Kate Upton is better than you are

So once I finished my ObamaCare victory lap last night, I realized something important. I've spent far too long now writing about trivial things, such as the ongoing bankruptcy of the United States, how awful and moronic Canadian politics is getting, and how foreigners enjoy killing one another a great deal. 


Yes, the entire point of this blog is that the human spirit is suicidally stupid, but often times this depresses even me. More importantly, those things can't be very much fun for you to read. While I understand that my Armageddon fetish gets you all damp in the panties, I think it needs to be doled out in smaller doses. 

I realized that I have needs, godfuckit! And this blog hasn't been fulfilling them for far too long. I haven't been writing about life's truly important things, which obviously revolve around my penis and its strange and wonderful appetites. I understand that life isn't exclusively about depraved orgies and interesting new women within whom I'd like to implant myself, but I'll argue to my dying breath that it should be!

About a month ago, I went out with your friend and mine, the great and good Doctor Reverend. As I do my level best to avoid any social activity that doesn't involve copious amounts of alcohol, we found ourselves at a liquor store. A really nice one in Leaside.

The cashier that served us was tiny, brunette and awfully cute. Upon seeing her, I felt the familiar churning in my loins that tells me that I'm falling in love. I recognized the sensation immediately, seeing that it overtakes me about 37 times a day. Some people think this is shallow, but I would posit that they don't know what love is. If you're a regular reader of mine, you know better than to argue with me about such things. This is the kind of country wisdom that I've been bringing you for nearly a decade now.

We returned to the good Doctor's car, freshly supplied with our precious amber liquids, and I began musing about the cute LCBO girl. I pointed out that my love for her was such that I could devote my life to holding her like a puppet.

Being a doctor of divnity, so ordained by some mail-order ministry in Bakersfield, my great friend asks the truly important existential questions, and that day was no exception. He turned to me and asked "What would you make her say?"

I was haunted by the question, as you might well expect. I don't consider myself a spiritual man, which is why I need Herr Doktor as a constant presence in my life.

Then I saw the famous "Cat Daddy" video and it changed me.



The Cat Daddy video actually hypnotized me into being a better man, which is surprising, in that I always considered hypnosis to be utter bullshit and probably satanic. I found what the Quakers call "peace at the center." It was the closest to God that I've ever felt.

As my powerful prick, Christ-like in its love for everybody, quivered and throbbed in my drawers and my balls churned with Truth, I accepted a fundamental reality - that there is no doubt as to what I would make Kate Upton say. What exactly that is, I'm not going to share. Some things should stay private, after all. Isn't that what love is all about, sharing things that will never be shared with another?

This Truth has been spewing from my loins with greater frequency and in thicker volume than it ever had before, no small accomplishment, given my freakish and gluttonous carnal appetite. Several of my fuck-buddies have noticed this, too. How could they not, what with their being practically waterlogged with My Truth every time our paths cross?

The Truth is a powerful, powerful thing, to stay nothing of sticky. It has been known to hurt, especially when it gets in your eyes.

Whether I want her to or not, Kate Upton keeps dragging the Truth out of me. Upwards of a dozen times a day now. A lesser man probably wouldn't survive it. I come from sturdy stock, and I do try to stay hydrated.

Kate is 19 years old and completely shaved, just like all women should be. And it's no surprise that she's from St. Joseph, Michigan, famously the home of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. There are only two credible explanations for being that perfect: biological engineering or being sent from the fucking future.

 


I've always known that really pretty, huge-titted, hard-nippled girls that like putting things in their mouths are superior to every other kind, but I never really knew it. I've never been one to proselytize, but Kate Upton has changed me in fundamental ways. I might very well start screaming her message to passers-by on street corners everywhere. I would have done it in an Elmo suit, but rampant, psychotic anti-Semitism has ruined that outfit for everybody.

I'm her ideal messenger. Having stuffed myself with toxic shit for some thirty years and to be still standing convinces me that I'm very probably immortal.

And to think that it all started with a girl at the Leaside LCBO. It makes me look at the provincial civil service in a whole new light.



Kate Upton .gif lovingly stolen from What Would Tyler Durden Do. The wet-t-shirt shot was ruthlesslt taken from Drunken Stepfather, who should be considered NSFW unless you work in a whorehouse. Or a morgue. 

How John Roberts re-elected Barack Obama

Twenty-seven months ago, almost to the day, I wrote about how I believed that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would be upheld by the Supreme Court. And lookie, it just was this morning. Most everyone thought I was a fucking nut for saying this in public, and I do hope that it'll get everybody off of my dick for predicting that Rob Ford would lose.

I think it's time for everybody to admit that I have a more supple mind than you do, both legally and politically. As Robert Plant declared from a balcony at the International Hyatt House in 1975, "I am a Golden God!"

But this isn't entirely about me gloating, just mostly.

Before I go further, I should re-iterate what I said nearly two and half years ago: I don't like the individual mandate. But for everything else that the Congress and the Courts - conservatives and liberals alike - have done over the last century, it would be unconstitutional. The idea that the government can compel an individual to buy a product from private industry - particularly an industry so unashamedly fucking sleazy as the medical insurance business - is repugnant to everything I believe. But that decidedly doesn't make it unconstitutional.

And you know what? This is where shit gets really interesting. Well, it doesn't just get interesting. It gets downright hilarious, too.

The conventional wisdom has been that upholding the PPACA would be the best thing that could have happened to the Republican Party generally and Mitt Romney specifically in this campaign year. Conventional wisdom is wrong.

If the GOP just stuck to "repeal" on ObamaCare, they'd be on safe ground. But because they're dishonest whores, idiots, or both; they decided to go further. They've seen the same polling that I have, and they know that large swaths of the PPACA - such as banning the disqualification of coverage because of a pre-existing condition, barring companies from withdrawing coverage from sick people, and keeping the kids under Mommy and Daddy's plans until they're 26 - are incredibly popular.

So they stupidly decided to double-down. They said that they would "repeal and replace" ObamaCare. They're just going to do it without the much-loathed individual mandate. And that's where they're going to get fucked out until nobody recognizes them anymore.

Republicans invented the individual mandate for reason, folks. It's pretty much the only way you can achieve anything even close to universal coverage, short of single-payer. Without dramatically expanding the risk pool to cover everyone that Democrats, Republicans and the American people say they want covered, the HMOs will go bankrupt in about thirty-five seconds. Because the parts of ObamaCare that everyone has fallen in love with are monumentally pricey!

The Republican proposals are adorable - and I even agree with some of them, in theory and outside of the current debate - but they're either incredibly impractical, illegal, or the math doesn't work.

Let's start with tort reform.

Firstly, just as Mitt Romney likes to be able to fire people who provide him services, I like being able to sue the tits off of people who suck at their jobs to my physical detriment.

Secondly, if you get as loose with reform as Republicans seem to desire, there's a really good chance that Dr. Conrad Murray would be treating you with propofol and lorazepam every time you stub your toe. There used to be a time when conservatives believed that unless you made people pay for their fuck-ups, there would be no incentive for them not to fuck up.

Thirdly, the most optimistic estimates that I've seen show tort reform saving only about $300 million a year. Heath care consumes about 18% of GDP, which translates into trillions of dollars.

Finally, tort reform assumes that Democrats will no longer exist. But they will, and in sufficient numbers to filibuster the tits off of any bill in the Senate. Period.

Then there's the idea of letting people buy insurance across state lines, which might be the dumbest goddamned thing I've ever heard.

Insurance companies enjoy an exemption to the federal government's anti-trust laws. I have no idea how you maintain that exemption when said companies are forced to compete with one another nationally. And if you think that they're going to just surrender that exemption, you're hallucinating.

The godless insurance industry has armies of shitstain, scumbag lobbyist assholes, each one of whom owns three or four individual members of Congress and at least one potential presidential candidate. The only reason that said shitstain, scumbag lobbyist assholes didn't destroy the individual mandate the way they did the public option is that the mandate was good for business. Getting rid of the anti-trust exemption would be very, very bad for business. Think that's going to happen any time soon? If so, I have cock ring that'll give you super powers that I'm dying to sell you!

