullshit premise, he still failed to explain why it would be a bad thing.


In fulfillment of prophecy, David Fucking Brooks appeared on “Meet the Press” ,

to speak about “Independents”, but the real fun happened after the show, about which more down below.


“Fox News Sunday”'s own Ralph Furley -- Holy Joe Lieberman -- dropped in one again, this time to talk in pedantic tones about Islamic Extremism and Fort Hood by essentially reading one New York Times headline after another.

Lieberman knows nothing of his own. There is nothing he can confirm.

So why was he on at all?

To warn against premature speculation…after which he speculated darkly and prematurely about larger plots. By self-radicalized, home-grown terrorists. Who got their stuff over…Teh Internets!

Holy Joe also demanded hearings because “You have to see this as if 12 American troops were killed in Afghanistan” which, even if you buy Lieberman’s point (which is, apparently, that he can read headlines out loud without help) I don’t remember Joe Lieberman running onto the Fox News to demand hearings on every other occasion that an American soldier was killed in Afghanistan.

No, it had just been too long since the Senator from Likud had had a chance to suckle political advantage off of the 9/11 teat and to get his political rocks off say “Islamic Terrorism” over and over again in front of a camera.

Holy Joe: The debt! It is sooo high! And the public [health care] option will send us crashing into a new recession.

Of course, he’s lying, but so what? Flipping over a rock and finding Holy Joe playing at superfuckingpatriot and lying about Democrats on Fox is about as surprising as finding dung beetles holding a rave in a shit house.

On “This Week” , Republican Party Chairman DJ Mikey Steele shook his tiny, rented fist at God and shouted: “You delivered a 2,000 pound baby that nobody wants!”

Which, I don’t know what that means, but it was Steele’s intellectual high-point.


Later, Republican consultant and perennial “Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians” also-ran

Frank Luntz followed the chemical trail laid down by the likes of Dick Armey, Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham in weeks gone by and hauled his pie wagon onto the show to peddle his dirty, little book.

Sexual super-collider

George Will frets: Nothing frightens a middle class like inflation. India bought gold! Not a lot, but still!

But…there is no inflation.

Will: Yeah, sure, but there could be.

Luntz: The public is most angry about wasteful Washington spending. (Luntz then reads his own polling questions as if they mean something.)

Cokie Roberts: The problem is, people want jobs and don’t want to spend any money. How oh how will they do that?

Will: I remember how the Carthaginians handled a similar problem in the…

Luntz: I’m gonna throw out a completely unrelated issue which my PR firm is contractually obligated to drag into this conversation: Governors releasing prisoners.

At which point you can actually see Donna Brazile roll her eyes.

Stephanopoulos: OK, enough with the meaningless digit-salad, Luntz. What about the effect of awful shitty crazy that is boiling out of the skulls of GOP leaders? What about that?

Luntz (categorically refusing to even acknowledges the question): There are two statistics I want to put forward about what people are really angry about; intergenerational blah blah and economic whatsis.

Back and forth it went, with Sam Donaldson pushing back harder and more consistently than usually against the predictable tide of George Will “trial lawyer and tax cut” wing-natter, while Luntz just jamming the issues he gets paid to pimp into the public discourse in with a fucking turkey baster.

Even Cokie Roberts had to grudgingly admit that, while the Evil Liberal had once upon a time driven the Holy and Almighty Moderates out of their Party, it was not the case anymore. But Republicans? Are you kidding me? They should start calling themselves Pecan Log Cabin Republicans (driftglass tm) they’re so fucking nuts.

And whenever there was a nanosecond lull in the chatter?

Luntz: Let me grind out more hollow, contextless statistics so I can tack this show onto my video-resume.

On ”The Chris Matthews Show” Tweety just kept whanging away at the facts with the Beltway Wisdom Hammer, trying to force them to fit the fiction the Villagers have already decided to sell and insist that everyone pee their pants in Bellagio Fountain Unison

over the results of a trivial, off-off-year election that wouldn’t have registered as a rounding error during a real election year as seen through the filter of the granfalloon of the “Independent” voter.


Over on CNN’s Washington Pundit Full Employment Rodeo "State of the Union with John King", the mortal remains of Mary Matalin and James Carville Punch-and-Judy their Sunday morning away doing Very Badly (but with zoomy graphics and urgent music) what some of us have been doing Rather Well with naught but coffee, a keyboard, a box of fortified wine and a strong stomach since 2004: examining the Mouse Circus and parsing what we see there.

Their Very, Very, Very, Expensive version of what I do here every Sunday was all but unwatchable.

