Thursday, August 23, 2007

A Reason to Disbelieve

Hereby a brief encapsulation of a book review, a rarity in these parts. Both the subject (Fred Thompson) and the news that the book is out of print got my attention. The original article has at least one great picture justifying a visit.

Books by presidential candidates generally boast the authenticity of Karen Hughes channeling the inner thoughts of George W. Bush in a quickie autobiography concocted for the 2000 campaign. But occasionally -- as with Barack Obama's 1995 "Dreams From My Father" -- a would-be politician publishes a book before he can afford a ghostwriter and before he acquires aides to scrub every sentence for any human revelation.

That is the intrinsic fascination of Fred Thompson's 1975 Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," completed nine months after Richard Nixon's resignation and long out-of-print. With Thompson, the "Law and Order" star who spent eight years in the Senate from Tennessee, poised to enter the Republican presidential race next month, a used copy in "good condition" was available as of yesterday from Amazon.com for the bargain price of $127.24. The period photograph on the back cover probably justifies that price -- it shows a Brylcreemed Thompson in a heavily patterned sport shirt sitting under a tree with his long-haired first wife, Sarah (they divorced in 1985). The couple is separated by a gym bag holding a tennis racket sheathed in a covering adorned with the seal of the U.S. Senate.

A protégé of Sen. Howard Baker, the 30-year-old Thompson was vaulted in early 1973 from the back rooms of Tennessee politics to the klieg-lighted center stage as the Republican counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. As Thompson recounts at the beginning of the book, "For me, as for millions of other Americans, Watergate did not ring many bells in the winter of 1972-73 ... My only reaction to the case had been a vague feeling that every political campaign has a few crackpots who cause embarrassment."

"At That Point in Time" can be read as the story of Thompson's 18-month odyssey from this semi-informed Watergate skeptic to a grudging convert in the bipartisan consensus that Nixon had to go. But Thompson's narrative also offers perspective on 21st-century politics -- especially the full-throated cries by some antiwar Democrats for the impeachment of George W. Bush.

Had it only been Democrats back in 1973-74 calling for the president's scalp, Nixon would have served two full terms in the White House. What brought down Nixon was the growing realization by mainstream Republicans like Baker, the vice chairman of the Watergate Committee, and on-the-make GOP operatives like Thompson that a
cancer was indeed growing on the presidency. Without genuine bipartisanship, an impeachment drive aimed at Bush (or Dick Cheney) is apt to yield little more than the Republicans' Starr-crossed zealotry in pursuit of Bill Clinton.

Written in a self-deprecating style that could be described as Washington Aw-Shucks, "At That Point in Time" (the phrase refers to a verbal tic used by many Watergate witnesses) is surprisingly candid about Thompson's two-faced role as he vacillated between aiding an impartial investigation and periodically offering back-channel alerts to the Nixon White House. "What should be the role ... of the committee's Republican lawyer?" Thompson asks rhetorically early in the book. "Two alternatives were apparent: to act as a self-appointed defense counsel for the White House ... or to seek to outdo the Democrats," Thompson writes, before modestly claiming that "I decided that I was probably placing too much importance on my own role in the process."

As was rediscovered by the Boston Globe last month, Thompson on his own authority alerted White House counsel Fred Buzhardt that a committee witness (Alexander Butterfield) was about to testify that Nixon had installed a secret taping system in the White House. As Thompson explains his motivation in the book, "I wanted to be certain that the tapes were not a trap for the committee" and "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action." There was little admirable about Thompson's backstage machinations, even though he would receive public credit as the committee staffer who initially questioned Butterfield during the public hearing.

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"I often wondered," he writes in the most fascinating passage in the book, "what might have occurred if, on arriving in Washington, convinced of the president's innocence, I had called the White House and assured [H.R.] Haldeman or [John] Dean that I could be counted on to see that Nixon got a fair shake." Thompson imagines that had he chosen this route of pure GOP partisanship, the White House tapes would have featured Haldeman bragging to Nixon, "We've got the minority counsel in the bag." As the ambitious Tennessee lawyer puts it, "Such a naive and basically innocent action on my part would have destroyed my credibility and damaged my professional reputation."

At the end of "At That Point in Time," Thompson is flying back to Tennessee musing that "I would probably be thinking about the implications of Watergate for the rest of my life." After the imperial hubris of the Bush administration, it would be a refreshing turn if would-be Republican presidents like Thompson were still obsessed with the implications of Watergate.

