Does Fox News talking neck Chris Wallace covet the bum of Dick Cheney?

Faux Universe--He was preening, pawing, and only corrected the former VP once in the entire interview so as not to look like the obvious whore that he is, but nothing doing, Chris Wallace still came off like a whore to the powerful.

Worst of all: Wallace and Cheney were wearing virtually the same kind of pants and suit, just to let us know they're both of the same class, meaning privileged criminals. You'd think Wallace was interviewing his favorite pop star, and in-essence, he didn't even need to be there prompting Cheney's rehearsed statements to save his own ass and to keep the criminal programs he helped create and authorize going. Wallace was just a prop, a stool to stand on while Cheney used Fox News (the only news network he watches, just read a past rider) as his personal soap box.

Is there a word for this? Don't get me wrong, I stand for sexual freedom and have no issues or problems with homosexuals and people being who they are...well, until it impinges on the rights of others, and that's what we have going on here with these morons. Wallace was literally feeding Cheney his cues, it couldn't have been a more baldly-staged event, call it guerrilla theater since it's obvious Cheney never got over the 1960s-70s:

...WALLACE: Do you think this was a political move not a law enforcement move?

CHENEY: Absolutely. I think the fact is, the Justice Department has already reviewed the inspector general's report five years ago. And now they're dragging it back up again, and Holder is going to go back and review it again, supposedly, to try to find some evidence of wrongdoing by CIA personnel.

In other words, you know, a review is never going to be final anymore now. We can have somebody, some future administration, come along 10 years from now, 15 years from now, and go back and rehash all of these decisions by an earlier administration.

WALLACE: Let me follow up on that. The attorney general says this is a preliminary review, not a criminal investigation. It is just about CIA officers who went beyond their legal authorization. Why don't you think it's going to stop there?

CHENEY: I don't believe it. We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn't be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration. Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they're reversing course on that.

The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He's now saying, well, this isn't anything that he's got anything to do with. He's up on vacation on Martha's Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn't do.

WALLACE: But when you say it's not going to stop there, you don't believe it's going to stop there, do you think this will become an investigation into the Bush lawyers who authorized the activity into the top policymakers who were involved in the decision to happen, an enhanced interrogation program?

CHENEY: Well, I have no idea whether it will or not, but it shouldn't. ...

I wish to God it wouldn't stop there, but President Obama doesn't have the balls or the principles to do much about it--that is, without immense public scrutiny and pressure, and he's getting it. The reality is that this isn't really a criminal probe at all, but you can learn a lot of Cheney's fears and create a road map of what should happen out of his very foolhardy statements. If you know one thing about criminals, it's that they tend to give away everything if you're listening closely enough, they're perverse. To be sure, he's scared shitless, and this talk of it being "political" just shows his contempt of the public, the people who are keeping this alive because they don't want torture done in their names, and because they know full well none of Bush II's programs were making them any safer.

Wallace's very leading questions don't remotely constitute journalism on any planet in any known universe, but I do think the ass-lick has a yen for Dick. Fine, but be honest, admit you're a sycophant and that your parents beat you and touched you inappropriately, then we can move forward rather than all of this looking back (in anger). Here's to the demise of the mainstream media and news networks, the time of reckoning has come for these bastards and their ilk. Give the man a microphone...again, and again, and again, and again, until nobody ever wants to hear him ever again (too late).

Americans will continue to have their backs pushed up against the wall and there won't be any choice left but to confront these problems, and that means strikes, demonstrations, and rallying against the program that is rocketing us towards the abyss. It's time to muster the winter soldiers, and that's not a call to violence, it's a call to civic duty. The time has come, now. But look at Cheney and his preening apparatchik, his dog, Chris Wallace, and know the face of human tyranny. It's an ugly, pathetic picture of humanity, isn't it?

The suits, and the damage done:

http://www.foxnews.com/fns/

Right wing columnist Robert Novak belatedly dies at the age of 78

WWW--He was a demagogue, a player, a hater, and just one-of-many jackapes screeching in our collective-ear for the last 30+ years, ramming a failed and moronic rightist agenda down all of our throats. At the end of his very pathetic and partisan career as an ostensible journalist and political commentator for old and young fools alike, he outed an active CIA officer for political purposes, for the Bush II administration. That's not a columnist, a journalist, or even a talking head. That's a political mercenary who deserves no respect whatsoever, a hack like Tim Russert or former NYT journo, Judith Miller.