Matalin -- dressed in her Arby's Regional Manager best -- bitches a continuous stream of loathing for all things Left of Dick Cheney in a voice that makes the sound of nine cats and a sack of ball bearings in an industrial dryer sound sonorous.

Carville honks and smirks his way through a big, Cajun pot of Beltway Wisdom Gumbo. Then they stack in a few more panelists. Then a few more. All getting their pundit contact highs on sniffing the panties of everyone else on every other show, and finishing the job of completely composting the corn at the bottom of the Beltway Soup of the Day.

Because there’s just not enough of that going on already.

But the real sweet honey in the rock was buried inside something called the “Meet The Press: Web Extra", during which David Fucking Gregory questioned David Fucking Brooks about how he writes a column.

Yes! Finally, someone asking the tough questions!

Gregory: Let's ask about your work. David, I'll start with you. How you, um, arrive at a topic for your column. Because and for you it's particularly interesting 'cause you...you...you'll get into politics a LOT, but then you're also interested in, uh, in other matters like, uh, the neurological makeup of human beings.

Brooks: And you know if you want some brain surgery, I'd be happy to perform that.

Crosstalk.

Brooks: No, for me it's pure desperation. I, uh, find it actually extremely hard -- I tell college students, imagine having a paper due in three days and that's the rest of your life.

OK, on a purely professional level, I’m never gonna begrudge a fellow writer making a living from their craft: writing -- especially writing well -- is hard, fussy work that is usually done in painful awareness of the lengthening shadows of a culture hurtling towards a dark age of celebrity worship, giggling illiteracy and pandemic superstition and irrationality.

That being said, pause with me for a moment and consider that writing two columns a week is not something David Fucking Brooks does in his spare time.

Not something he knocks out in the few spare moments each day he has when he isn’t, say, taking care of children.

Not something he squeezes in between a job that barely pays his rent and another job that almost pays for his health care.

Not something he supplements with custom-made editorial art or video.

No, David Fucking Brooks’ whole job is writing two columns a week about whatever he wants, and then reiterating those columns on radio and teevee.

That’s it.

Bobo continues: And so for me I used to have all these normal, human needs for food, for water, for leisure. Now I only have one need: column ideas. And it’s all just panic and desperation. But I do write about that other stuff because I do fundamentally believe that culture shapes our lives more than politics.

Two things, then I'm done.

First, as the economy continues to drive PhDs into pizza delivery jobs, and pizza delivery guys into cardboard boxes, it was hilariously revealing to hear Bobo offhandedly categorize "leisure" with "food" and "water" as a basic human need. Reminds me of “The Simpsons”, when Krusty the Clown was trying to break back into comedy by doing topical, observational humor about things people “deal with in everyday life.”

Krusty – “Oh, yeah. You mean like when your lazy butler washes your sock garters and they're still covered with schmutz?”

Second, consider that for the last few years we have all watched the Corporate Media imploding in slow motion, sending hundreds of hardworking reporters to the unemployment line and leaving hundreds of important stories unreported. And every time another newspaper goes down, we all hear the same 7-10 excuses for the collapse: too much debt, falling ad revenues, Teh Internet, mismanagement, antiquated work rules, ancient Mayan curses, whatever.

It’s sad, no doubt about it (and, as the joke goes, if the New York Times finally closes its doors, who will the Huffington Post have to steal from?) but there is also something terribly wrong -- something that reeks of the same wildly-out-of-balance-and-ripe-for-extinction aroma as Wall Street banksters gloating over their billion dollar taxpayer-subsidized bonuses…after nearly destroyed the world…in pursuit of billion dollar bonuses –- when the Mainstream Media is crying poormouth at the same time it is overpaying its top talent by several orders of magnitude for cranking out creative typist piecework twice a week.

Something that begs for our contempt in that this stratospheric overcompensation for mediocrity is happening in the same Universe where a dozen bloggers I could name can and do regularly produce vastly more, better and more variegated work...in their “spare” time...at 1/1,000th of what "Meet The Press" spends on Green Room snacks every month.

Who see the world like this.

Will never understand those who see it

like this.

In which I play a little game with myself trying to predict what piffle David Fucking Brooks will be trafficking tomorrow on MTP as Rachael Maddow puts her Keds up his ass.

I'm guessing Bobo will be Speaking With Authority about "Independents"; after all he wrote a whole, dumb column about it on Thursday, and has been dining out on that dumb column on radio and teevee for the last two days, so why not make a Sunday brunch out of the leftovers too?

