Tidbits....

Finally, only thirty-eight years late, Bush is on his way to Vietnam. Wonder if he'll tell the Vietnamese stories of his drunken frat boy days when he was all for someone else killing them. While there, he's going to prove that John Kerry's war record is a lie, with the help of the Swift Boat Veterans and O.J. Simpson.

Florida political cartoonists are committing mass suicide because Katherine Harris is no longer running for anything. One says, "there's nothing left to live for."

Bush wants to run John Bolton headlong against the Senate again. Wonder what the justification for yet another try will be? "John’s a good man. He hasn’t killed any other ambassadors, yet. He did throw his shoe at an Iranian staffer, but that’s all blown over now. And there’s just no truth to the rumor that he told the French foreign minister, Mr. Barn-yay, that he was gonna ‘pull down his pants, bend him over his desk and make him squeal lak a pig.’ It’s just not true.”

The word is out that hundreds of young Republican staffers around Washington, DC, will be without a job soon, and long faces abound (so many thought they'd have a lifelong career thanks to the one-party oligarchy they'd been working so hard to achieve), and there's no question that even the mighty right-wing welfare system isn't going to be able to accommodate them all. They've been casting about for suggestions. So, my first is: make the most of that horrid Democratic New Deal program, unemployment insurance. Second, there's always this.

Patrick O'Connor writes in The Hill: "'The White House said keeping the majority was a priority, but they failed to do the one thing that could have made a difference,' one House GOP leadership aide said Thursday. 'For them to toss Rumsfeld one day after the election was a slap in the face to everyone who worked hard to protect the majority.'" One of those instances of "can't live with `im, can't live without `im," I suppose. The good news is that Rummy's gone, the bad news, according to the GOP, is that he wasn't gone soon enough (didn't hear many of them saying that before the election, though). But, there's a silver lining in every cloud. Rummy has hired Karl Rove to be his pool boy at his new retirement home in an unextraditable country.

But, it certainly shows Bush's political savvy--he created an October Surprise to influence the election, and then didn't announce it until November, the day after the election was over. As they used to say in your Dad's day, George, "smooth move, Ex-Lax."

Shrub wasted no time in announcing he had a replacement for Rummy (Robert Gates), thereby proving to all that he had openly and repeatedly lied about keeping Rummy on, and therefore, had been playing to his and KKKarl's hard-core base in a shoddy attempt to sway the election. Like, "if the Democrats win, the terrorists win" wasn't shoddy enough. Good thing this wasn't 2004, with all the negative campaigning that went on then....

Speaking of Gates, Billmon thinks he's gone through a time warp. He may be right. If so, when does Gates get brain cancer, like Bill Casey, go completely aphasic from the surgery, and then, despite being unable to speak, give Bob Woodward a death-bed interview?

Speaking further of Gates, his confirmation hearing would be a wonderful time for Democrats to settle some old business, such as determining his whereabouts on Oct. 19, 1980, and finding out why the guy with the photographic memory couldn't recall details of his involvement in Iran-Contra thirty-three times. Maybe the larger question in this should be for Bush himself. Why is he now throwing out the new Republican neo-colonialists for the old Republican neo-colonialists? Maybe they're the only people who know how to circle the wagons?

Still and all, it was the election that was, and Republicans, as usual, were self-important in victory and pissy in defeat (something they all learned from Dick Nixon, I think).

And, just in case you thought they went away because we were busy with other things, those *cough* indictments *cough* and *hack* investigations *hack* are still pending. As I've mentioned before, the Republicans have tried mightily to do some sophisticated marketing cross-branding between themselves and the evangelicals. Hear "Republican" and you're supposed to also think, "Christian." Well, I've got a feeling that a new subliminal cross-branding is in process, and with any luck, by 2008, when someone says, "Republican candidate," a whole lot of people are going to think, "criminal shithead." And just in time, too....