But you wouldn't know any of this listening to NPR today, those scions of ass-licking. I expected this since they're as predictable as a Rush Limbaugh monologue, but they were gunning for a new low today and their rush to the bottom was achieved. When NPR offers the same drivel as the rest of the mainstream media--which is generally free--why pay for it at all? Thankfully, few are, and jazz fans are going to have to deal--all 10,000 of them.

Whenever I feel the slightest twinge of guilt over never having contributed to public radio, it's days like this that remind me that it was always a good move. But NPR are hardly alone in this bizarre adulation of this not-a-man, this moron, this careerist slimeball. No, we shouldn't be mourning Robert Novak, we should be mourning the perfectly viable cancer cells that had to die with him, it's not fair. That he was intellectually bankrupt is a given. That he was annoying is a given. That he was a liar is a given. There's no reason to celebrate him anymore than it would have been when some clone-like apparatchiki died in the former Soviet Union. Good riddance.

Nixon's former counsel John Dean (no, not Howard Dean, former DNC chair) once told the late President Richard Nixon that, "There's a cancer on the presidency," referring to the Watergate burglars. He was far too optimistic--Nixon was that cancer. When thinking of the late conservative columnist it just brings-to-mind the obverse: "There's a Robert Novak on the cancer." Poor cancer. He wasn't a journalist, he was just some asshole powerful people gave a soapbox to, and for far too long. Thanks for reminding me that mortality's not so bad, Bob, thanks for the reminder (thanks God!). At least you die too.

And what should be his epitaph? We already know: Valerie Plame, and the fact that he did a hit-and-run on someone, went to the doctor, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. That seems to sum-up the reactionary right. Finally, I and millions of others don't have to tell this asshole to shut the fuck up.

Obama: "Obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law."

Fox News Universe--Just moments ago, Fox News reported the opposite of the above statement with the byline, "Obama: 'We're not going to prosecute Bush administration officials.' "

Whenever I want my sci-fiction and fantasy needs met, I don't go to the Sci-Fi Network™--no, no. I go to Fox News for the fantastical, the bizarre, and the outright fictional. It's true, literature has a hard time competing with the scions of the right-wing.

That they're strange is a given. That they lie is a given. But to believe one's own lies means mental illness, which has become the only thing that makes sense about them. Yet, like in all propaganda, there's that tiny kernel of truth in there. President-elect Obama's voting behavior on constitutional issues really is unimpressive. This is troubling for someone who lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years, off-and-on, someone considered a professor of it.

Obama knows full-well that if the laws broken by the Bush II aren't investigated and prosecuted, that they stand as precedents. For those who value their personal liberties, that's alarming, to put it mildly. But, as I wrote to Rawstory's Larisa Alexandrovna, we're seeing a system in crisis rather than a mere "coup" that she and Naomi Wolf, Michael Moore, and others suggested was taking-place with the Wall Street bailout. It was a belated observation. But this is all really beside the point: Congress should be doing most of the heavy-lifting here, and cries of partisanship from the Republicans isn't going to matter in-the-face of an independent truth commission and the economic crisis they midwifed.

As they did with the Church Commission in the 1970s, the Democrats are standing down and doing very little to hold anyone accountable.

Excuses, excuses. The GOP in Congress has no other option but to cooperate in reconstructing the economy along with Democrats and Independents because their very survival depends on it. Democrats can--and will continue to--enable them and make as many excuses for inaction as they want predicated on the straw man arguments for "bipartisanship," but the reality is that Republican incumbents are already greatly disempowered and back in their minority-status where they belong for good. They are extremely vulnerable.

It's true that the Obama administration and Congress are going to have their hands full for some time, but they won't have to do the work of an independent commission--that's why you form one in the first place. With a new majority in the judicial and executive branches, excuses are going to be all congressional Democrats have when they don't act substantially to hold the Bush II administration accountable for crimes we all know were committed, there's no mystery to it. Only the scope is unknown.

The Fox story is wishful thinking in a way, because they understand that while they cannot be pushed into recognizing the public will very often, the Democrats can. They also know that the charges will stick if things go far enough, making for a one-two punch to an already embattled and criminal GOP. This is exactly what should and can happen, but the missing-ingredient--once again--is the American public, their outrage, and their thoughtful action. The factors of anger and action are growing exponentially every day as once cherished values of the marketplace are shown to be the hollow theories they always were. This is because, "It doesn't affect me, so I don't care," is no longer a reality.