In case you are unfamiliar with David Fucking Brooks' œuvre, for as long as anyone can remember he has made a very fine living purporting to Speak With Authority on a variety of subjects about which he was either wrong, or about which no one has any business speaking with authority in the first place. In the past, some of his favorites topics have been the Awesomeness of the Coming Republican Majority, the Secret Genius of George W. Bush, Scooter Libby's honor bona fides [apparently based mostly on the fact that A) he actually paid!for!his!own!lunch! with Bobo, and B) He didn't say "fuck" even once or wipe his treasonous nose on his shirtsleeve], the smashing victory over Existential Evil which was always juuuust around the next corner in beautiful, downtown Baghdad, and how scary women can be when they get all educated and uppity.

Bobo is one of the MSM's last remaining "Reasonable Conservatives" whose face doesn't give children nightmares and whose voice doesn't stun dogs into comas for six blocks in every direction. And being a man who is chronically short on original thinking to begin with, to keep up with the demand, Bobo is notorious for double- and triple-dipping the same shopworn topic for 2-3 different paydays a week as shamelessly as any Chicago alderman selling insurance out of the back of his neighborhood office.

And since his schtick depends on squeezing a few extra drops out of the same old lemons week after week, Bobo is never happier or more in his element than when he is curled up in his NYT Snuggie, sipping cocoa from his David Fucking Broder commemorative mug in front of a big, roaring fire of Conventional Washington Wisdom, and repeating in well-modulated tones what everyone else in D.C. is thinking. Which is why he let his Villager spurs all the way out as he rode the subject of the "independent" voter into the ground, opining in great, farty word-pillows about the mores and folkways of a group of people who -- by definition -- have no, definable commonality.

So after stitching together a couple of snippets from a couple of polls into a big, floppy sack, Bobo dumped every loose button and paper-clip of his own privileged, white, suburban, middle-aged, Boomer Burkean bourgeoisie terror into it and called it analysis...

What Independents Want
By DAVID BROOKS

Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories.

Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this. They don’t have institutional affiliations. They don’t look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren’t many commentators who come from an independent perspective.
...

The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices.
...

Why? What do these voters want?

...
According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that there is too much government regulation rose from 38 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2009. The percentage of Americans who want unions to have less influence rose from 32 percent to a record 42 percent.

Americans have moved to the right on abortion, immigration and global warming. Over the past seven months, the number of people who say government is doing too many things better left to business has jumped from 40 percent to 48 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Surprise! By making a tasty tossed salad out of a grab-bag of different polls and "trends" that are a scant seven months long, Bobo desperately wants you to infer that the country is being driven by "independents", and independents have made some massive leap to the Right. He then sucker-punches the same, wingnut strawmen -- unions, abortion, "too much Gummint"

(and as a brief aside, I've always been dying to know by exactly how much the "too much Gummint" crowd thinks Gummint should be decreased? By by seven percent? By three feet? By four fathoms? 90 angstroms? 135 degrees? 44 pounds? 23 Hamiltons per square Addams? They seem to have a very definite number in mind, but are mysteriously unwilling to share it with the rest of the class, so I have to wonder, is this a secret number? Is there a conspiracy to keep the secret "Decreasing Gummint By This Amount Will Solve All Our Problems" number from us? And, if so, who are these conspirators? And why do the hate America so much that they're conspiring to keep the all-important "Decreasing Gummint By This Amount Will Solve All Our Problems" number from us?)

-- in the crotch before leaving us with meaningless burbles of eternal Bobo wisdom like this:

If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S....

and

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order...

Feh.

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

Consider that if you defined “independent” as someone who, broadly speaking, supported a Liberal agenda (not the imaginary, shadow-puppets-made-out-of-Rush-Limbaugh-stool-samples “Liberal agenda” that Conservatives have been using to scare stupid people into committing economic suicide for 30 years, but the real Liberal agenda) but was not welded to a particular candidate, or even to a particular party, then that would describe me pretty well.

But I'm also quite sure that a fair chunk of the the 5% of the voting public which -- just 24 hours before the 2004 Presidential elections -- still couldn't quite make up their minds whether to vote for Kerry/Edwards, or the lying, feeble-minded frat boy (and his homicidal regent) who had fucked up everything he had ever touched ...consider themselves "independents".

Rebel nuns who might just think that letting a rape victim have access to abortion services would not be the end of the world?

Independents.

Snake-handling queer-hating Leviticans who think the GOP is too gutless because it won’t advocate rounding up Teh Gay and putting them in camps?

Independents.

Bunker-dwelling survivalists?

Independents.