Because anti-trust exemptions by their very nature destroy market competition, Americans would have to take it on faith that prices would go down. You would actually have a faith-based health care economy because there's absolutely no evidence that what Mitt Romney and John McCain say would happen actually would.

More importantly, interstate commerce in health insurance would destroy politics as Americans currently know it.

Since no Republican is daring to propose actually federalizing the regulation of interstate insurance policies, it's only natural that the companies would all headquarter themselves in the state with the weakest (if not actually non-existent) regulations. Nobody wants their medical care controlled by "unelected bureaucrats", but I can't see the good folks of Alaska, California, Michigan and Maine enjoying having te terms and conditions said care dictated to them by Mississippi's insurance commissioner, either.

Such an arrangement would, given the percentage of GDP eaten up by health care, give one guy in Jackson more practical political power than all but a very few members members of Congress. I figure that it wouldn't take Congress more than a few months to figure that out and, out of the blue, you'd suddenly see national insurance regulations to rectify the situation. The only thing that would cost is the federalism that GOP politicians are making this awkwardly dumb proposal to protect.

Proposing tax credits as a way of paying for coverage is insulting to the intelligence of even  pituitary retards. Even the lowliest of do-nothing, "Let's treat cancer with leeches" insurance plans cost anywhere from seven to thirteen grand a year. A tax credit assumes that you have that coin up front, to be redeemed the following April. And most middle-class families don't, to say nothing of the working poor.

Block grants to the states are even worse. The states, as you may have noticed by now, are even more broke than the federal government is, which is saying a lot. Blocks grants don't tend to rise with regular old inflation, let alone the atmospheric inflation of the health insurance sector.

Sooner than almost anyone realizes, the states will put that money to other shit, like tax cuts and new sports stadiums, and find reasons to deny people care.  They'll be doing precisely what the insurance companies are doing now.

How do I know that? Because that's exactly what happened after Bill Clinton's welfare reform plan passed and AFDC was abolished. Looking after the sick and the poor is the least effective vote-getter there is. If you're wondering why federal unemployment insurance benefits have had to be extended so often, look no further than the block-granting of welfare.

More importantly, block grants will induce employers to do exactly the same thing that ObamaCare does; dump their private coverage and force employees into the state program, which won't cover them, either.


So what does that leave you with? Not much. 

1. An employer mandate: This was Richard Nixon's idea back in 1974. Unfortunately, this was well before Frank Luntz (who invented "The Death Tax" out of an innocuous estate tax that almost no one paid) re branded "rich motherfuckers"  as "job creators." More importantly, an employer mandate assumes the existence of a manufacturing sector that the United States no longer has. If you insure the manager at McDonald's, you'll very quickly find that your Quarter Pounder costs forty seven fucking dollars. 
2.  Deficit financing: This is something that Republicans are exceptionally good at, as evidenced by the years 2001-06 and the Ryan plan, which is so front-loaded with tax cuts that it explodes the deficit in the short and medium terms. The only problem here is that the United States is no longer in a position where it can finance giant programs by borrowing. The international bond markets will call bullshit the second it tries, and Americans will be scrambling to pay the pizza guy with a more stable currency, like the peso. 
3. Single payer: If Romney and the congressional GOP gets their way, this will be the only option left to them because private insurers will no longer exist. If we know anything about Mitt Romney, it's that he's good at putting things out of business. The only difference is that he won't make money out of it. He'll just be doing it for fun and out of his base animal instinct. 

Not only do I know that Mitt Romney is lying when he says that he'll "repeal and replace" the PPACA with all of the goodies intact and the odious individual mandate gone, Mitt Romney knows that he's lying. He spent a couple of years studying the issue up in Massachusetts and the only thing he could come up with was the individual mandate. Romney and Barack Obama are the only guys in America with any hands-on experience in this field and they came to exactly the same conclusion. 

If you think that the President isn't going to point that out in public, you're even dumber than you look. Not only is Obama smart, he's a mean little bastard, too. Not only will he pulverize Romney with this in the debate, he'll almost certainly steal this essay and run it under his name in the following day's New York Times. I'm betting that he'll change my title to something snappy, like  "Mitt Romney is a Lying Cunt." 

Everybody expected that if there was going to be a flip vote in the Supreme Court this morning, it would be Anthony Kennedy. And almost no one thought that there was a flip vote to be had. 

Instead it was Chief Justice Roberts who voted with the liberals on the Court and almost single-handedly guaranteed that  Barack Obama is re-elected in November. But why?

Weapons-grade shitheads like Erick Erickson are running around making excuses for the Chief that only make sense if you drop acid for breakfast and bathe in them new-fangled bath salts that all the kids are talking about. Moreover, he suggests that this is somehow good for the GOP, which it clearly isn't.  

I'd like to think that the Chief Justice essentially re-elected the President this morning because he felt that he had to to uphold the law. But there might be another reason. It could be that he wants a Mulligan on administering the oath of office to him.

Turnaround: Republicans and executive privilege, then and now

Earlier this week I wrote about the titanic fuck up that was Watergate. One of the things that I wish I had gone into a little more depth about is impeachment. Specifically, it is my contention that there isn't enough of it.

I hear American liberals and conservatives alike continually howling at the moon about "imperial" or "criminal" presidencies, but none of them ever want to do the one thing that the Constitution expressly provides for: impeach the cocksuckers and remove them from office, post-haste.

Worse, they're not even willing to try to remove the evildoers from the palace. Most often they'll tell you that "there isn't a national consensus for impeachment." All that means is that "I'm afraid that I'll lose my fucking seat if I did it. Better still to let a member from some lunatic district in (insert your favorite deep Red or Blue state here) do it, and I'll go whichever way the wind does." But they'll always campaign in the next election as "Proud American Leaders", won't they?

Only two presidents - Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton - have been impeached. Both were acquitted by the Senate and served out their terms without any apparent sense of disgrace at all. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached and convicted. Any any number of criminal presidents died as respected statesmen, or soon will. Actually that's not true. The two oldest living former presidents, Carter and Bush 41, generally abided by the Constitution, which goes a long way in explaining why they were only one-term presidents.

As I said in the first paragraph, I'm of the mind that presidents aren't impeached nearly enough. If the United States seriously wants to consider itself a nation of laws, its presidents need to know that there actually are consequences for violating those laws. As it is, there have been a grand total of three serious impeachment attempts in since the Constitution was ratified 223 years ago. Do you really believe that there have only been two - Nixon and Clinton - criminal presidents? (Most scholars now agree that Andrew Johnson was railroaded, and his "High Crime" - violating the Tenure of Office Act - is now standard operating procedure)

Opponents of a given impeachment suggest that it only serves to "reverse an election." This is one of the rare instances in the human experience when people can be both completely full of shit and absolutely right at the same time. The entire point of impeachment is to reverse elections. This is because some elections warrant reversing. Americans (depending on their political affiliation at any given time) are so afraid of becoming a parliamentary system, as Nixon spent his entire post-presidential life arguing,  that they'll forgive their presidents almost any and all crimes,

But they forget - or never knew - that Watergate was relatively minor, given what came before and after it.

As I mentioned this week, Nixon deserved to be removed for obstruction of justice. You can make a strong case for the other three Articles of Impeachment against Nixon, too, even though none of them are actual crimes.

If it were up to me, most of the modern presidents would be impeached, including some that I rather like.

