My cyber-soul-brother sent this to me:
Jqp,
it's hard to feel inspired to do anything -- much less blog -- when> the temperature is 95°, the heat index is 110 and the sun is curling back the shingles on the roof and turning the driveway into a strip of> burning black goo.
Call it global climate change on overdrive or just an unusually strong> Bermuda high that's decided to park itself semi-permanently over the eastern seaboard. Either way, the heat has been squeezing the> motivation out of me for the better part of the past week.
These are the dog days -- a name which, according to this trivia page, dates back to the ancient Mediterranean, when the hottest part of the> summer was marked by counting the 20 days to and the 20 days after the conjunction of the sun and Sirius, the dog star.
No, Siriusly. It's as good an explanation as any, I guess, although to me the expression "dog days" has always called up images of rabid canines, their muzzles dripping with foam and blood from their own self-inflicted bites, writhing in crazed torment under the blazing sun while their virus-riddled brains gradually turn to mush inside their narrow, wolfish skulls. Which, more-or-less by coincidence, appears to be the effect that Cindy Sheehan is currently having on conservatives.
Except for the gradual part. At another time of the year -- or another time in my life -- watching> a senile old pervert like Bill O'Reilly or a brainless fraud like Michelle Malkin trading insults about a Gold Star mother standing in a ditch outside Shrub's dude ranch might have been enough to drive me> into either a blind, homicidal rage or a stark, dying-of-the-light depression. Or maybe both -- thus validating my post-Columbine decision to get rid of all my firearms. But it's way too hot to get angry and the whole mise-en-scene is way too absurd for despair. I mean, what could be more preposterous than the sight of the mighty GOP propaganda war machine -- built up with> such effort and at such great cost -- aiming all its guns at one bereaved, 48-year-old mother camped by the side of the road in Crawford, Texas?
The same massive tank that once crushed Senators and presidential candidates with such effortless ease is now practically> busting a tread trying to turn this face into an enemy of the people: There's a kind of comical desperation about it -- like watching> cartoon elephants dance in hysterical fear at the sight of a cartoon> mouse. I said recently that the Rovians attack what they fear most.> And when your greatest fear is the mother of a combat soldier who wants to ask the president why her son had to die in Iraq, you know> you've got some serious PR problems. Dumbo, on the other hand, still doesn't understand what all the fuss is about: Bush's Saturday schedule included an evening Little League Baseball playoff game, a lunch meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a nap, some fishing and some reading. "I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."
At this point, to call the Commander in Chief detached from reality would be an insult to paranoid schizophrenics everywhere. Not just from the reality of failure in Iraq -- that's a given -- but from the political reality that public support for the war, and more> particularly, for his handling of it, is in something close to free fall. The fact that Bush appears more fixated on his heart rate than on the constitutional negotiations under way in Baghdad -- supposedly the key to a face-saving exit from the Iraq fiasco -- is, of course, substantively irrelevant. If Zalmay Khalilzad can't break the deadlock, there's certainly nothing Shrub can do that wouldn't make things worse. But symbolically, the president's French-style, five-week vacation is starting to look like a rather spectacular PR blunder, thanks in large part to Sheehan, who's doing a great job of> playing the albatross to Shrub's ancient mariner: Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks. Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.
In fact, if Cindy really is a front woman for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, as the wing nuts now claim, then you'd almost have to> conclude that Bush was in on the planning, too. Hauling the entire White House press corps down to Bumfuck, Texas, so they can spend the better part of August playing cowchip bingo, was a move that seems, in hindsight, almost custom-designed to generate massive media coverage of Cindy's protest. In Washington, she'd be just another face in> Lafayette Square (the designated "free speech zone" in front of the> White House.) In Crawford, she's the only thing making news within a 500-mile radius.
That seems like an awfully high political price to pay to move Bush and his imperial retinue from one volcanic pit of> heat and humidity to another for five weeks. There's more going on here, though, than just the usual seasonal news drought and a bunch of bored-out-their-skulls reporters marooned in> the Texas outback. Cindy Sheehan has touched a raw nerve (both with the media and with the GOP propaganda machine) less because of who she is than because of who she isn't -- Jane Fonda.