Pimple-faced 30-something John Galt wannabees who masturbate themselves blind to “Atlas Shrugged” because that hot chick in accounting won’t give them a second look, but won’t she be sorry when Objectivists stop the engine of the world and people like her will have to stand in like to offer their vajay-jays to the alpha studs wealth producers!

Independents.

Klansmen who want to smoke a little weed?

Independents.

America's compulsive political middle-children who have been taught so thoroughly to compromise their way out of any conflict that they will travel a 1,000 miles just to find a fence to straddle?

The opinionless little ciphers who just want to make sure they line up with a winner?

The moral cowards wouldn’t pick a side with a gun pressed to their heads, because of the terror of then being committed to actually doing something instead of snarking their way through life declaring "Well, ya know, bote sides are juss a buncha crooks anyway!" about every situation regardless of context and circumstances?

If asked, I guarantee you all virtually of those people would tell you that they think of themselves as “independent”.

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

That when I read this in the Sun Times:

North Side mystery: Where did falling ice come from?

'The whole house shook and it felt like 'Boom!'' says homeowner.

BY KARA SPAK

The ice chunk cometh.

A large piece of ice fell from the sky Wednesday evening, tearing roofing from a North Side home before shattering into dozens of cloudy ice cubes and ice balls.

"The whole house shook and it felt like 'Boom!'" said homeowner Linda Dowd, who was watching "Freaky Friday" with her 11-year-old son Sean when the chunk struck. "We thought at first my son's drum set fell down or maybe the chimney, but it wasn't windy."

...

Linda Dowd said she was frosted over the $500 deductible her family would be paying on their homeowner insurance. Beyond the exterior damage, she said there is plaster damage in their bedroom next to where the ice struck the roof.

"It's like, why me?" she said. "It's falling out of the sky."

Tony Molinaro, Federal Aviation Authority spokesman, said investigators would track down any planes flying over the home around 8 p.m. last night to see if they sprung a leak. The home, he said, was about 10 miles from an O'Hare runaway.

I showed what can only be described as positively superhuman restraint when I threw away all 17 of my posts -- written in a single runaway, adolescent, coprological frenzy -- reworking the ancient "House Hit by Icy-BM" joke, which has been handed down through the ages in one form or another from Ezekiel the Tragedian, to Omar Khayyám, to Geoffrey Chaucer, to Bill Shakespeare, to Miyamoto Musashi, to Vladimir Nabokov, to E.E. "Doc" Smith, to Nelson Algren, to Spider Robinson, from whom I filched it.

Because I realized now that I'm writing for posterity and awards and treasure and immortality and stuff, poo jokes are just wrong.

Just plain, fucking wrong.

Begins Again (Link here)

My early nomination for the most conspicuously out of place nominations?

"Little Green Fratbawls" and "Andrew Sullivan"

for "Best Liberal Blogger".

Which is only slightly less hilariously than, say, nominating YouPorn as "Best Religion Blog" because many of the on-screen performers shout "Oh, God" very enthusiastically while knobbing dozens of well-endowed strangers.

After my ten millionth page hit I understand that I get to meet Arianna Huffington and have my name stenciled onto a Kindle which will be given away in a gift basket at a Davos panel on the Future of Media.

So, y'know, something to live for.

Very Leonard Cohen today


Especially this bit:

"... I saw there were
No oceans left
For scavengers like me..."

Sometime in the next few hours my little blog will cross the two million hit threshold. Which is both a dauntingly high number that took me 5.5 years of constant, daily effort to achieve...and the total number of people who will have read "Lindsay Lohan Slams Dad Michael, Eyes Restraining Order" on the online Serious Liberal Journal of Record this weekend.

There's a lesson there somewhere :-)

Anyway, five and a half year, closing in fast on 2,200 posts, and two million page views, which means that, by now, if I am not well-known or influential enough, I am at least persistent enough that my email in-box (driftglass00 AT yahoo DOT com) is usually full of correspondence that is non-Nigerian banking/miraculous penis cream related.

But really only barely.

You see, every day, organizations like "Democrats DOT com" presume to send me long urgent lists of what I or Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama MUST DO RIGHT NOW.

To which I say, "Fuck. You." RIGHT NOW I am trying to figure out how to keep doing this while keeping the castle's roof over my head and avoiding making the wenches take any more unpaid furlough days.

There are also petitions I absolutely HAVE TO sign and causes that demand I travel across the continent to wave a sign and fill out the crowd scene in the fourth reel of someone else's made-for-YouTube micro-Woodstock . "The Nation" is one Liberal institution among many which takes it upon itself to urgently inform me that they may not survive without my generous infusions of dough-ray-me...without bothering to extend to me the common courtesy of attaching even a one, single nekkid picture of Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Now, I ask you, is that neighborly? Is that grass-rootsish?