• Harry Truman should have been impeached for making war in Korea without any prior congressional authorization. The United States had no mutual defense treaty with South Korea in 1950. The Constitution doesn't recognize the supremacy of the United Nations Security Council, therefore it cannot commit America to an extra-constitutional war.
• John F. Kennedy should have been impeached for a list of felonies too long to list here. And his brother would have been impeached right alongside him (remember, Cabinet members are "officers of the United States.")
• Lyndon Johnson should have been impeached for perpetrating a fraud on the Congress with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. We now know that LBJ was aware that the North Vietnamese "provocation" didn't actually happen. Hanoi never fired torpedoes at the Maddox on August 2, 1964, and Johnson knew it.
• The fact that Ronald Reagan wasn't impeached over Iran-Contra convinces me that Americans (and Republicans specifically) aren't serious about even the basic concept of justice. Reagan personally violated multiple laws in Iran-Contra. Even if you ignore the Boland Amendment and the "Contra" side of the scandal, Reagan's back-dating of intelligence findings when the jig was up made a mockery of the National Security Act of 1947, which expressly mandates a presidential finding to authorize a covert action. Say what you will about Watergate, but at least it didn't involve giving heavy artillery to terrorist states. Iran-Contra was easily the clearest example of impeachable offences in American history, bar none.
• Bill Clinton should have been impeached, not only for twice perjuring himself about blowjobs, but taking campaign money from the Godless Chinese military. I'd also impeach him for having anything at all to do with a reprehensible toad like Dick Morris, but I doubt the Senate would go along with me on that.
• George W. Bush should have been impeached for a mesmerizing level of incompetence. If the ruination of national security through two horribly fucked-up wars isn't a High Crime and Misdemeanor, I would suggest that nothing is. The selective declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to justify the aggressive war on Iraq was a fraud on the level of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. I also believe the Bush's "enhanced interrogation" program violated the Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory and carries the full force of federal law under the Constitution. 
• Barack Obama's High Crimes and Misdemeanors include making war on Libya without congressional authorization and the targeted killing of American citizens "on the battlefield" - particularly those that have already been indicted by federal grand juries - absent the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law.

During the Clinton impeachment, the Democrats (joined by Former President Gerald Ford) suggested that Slick Willie be censured by Congress,  just as Andrew Jackson was in Ye Goode Olde Days.

There were three problems with this.

First, it's a silly fucking idea. Censure is retarded and utterly without consequences. After censure, you retain all the powers of your office. The only difference is that everyone pretends not to like you during business hours. That's it.

Second, the Constitution doesn't provide for the censure of a president. Censure isn't mentioned in the Constitution, mostly because it falls under the Article One provision allowing Congress to implement its own rules. It is therefore a congressional procedure and decidedly not a constitutional mechanism for Congress to do anything outside the walls of Capitol Hill. To impose a congressional procedure on the executive branch would violate the "separation of powers" doctrine to the point that it wouldn't mean anything at all.

Third, Jackson was censured by a Whig Senate - and only the Senate. As soon as the Democrats regained control of that chamber, the censure was expunged from the record. For all intents and purposes, it didn't happen at all.

Not only is impeachment the way to go, it's the only way to go. Granted, if Congress doesn't have the balls to impeach, one can suppose that a clever U.S Attorney can indict a former president for criminal activity, but I think that no sitting president would allow that, for fear of what would await him upon leaving office.

Ford heroically imploded his own presidency in pardoning Nixon because he knew that the country couldn't withstand a presidential criminal trial after a decade and half of Watergate, Vietnam, three heart-rending assassinations and years of street riots. Gerald Ford inherited  country that was literally falling apart and sacrificed everything to right it.

George W. Bush invoked executive privilege to spare Bill Clinton further investigation twice. Why? What is Obama's excuse for not even investigating George W. Bush? What will Obama's successor's excuse be for not investigating him? What did (or will) they sacrifice?

In a roundabout way, that brings me to President Obama's actions this week, specifically, his assertion of executive privilege to guarantee Attorney General Eric Holder's successful cover-up in Operation Fast and Furious

I love Operation Fast and Furious for a couple of reasons. First, I suggested in 2008 that the Mexican drug war was being fought with American guns, and some of my commentators thought I was insane. One went so far as to say that the gun were coming from Guatemala and Costa Rica, which was a laughable assertion, now totally disproven.

Second, the war is being fought entirely because Americans - not Mexicans - really like getting high. It isn't Juan Valdez that's doing blow off of a stripper's ass-crack, kids. It's Lindsay Lohan. The only reason that Mexico is involved at all is that it suffers from the unhappy geography of being between Point A - where the drugs are coming from, and Point B - the United States, where 5% of the world's population happily smokes, snorts and shoots up 50% of the world's drugs.

American guns are killing tens of thousands of Mexican citizens because the Mexican government is being pressured to prevent Americans from getting dizzy and dumb. It's an atrocity of overwhelming stupidity that I'm continually amazed that the people of Mexico tolerate for even a second. Worst of all, Mexico is merely a transit point for the drugs. It isn't even a major producer.

The inescapable fact is that these Mexicans are being killed by both the American War on Drugs and the inability of the United States to control guns. Nothing's funnier than watching people like Dana Loesch hyperventilating on Twitter about the 300 Mexicans and 2 Americans killed by Fast and Furious guns, but ignore entirely the 57,000 Mexicans that have been killed by American guns from other sources.

Nor has she justified why any Mexicans should be killed because Lindsay Lohan likes doing blow. Ms. Loesch  just takes it as a given that they should be. Her inhumanity almost makes me not want to fuck her. Almost. She is pretty hot, after all. And silly shit like politics should never get in the way of that.

So, yes, I'd eat her pussy until she cums so hard that she thinks that she's going to die. But, as a matter of principle, I would pretend not to like it very much. I've brought pretty, moronic girls that believe crazy shit off before and, God help me, I'll probably do it again.

Anyhow, I spent most of yesterday watching the Breitbart, RedState and Fox News crews melting down over something - executive privilege - that they're either too dumb to understand or can't bring themselves to admit that just they're wrong about. Or it might just be that they're lying because their shithead politics demands that they do so.

My friend, hero, and the finest fucking writer on all of the Interwebs, Velociman, seems to have fallen for it, too. He wrote:

A quick aside on "executive privilege," which my brother courteously reminded me of today: it don't exist. It is an extra-constitutional device Eisenhower concocted during the Army and McCarthy hearings to protect national security issues.  

Actually, that`s not true.  The concept is inherent in the Constitution`s "separation of powers" doctrine, and Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Jackson asserted early forms of it.

Moreover, one wouldn't think that hiding communist subversion of the military from the United States Senate by invoking executive privilege would actually protect national security, would one? Also, Truman did it first, going so far as to move FBI files into the White House itself and barring executive branch employees from testifying.

Yes, Eisenhower rightly thought that Joe McCarthy was a cunt, but he also had precedent going for him. Not for nothing, but Ike had the facts on his side with that one. No paranoid, fearmongering, Milwaukee drunkard; regardless of his office, should presume to hold a higher claim on the  military than the president of the United Fucking States.

Most frequently, executive privilege has been asserted to protect conversations with, and advice given to, the president. Without that protection, the argument goes, no one would be able to freely give their honest opinions to the president for fear of being dragged onto Capitol Hill to explain them.

Congress, in its oversight capacity, has the right to compel members of the Cabinet to appear before it. After all, they are confirmed "upon advice and consent of the Senate" and Congress approves their budgets. And Congress is pretty dilligent about not asking them about conversations that they have with the president, mostly because they know that they won't get an answer.

However, direct employees of the executive branch - the White House staff, which isn't confirmed by the Senate - usually aren't subject to being called to testify. That's why you never see the White House Chief of Staff or the National Security Adviser appearing before congressional committees.

The second President Bush spent weeks saying that he wouldn't allow his National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, to appear before the congressionally created 9/11 Commission, although he waived any objection to Former President Clinton's, Sandy Berger, from appearing.As we'll soon learn, a sitting president can invoke executive privilege to the benefit of a former president.

The separation of powers upon which executive privilege is based, is also why, for example, Congress can't call federal judges before it to "explain their decisions", as weapons-grade fuckheads like Newt Gingrich think they should. Although, I'll grant you that any number of liberal assholes would like to call the living majority members in Bush v. Gore up to the Hill and slap 'em around in public some.

Amazingly. I don't remember Gingrich howling when the Senate Judiciary Committee wanted opinions that John Roberts wrote for the Reagan White House's Office of Legal Counsel and as a staffer to then-Solicitor General Kenn Starr in the first Bush administration during his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice of the United States. Roberts'  Reagan records were obtained through the Reagan Presidential Library. His work for Justice, to my knowledge, never was. That was covered by, you guessed it, executive privilege!

