Whiskey Annex

We're All Just Bozos on this Bus

The title borrowed from the comedy maniacs of my late teens, Firesign Theatre... I could also quote their: "How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all" But I won't.

But the point of the whole thing is to talk about how even politically aware people can feel out-of-kilter these days, and about how US anti-political people feel similarly but try to take up the slack, hold their respective noses. Poll reading is akin to Madame Arcati's crystal ball readings. Public sentiment we are told turns on those polls. Puleese! Drugs. And lots of them.

The time seems ripe for a thread where we can all talk about our own thoughts, connect and disconnects with the political world... as I call it "Planet Patriarcy", the Happy Planet. So here's a place to vent about your likes and dislikes about the US presidential campaign. Have at it. Remember that we're all just bozos on this bus.

a minor puzzle

Whiskey Annex

Has Rove been off his game? Is his game being interfered with? I take the White House at its word when it says that it isn't involved in the Swift-boat ads--not in their fabrication, anyway, because if Rove had been paying the kind of attention he's famous for, then all those little mistakes (like Anthony Cordier) would have been caught in the vetting process. And here's another thing: given the way that Rove has been fashioning the upcoming convention--as a pitch to the alienated center--it's just insane to let Colin Powell stay out of the line-up. If Rove can't bring in Powell, then something is tying his hands--and it isn't Sy Hersh's book, and it isn't the war in Iraq.

I persist in thinking it has to the Plame affair (Powell's great weapon against Cheney and Rove). This affair may continue forever, finally, and leave no meaningful trace in the public record, but it's been messing up the Republican's internal machinery for more than a year now. It's like a pair of cement boots dragging the White House to the bottom of the Potomac, and no one's saying a word.

Washington's bureaucratic wars of today are different from those of thirty years ago. Back then, people from all quarters leaked everything they could thing of in order to sink the White House. Today, all the contending parties (within and around the White House) need most of all to keep themselves under cover. Cheney and his friends have to keep silent, and Fitzgerald seems to have cornered them for stonewallers. Reporters, for their own good reasons, have refused to finger their sources. But what about Cheney's other enemies, the one's who have other complaints? Why arent' they playing the leaking game--as they did in the run-up to the war? The CIA and FBI, for cxample, have lots of keen arrows in their quivers.

Perhaps they've decided that Fitzgerald is doing just fine, and that further leaks would only complicate his game. And while he may never indict the folks who outed Plame, and while he may also fail to indict the folks who've been stonewalling (they're one and the same, of course), his lines of pursuit must be drawing lots of blood. Call it "internal bleeding". If Rove is among Fitzgerald's primary targets, then the man has excellent reasons indeed to be off his game. It helps that he has no back-up to give him assistance--he's a sorcerer without an apprentice, so far as I can tell--and I expect to see many more blunders along the way. The upcoming trip to Greece would be one of these (shades of General de Gaulle in the spring of '68!).

Are we off the mark here? If so, it's the best we can do in a climate of paranoid silence. The silence, at last, is the key--not the story it keeps under wraps.

Any corrective input, friends, would be most welcome!

Who "controls " oil?

I have written a pretty long post to try to describe how the oil industry works and what it means to "control" oil. For the time being, I have posted it here, but I hope that we can discuss it here at the Annex.

It is still a work-in-progress and I would be especially grateful for your questions and comments on items that you find unclear or would like described/investigated in greater detail. This text is a fairly general and theoretical one, and I am planning a second part which would examine concrete projects and countries in more detail. again, questions and suggestions would be helpful to make this more interesting.

A Remarkable Series of Coincidences

A few days ago, I wondered if there had been any attempt to correlate terror alerts from Homeland Security and bad news for BushCo.

Well, ask and ye shall receive (thanks to Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway for pointing me at JuliusBlog's excellent chart and timeline).

Now, if we could just corral somebody with Nexis-Lexus access, to do a numeric breakdown of the frequency of these stories' appearance in the media just prior to and after the alerts...

A tasty quote from Julius Civitatus:

...for the record, we are not claiming that all these alerts are politically motivated. We are sure a considerable amount of these alerts were legit and caused by real and immediate information of potential threats. What is important to note is that many of these "immediate" terror alerts were later on discredited [p.f.: emphasis mine] (in some cases they used old data, in other cases the announcements were less immediate and less urgent that we were lead to believe, as the press reported.) Those are the cases that could be interpreted as politically motivated, especially when they seemed to coincide with political news and events unfavorable to the administration.

America’s Vichy Left vs. Michael Moore

This article is a couple of weeks old, but makes some interesting points.

