Pirate's Day....

All the talk lately is about the money the RNC plans to spend digging up dirt on Democrats in critical races and then running negative campaign ads about it all. Democrats, on the other hand, are sitting on their hands, waiting for the FBI's public corruption units to take care of their ads for them. Video of one's opponent being frogmarched out of the Capitol Building doesn't even require snide narration, but I don't think time is on the side of Democrats, not with seven weeks left.


James Moore, co-author of a new book on Karl Rove, speaks to Rove's abilities and disabilities in an interview, and to the curious effect George W. Bush has on Republicans:

BuzzFlash: It’s the kind of physical detail that you just don’t normally see if a person doesn’t have an emotional attraction to somebody.

James Moore: Right. He said, I saw him walking up, and he was wearing boots and blue jeans, and a brown leather bomber jacket, and he had these steely blue eyes, and he was smacking gum. He had this thick curly hair, and you could see the tobacco circle pouch in his back pocket. And Rove said, I thought he was just the coolest guy in the world. I wanted to be like him. The context, of course, is that George Bush was sort of the antithesis of what Karl was at that -- the glasses-wearing guy, a geek, and W. is cool. That’s why I’ve said their political union is also sort of a physical and spiritual union as well, because they’re two different kinds of characters.

But bear in mind, Karl isn’t the only one who’s offered up that sort of description. As you’ll recall, Mark McKinnon once described, I think in an interview with Tucker Carlson, how he got involved with Bush. McKinnon said, well I’m not a Republican. I’m a Bush guy. I was at a party, and I saw Bush across the room. I sort of felt the same way that a guy does when he goes to a party with his wife, and he sees a beautiful woman across the room, and he’s compelled to go talk to that person, even though he knows he shouldn’t. So this is a theme that has run throughout the Republican Party, in terms of its admiration for George W. Bush. What they had fundamentally managed to do is fall for the dumb blonde, from what I can tell.

This is definitely a "walk on the wild side" modern expression of the Warren G. Harding Syndrome. Harding's wife insisted that he run because "he looked presidential." It seems Bush ran because every Republican secretly lusted after him like he was a 42nd Street cowboy slut. And they had another shared problem--slapstick speechifying. Of Harding's verbal assaults on the mind and ear, H.L. Mencken said: "It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm... of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash... but I grow lyrical." Sound familiar?



Dick Cheney has donned his tights and cape. Now let's see the "leaps tall buildings in a single bound" routine--that should be good for an honorable mention on The Daily Show. And we all thought that it was the height of arrogance that he wanted to secretly run the country.



Bush visits the UN, and extols the virtues of democracy by singling out three non-democratic countries for praise--Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. I would hate to think this was due to an organic condition. Better to blame Quaaludes, or something. It really has been a day to make Orwell forlornly proud of his observations.



Speaking of pirates, they were also called, once upon a time, privateers. Sort of the privatization crowd of colonial days. Only now they fly in private jets and drive black SUVs... and do thing their thing through war contracts. For these folks, every day is pirate's day.





(graphic from the inimitable darkblack)