Oh, and the Roberts work for Bush 41 was protected because Bush 43 re-wrote the Presidential Records Act of 1978 - which was passed by Congress and everything ... by executive order.

The separation of powers and executive privilege doesn't just apply to national security, as some dishonest Internet hacks might tell you. They apply to all presidential communications (with the exceptions of those that directly apply to criminal conduct, as decided 8-0 in Nixon v. United States)

In fact, the Court upheld the notion of executive privilege in Nixon, recognizing "the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties" and that "[h]uman experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decision making process."

People like Ms. Loesch spent all day yesterday on Twitter being almost malignalanty dishonest (although it would be incredibly unfair to overlook the fact that they might actually be retarded) in  suggesting that any suggestion that there is a precedent was saying "Blame BOOOOSH", which seems to be the primary GOP-Tea Party excuse for their own fucking history, y'know, when they aren't telling us how great everything would be if Reagan was still calling the shots from the Great Beyond.

Because they are self-described revolutionaries, rather than conservatives, Tea Party folks like Dana aren't particularly fond of precedent unless that precedent serves their immediate political ends and somehow involves "Shit Ronald Reagan Said."

But the respect for precedent is something that makes First World countries different from Banana Republics. And those idiots love it when you call it the "Rule of Law", so long as George Zimmerman or Scooter Libby aren't involved.

Bush invoked executive privilege a bunch of times, never once - contrary to yesterday's Web chatter -  involving "national security" (a singular justification for the doctrine that was apparently invented just yesterday, as I had never heard anyone suggest that executive privilege can only be applied to national security before then. Usually, the classification process and the "state secrets doctrine" were enough.)

He twice invoked it to protect the Clinton administration, once in denying evidence of the Department of Justice's complicity in Whitey Bulger's decades-long psychotic crime spree, and then to cover-up Clinton's aforementioned illegal fundraising from the People's Revolutionary Army.

Then Bush invoked the privilege to protect the privacy of the vice-president's conversations with scumbag oil and gas lobbyists, which is singular. Never before had a vice-president's communications that didn't involve the president been considered grounds for executive privilege. If only Spiro Agnew had lived long enough ...

The best part? Cheney later went on to assert that vice president's office is not an "entity within the executive branch" at all! Psyche!

See, Cheney wasn't funny just because he shot old folks in the head and chest. He had other punchlines, too! Try this one at a party, "I'm vice president, but because I'm paid by the United States Senate I'm not a part of the executive branch! Oh, but I can still have executive privilege asserted to keep my meetings with motherfucker lobbyist assholes secret! Bang, bang!"

If you miss Andy Kauffman as much as I did, you probably found the Cheney years delightful.

In the summer of 2007, Bush invoked executive privilege four times in five weeks, three of them relating to the probably political firing of U.S Attorneys and to quash congressional subpoenas issued to Harriet Meirs, Sara Taylor and Karl Rove. The fourth involved records pertaining to the friendly-fire homicide of Army Ranger and NFL player Pat Tillman.

So let's review the Bush record on executive privilege, shall we? They involved a mobster, campaign finance, Dick Cheney's meetings with cocksucker lobbyists,  the possible political misuse of the Justice Department, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding the shooting of a soldier-football player-American martyr.

No reasonable person would suggest that any of them involves national security. Amazingly, I don't remember radio talk show hosts or fucking bloggers going crazy at the time. I could be wrong, though. Twitter didn't exist in 2001-07. But the fact that they're openly lying about Bush's executive privilege claims - which took me all of 30 seconds to dig up - suggests something more nefarious and political.

So when you read that Bush only used executive privilege to protect national security, ask them when. Watch them blush and stutter. You'll enjoy it, I promise.

Now, do I think that President Obama and Attorney General Holder are using it to cover up? Of fucking course I do. There's no other reason to invoke the privilege, unless Obama personally directed Fast and Furious from the White House, or had some direct communication regarding it while the operation was ongoing, which is a whole other can of worms. Of course Obama and Holder are lying.Shit, you'd have to high, insane, stupid or all three not to know that.

The relevant question is whether Obama and Holder are covering up political embarrassment or an actual crime. If it's a crime, then it's incumbent on Darrel Issa and his scumbag blogger fan club to march into court and prove it. The Nixon v. United States precedent does allow for that. Either way, the Republican House is free and able to impeach the both of them.

Somehow - and maybe it's because I'm psychic - I know that they won't. This is because they're starting to think that Mitt Romney might somehow get elected president. Once that happens, he can start abusing executive privilege (and, God, why would I think he'd do that?) and Romney's Twitter, blogosphere and cable news puppets will pretend that it's business as usual again.

Better still, they'll say "Well, Obama did it." Just as Bush got away with what he did because Clinton did it, Obama will be excused because of what Bush did.

And that, my friends, is how the United States Constitution was destroyed. If you think that social media, talk radio and cable news are serving constitutionalism, rather than patrtisan hysteria, you're very probably a fucking moron. Look at the horseshit that you've read on Twitter and blogs, heard on talk radio and seen on Fox News over the last 36 hours. Then look up the facts. Notice how they're different?

You've got a really nice country. I like it a lot and have spent over 30 years of my life studying it's history in some depth.

It's a shame you've gotta fuck it up like you have over horseshit, blogs, talk radio, Twitter and stupidity. The more religious types among you worry about America becoming Rome, forgetting entirely that sodomy is fun and stupidity is just sad.

I'd love to go on, but I've got a border fence to build. Some good Republicans once warned me that when the shit hits the fan down south, a man needs a good fence. How lethally electric that fence should be was never resolved, but moats with alligators were mentioned.

Watergate, Woodward, Bernstein and bullshit

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate office building. Dozens of Nixon staffers would be prosecuted and President Richard Nixon himself would be forced to resign and accept a presidential pardon from his successor, Gerald R. Ford.

In pardoning Nixon, Ford sacrificed his chance of being elected in his own right and relegated himself to being the only American president in history not be elected to the Executive Branch (having been appointed vice-president upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew.) In giving up something as consequential as the presidency in doing what he beileved was right, Ford might have been the last hero to hold the office.

Watergate changed history in several ways. Were it not for Watergate, Jimmy Carter almost certainly wouldn't have been elected president. In the absence of a Carter administration, it's difficult to imagine Ronald Reagan being elected. Without Reagan, conservatism wouldn't have taken the turn that it has and there might actually be a party that stands for balanced budgets in Washington, other than rhetorically.

Nixon often spoke privately about starting a third party (which I'll refer to hereafter as "The Nixon Party") from the White House. It would have been composed of moderate Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. In Nixon's scenario, it's first presidential nominee would be John Connally, who he thought could have been elected in 1976. Connally was also Nixon's first choice to replace Agnew, but was convinced that he couldn't be confirmed by Congress.

Were it not for Watergate, the Nixon Party would have upended U.S politics. Never before had a third party been openly backed by the White House. Because President Nixon had built an unparalleled political organization, independent of the GOP, over his career ballot access likely wouldn't have been a problem and the public backing of an incumbent president that had just won 49 states and almost 61% of the popular vote would have been indispensable. With both the Democrats and Republicans split by the Nixon Party, it isn't at all hard to imagine Connally winning the presidency.

Of course, that all hinges on whether Richard Nixon was serious about starting a third party. As I'll address later, Nixon said any number of things that he didn't mean and never intended to be followed through on.

Much too much is made about the impact that Watergate and Nixon's resignation made on the presidency. Look at the the last ten years and ask yourself, "Does the presidency look any less imperial to you?"

George W, Bush circumvented acts of Congress with any number of signing statements (in fact, more than all of his predecessors combined) or the secret use of the Commander-in-Chief power that established a domestic wiretapping program in the National Security Agency that violated both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment. Bush also wrote his very own stem-cell research law by executive order. This past Friday, Barack Obama essentially rewrote immigration law the same way.

Congress meekly re-asserted itself after Watergate, but Iran-Contra blew those reforms right out of the water. From Reagan forward, presidents have gotten ballsy to the point that they don't have to ask to bomb anyone anymore. The Watergate reforms pertaining to executive power lasted not even a decade.