"...For years now, America's Leftists have been flogging themselves to death wondering why it is that they remain so weak and disenfranchised. Most Leftists agree that it's all the fault of the right-wing dominated media, and the Republican-infested corporate conglomerates that control the major media outlets. Others blame religion, or advertising, or popular culture, or something inherently base within the genus americanus. Sometimes they even blame themselves, though only in a safe, disingenuous, fake-self-loathing way: we're out-of-touch, too serious, too high-fallutin', we need to get with the times, etc.

In fact, the main cause for the demise of the American Left is much more sinister than that. The American Left is responsible for destroying the American Left. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean quite literally that anytime the Left starts to get somewhere, you can be sure that a vigilante mob of other Leftists will rise to the occasion to crush it, to make sure they stay as marginalized and ineffective as always. It's a kind of ghetto envy endemic to the Left - the Right is always rooting for its heroes to succeed. Not the Left. The key for them is to sound Virtuous - and oftentimes that means eating their own in order to promote themselves.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the American Left's envy-fueled lynching of Michael Moore, the only Leftist to make it out of the ghetto...

What do you think?

DOJ Documents Given 11th Hour Stay of Execution

The minions of the Grand Inquistitor AshKKKroft have changed their "mind" about the destruction of Department of Justice docs available to the "little people" at repository libraries, and it appears that pressure from the American Library Association (ALA) was instrumental in the rescision.

ALA welcomes Department of Justice decision to rescind destruction request

"The documents that were to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA)."

"Interesting" choices of reading material in my mind. All about civil and criminal asset forfeiture...

So have they just floated the "book burning" trial balloon to check the public outrage barometer? Can heretic-burning be far behind?

Inquiring minds...

I Have Faith in Prozac Nation

Excerpt: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.

The comment was apparently directed to a colleague who was transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about job quality, and who overheard the remark.

When told the Prozac comment had been overheard, Sheybani said: "Oh, I was just kidding."

Well, I don't know about you, but I got a big belly laugh from Ms. Susan "Marie Antoinette" Sheybani's joking off-the-cuff comment. Adam Felber at Fanatical Apathy thought it was a laugh riot also.

"My life is totally better now," said Anthony Lombard, 34, of San Jose, CA. A former software engineer, Lombard had experienced some difficulties adjusting to his new career cleaning lavatories at a bus terminal. "Zoloft is what really pulled me out of all that negativism," said Lombard. "Zoloft and Paxil. Now I go into work with my head held high, and everything's cool. It's, like, I remember feeling bad, but now I just look at my problems and kind of laugh them away. I was holding my daughter last night as she was crying about her new school and how brutal and teacher-less the envorinment is and I was thinking... wow, she's so beautiful."

Mandatory mass mental health screenings by the Department of Human Services in the "news" lately hits a little to close to Aldous Huxley's somatized vision in "Brave New World" for me, and antidepressant medication saved my life once about twelve years ago ... not that the dingbats in DC are going to be able to implement such a program.

Someone might quietly remind Ms. Sheybani that it's risky business pissing off both mental health patients AND the unemployed. Maybe a word or two of warning about the fate of that "other" Marie Antoinette ...Let them eat Prozac, indeed! SSRIs like Prozac, Zoloft and the like will not repair that kind of "head case".

"I have faith in medication
I believe in the Prozac Nation
You play doctor, but I've lost patience

But this is where it ends
This is where it ends
Call the police and call the press
But please, dear God, don't tell my friends
This is where it ends
This is where it ends"
Barenaked Ladies

Just a Game

Some of my favorite lyrics from the musical Blood Brothers, by John Lennon contemporary and fellow Liverpuddlian, Willy Russell go like this:

"But you know that if you cross your fingers,
and if you count from one to ten,
you can get up off the ground again.
It doesn't matter the whole thing's just a game."
"Kids' Game"

Does art imitate life? You'll have to decide for yourself. The example is from the LA Times: The Right Wing's Deep, Dark Secret

Excerpt from the top:
"One of the secrets of conservative America is how often it has welcomed Republican defeats. In 1976, many conservatives saw the trouncing of the moderate Gerald Ford as a way of clearing the path for the ideologically pure Ronald Reagan in 1980. In November 1992, George H.W. Bush's defeat provoked celebrations not just in Little Rock, where the Clintonites danced around to Fleetwood Mac, but also in some corners of conservative America.

"Oh yeah, man, it was fabulous," recalled Tom DeLay, the hard-line congressman from Sugar Land, Texas, who had feared another "four years of misery" fighting the urge to cross his party's too-liberal leader. At the Heritage Foundation, a group of right-wingers called the Third Generation conducted a bizarre rite involving a plastic head of the deposed president on a platter decorated with blood-red crepe paper."

As I said, you'll have to decide for yourself. In the wee hours I find it almost perfectly ironic in an imperfect world, that what US citizens take so seriously -- political conventions, elections and the like -- seems so absurdly like a game to the people "chosen" to rule.