If I listened long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe it's all true
Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried
Still I'd look to find a reason to believe (T. Hardin)

Forever Young

I have a pretty serious jones for reading, as may have been signaled here before. Libraries (and librarians!) are the occupants of my pedestals. "People are crazy and things are strange" (now where did you hear that before??), but books have a wonderful persistent sameness, yet with a variety that is remarkable.

So you can probably imagine my reaction to this account of what seems undue lazy mindless censorship of a books-for-prisoners program:

Earlier this year, Carla McLean, a librarian and volunteer for the organization Books to Prisoners (the group's function is self-evident), struck up a correspondence with a Buddhist pen pal at the Airway Heights Corrections Center west of Spokane. He was getting books sent to him from both BTP and the Zen Mountain Monastery. Then one day, the packages stopped arriving.

"Why did he not get those books?" she wonders. "It's not because of a three-item limit."

McLean is speaking from Books to Prisoners' headquarters, which occupy a dark, 500-square-foot basement in Seattle's International District. Here, BTP fulfills more than 800 requests per month from prisoners nationwide seeking reading material. The stacks around her reveal an unsurprising truth: Most books the nonprofit receives are donations from individuals looking to empty their homes of used books, which are considered contraband by the Washington State Department of Corrections. So whatever new books BTP manages to get hold of, it sends to prisoners in Washington state prisons.

"Offenders are clever, frankly," says DOC spokesperson Mary Christiansen, explaining the rationale behind such stringent policies. "People can hide things very well, and we always have to balance an offender's ability to get legitimate things with security. The balance for us is that offenders do need to read, but we have addressed that by allowing them to buy books from legitimate vendors, versus people just sending books in to somebody."

While Books to Prisoners had been sending its requested materials to inmates at Airway Heights for years, Andy Chan, who has been volunteering with BTP for more than 10 years, says, "Recently, they just started sending them back with a note: 'Not an approved vendor.'" Similarly, according to McLean, another pen pal at Airway Heights was expecting a package that never arrived. "His grandmother tried to send him books, and they rejected it, saying they didn't come from an approved vendor."

Turns out, grandmothers cannot send books to anyone in a Washington state prison. No one can, unless they're on an "approved vendor list." As of May, Airway Heights joined a growing number of corrections centers in Washington state that only accept books sent by vendors on such lists. (Airway Heights' approved list includes Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, as well as smaller outfits like Lamp Specialties.)

While not mandated by the state, DOC spokesperson Chad Lewis states that "there are some facilities that only allow books to come from certain vendors." While official state policy says that "offenders may receive gift subscriptions and/or publications from any party other than another offender or the friends or family of another unrelated offender," the personal-property policy states that "offenders may acquire personal property only through the following sources: 1. Facility offender stores, 2. Approved vendors."

According to the DOC's Christiansen, "There is a line within the property policy stating that there is an approved vendor list, and it's up to each facility to establish each list of who's approved. That's based on safety and security. It kind of makes a difference based on which vendors are allowed to send things in."

Seattle's Prison Legal News, the nation's longest-running prison newsletter, has had its own share of troubles getting its materials—including books—sent to prisoners. After discovering that PLN wasn't on the initial list at Airway Heights, Editor Paul Wright petitioned for and received approved vendor status.


"It's probably unconstitutional," he says of the lists. "But it's going to take someone to step up to the plate and challenge it."

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I never managed the first merit badge towards tin-hat conspiracy-theoricist membership. And I don't think this will count either. I'm not saying there is a connection. I am a reader-advocate, very concerned with folks who "never read a book." Frankly, it makes me think of "never having sex." As in, this person might be a tad dysfunctional.

"It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," says my Bob (Wonder Boys still!).

The punchline:

There it sits on your night stand, that book you've meant to read for who knows how long but haven't yet cracked open. Tonight, as you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of magazines, know one thing - you are not alone.

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year - half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

That choice by Bustos and others is reflected in book sales, which have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started - a similar but not directly comparable question - the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.


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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Sneakin' Sally Down the Alley

Willpower being finite, I dole mine out carefully. It should never be used, e.g., to resist reading a Frank Rich NYT column. By the way, rumor has it that the Times will be abandoning their firewall program, freeing up what for me were always the best parts of the coverage, such as Krugman and Rich. In fact, they are so much the best part that I would bet my hits on the NYT site since the wall went up have been 25% or less than before. Classic mis-marketing, if I am an example of more than one.