But the biggest impact of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon was on journalism. After All the President's Men, every semi-literate shitheel that was barely qualified for landscaping decided that they were gonna go to journalism school and bring down a president of their own. Which is how you wound up with a generation of people that were singualarly ignorant about history telling you that Watergate was singular in it's scope of evil, yet attaches the suffix "gate" to every scandal, no matter how inconsequential.

Everybody who knows how to spell their own name wants to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Unfortunately, not everyone has Woodward and Bernstein's story. And, as it happens, neither did Woodward and Bernstein.At least not completely.

Politics has nothing on journalism when it comes to arrogant self-justification, as we saw with "Woodstein's" incredibly self-congratulatory editorial in the Washington Post.

Forty years after the fact, no one can even agree about what Watergate even was, let alone what it actually meant. And because Americans are generally so proudly ignorant of their own history, they'll take as accepted wisdom what a couple of city desk reporters tell them it was.

My definition of Watergate is very strict and very simple. It is restricted to the initial break-in and the subsequent cover-up. And you know what? That's more than enough. The "smoking gun tape" of 17 June 1972 - five days after the break-in - which recorded Nixon ordering the CIA to interfere with the FBI's investigation was a clear obstruction of justice and therefore an impeachable offense which Nixon should have been removed from office for, had he not resigned first.

Woodstein's June 8 op-ed takes Watergate to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, including every objectionable, or even illegal, thing Richard Nixon did, and included it into the rubic of "Watergate" in a way that almost magnificently distorts history. Setting the tone for the liberal intelligentsia Watergate began not on June 17, 1972, but on January 20, 1969. From wiretapping staffers of the National Security Council suspected of leaking war secrets to various racist and anti-Semitic remarks, it's all Watergate, which is beyond silly.

Sillier still, Woodward and Bernstein imagine the scandal as not one, but five separate "wars." I'll have fun with each.

1. The war against the antiwar movement:

This argument is almost delusionally dishonest, in so far as it utterly ignores historical precedent (as do most of Woodstein's imagined Nixon "wars.")

Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected — not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations.

You can't even argue that this was the genesis of Watergate. The Huston Plan - while violently illegal - only sought to expand the participation to other agencies of the FBI's already illegal activities.

If Nixon is guilty of a High Crime or Misdemeanor in the Huston Plan, it would be stupidity. Everything that the Huston Plan would have accomplished was already being done under COINTELPRO, which was first authorized during the Eisenhower administration. As a matter of fact, the Huston Plan was proposed a year before COINTELPRO was exposed. The Church Committee determined, after Nixon's resignation, that the CIA was unlawfully interfering with the anti-war movement before Nixon was sworn in as president.

COINTELPRO was already intercepting mail, as was the CIA, and "black bag jobs" had been carried out going back as far as the Wilson administration during the Palmer Raids. We also know that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, through Bobby Kennedy's orders, were wiretapping scores of American citizens without a court order, including Martin Luther King and some guy who was writing a book about Marilyn Monroe.

Anyone that knows anything about J. Edgar Hoover knows that the Huston Plan was already being carried out. Edgar just didn't want to share the spoils with the CIA and military intelligence. More importantly, he didn't want those operations controlled by anyone other than him.

Nixon's biggest mistake was that he brought all of these illegal activities into the White House, which took away the plausible deniability his predecessors enjoyed.

Woodward and Bernstein make much of Nixon's repeated orders to break into the Brookings Institution. Yet no action was ever taken on it. If one assumes a "criminal presidency", one would also assume that this order would be carried out.

However, Chief of Staff H.R Haldeman, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser John Ehrlichman and National Security Advisor (and later, Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger all have written that Nixon often gave orders that they knew to ignore. And they did. Regularly. The most persuasive evidence of this is that Brookings never actually was broken into.

Having said that, things took a decidedly darker turn when Nixon took the recently departed and superhero to the Christian Right, Charles Colson into his confidence. Whenever Nixon told Colson that something needed done, it got done.

Forty years later, no one knows who ordered the Watergate break-in  Because Nixon had everything he said during that period taped (and because it made no sense), we can be pretty sure that he didn't. But Colson is as good a suspect as any.

2. The war on the news media: Nixon's reaction to the Pentagon Papers was hardly new. Indeed, subsequent presidents have gone further. Ronald Reagan was convinced by Ed Meese and Bill Casey that Cabinet members should be regularly subjected to polygraph examinations because of leaks. It was only when Vice-President George Bush and Secretary of State George Schultz threatened to resign over it that President Reagan dropped the matter.

Woodward and Bernstein spent over half of this section going on about Nixon's anti-Semitic rages, never once noting that his fury over the leak was instigated by Henry Kissinger.

The Pentagon Papers were commissioned by Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, as a study of where the Vietnam War went wrong. Therefore, they incriminated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, not Nixon's. Nixon was intitally thrilled to have JFK and LBJ's dirty laundry spilled all over the front pages of the New York Times. Kissinger, however, was secretly negotiating the China opening and the SALT talks with the Soviets, and he knew that having U.S secrets out in the open could destroy both.

Why would you include four paragraphs of anti-Semitic quotes that had little or nothing to do with the press in a section on a war on the news media? Is someone suggesting that the media s controlled by Jews? If so, who?

My personal favorite part of this retarded section is the following;

“The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”

We now know from independent historians and Nixon's own then-secret grand jury testimony that Moorer himself was spying on Nixon through Yeoman Charles Radford on Kissinger's NSC staff, which might go a long way in explaining Kissinger's reaction to the Pentagon Papers leak. Irony practically enveloped the Nixon White House.

3. The war against the DemocratsJohn Mitchell was never convicted of approving Gemstone, which Woodward and Bernstein never point out. But even if they take Magruder's word for it, there's still no evidence that Nixon approved it.

Nixon had the Oval Office, his Executive Office building office, all of his phones, and his vacation homes in California and Florida wired to tape recorders that recorded everything. Unlike FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon's taping system was voice activated. Most of the principals on the tapes either didn't know, or had forgotten, that they were being taped. But there's still no direct evidence of presidential knowledge of either Gemstone or the Watergate break-in. And there are over 3,400 hours of those tapes.

Going to extremes to prove an already-thin case of a "war against the Democrats", Woodward and Bernstien pull out Donald Segretti. Segretti, unlike Nixon, wasn't even disbarred for his political shenanigans. He was the Republican Dick Tuck, the only difference being that no one knew what the Kennedy campaign was guilty of until decades after Kennedy took a bullet to the noggin. Of course, that's not to say that Tuck was involved in stealing the 1960 election in both Texas and Illinois, although that happened, too.

If you have to go down the ranks so far as Segretti to prove a "war", you essentially have no proof at all. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of the Kennedy and Johnson's misuse of the IRS to audit Republicans, including Nixon himself.

4. The war on justice: This is the hardest to argue against, in so far as Nixon actually was personally guilty of this. The "Smoking Gun" tape couldn't be clearer in his intention to obstruct justice. That itself was enough to warrant his removal from office, although President Clinton's directly and with foreknowledge lying to both a federal judge and a separate Grand Jury wasn't.

We know that between the August 1, 1972 tape where Nixon told Haldeman that "They (the Watergate burglars) have to be paid" and the March 21, 1973 conversation between Nixon and John Dean in which the President said that he knew where a million dollars of "hush money: could be gotten in cash that the burglars were indeed paid.

The "war on justice" is the only one in which Woodward and Bernstein make a clear and convincing case in their entire article.

Their last "war" is, far and away, the silliest of all.
5. The war on history: This is dishonest and best and retarded at worst. Moreover, it's hypocritical.

Woodstein make much of Nixon's denials of responsibility for Watergate, but there's nary a mention that Bill Clinton's legacy relies on the same assertion that "I made mistakes, but did not commit a crime." But both did, and there's evidence in both cases. With Nixon, there are the tapes. In Clinton's, DNA.