Both parties embraced these notions of the marketplace and force-fed them to the public for almost an entire generation. At least two generations have been ruined by this, their minds poisoned with the drivel of the Chamber of Commerce and all the rest of the right's literary output. Systems have a way of playing-out, it's an immutable fact of human history, yet they're still going to try to save their rotten barrel, repeating the actions of all tyrants in all eras. This is the reason behind the president-elect's seeming apathy in prosecuting George W. Bush and his fellow travelers.

This peculiar apathy towards holding the Bush II administration is only going to engender a well-earned cynicism in his direction, and he's going to feel tempted to abuse these new powers of the executive when the going gets tough. If he does utilize them, he's going to be letting not just Black Americans down, but the rest of the world and himself. There will be no transcendent or transformative moment except in the negative, and history will record he was just another ass holding power in another era.

We've already had enough of that, but the choice is his and Congress's to make, a choice between honor and ignominy, of being thought of warmly by future generations, or having one's name spat-out by them as George W. Bush is going to be (we haven't had to wait on that one). What Obama and Congress don't want to admit to the rest of us is that it's implicit to uncover as many of the crimes of the Bush II administration as humanly possible to fix the mess we're in right now, but they're busy trying to save the rotten barrel that produced that mess, all the ingredients for a failure that could grow into a catastrophe.

It was never about George W. Bush. Protecting him and his co-conspirators is protecting a bad system whose time has come. Again, that missing-ingredient is the public. Get angrier, get louder, and start demanding a truth commission, but be good. Let those in power break the law, as it's their wont to do; it makes them more vulnerable than you think.

The real exchange between George Stephanopoulas and Barack Obama: http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/01/obama-leaves-do.html

The silver-lining of the economic crisis: the death of the management class

The Tomb of Frederick Taylor--You can't feel sorry for them. They've worn the brown-lipstick, they've kissed-up, and they've done their best to ensure that American workers have no say in hows and the whys of production or what a business delivers as a product or a service. Why ask the people on the ground?

No, they won't listen to anyone but ownership, and often, they won't even do that, amazing as it sounds. This is why they're all going to be kicked out soon. Apparently, corporations aren't "immortal entities" after all. "Management" is just another word for "overseer" when it comes down to it.

Watching this particular species of social animal croak is a delight, the height of schadenfreude. Any American who's worked under a tyrannical boss knows these bastards for what they are: pea-brained roadblocks to fairness and innovation in the workplace. The most any of them have accomplished is dividing the social bonds between people and running the institutions so badly that they crash. Their time has finally come...to push the mops that have always been beckoning to them to come back home to their true vocations, namely shoveling shit.

These shovels, the sponges, dishcloths, irons, and garbage cans are calling out to them like the Sirens did to Odysseus, longingly. Finally, these little men are going to have to shut-up and have their share of crow as so many former apparatchiki did when the Soviet system collapsed. The public is already beginning to demand accountability, making probes and trials a real possibility.

Will Congress save the day and deflect the forces of law and order from apprehending the Bush II administration? The same with Wall Street's corporate crime wave? Who's going to be the scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb? To be sure, it's going to be someone.

But what's going to be the best is watching the many of these types who were stupid enough to break the law under the duties of their self-appointed jobs being arrested. Certainly, they're going to cling-to their kingdoms in hell for a short time, but then the subpoenas and the criminal and civil suits will come. Most of them will simply be discarded along with the rest of the American working-class, that group they stupidly convinced themselves that they were never a part of.

The only thing management has ever cared about is the perpetuation of management.

That's not a solid platform for any system as we have ample-proof of today. Even bad ideas die hard. Taylor posited the theory that human beings are naturally lazy--indolent--and had to be driven to work if they were going to work at all. This meant the imposition of an authoritarian culture in the workplace, something that wasn't exactly new 100 years ago! Taylor's writings--at best--read like a tract by Ebeneezer Scrooge and Lenin, with a dose of your senile old uncle who drools in the corner at family-gatherings.

Taylor was a High Priest of business Bolshevism; contemporary business/tech/financial elites hold values that aren't especially different from Taylor's and his robber baron "acolytes." Like the phenomena of Social Darwinism, Taylor was just giving a more pointed voice and direction to what was already the overriding spirit of his time. That Americans must work so hard merely to survive is a testament to the anti-humanist and authoritarian nature of forced production in the United States. Why it would behave any differently having its roots in the days of the robber barons, a time when there was virtually no regulation of the economy whatsoever.

