The Mountain Rumbles. Bush Heads Deeper into the Bunker

David Michael Green wrote a very prescient article back in June of this year, and I am cheered by recent events that bear out his supposition.

Somewhere in America, on the highest perches of a tall mountain, a small rock has begun its descent, bringing others down with it. This rock was loosed by the release of a secret memo far across the Atlantic, but its path has been prepared by years of political deceit, arrogance, and aggression at home and abroad. The avalanche it has precipitated is at this moment gaining mass and velocity at a fast-growing rate. Its ultimate destination is Pennsylvania Avenue, in the American capital, though it remains unclear whether it possesses sufficient energy to carry that far.

While the vast bulk of Americans haven't yet a clue of what lurks on the horizon (because their media persists in not telling them), there is in fact more than a whiff of regime change in the air as a potential Washington Spring of our time gains momentum.

But now the mainstream media has begun its pile-on in the same blind rush that it pursued the Clinton impeachment and the Natalie Holloway missing white woman case in Aruba (which is still covered on all cable news channels more than the DeLay indictments, Frist investigation, or Plame CIA outing). That's bad, bad news for Chimpie. The news media is amoral, actually, and while it may have been licking the boots of the Bushits all these years, it wasn't because of any ideological orientation. No, they're just sycophants, groupies to power, cocksuckers of whoever the current rockstar happens to be. And now Chimpie has been found to be metaphorically OD'd in a hotel room with a dead underaged boy hooker, and the media smells which way the mood of the nation is trending and will dutifully open its collective puss wide enough for that chubby to stroke and blow its wad.

Chimpie's regime is going down, down, down. Down, down, down. All that remains is cyanide and a pistol shot and they join the other historical bunker dwellers in infamy as war criminals, as enemies of freedom, as usurpers of power through the most despicable lies.

If there is a hell, long may they burn.

Why Oh Why Must Patience Be a Virtue?

Your humble correspondent is engaging in some very immature behavior today, because he simply can't contain himself. He has been lying on the floor, kicking his feet and pounding his head and fists and screaming, "I want my indictments NOW!" over and over. Now that the Wall Street Journal has reported that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is looking into a little White House cabal called the Iraq Group, it's suddenly like Christmas Eve and you saw Dad back a horse trailer up to the garage during the day, telling you it was just straw for the manger in the nativity display. You thought you heard a tiny whinny out there. Is it your pony? How many hours before Christmas morning comes? Check the weather page...sunrise at 6:59am. Ooooooooh, how am I gonna wait that long?

You get the idea. Here's an excerpt to read while I run around the house a few times screaming "Chimpie Chumpie, Chimpie Chumpie, Chimpie Chumpie, FLUSH!!!"

There are signs that prosecutors now are looking into contacts between administration officials and journalists that took place much earlier than previously thought. Earlier conversations are potentially significant, because that suggests the special prosecutor leading the investigation is exploring whether there was an effort within the administration at an early stage to develop and disseminate confidential information to the press that could undercut former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Central Intelligence Agency official Valerie Plame
...
Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group. Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. Rove and Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to Mr. Wilson's claims.

Given that the grand jury is set to expire on Oct. 28, it is possible charges in this case could come as early as next week. Former federal prosecutors say it is traditional not to wait for the last minute and run the risk of not having enough jurors to reach a quorum. There are 23 members of a grand jury, and 16 are needed for a quorum before any indictments could be voted on. This grand jury has traditionally met on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Now, what is the White House Iraq Group, you ask? Let's just flip back to a Washington Post piece from more than two years ago by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus:

The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.

"Educate the public." Get it? "Mushroom cloud." Think of media buttplugs Judy Miller and Robert Novak. Educate in this new Orwellian world meant "lie to the public in whatever ways required to get support for an invasion." It was a full-fledged propaganda and smear operation designed to twist the media into compliance and destroy anyone who sought to expose the truth, like Joe Wilson.