The wing nuts have been salivating for weeks over the news that Jane> plans to hit the anti-war trail again -- this time in a vegetable-oil powered bus. (You really think I could make something like that up?)> For pro-war conservatives, this is roughly the same as hearing that the Democrats have decided to put Zippy the Pinhead and Timothy Leary's corpse on the ticket in 2008.
From the right's point of view, you couldn't invent a better caricature of a New Age Hollywood zillionaire to be the public face of the anti-war movement. Which is why my own personal reaction to Fonda's plan was: "Why the hell can't she be on their side for a change?" But, instead of feasting on Hanoi Jane, the wing nuts are driving> themselves nuts trying to figure out how to take down Vacaville Cindy: a woman who looks and sounds like she spends her free time organizing church socials and helping her husband clean out the garage -- that is, when she isn't busy searing George W. Bush's butt with a white hot poker for dragging the country into an unnecessary and failed war in Iraq, and getting her son killed in the process.
Don't forget Dick Cheney, Cindy. But you may want to stoke the coals first: It's an awfully big butt. Some see Sheehan's turn in the spotlight as a demonstration of the> weakness and impotence of the anti-war movement. Take, for example, this politically confused columnist for the Seattle Post> Intelligencer, who says he's against the war and against Cindy: If the anemic antiwar movement needs a mourning mom to lead the charge against this unjust war, then the movement is in dire straits.
Now calling the anti-war movement "anemic" is obviously wrong, since it implies that it actually has a pulse. The truth is that there is nothing that can be plausibly defined as an anti-war "movement" in this country -- just a couple of web sites, some bloggers, a few Democratic congressmen, and an angry Air Force colonel with can of spray paint. That, plus about 50-60% of the American people, give or take -- at least according to the most recent polls. There's probably a connection, in other words, between the precipitous decline in popular support for the war and the absence of a highly visible anti-war protest movement that counts people like Jane Fonda> among its mascots.
As Harold Myerson put it a couple of months ago: However perverse this may sound, the absence of an antiwar movement is proving to be a huge political problem for the Bush administration . . . The administration has no one to demonize. With nobody blocking the> troop trains, military recruitment is collapsing of its own accord. With nobody in the streets, the occupation is being judged on its own merits.
Without hordes of angry yippies to distract it, the silent majority -- or at least, the non-GOP majority -- has managed to conclude,> correctly, that the war cannot be won. Even worse, it seems to have> picked up on the fact that the Cheney administration is no longer even trying to win it, but is simply looking frantically for a face-saving way to get out of the swamp. (Or, in Journalish: "lowering its expectations.") When it becomes clear on Monday that our squabbling Iraqi clients have missed yet another critical deadline in the political process that's> magically supposed to bail us out of the mess Cheneybush has made, the silent majority will have a better idea of just how much lower those expectations could go. And if they see this story, they'll get a hint> of what the consequences of failure on such a grand scale could be: US troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on US and Iraqi forces and> civilians, military officials said yesterday . . .
Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from sometime after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Whatever her current political leanings (or her choice of blogging partners) Cindy Sheehan can stake a powerful claim to being a dues-paying member of that same silent majority -- but in her case,>without the silence. Which is precisely why she's being swift boated> so ferociously by the professional liars on Fox News and their amateur auxiliaries in Right Blogostan. One angry mom is dangerous enough, especially when the President of the United States insists on being her unofficial publicist. But now there are 300 of them standing in the dirt and the heat down in Crawford -- and millions more watching on TV, silently asking themselves the same questions Sheehan wants to ask Bush: How did we get into this mess?
How do we get out? Have our sons and daughters>been sent to die in vain? The machine can try to demonize Cindy Sheehan. But it can't demonize> those questions -- not any more, not when so many others are asking them. Here in the dog days of August, it appears the rabid curs of the> authoritarian right have finally met their match, in the form of a middle-aged woman in a sunhat, holding in her hand the metaphorical equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper for wacking bad little GOP doggies (and presidents) on the nose.
If that's not enough to shake off the dog day blues, I don't know what is.