Taylorism was adored by the Soviet system's architects, admirers of American authoritarian methods of production.

Lenin and other leaders of the Soviet Union displayed even greater enthusiams for Fordism [standard-parts put together on an assembly line] and Taylorism than the Americans had. When the Soviet Union embarked on a Five-Year Plan that specified mammoth regions of technology based on hydroelectric power and prodigiously rich stores of Siberian natural resources, it turned to American consulting engineers and industrial corporations for advice and equipment. The Soviets constructed entire industrial systems modeled on the steel works in Gary, Indiana, and hydroelectric projects on the Mississippi. (Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis, University of Chicago Press. 2004. P.8)

Work, work, work, and more work, because there's work to be done and nations to be built. Except that that's not the case any more, at least not in the "developed world." Things need repairing and maintenance, but nation building is over in North America.

What happens when the justifications for work are only in-place to perpetuate a hierarchy? That system eventually falls over its own internal paradoxes, just as the Soviet system belatedly did in the early 1990s. But no, the candidates tell us, "Work, work, work--you're gonna have to work harder than ever!" Why? Just to be able to live, to have shelter and be able to eat? That's a violation of a human being's basic human rights.

With a genuinely scientific approach, Americans wouldn't be working the hours they do because there would be an efficient division of the work, making it more manageable with greater rewards for every contributor. Most major industrial production should be nationalized, or more accurately, owned and directed by the American public. A logical distribution of wealth would also make for a more stable economy, a dynamic one instead of the historical pattern of boom-bust cycles.

This isn't how ownership and employers want you to think, but if this economic crisis should teach us anything, it's that they're the parasites, the exploiters of our labor, and that we don't need them. We never needed them, and their claims of ownership are shoddy. Management has been their flesh column to block the progress of everyone else. If anything, management has been an obstacle of efficiency in production in meeting the essential needs of American workers. This class has been a general drain and an authoritarian roadblock to natural change in the workplace, a buffer between ownership and workers.

Now, these individuals have taken their system over the cliff. This was the natural result of dissolution, when ideas and practices that no longer work and rarely ever did, stop working. With the practically inevitable nationalization of Ford and General Motors, we're seeing the end of "Fordism" and "Taylorism" as core principles in production and the structure of private business and financial organizations.

Are we a "body politic" again? It remains to be seen. Society isn't a machine, but an organism, and organisms require that we're flexible to change.

Future social institutions will have to embody a reasonable degree of this flexibility through an expansion of workplace democracy through the support (allowing it to happen) of the federal government, but not necessarily under its direction. Innovation has been repressed for far too long and the road ahead is a high-tech one with a green-lining. The "Socialists are taking over"? Authoritarian ones did long ago in the United States, and the Cold War was just a matter of competing power structures, a game of semantics and straw men. Similar games are being played (badly) today.

Why do so many of us fear freedom and liberty? Because that means more responsibility and accountability for all, and equality under the law. We have only ourselves to blame for not fighting corporatism in America as we should have. That's reason enough to make up for lost time.

Step 1: Attention management! Clear-out your desks, you bums, and get out. You're fired. Have a nice day, m'kay?

Those folks in Chicago are going to win their strike. The world will take notice of this and workers in other nations are going to emulate it, even in China. You have to make a new day in America happen, and the world can change. Make it happen.

"The Socialists are taking over": A Free-Market Final Solution for the American/Global Economy

Waukesha, Wisconsin--If you didn't see it on Fox or C-Span today, John McCain was speaking at a rally when a very stupid old man started yelling, "The socialists are taking over," which makes no real sense while making a certain slanted sense, it being the GOP's lot to make no sense at all.

Of course, McCain being McCain, the dumbo demagogue he is, agreed with him, which is totally insane.

This line is being peddled by the GOP far-and-wide right now, and it's something to watch, counter, and to be wary of. "The Socialists are taking over."

We are? Can I tell you what to do now, asshole? Please? I kid. Others aren't, and they're rightly angry over the last 28 years of GOP meddling (they had DNC help) in our lives. "Kozmik" at Talking Points Memo wrote this eloquent and accurate assessment of where the GOP is right now regarding the Wall Street crash:

The GOP is in shambles. The ideology which sustained the GOP through the cold war is now expiring in rough parity with the Chevrolet truck as commuter vehicle.

You just can't base a platform on greed, ignorance, and violence and expect to be prosperous. You can't run a party on nihilism while claiming to be the party of morality. You can't expect to be the world's leader while encouraging anti-intellectualism.