Oh, and speaking of grass roots, Netroots Nation warns me once every 104 hours that my window to bid on the actual Styrofoam coffee cup from which the actual Atrios was actually sipping when he put up a gen-u-ine "More Thread" post LIVE from Pittsburgh is closing fast.

So much for the pallid fruits of persistence.

So I started my Sunday the same way I usually do; bolt upright and screaming my way out of the middle of a nightmare that Dick Cheney was still President.

Nine Advils later...I set my clocks back an hour as required by the God Damned Federal Time Thievery Czar, and curse you Comrade Barack Hussein Obama and your whole illegitimate Marxist Government for compelling American schoolchildren to begin their mandatory indoctrination one hour earlier [Or is it later? I could never figure that out.] and -- oh so much more sinister..ly -- dictating that some Washington Bureaucrat now gets between Americans and their snooze buttons AND forcing the entire country to treat Time itself as something weak, nuanced, Liberal and European as opposed to the fixed and inherent Universal freedom-and-Jesus-loving value all Real Americans know it to be!

So where was I?

Oh yeah.

Persistence.

After waking up in the middle of the Soul's Midnight, and the Advils, and finding "no way to hold my head that didn't hurt", I warmed up for the Mouse Circus by watching Local Fox.

That was a mistake.

You see, they were doing a glowing interview with Jack Higgins, Sun-Times Cartoonist. He draws funny pictures for one of our three major metropolitan papers (now that The Chicago Reader is swinging major reportorial timber, it definitely deserves inclusion into that rarefied club), and his work elicited remarks from Local Fox interviewers sush as this:

"You can say things that we can't. That writers of editorials can't."

To underscore Mr. Higgins' awesomeness, they showed a little of his work, starting with this piece

from September of 2009.

Which flicked the blear straight out of your humble correspondent's sleepy eyes and caused me to notice a certain, striking similarity between Mr. Higgins' observational art from September 2009, and this piece of observational art by your humble correspondent

from July 2009.

Which sent a thousand cruel and unworthy thoughts flittering through my mind until, at last, I settled on the timeless reminder from Ecclesiastes that:

...the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them.

Fuckin'-A.

After which I watched what was arguably the greatest advance in jaybird-naked cross-promotion since

Mork showed up on Happy Days.

Rush Limbaugh being "interviewed" for 30 minutes on FoxNews.

Why bother?

I mean other that noting that this:

Wallace: And without putting you on the couch…so you guzzled the Hillbilly Heroin because you felt inadequate?

Boss Limbaugh: True, Chris. True. Now that I have spent seven weeks in rehab I have zero sense of inadequacy. It hasn’t been replaced with an irresponsible ego…

Wallace: And don’t get me wrong – I think you’re a great broadcaster and I want to have your babies – but how can you be worth 400 million dollars?

Boss Limbaugh: Free markets, bitchez!

was the most "heated" exchange, and that Boss Limbaugh was given 30 unopposed, free-fire minutes of public air time to accuse President Obama -- over and over again -- of deliberately trying to destroy the country and eviscerate the military to advance a Sekrit Marxist Agenda that, somehow, Boss Limbaugh of all people is privy too, it was exactly like watching a hooker interview her pimp at the point of a gun.

Down the dial I caught Traitor Joe Lieberman once again converting his latest "Judas (I-Scariot)" escapade into 15 more minutes of lucrative teevee face-time on "Face the Nation", followed by an eyeful of Al Fucking Sharpton treading the boards once again as the "liberal" on "This Week...", and I realized just what a comically bad series of career moves I have made in my life so far.

That however insightful or clever or penetrating or funny I may be,
There are no oceans left for scavengers like me.

That it is too late for me to learn to belch hate to the Pig People for big money.

Too late to get rich selling sanctimony by the pound; richer still selling out my alleged principles; to follow George W. Bush and my own bloodthirstiest Zionist fantasies into the political grave, only to claw my way out by creating my own political party; then further enrich myself by re-betraying everyone who stood by me during my first few rides on the Quisling-Go-Round.

Too late to turn a Velour track suit, a mile-high pompadour, a flair for slingin' scripture, a 150-decibel voice and a ruthless pursuit of the limelight into a career as a camera-ready "Liberal"

quote machine.

Too late to figure out how to plug into Sun Times Cartoonist Local 317.

I can only hope for the sake of the castle wenches that it's not too late
to learn to dance for my supper.