The fact is that most presidents are at war with history. Read almost any presidential memoir and you'll see just that. Reagan's and Clinton's come to mind most immediately. No one that I'm aware of thinks that Jack Kennedy would admit to being the Champion of Presidential Felonies had he have lived to write his.

The difference is the evidence. FDR, Kennedy and Johnson were very selective in what they recorded doing. Nixon, stupidly wasn't. He recorded everything, which, as he put it, "gave them a sword."

However, we now know about virtually all of the crimes committed by the United States government under the Wilson, Roosevelt. Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and Clinton administrations. There have been several actions under the second Bush and Obama administrations that, while not openly criminal, are certainly impeachable.

Richard Nixon isn't the Gold Standard of Presidential Corruption because what he did was unique. Far from it. He has his place in infamy simply because he did what he did in a short period of time, because he was caught, and he was dumb enough to record it all.

But Nixon didn't lie directly to federal judge or a grand jury. Nor did he sell weapons to a terrorist state and give the spoils of those sales to another terrorist group, several time zones away. He also didn't order the wholesale wiretapping of the American people without warrant or the execution of U.S citizens absent due process of law. Those crimes occurred well after Watergate. And they continue to this day.

No, if there a war on history, it is being waged by the American people against themselves. If you don't hold your leaders accountable today, you shouldn't count on history doing it for you.

The party's over

I had the distinct pleasure of voting against Bob Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP. He was a socialist (albeit a very soft one) and I was not. I instead voted for Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives in 1990 and '95 (and again in '99, those votes also turned out to be problematic for various reasons.) My loathing of the Liberal parties of both Ontario and Canada is world-renowned.

That being said, I do have a healthy respect for Mr. Rae. I do think that he's a decent and honourable man. More importantly, he recognized when he was wrong and sacrificed his political career in order to make it right.

As premier, Rae ran up a truly impressive debt, although nothing of the scope and size that Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill and Dalton McGuinty at Queen's Park have managed to create. It should be remembered that in 1990, we were in a fairly bad recession and Rae figured that he could spend his way out of it, which is precisely what Harper and McGuinty subsequently did and what federal Conservatives and anti-Rae Liberal partisans - some of whom also work for McGuinty -  now slam him for. After all, nobody said that intellectual honesty was required, or even desirable, in politics.

However, unlike Harper and McGuinty, Premier Rae attempted an economic course correction on the deficits he created that primarily impacted his own political base, the civil service unions. He knew that he was likely immolating his own career i doing so, but he went forward anyway because it was the right thing to do.

No one else in modern politics that I'm aware of has shown that kind of courage. After all, it's pretty easy for weapons-grade morons, like Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak or Tea Party shitheels like Scott Walker to take on public sector unions. For Rae it was political suicide and he did it anyway. I'd never actually vote for him, but he's earned my deep respect as a man of principle. If more politicians were willing to attack their own constituencies to reduce deficits, we wouldn't be as fucked as we are.

When both the federal and provincial NDP became too anti-Zionist for his liking, Rae publicly broke with them and joined the federal Liberals. Again, this was a matter of principle and not something that made his life any more comfortable. He could have just retired from public life entirely and devoted himself to making assloads of money in the private sector. Dippers despised him and far too many Liberal hacks described him as a "tourist."

Oddly enough, Bob stayed through the worst of it and the guy that those hacks supported, Michael Ignatieff, hasn't had anything to do with the party since.

Not only did the Liberal Party spend the last year doing a terrible wrong to Bob Rae, I'm pretty sure that they blew their own heads off in the process.

The Liberals love of situational ethics is storied, but never has it been so egregious as it has been over the last thirteen months. To explain, we have to go all the way back to the winter of 2008-'09, when Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff did their level best to make the Liberal Party of Canada virtually unelectable.

Dion had managed to throw away a perfectly good election that the Tories were actually born to lose. The Harper government had managed to piss away a healthy surplus that was left to them by Paul Martin, just as Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world started ending. Then Harper and his dickhead of a finance minister lied about there being a problem at all and suggested that it was an ideal time to get into the markets, which had lost half their value in a single day. If you followed Stephen Harper's financial planning advice, you'd be broke today because the markets continued bleeding money for months afterward.

Monsieur Dion took the reality of his loss the way only a Liberal can be expected to: He attempted a coalition coup with the NDP and supported by the treasonous Bloc Quebecois, which destroyed his leadership in less than a week. Michael Ignatieff was named interim leader by the party executive - none of whom are elected by the people -  who also expressly allowed him to run for the permanent leadership from that post.

I think we all know how well Ignatieff's leadership worked out. He managed to do something that Dion - or any other Liberal leader since William Lyon Mackenzie King -  couldn't pull off. He lost his own seat. And at least King twice lost his seat (in North York, Ontario and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan) while winning majority governments. Ignatieff did it as he lost over half of his party's seats. Ignatieff resigned as leader and fled to the safety his Yorkville condo before he could be butchered alive by his fellow Liberals.

The Liberal parliamentary caucus unanimously nominated Bob Rae as their leader. Unfortunately, the party's national executive board - which, again, hadn't been elected by the people -  remained staffed by Ignatieff flunkies that hated Rae for having the temerity for having twice challenged their guy for the leadership. They made him pledge that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership if he was interim leader, thus denying Rae exactly the same situation that Ignatieff enjoyed and virtually nobody bitched about. If you want to know why I hate the Liberals so much, that's as good an example as any.

Of course, everybody knew that the fix was in and, when the terms of Ignatieff's devious scumbags expired, the reality of Bob Rae's pledge would change. But that didn't stop the anti-Rae faction of the party, who didn't at all object to the constant and conscious lying of Jean Chretien, Dion (who pledged that he would never enter into a coalition) and Ignatieff, from holding him to a politically engineered promise that was expressly designed to hobble him.

Here's the sleaziest thing of all. If Rae had refused to serve as interim leader, despite the unanimous nomination of the caucus, because he wanted to be permanent leader, he would have been shithammered by his detractors for that. These people are just pathologically dishonest. Once they get kicked out of politics forever, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them running professional boxing.

There's just no winning in that goddamed party, which is why I think that being a federal Liberal is a genetic defect, sort of like Down Syndrome. Or a physcriatric disorder, like self-mutilation. Liberals are like teenage girls who cut themselves because no one wants to be their boyfriend, but don't understand that guys are even more a-scared of cutters.

If those assholes would act like halfway normal human beings, they might actually be able to resurrect themselves enough to form a government someday. I believe that Bob Rae was the clearest shot they had of doing that, and his record in Ontario was a plus, rather than the minus that chronic shitheads think it is.

He's uniquely positioned to respond to Conservative attacks. All he need do is respond with an ad that says "Did Stephen Harper engage in wild spending during a recession, yes or no? Is Stephen Harper now targeting the civil service to contain the deficits he himself created, yes or no? Yes, Bob Rae did both, but he did so against his political interest rather than to further it."

Rae could have easily called the Tories on their own bullshit talking points and used his own experience to do it. There isn't another single Liberal that can do that. Not one. Does anyone think that someone named McGuinty can pull that trick off?

If you want an election about the character of the leaders, Bob Rae would've been the guy who was born to make Harper sweat. Why in the fuck do you think that the Tories launched an attack ad against an interim Liberal leader? Has that ever happened before?

Notice how a giant "Not a leader - Just visiting" campaign hasn't been fired at Thomas Muclair? Why do you think that is? But they did shoot one across Bob Rae's bow because I think that Harper was fucking spooked at facing Rae. And the Liberals, being galatically dumb, fell for it. Again.

The one guy who could've fought the Conservatives on their own ground was taken out today because the Grits are too scared and too stupid to do anything but count on The Next Big Thing.

Would Rae have become prime minister? Probably not. The kamikaze factions in the party (which is to say all of them) wouldn't allow it. To a person, Liberals hate each other with a much greater intensity than they hate even Stephen Harper.

But I do think that Bob Rae would at least hold what the Liberals have now, and maybe even pick up a few seats. He's the only Liberal with a record capable of bringing the fight against the Harper Tories. Rae could define the Tories just as easily as the Tories define him.

So what happens now?