Both McCain and the Bush family show they've lost control of the base they cultivated and hoped to exploit for their ignorance. The essential flaw in Machiavellian logic.

Today's GOP is based on? What?

It's all garbage. From the virulent anti-intellectualism to the nonsense laissez-faire supply-side economics, to the moronically hyper aggressive FP and colonial mindset more appropriate to the era of telegrams and horseback than global markets/media and loose nukes. http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/mccain_supporter_rants_about_h.php

Of course bailing-out the banks is a kind of socialism, but it's nothing new to this country, it hasn't felled any civilizations recently (actually saving them in Sweden when their banks collapsed for similar reasons), and he's misreading history as most Americans who have had to suffer under our miseducational system that allows gym teachers to instruct in history, forget economics.

But you see, I have a plan that can bring about a kind of Gnostic-healing of the divide between the Free Market and Socialism, an admixture, and it's a novel one.

It's very simple and very American: give everyone a credit card with an absolutely insane credit limit. Then, tell them they can go out and spend-spend-spend. Go to Pier 1 (not really, this is hypothetical, don't do this at home), go to Red Lobster, take vacations in Europe (Italy, that should do the trick), hit-up all the remaining record stores and comic book shops and buy almost everything, buy new cars and trucks, start an expensive and trendy new drug-habit, eat out all the time, go to tanning salons, and all those expensive department stores you always wanted to go nuts at.

You know, just go crazy, girl, and spend as much as humanly possible.

After that, we know the rest: bailouts for the entire American public, everyone, even illegal aliens. That's right, drinks for everyone, and on the house. That free lunch we've all been dreaming of could be nigh, and since it's the nightmare of the Republican Party and bitter shopkeepers everywhere--delicious. Voila! Everyone in America is bailed-out by the government, all will be pure as light, and we'll live happily ever after in la-la land.

You might think I'm kidding, but that's OK. It's understandable.

The insanity of it all is that my plan would likely work, this being the worst--and utterly irrational--of all possible human worlds. While Michelle Malkin (who's losing it today more than usual), Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest of the GOP's apparatchiki go even crazier than they already are trying to explain away the bailout, we can all rest more soundly than they ever will. Yes, even with the worst economic crisis in our history facing us. Idiots like that old man in Waukesha are about to become a very isolated-cult of wackos, which is exactly what they were all along.

Now, things have been pushed so far by the conservatives that they've kicked their own hollow ideology from underneath themselves, they're done. Hemlock anyone? A drink for that man in the back row! I'd suggest that the old man from Waukesha drink hemlock, but he committed mental suicide a long time ago when he became a Republican.

And how is the right's "socialist" panic any different from the so-called online Left's with their hysteria over "an October 1 takeover"? It's not. They're all reactionaries who need to get-a-grip on themselves. That means you too Larisa Alexandrovna and all of the kooks at OpEd News. Reel it in, you're all beginning to sound like a bunch of hopped-up rednecks.

President Jonah claims another victim: Robert Novak

"Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation!" --Gore Vidal, "President Jonah," 01.25.2006

Washington D.C.--Just a few years ago, the legendary Gore Vidal observed that the Bush administration was cursed, and that George W. Bush and those surrounding him couldn't do anything right and that they were a plague upon wherever they went and whatever they touched. Of course, if you touch people you've kidnapped from another country too hard, it's a war crime and a human rights violation.

Today, we have the news that partisan journalist--usually referred to as a "columnist"--Robert Novak has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. If only this were some indication that we live in a meaningful and just universe, but it isn't, and we don't. Has Novak served the Fourth Estate or a "Fifth Column"? History is likely to record the latter as his master.

For a long time, Novak has written a blustery column of business-politico propaganda for The Chicago Sun-Times (and in syndication), echoing the glory days of the barking apparatchik in the Soviet Union. From 1980-2005, Novak was a co-host of CNN's "Crossfire." He was the argument for the right-wing on a decidedly right-wing news network, contrary to the assertions of Ted Turner and his admirers...all three of them.

Novak's leaving for Fox News as a sometime contributor wasn't much of a change. But it does raise suspicions that he was part of a propaganda campaign to promote the war, and one that was very mainstream. He has hardly been alone in his tacit support and bias for the war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, and essentially the entire GOP/Bush agenda. So why call him a "journalist" at all? Why call stenographers to power "journalists" at all? To serve the fix, the boys currently holding power illegitimately.