Who was in the WHIG? Good question, because when you start talking about conspiracy charges, it becomes central to what Fitzgerald is now investigating.

Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."

In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.

The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

So can I be blamed for hoping that Rove, Hughes, Matalin, Wilkinson, Calio, Condi Rice, Hadley, and Libby might find themselves on the wrong end of an indictment, or at least under subpeona to testify against Cheney and Chimpie themselves? Oh! Oh! Oh!

Please, please, please! I can't wait any longer! Please Mr. Fitzgerald! I'm gonna hold my breath until you indict those damned little piggies.

Here goes... I want my pony now!!!

More Rats Deserting the Good Ship Bushit

When you have someone like Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum in your corner, or rather, so far up your ass that he doesn't know where he ends and you begin, you figure that he not only may be politically ambitious, but a true believer too. All the better, you think, because the true believers are so easily duped. Santorum's desire to climb all the way to a run for the presidency was bolstered by the apparent power of the evangelical-Catholic coalition which wants no abortion, no contraception, no homosexual acts, and the permanent installation of women as slavish factories for reproduction, and he saw the coattails of el presidente Chimpie as a way to prove his bona fides to this group.

But Ricky must have needed a breath of fresh air after so many months in Chimpie's colon sucking down methane, so he pulled his head out to inhale oxygen and discovered the Bush maybe wasn't so popular any more with that core group of religious and sexual theofascists that yearn for a return to the dark ages. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sums it up nicely:

It has been an unquestionably brutal summer for the president -- from waning support for the Iraq war, to the slow and almost certain death of his plan to restructure the Social Security system, to criticism over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, to concern about gas prices and the economy. If those trends continue, a looming question for candidates like Mr. Santorum is to what extent the public's dissatisfaction with the administration will spill over into the midterm elections in 2006.

A sinking Chimpie wouldn't trouble a true believer one bit--look at that core 26 percent who think the country is on the right track--but when you have ambitions that are more secular, like someday running for president, the role of the out-of-power martyred true believer becomes less attractive, even if it is the right thing to do given your previous pronouncements of "principle" regarding allegedly conservative ideas.

Is Santorum, then, really just another opportunistic relativist in Christian clothing, ready to turn Brutus to Chimpie's Caesar?

In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette several weeks ago, Mr. Santorum said for the first time that the White House had stumbled badly in its handling of the Social Security issue, and compared Mr. Bush's decision to demand a restructuring of the Social Security system immediately after the contentious 2004 election as "taking a 3-iron to a beehive."

Two weeks ago, Mr. Santorum startled some conservatives and tax lobbyists when he said the costs of Hurricane Katrina had made it necessary for Republicans to reconsider whether they should extend some of the president's tax cuts -- such as the lower rate on capital gains and dividends passed in 2003.

"There's a chance we may not extend some of those provisions this year," Santorum told radio host Don Imus, adding that Congress might not do "as much in the way of tax relief as we had originally scheduled or target some of that tax relief to the affected areas."

So Ricky-boy in one fell swoop cuts himself away from the web in which he had been gleefully entwined, the web that held religious wingnuts and libertarians alike in thrall of Bush: tax cuts and gutting Social Security. And yet Santorum is no dummy--he still needs the Chimpie juggernaut to keep him, if not legitimate, at least financially solvent.

If Mr. Santorum does distance himself from White House policies over the next year -- one area where he is certain to retain their help is in fund raising. Just two weeks from now, Vice President Dick Cheney will hold another fundraiser for Mr. Santorum in Shavertown, Pa..

"It's a delicate balancing act," said Carroll J. Doherty, associate director of Pew Research Center for People and the Press. "This president, he's had a rough stretch, but he still commands loyalty from around 80 percent of Republicans, which is not inconsiderable. ... He has enormous assets to bring to the table."

So as hard as I've been on the Democrats for being weak-kneed with regard to what should be their core principles, it's nice to see that opportunity, greed, power hunger, and unprinicpled gutlessness exist on both sides of the spectrum. Third party, anyone?