This is a simple one-item post, courtesy of access to Mr. Rich. He titles it "He Got Out While the Getting Was Good," a great evocation all by itself of one famous Western American credo. Rich has a knack that way, and his early framing of the column is, as we have come to expect, so clever and insightful that it is hard to resist following up. I.e., what a great writer does. I will of course only excerpt here - reading through is easy via link, assuming you are a sentient creature with at least a soupcon of curiosity and hence interest in furthering your knowledge.

Scurrying offstage to let a master entertain, here is Mr. Rich:

Back in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn’t yet arrived.”You don’t introduce new products in August,” he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.

Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you are Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive.

Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?

Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Rove’s departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No Republican presidential candidates paid tribute to Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp - not the Democrats’ familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. - that the White House and Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.

What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring “the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies,” not to mention “the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty.” Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.

Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in The Journal interview when Rove extolled his party’s health by arguing, without contradiction from Gigot, that young people are more “pro-life” and “free-market” than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country’s. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)

That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified Republican voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.

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Rich later in the column (but you probably already saw this I bet) identifies the "Macaca" incident in Virginia as a deciding moment in the steep slide. Interestingly, elsewhere today I saw parallel ID of the Schiavo incident as the tipping point for the Bush administration. I guess the point is, the "tip" is on, no Pulitzer for being the first to find the straw that did it - but a fun game nevertheless.

Things Could Conceivably Change

OK, a dour preface here. The absolutely crappy system that has evolved out of the marriage-from-hell of Google and Blogger once again caused me to lose at least an hour of work tonight. It's easy to understand why so few mainstream blogs bother with these folks anymore. Simple picture uploads require multiple attempts. Having just gone through that it is a total pain in the ass to have the post itself just dissolve. Up you, Google assholes. Your service truly sucks!

But okay, I'm the last one in my neighborhood putting up with the crap from AOL too (one of the original progenitors of the "D-minus is plenty good" school of thought, along with virtually all of the Worst and Dimmest given their first job by 43 - and Google it appears), so maybe it is just my masochism? Still, it would seem that you would want to put some sort of a pretense of service out there, eh? I guess I should be thrilled that several primitive non-pic posts got through before the awful deficiencies of the mediocre facilities crapped out again.

I will try to regain upbeat state of mind starting over with the material I had saved.

One of the joyous, at-times titillating, features of the iPod for me (an entirely different category of technology!) is the idiosyncratic possibilities of the shuffle function with lots of varied and non-hidebound sound options available in the queue. Tonight on the way to the bus I finally managed to conjure up for the first time a track of the Peterson Field Guides' "Birding by Ear." I was probably doing a pretty good imitation of a street-denizen to the tune of the Poorwhill and Quail and all (this track focused on "name-sayers," the latter-named of which I happily got to see this weekend).

The segue was to Steppenwolf's "Monster." It's been a long time since I gave that tune more than minimal attention. Try this on for size:

Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching


Eerie, I'd call it. Or maybe not. At the very least Mr. Kay and company had a finger on a recurrent American theme. There's probably a post or more hidden in tunes with the "A" word in them, come to think of it: Starship, P. Simon, and N. Diamond are the first three more that leap to mind. Maybe some other time.

And, just so you know, I stumbled on a used copy of the Wonder Boys soundtrack today and couldn't resist. The movie thesis of early critical acclaim and subsequent blockage and the seminal Dylan tune have intrigued me for some time. So you'll find some of that in the weft here too. You might consider dropping another scoop of vanilla in that root beer - there's a few more words to come - not all mine, which may help.

Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through.

I hope some of you have already come upon the excellent Op-eds in two of the signature national papers this weekend. These are especially important as followups, in one case explicitly, to the Pollack and O'Hanlon clap-trap pro-Bush propaganda piece of a while back. I believe I posted on that nonsense once already, probably letting Glenn Greenwald at Salon do the heavy lifting he is so exceptionally good at. I will excerpt the op-eds here but you owe it to your self-esteem and me, at the very least, to check out the originals. Good stuff.

You can't win with a losin' hand.

Jonathon Finer had a great piece in the Washington Post on Saturday. He sets his cleats against the lazy, disingenuous P/O'H pair but does not stop there. In the interests of actual fair-and-balanced, you will find when you click through that he does some takedowns on progressives too, who have also dishonestly used a mere passage through Baghdad as some sort of vindication of their position. But we know where the real crime in this has and continues to occur:

Late last month the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, just back from a quick trip to Baghdad, proclaimed in the New York Times that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq." In June, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, fresh from his latest whirlwind tour of the war zone, described in the Wall Street Journal a "dramatic reversal" in the security situation in restive Anbar province. As Washington anticipates a September report assessing the troop surge, there is good reason to be skeptical of such snapshot accounts.