Take it from someone involved in the DC Madam story: when you're part of a story you're not necessarily a journalist. You're a participant-of-sorts, a chronicler, but not a journalist.

Thankfully, this isn't the end of the world for anyone, especially considering the profession of journalism is about as popular as Congress at this particular historical moment. On July 14th, 2003, Novak illegally revealed the identity of an acting CIA officer Valerie Plame in a Washington Post piece:

[Former US ambassador Joseph C.] Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counterproliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me. ("Mission to Niger," The Washington Post, 07.14.2003)

That's not acting as a journalist, however, but as a mercenary for the White House, a Republican one. By writing these lines in the Post, Novak was aiding and abetting the Bush administration by exposing the covert identity of the former US ambassador who went to Niger to examine the evidence of whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to procure uranium-ore from the African nation for a nuclear program. His sources were not "whistle-blowers," but the kind of politicians who often beg to be exposed for their abuse of office. Et tu, Judith Miller.

Like all of the experts on nuclear proliferation were saying back in 2002-2003, former ambassador Wilson didn't find any credible evidence of Iraqi attempts at a nuclear program. This didn't support the already eroding pretext for invading Iraq--namely WMDs pointed at the United States--and Wilson suddenly became a target of the Imperial Vice President's office. Novak was very consciously helping the White House in discrediting Wilson's very credible conclusions that Iraq had never attempted seriously to obtain the "yellow-cake" from Niger. This was done to salvage the pretext for the war in Iraq and punish and silence critics of the invasion .

There are worse things than being a journalist these days, and Novak embodies it, just as the late Tim Russert. However, it's even money that Novak is going to be enshrined as "one of the greats" of journalism soon. He's not.

Knowingly disclosing the identity of an undercover intelligence agent can bring a federal prison term of up to 10 years under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Novak wrote Tuesday that none of his sources have been indicted.

The Libby indictment stated that Rove, identified as "Official A," had discussed Plame's identity with Novak. But Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin said in June that Rove had been informed that he would not face charges in connection with the probe.

Novak said a third source, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, confirmed Plame's identity.

Harlow was not available for public comment on Novak's latest account. But a former intelligence official said Harlow did not know what Plame's position at the CIA was at first and that he tried to talk Novak out of publishing her name when he did find out, making it clear the disclosure could be damaging. ("Novak: Rove confirmed Plame's identity," CNN.com, 07.11.2006)

They broke the law, and Robert Novak kept his mouth shut for them until he knew there would be no convictions and that he was in-the-clear. This is because he was compromised early-on by his illegal participation in the propaganda campaign. He furthered this compromise by publishing Plame's identity as an acting CIA officer. Yet, despite this fact, an increasingly irrelevant mainstream media is going to prop-up Robert Novak just as they did Tim Russert. That's OK, the internet is now here to counter the lies.

Like Congress, political creatures like Novak compromised themselves to the Bush administration and are still her captives--enter former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, the other option. While McClellan served the Bush administration back when the candidate was still the governor of Texas and it was merely a campaign, he was never completely an "insider"--not nearly as much as the GOP's commissar Novak who was told much more and involved in much more. Success has its price.

An October 1, 2003 press conference on the then-expanding Plame investigation underscores how in-the-dark the White House press secretary was being kept:

Q Scott, this is not hypothetical at all. You say the issue is leaking classified information. So my question is did Karl Rove or any others in the White House talk with reporters, not leak classified information, but talk with reporters about Mr. Wilson's wife and her CIA status after the initial report by Robert Novak?

MR. McCLELLAN: After his initial report? Again, you're -- now the issue is changing. The issue was --

Q No --

MR. McCLELLAN: The issue is, did someone leak classified information. That's a serious matter.

Q Right. But if someone --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's being investigated. Do people talk about what's in the news? That's a whole a different -- that's on a different --

Q There is talk about a woman who's still undercover.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I just made clear --

Q I believe --

MR. McCLELLAN: I just made clear that -- well, was it reported that, one, was that what was reported in the article?

Q I'm just asking, did --

MR. McCLELLAN: Was that what was reported in the article?

Q She was an undercover operative.

MR. McCLELLAN: In the original article?

Q Yes.

Q Yes.

MR. McCLELLAN: I think it was reported "operative" in the Novak column.