Well, I suppose that Justin Trudeau has no other choice but to renege on his pledge not to run for the leadership, his family be damned. And every other biological loser in the party that knew that Rae was the prohibitive favorite is now free to get in, all of whom are going to concentrate their energies and resources on killing Trudeau, which I'm pretty sure they will.

My guess is that we're going to see a re-run of the 2006 leadership convention. Ignatieff, the last leadership candidate without a political resume to speak of, was the frontrunner until he wasn't. Having suffered a death by a thousand cuts during the campaign, Iggy couldn't win on the first ballot and lost on the fourth, giving the leadership to someone no one previously thought possible. And that long-shot was beaten before he even got the furniture into his new office.

There's an extreme long-shot chance that the Grits give the leadership to a Quebec pro, like Denis Coderre, who could at least build a party base for the future. But the Iggy faction will almost certainly kill him, too.

The difference between 2006 and now is that there was a Liberal Party left for Ignatieff to inherit three years later. Chances are that there won't be one for Justin to inherit three years from now.

The Liberal Party of Canada saw their Last Best Chance for Survival and they raped it to death. I really shouldn't be surprised that they did it, but I sort of am. They sure picked an odd time to stand on principle.

I hope that Bob retires from politics before he loses his seat. The vengeful incompetents in his own party won't be happy until he's disgraced and defeated once and for all and use that to prove that he could't win, despite whatever misfit they finally wind up with as their leader.  As a good and honourable public servant and a deeply honest man, he deserves better than that.

The party's over. It might be a few years before the autopsy is conducted, but they're done. With the political mugging of Bob Rae, the Liberals have created a perfect storm where no Liberal can win. They can't trust the caucus or the party executive anymore because they seem to be in conlflict with one another in the leadership wars. The entire infrastructure of the party is, at best, dyslexic and incapable of being rebuilt. At worst, they're committed to killing their own in favour of cheap stunts.

For the record, I should point out - yet again - that I'm not a Conservative Party voter, nor do I work for them, nor would I. I doubt that I can say that about some anti-Martin, Dion or Ignatieff Liberals. 

The last time I voted "Conservative" was for Joe Clark in 2000. Since 2000, I voted for the Progressive Canadian Party, the Greens and finally, the NDP in 2011 because I hoped to destroy the Liberals without voting for Stephen Harper.

I'd be thrilled to vote for a conservative party that doesn't insist on pissing away all of the fucking money on stupid shit. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party doesn't run in my riding.

I'm terrified that without some competition, Harper will complete his life-long mission of turning the Conservative Party into the Liberals, a "natural governing party" that doesn't have to bother with being all that conservative. Frankly, I'd prefer the NDP, who are at least honest about wanting to ruin everything in their sight without caring about conservatism.  

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Ballad of the Teenage Jesus: Justin Trudeau and the Great Leap of Faith

Over the last week there's been much ado about whether or not Justin Trudeau, the scion of our Home and Native Land's deceased Sun King, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, will run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. It could be considered a frenzy, if only because Canadians are an especially boring people.

And why wouldn't Canada be excited by the ascension to power by the offspring of a former leader? The United States did so well under the most recent incarnation of the House of Bush, did it not? If Justin wins he can always start a club with George W. and Bashar Assad, two other dynastic products that weren't as smart as their fathers.

Much has been made of young Justin over the last several months. He's pretty! He has a cool name! He has a hipster beard sometimes! He beat the shit out of a guy who smokes two packs a day! He has fabulous hair! He flirts with treason sometimes! He equates government ministers with feces on the floor of the House of Commons! He is, as a partisan a Grit as BigCityLib calls him, "Teenage Jesus"!

All of those things more than qualify Justin Trudeau to be a Hollywood star, but I'm not aware of them ever having qualified someone to run a major political party - or a modern industrialized nation - before. But here we are. When a murderous, unprincipled cyborg like Stephen Harper can be elected three times, I suppose that anything's possible.

I'm of the opinion that this shithead media-blogosphere tizzy is just that, a shithead media-blogosphere tizzy. If you pay enough attention to predictions that are made during the summertime news cycle, you very quickly notice that they rarely come true. For example, everyone in North America didn't wind up either getting fucked to death by Gary Condit or eaten by sharks, as was predicted in the summer of 2001. Instead, we wound up with Arabs riding jet liners into buildings, like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

Justin has repeatedly said that he isn't going to be a candidate for the leadership, as he is unwilling to abandon his children for a cynical quest for power. And as inadvisable as taking the word of someone named Trudeau can be, I'm inclined to believe him. Not because of his kids, for chrissakes (every doomed politician uses his or her family as an excuse), but for several other good reasons, which I laid out for your friend and mine, the great Tiger on Politics, over the weekend. I thought that I'd also put them down here and expand upon them.

1) He’s got anger management issues to work on. Having him muse about becoming a traitor to his county every time he gets miffed at long-disproven "hidden agendas" or calling Cabinet ministers “a piece of shit” in the House is fine for a backbencher. However, it’s a lot more problematic for a party leader.

Christ, I don’t think that even Justin has ruled out the possibility that he could have an epic meltdown during the leadership debates, which would be fatal. If I were Rae, I’d be thinking of ways to goad the boy into a public tantrum even before he declares his intentions.

Trudeau's partisan-inspired comments regarding his possible sympathy for Quebec independence were a titanic fuck-up. And you only get one of those in politics, if you're lucky. Another outburst anywhere approaching that will kill him.

2) If he knows anything at all about his own party, he knows that he can’t play National Saviour while ensconced in never ending leadership wars unless he wins by a margin so unimaginably large as to silence his potential Bruti forever. And if he can’t play National Saviour, why bother?

Even If Trudeau were to win, the supporters of his rivals would do everything in their power to sabotage his leadership and election prospects. Such as it has always been. As Turner did to Pierre Trudeau, as Chretien did to Turner, as Martin did to Chretien, as Ignetieff did to Dion, and as Rae did to Igntieff, Rae and everybody else will do to Justin.

The Liberal leadership has been a poisoned chalice for much longer than most folks understand. The Grits have only won elections since 1975 because the opposition parties were either incompetent or divided. As we've seen over the last decade, that isn't the case anymore and the divisions within the LPC have rapidly destroyed them.

3) He’s fourteen years old and might like the idea of  having a future in politics. The ordinary rules don’t apply to people named Trudeau.If Justin runs and loses, his mystique – the only thing he’s really got going for him at present  – is ruined. A Trudeau loss would be devastating in ways that Bob Rae’s dual defeats weren’t. Rae is seen as being a credible manager. Justin Trudeau is looked upon, by Liberals dumb enough to do so, as a messiah.

Bob Rae, if nothing else, is a well-known and established commodity in politics. He's been on Parliament Hill or Queens Park since the 1970s. He's run more campaigns than all of the other party leaders - and Grit leadership aspirants - combined. If Bob runs for and loses the Liberal leadership for the third time, he'll retire peacefully, knowing that he's had a long and distinguished career.

Before running in Montreal - one of the very few places left in Canada where Liberals are still allowed to roam free - Justin's life experience consisted entirely of being a school teacher. He's run nothing larger than a classroom in his entire life. Not only has he not even been Minister of Hipster Beards, we don't even know if he was Class Clown in school.

This gives him the same resume problem that Micheal Ignatieff had, but Ignatieff could at least position himself as a "public intellectual" who had written some seventeen books that nobody has read. Iggy was the first Liberal leader to win the leadership without considerable political experience behind him in my lifetime. I just don't see the Grits going back to that well anytime soon, at least not if they intend to be taken seriously.

Oh, and for the enemies of Bob Rae out there, none of you bitched when Ignatieff ran for the permanent leadership from the interim leader's office.

If Trudeau runs and loses, he's done. Celebrity mystique is a fantastic thing if you win on your first try. If you don't, it dissipates so quickly that you may as well have never had it in the first place.

4) Beating Bob Rae is going to be very, very hard. Rae has the money, organization, momentum and political experience that give him a profound advantage in a hypothetical head-to-head with Trudeau. Bob also knows things abut public policy, caucus relations and campaigns that Justin can't be expected to.  These are all things that the Grits are going to need if they plan on having a life-expectancy of more than three years.