RD
(Thanks to he who is King, Dobbs)
it's hard to feel inspired to do anything -- much less blog -- when> the temperature is 95°, the heat index is 110 and the sun is curling back the shingles on the roof and turning the driveway into a strip of> burning black goo.
Call it global climate change on overdrive or just an unusually strong> Bermuda high that's decided to park itself semi-permanently over the eastern seaboard. Either way, the heat has been squeezing the> motivation out of me for the better part of the past week.
These are the dog days -- a name which, according to this trivia page, dates back to the ancient Mediterranean, when the hottest part of the> summer was marked by counting the 20 days to and the 20 days after the conjunction of the sun and Sirius, the dog star.
No, Siriusly. It's as good an explanation as any, I guess, although to me the expression "dog days" has always called up images of rabid canines, their muzzles dripping with foam and blood from their own self-inflicted bites, writhing in crazed torment under the blazing sun while their virus-riddled brains gradually turn to mush inside their narrow, wolfish skulls. Which, more-or-less by coincidence, appears to be the effect that Cindy Sheehan is currently having on conservatives.
Except for the gradual part. At another time of the year -- or another time in my life -- watching> a senile old pervert like Bill O'Reilly or a brainless fraud like Michelle Malkin trading insults about a Gold Star mother standing in a ditch outside Shrub's dude ranch might have been enough to drive me> into either a blind, homicidal rage or a stark, dying-of-the-light depression. Or maybe both -- thus validating my post-Columbine decision to get rid of all my firearms. But it's way too hot to get angry and the whole mise-en-scene is way too absurd for despair. I mean, what could be more preposterous than the sight of the mighty GOP propaganda war machine -- built up with> such effort and at such great cost -- aiming all its guns at one bereaved, 48-year-old mother camped by the side of the road in Crawford, Texas?
The same massive tank that once crushed Senators and presidential candidates with such effortless ease is now practically> busting a tread trying to turn this face into an enemy of the people: There's a kind of comical desperation about it -- like watching> cartoon elephants dance in hysterical fear at the sight of a cartoon> mouse. I said recently that the Rovians attack what they fear most.> And when your greatest fear is the mother of a combat soldier who wants to ask the president why her son had to die in Iraq, you know> you've got some serious PR problems. Dumbo, on the other hand, still doesn't understand what all the fuss is about: Bush's Saturday schedule included an evening Little League Baseball playoff game, a lunch meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a nap, some fishing and some reading. "I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."
At this point, to call the Commander in Chief detached from reality would be an insult to paranoid schizophrenics everywhere. Not just from the reality of failure in Iraq -- that's a given -- but from the political reality that public support for the war, and more> particularly, for his handling of it, is in something close to free fall. The fact that Bush appears more fixated on his heart rate than on the constitutional negotiations under way in Baghdad -- supposedly the key to a face-saving exit from the Iraq fiasco -- is, of course, substantively irrelevant. If Zalmay Khalilzad can't break the deadlock, there's certainly nothing Shrub can do that wouldn't make things worse. But symbolically, the president's French-style, five-week vacation is starting to look like a rather spectacular PR blunder, thanks in large part to Sheehan, who's doing a great job of> playing the albatross to Shrub's ancient mariner: Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks. Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.
In fact, if Cindy really is a front woman for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, as the wing nuts now claim, then you'd almost have to> conclude that Bush was in on the planning, too. Hauling the entire White House press corps down to Bumfuck, Texas, so they can spend the better part of August playing cowchip bingo, was a move that seems, in hindsight, almost custom-designed to generate massive media coverage of Cindy's protest. In Washington, she'd be just another face in> Lafayette Square (the designated "free speech zone" in front of the> White House.) In Crawford, she's the only thing making news within a 500-mile radius.
That seems like an awfully high political price to pay to move Bush and his imperial retinue from one volcanic pit of> heat and humidity to another for five weeks. There's more going on here, though, than just the usual seasonal news drought and a bunch of bored-out-their-skulls reporters marooned in> the Texas outback. Cindy Sheehan has touched a raw nerve (both with the media and with the GOP propaganda machine) less because of who she is than because of who she isn't -- Jane Fonda.