Q Operative by definition --

MR. McCLELLAN: I think it was reported -- and he said, you shouldn't use the word "operative." I think the word was "operative." So, I don't know that it said -- I don't --

Q My question is pretty straightforward. Did Karl Rove or others have conversations with reporters about Mrs. Wilson?

MR. McCLELLAN: In what way?

Q And her CIA status.

MR. McCLELLAN: There's an investigation going on in asking everybody to preserve any information they would have related to some of the issues you bring up. I'm not -- there's been no information brought to our attention to suggest that anyone leaked classified information [Ed. My emphasis.], and the President certainly doesn't condone the leaking, or the tactics you're suggesting.

Q You seem to be suggesting that perhaps they had conversations, but weren't leaking classified information.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, there's an investigation going on to pull together all the information. But the issue is, did someone leak classified information? That's a serious issue. And I just made it -- I made it clear early, you brought up Karl's name. Let's be very clear. I thought -- I said it was a ridiculous suggestion, I said it's simply not true that he was involved in leaking classified information, and -- nor, did he condone that kind of activity. This has been answered, and now we're trying to get in a whole bunch of issues, separate and apart from that. ("Press briefing by Scott McClellan," Whitehouse.gov, 10.01.2003)

But Rove lied to the Press Secretary, as did "Scooter" Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff and right-hand man. McClellan was a Sphinx (and still is)--you had to be paying very close attention to his wording. He was telling us all-along that all he could tell the public is what he was being told. That's bad. His employers were keeping him in the dark too, but he was covering his own posterior. That was wise, but it doesn't make him a hero. But compared to the Robert Novaks or the Judith Millers, he is one.

According to pundits in the GOP, the mainstream media (including the unethically biased Novak himself), McClellan is simply "bitter," but this doesn't wash: When individuals like Novak stand down and recuse themselves of checking power, you know a fix is on and that the game is rigged. When they chime in that some former associate is "bitter," it's best to see where the strings coming out their backs lead to. That's right, follow the money.

These kinds of American "apparatchiki" aren't a new phenomena at all, they've been with us the entire, short, run of our history. Why do these creatures yearn to be slaves so badly? Foolishness and delusions of adequacy. If you have any sense at all, you don't miss people like this when they're gone, let alone admire them. Without a blanket rollback of Bush policies and precedents, the war on terror's curse will hold long after Jonah has left us.

Candidate Obama is already showing troubling signs that he's going to play the same game as this administration. It isn't about George W. Bush in the end, and never was, but the mess we're allowing our world to become. There's a cancer on the presidency...and the press, and the public.

Robert Novak is diagnosed with a brain tumor:http://enews.earthlink.net/article/ent?guid=20080728/488d4440_3426_1335020080728-1071750391

"Mission to Niger," The Washington Post, 07.14.2003: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html

"Novak: Rove confirmed Plame's identity," CNN.com, 07.11.2006: http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/07/11/cia.leak/index.html

"Press briefing by Scott McClellan," Whitehouse.gov, 10.01.2003: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/10/20031001-6.html

"President Jonah," by Gore Vidal, 01.25. 2006: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060206/vidal

Was Tim Russert a Divinely Inspired Hack?

Our Generally Crappy Mainstream Media--Perhaps eclipsing the death of the last Pope, Rudolph Valentino, JFK, RFK, and Gerald Ford (still dead), we got an earful about the allegedly wonderful Meet the Press host over the last several days. The litany was endless over what a "great guy" Russert was, and just what an incredible journalist he'd been...except that he wasn't, and expect them to keep braying. And where's Russert's Oswald? It was his heart, it betrayed him after he betrayed all of us.

Granted, he cast a charming Irish spell on those of us who want to feel reassured by a journalist who doesn't ask the "hard" questions of public officials--something he rarely ever did, if ever. I never noticed any substantial questions. For those of us who don't want things to change for the better, and for those of us who are afraid of a truly dynamic democracy where there's supposed to be acrimony and disagreement, Tim Russert was Jesus.