A dizzying number of dignitaries have passed through Baghdad for high-level briefings. The Hill newspaper reported this month that 76 U.S. senators have traveled to Iraq during the war, 38 in the past 12 months. Most never left the
Green Zone or other well-protected enclaves. Few, if any, changed the views they held before arriving.

Reporters based in Baghdad rarely pay much attention to these visits, often skipping the news conferences that conclude most visiting delegations' itineraries. Since leaving Iraq last year, I've been surprised by the impact these choreographed tours have had on domestic discourse about the war. First come opinion pieces full of bold pronouncements of "what I saw" at the front. Next, the recent returnees appear on late-night cable programs or the Sunday talk . Those with opposing views respond, and soon the echo chamber is drowning out whatever's really happening.

This practice ought to have been (finally) discredited by Sen.
John McCain's trip to Baghdad in the spring, after which he all but declared that Freedom had marched alongside him as he strolled through a marketplace, chatting with shopkeepers. That McCain had been trailed by an armada of armored vehicles and Black Hawk helicopters was only later reported by "60 Minutes."

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And Sunday brought what I think I recall Mr. Greenwald enshrining in terms like "the single best op-ed written on the [Iraq] war since it began." And I note in tracking down link there (and, indeed, h/t GG for drawing my attention to both of these in my weekend absence from keyboard) that Glenn has another remarkable rebuttal post today in his on-going series with the America-uber-alles Foreign Policy establishment.

If you're not sated by the end of this, by all means check it out. If you are, get up early tomorrow. He is with a handful of others having to take charge of what the old media used to do, namely being skeptical, not swallowing the propaganda, not genuflecting to those who get to rehearse rap numbers with Rove. As we know, the Endangered Species Act instead of being exfoliated needs to be expanded to cover independent reporting on and checks and balances on an executive run amuck. (And of course Greenwald is smart enough to have got the hell away from mediocre blogging systems.)

I’ve been walkin’ 40 miles of bad road
If the bible is right the world will explode
I’ve been tryin’ to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losin’ hand.

The Times op-ed, entitled "War as We Saw It," was authored by no fewer than seven actual soldiers having served time in Iraq. These are folks who demonstrate the loyalty/honor/service/honesty etc. principles so critical to the proper working of the actual serving military, as compared to the. the credo of greed, venality, and lack of scruples or devotion to either the Constitution or the wellfare of the electorate shown by Bush and almost every lacky he has promoted to power. It's interesting to contrast what they have to say with the P/O'H claptrap and keep in mind the Finer op-ed also.

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

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And in the interests of rekindling the embers, due credit to Digby. She got me out of any possible "used to care but things have changed" mindset about this whole business. This topic may not get the MSM attention it deserves, but we know there are options, ehh?!! I certainly hope I am only one of a multitude doing some catapulting of non-propaganda in hopes of spreading the word. This was the metaphorical last straw that led to this post:

I was just on the Sam Seder Show with Jack Hitt and we talked about this amazing op-ed in today's NY Times by seven non-coms currently deployed in Iraq. We all wondered if it will get the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that the O'Pollack piece did a week or so ago, at the clear behest of the right wing who were pimping them like hookers to any TV John who would have them. The consensus is no, unfortunately.

My feeling is that they will not get the coverage for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as Hitt pointed out on the show, the Dems don't seem to have any kind of apparatus to "catapault the propaganda" (or seemingly any desire to have one) and the second is because I think the right will go into overdrive to present these guys as good and decent patriotic non-coms (who-aren't-all-that-bright-if-you-know-what-I-mean-shhhh.) They aren't capable of seeing the big picture there with their big clumsy boots on the ground and their heads in the sand. They're very sweet, but let's get serious. Very Serious People know a little bit more about these Very Serious issues than these well-meaning boys.

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So, to reprise, let us not be preached to by coddled, pablum-fed disingenuous pro-surge disney-tour visitors to the Green Zone.

And, while we're at it, let us absolutely not extend any undue credibility to General Petraeus despite the head-fake business about how he was not going to testify directly and openly. That
fake concession by the brownshirts occupying the house-that-used-to-be-white might con folks at the NYT and WP and other well-habituated propaganda-slingers, but we know better, right? He's still a recidivist and repeat-bootlicker with a record of commentary on conditions in Iraq that Judas would be ashamed of.

Standin' on the gallows with my head in a noose.

Oh, and after Monster? Brown Sugar!

America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

I'm so glad to know you are out there. We are much better together than apart.