The wing nuts have been salivating for weeks over the news that Jane> plans to hit the anti-war trail again -- this time in a vegetable-oil powered bus. (You really think I could make something like that up?)> For pro-war conservatives, this is roughly the same as hearing that the Democrats have decided to put Zippy the Pinhead and Timothy Leary's corpse on the ticket in 2008.
From the right's point of view, you couldn't invent a better caricature of a New Age Hollywood zillionaire to be the public face of the anti-war movement. Which is why my own personal reaction to Fonda's plan was: "Why the hell can't she be on their side for a change?" But, instead of feasting on Hanoi Jane, the wing nuts are driving> themselves nuts trying to figure out how to take down Vacaville Cindy: a woman who looks and sounds like she spends her free time organizing church socials and helping her husband clean out the garage -- that is, when she isn't busy searing George W. Bush's butt with a white hot poker for dragging the country into an unnecessary and failed war in Iraq, and getting her son killed in the process.
Don't forget Dick Cheney, Cindy. But you may want to stoke the coals first: It's an awfully big butt. Some see Sheehan's turn in the spotlight as a demonstration of the> weakness and impotence of the anti-war movement. Take, for example, this politically confused columnist for the Seattle Post> Intelligencer, who says he's against the war and against Cindy: If the anemic antiwar movement needs a mourning mom to lead the charge against this unjust war, then the movement is in dire straits.
Now calling the anti-war movement "anemic" is obviously wrong, since it implies that it actually has a pulse. The truth is that there is nothing that can be plausibly defined as an anti-war "movement" in this country -- just a couple of web sites, some bloggers, a few Democratic congressmen, and an angry Air Force colonel with can of spray paint. That, plus about 50-60% of the American people, give or take -- at least according to the most recent polls. There's probably a connection, in other words, between the precipitous decline in popular support for the war and the absence of a highly visible anti-war protest movement that counts people like Jane Fonda> among its mascots.
As Harold Myerson put it a couple of months ago: However perverse this may sound, the absence of an antiwar movement is proving to be a huge political problem for the Bush administration . . . The administration has no one to demonize. With nobody blocking the> troop trains, military recruitment is collapsing of its own accord. With nobody in the streets, the occupation is being judged on its own merits.
Without hordes of angry yippies to distract it, the silent majority -- or at least, the non-GOP majority -- has managed to conclude,> correctly, that the war cannot be won. Even worse, it seems to have> picked up on the fact that the Cheney administration is no longer even trying to win it, but is simply looking frantically for a face-saving way to get out of the swamp. (Or, in Journalish: "lowering its expectations.") When it becomes clear on Monday that our squabbling Iraqi clients have missed yet another critical deadline in the political process that's> magically supposed to bail us out of the mess Cheneybush has made, the silent majority will have a better idea of just how much lower those expectations could go. And if they see this story, they'll get a hint> of what the consequences of failure on such a grand scale could be: US troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on US and Iraqi forces and> civilians, military officials said yesterday . . .
Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from sometime after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Whatever her current political leanings (or her choice of blogging partners) Cindy Sheehan can stake a powerful claim to being a dues-paying member of that same silent majority -- but in her case,>without the silence. Which is precisely why she's being swift boated> so ferociously by the professional liars on Fox News and their amateur auxiliaries in Right Blogostan. One angry mom is dangerous enough, especially when the President of the United States insists on being her unofficial publicist. But now there are 300 of them standing in the dirt and the heat down in Crawford -- and millions more watching on TV, silently asking themselves the same questions Sheehan wants to ask Bush: How did we get into this mess?
How do we get out? Have our sons and daughters>been sent to die in vain? The machine can try to demonize Cindy Sheehan. But it can't demonize> those questions -- not any more, not when so many others are asking them. Here in the dog days of August, it appears the rabid curs of the> authoritarian right have finally met their match, in the form of a middle-aged woman in a sunhat, holding in her hand the metaphorical equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper for wacking bad little GOP doggies (and presidents) on the nose.
If that's not enough to shake off the dog day blues, I don't know what is.
RD
(Thanks to he who is King, Dobbs)
posted by John Q. Public esq. at 2:20 AM
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