There is one thing, and one thing only that the late Tim Russert should be remembered for: he and his counsel resisted testifying over his involvement in the Plame scandal, an incident that needs no explaining to anyone paying attention. Russert had crucial information on the outing of a CIA officer by members of the executive branch as part of a disinformation campaign surrounding the pretext for the war in Iraq, and he withheld it. So much for patriotism or principles, Russert was a crusader-in-disguise for creeping authoritarianism:

Russert was aware that a special prosecutor probing the leak of a CIA operative's name knew of his summer 2003 telephone conversation with Libby, and that Libby had released him from any promise of confidentiality. [Ed.-My emphasis.] But Russert, the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and host of "Meet the Press," and his attorneys argued in previously sealed court filings in June 2004 that he should not have to tell a grand jury about that conversation, because it would harm Russert's relationship with other sources. ("Russert Resisted Testifying On Leak," the Washington Post, 01.10.2006)

As this site has always contended, the livelihoods and careers of these so-called journalists are their main priority, and they believe in nothing. The "Fourth Estate" aren't concerned or worried about our rights, and therefore feel no connection to the social contract or the common good. What they care about is themselves only, but orders are orders. But man, the coverage of his death! Oh, the coverage! Wall-to-wall, just breathtaking.

CNN and other major television news outlets even told us that there was a rainbow shining during Russert's funeral, strangely begging the question that he--like El Presidente--was somehow touched by God (more like in the head).

Mark this, and mark it well: whenever this system props-up a supplicant like Tim Russert for public deification, something is amiss, and the lies are flying. Court jesters had more courage than this clown ever did. Mediacrit.com sums-it-up best:

Being favored by Dick Cheney’s handlers doesn’t sound like a case for the journalism hall of fame, though.

In the case of Russert, we should consider what small impact “public affairs” journalism like Meet the Press has in these days of The Daily Show, social networking on the Internet, and Obama’s nontraditional campaign. I think the New York Times’ Media Equation columnist David Carr got it right when he observed that the mourning seemed not only for Russert, but an attempt to celebrate and shore up the increasingly irrelevant establishment political journalism. ("Mourning in America," Mediacrit.com, 06.19.2008)

All hail the death of establishment journalism. No, there's no reason at all to think of Tim Russert as anything but an American version of a commentator for Pravda under the Soviet regime, or a voice-over from a creaky old Nazi propaganda film. He was a stooge, a lapdog, and a moral coward without a shred of credibility.

Not that that makes him any different from his peers who attended his funeral this week, endlessly expounding on his (and their) fictitious merits as a journalist. His passing really is only relevant in relation to the Plame scandal.

Like most working within the world of the mainstream news media, he was not a man, but he was a traitor to himself, his family, and his nation. He will not be missed by those of us with the ability to reason, and history will judge him harshly. We're all born, and we all die. Tim Russert was no exception to this rule, and therefore, not special. Mourn the people he could have saved, save it. See you in the Emerald City, the Populists are off to meet the Wizard!The only problem is, they're shelling the Emerald City.

"Russert Resisted Testifying On Leak," the Washington Post, 01.10.2006: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/09/AR2006010901745.html

Mediacrit knocks it out of the park, June 19th, 2008:

http://mediacrit.com/mourning-in-america

BOB NEY CONFESSES FOR THIRD TIME: "OK, THIS TIME YOU'VE REALLY GOT ME."

Washington D.C.--Bob Ney says that he's resigning. This is news? Ten year olds knew this. He plead guilty? The evidence was well-known, though everyone should have due process, right? Not to the GOP, unless it involves themselves. At least they're consistent on this point. Like Mark Foley, Ney's considering getting treatment for alcoholism.

Let's see...we have George W. Bush, Winston Churchill, Dick Cheney, Boris Yeltsin, Ted Bundy, Tip O'Neill, J. Edgar Hoover, Leonid Brehznev, George H.W. Bush, Spiro Agnew, Nikita Khruschev, Mark Foley, Herman Goering, Bob Ney, Richard Nixon...I could go on-and-on. When you know that you are a pig who is forcing American families into-the-streets, you would drink too. A whole lot.

We know where this leads: pedophilia, because Mark Foley said so. Are those gin-blossoms on Dennis Hastert's nose? What's most-irksome is, yesterday, Ney claimed he wasn't going to resign! Apparently, he sobered-up and reality sank in...then he had another drink.

Is Convicted GOP Governor Bob Taft an Alcoholic? http://governor.ohio.gov/releases/060306Prevention.htm

Detox this:http://tailrank.com/616032/Rehab-The-last-refuge-of-scoundrels

The Political culture of 'the Hooch':
http://www.health24.com/mind/Sexual_dysfunction/1284-1300,34254.asp

Newt Gingrinch, the best Literary reviewer since Poe (not really).There is
no-way he read some of these, but he's had the time. Here's to him having more:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A27WFYW9ZJ5DN1/ref=cm_aya_pdp_profile/102-6113671-6488152