Giving the leadership to a pre-teen novelty would be every bit as desperate as it looks, by a party that needs to be seen as anything other than desperate. And the Liberals are nothing if not pragmatic. It might not have worked out the way they wanted, but there actually was a rationale for getting behind Dion and Ignatieff that there isn’t for Trudeau, other than his surname. Naming Trudeau as leader will be telegraphing to the other parties that the Liberals are officially out of tricks and are going for a Sarah Palin-style Hail Mary that's doomed to failure.

5) Given that I don't think he's not an utter mouth-breather, I’m pretty sure that Justin has considered the very real possibility that the Liberal Party only has one more election in it. What do you suppose that his formally presiding over the death of the Most Successful Party in the History of Democracy will do to the family legacy?

If dear old dad’s eternal term of office teaches us anything, it’s that the Trudeaus care a whole lot more about the family name than they do the Liberal Party. Pierre so hobbled his rival and successor, John Turner, that he essentially handed over the government to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in 1984. The elder Trudeau destroyed the party brand west of Manitoba and crippled it in Quebec. Were it not for the fracturing of the Mulroney coalition, Pierre likely would've been the last elected Liberal prime minister.

If Justin runs a general election in 2015 and the Liberals lose even more seats (which seems an entirely reasonable prospect at this point), the party is finished forever. And so too will be his political future, even though he'll only be not quite 44 years old.

6) Even a wildly unpopular Harper would disembowel Justin in public. But Stephen Harper isn’t going to be around forever, and all of his potential successors are laughable ward-heeling hacks or genetic fuckheads. The Tories have the shallowest bench imaginable. Always remember, a misfit like Vic Towes is in Cabinet because everyone else in caucus is actually worse.

It's hard to see a scenario where Trudeau beats Harper (assuming that Harper stays in the leadership for another election.) But – with a united Progressive Party behind him – seeing him lose to a bloated hack like Jason Kenney in 2019 strains the power of my imagination. And I’m a pretty imaginative cat.

Let's get one silly notion out of the way right now. There isn't going to be a great Progressive merger. The NDP are smart enough to understand that the Liberals are dead and that they only have to wait for them to fall down before eating the carcass. Even the Grits that favour a merger are still so impossibly arrogant as to think that they can dictate the terms of one, which they can't, having only slightly more than a third of the NDP's seats in Parliament and polling that consistently shows them a distant third in public preference.

Because the LPC's public support is so pathetic, they aren't going to have money or credible candidates in the next election. Donors are fickle and the desire to serve the public isn't necessarily the same as a masochistic need for public humiliation. That means that the few remaining Liberal bastions in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are going to divvied up between the Tories and Dippers (with the Dippers probably getting the majority of them.)

Justin Trudeau is sufficiently left wing, and his celebrity strong enough, that he could win the leadership of a newly dominant NDP (or United Progressive Party, or whatever the fuck else they'd call it) after the final fall of the Liberals. Like Harper, Tom Muclair isn't going to be around forever, and he's already started bringing the NDP close enough to the middle that Trudeau could take it over when he's gone.

If Boy Justin focuses all of his energy on being the best constituent-service MP for the people of Papineau possible, raising shit-tons of money and quietly making nice with Dipper power players, he could probably survive the apocalypse. As the last national Liberal standing, he could bring together and lead a new Progressive movement. But he won't be able to do that as a failed Liberal leadership candidate or as the last fully discredited Liberal leader.

Justin Trudeau is a young man and the LPC is about as close to a political funeral as you can get. Being a pallbearer is no fun, but it sure as shit beats being the guy in the box. That being the case, he has a much better shot at running an NDP that swallows the remains of the Grits whole after the flood than he does being the Last Liberal Leader, so why not wait? Right now he has everything to lose and nothing to realistically gain.

Hey, how about we stay out of Syria?

If you've ever been curious as to when a proposed war is a really bad idea, consider the following. If people who can be reliably expected to oppose armed conflict in all of it's shapes and sizes find themselves in agreement with folks who think that there just aren't enough wars at any given time, that's as clear an indication as any that everyone has stopped thinking. And when people with lots of bombs stop thinking, no good ever comes of it.

That's pretty much what we're seeing today in regards to the continuing massacres of civilians in Syria. What's happening there is an outrage and affront to humanity's very dignity. And yes, Bashar al-Assad should be stuffed into an aluminium tube and dropped directly into Hell. I felt that way about his father when he bombed the city of Hama into rubble and paved it over.Those feelings are perfectly normal and, to be honest, I share them. The deliberate, wholesale slaughter of children by their own government is something not to be tolerated.

However, our being swept away by our emotions doesn't answer some fairly important questions, such as "Will foreign intervention make matters better or worse?" People as diverse as John McCain and everyone who opposed the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are unified in not even asking that question, let alone answering it.

Those who suggest that our (and that raises the important question of who "we" are) intervention will makes things better are generally silent about precisely how that will happen. No one is suggesting a ground invasion and a march to Damascus to topple the human monument to cruelty that is the Assad regime. They're just saying that we should bomb the shit out of them and arm the insurgency. After all, it worked in Libya, right?

Actually, that remains to be seen. I'm almost certain that the overthrow last year of Gaddafi regime is going to have unanticipated blowback over the next generation or so.

First, we still - a year after the fact - have no idea who the new government of Libya is or what they represent. We still know very little about their commitment to democracy, human rights, or where their sympathies lie in regards to the struggle against Islamist extremism. It remains entirely possible that NATO created a monster worse than the one that we had.

Second, while Muammar Gaddafi was a son-of-a-bitch, he was increasingly our son-of-a-bitch. Like Assad, Gaddafi was willing to play ball when it came to sharing intelligence and torturing America's terror suspects through the rendition process.

And exactly where did that get Gaddafi? Well, it got him bombed, deposed and ultimately murdered. Co-operating with the United States didn't stop Omar al-Bashir of Sudan from getting indicted by the International Criminal Court, did it? At some point, despots are going to understand that getting along with the West isn't good for their health.

All things being equal, I'm fine with that. The United States would be far better off today if they didn't get into bed with these monsters in the first place. The fact that it did is one of the primary reasons that Islamist militants are presently at war with America.

If, however, you get into bed with monsters and don't follow your word to the letter, everybody is going to be less inclined to trust you. A singular argument by Republicans against Jimmy Carter was that he damaged U.S foreign policy by not giving safe haven to the Shah of Iran after he was such a faithful ally for so many years.

More importantly, we have a pretty good idea of what a U.S or NATO intervention in Syria would look like. As Fareed Zakaria points out, Syria is too small a country with too many people for the insurgents to retreat. Nor is there a single leadership faction behind it, which means even if they did manage to topple Assad, there's a better than even chance that they'd immediately go to war with one another, just as happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. And that, one can assume, will kill more children than it saves.

Before I go further, I should point out that Syria is not unlike Iraq. A religious minority, the Alawites (an offshoot of the Shia), control the government and oppress the majority Sunnis. Remember what happened in Iraq when a domineering minority was overthrown? Who killed more kids, the American bombing or the sectarian war that followed?

What is now a low-level civil war in Syria is likely to explode if we get involved, and there will be no shortage of outsiders taking sides. If NATO acts to intervene on the side of the Sunni rebels, Russia, Iran and Iraq will  do everything they can to support their Alawite ally short of introducing their own ground forces, while Hezbollah will likely fight directly for them on the ground. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the United States will support the Sunni  insurgency. The Chinese will likely arm the highest bidder, which one should expect to be Assad. And then there's the question of if intervention would create an al-Qaeda in Syria, paradoxically fighting on our side.

Absent NATO (and let's be serious about this, massive numbers of American) ground troops, an all-out civil war will ensue in Syria, dwarfing anything that we've seen in Iraq thus far. As Mr. Zakaria points out, Syria would rapidly look like Lebanon did in the 1980s. And always remember, Syria intervened in Lebanon for a reason. You might not like that reason, but there was a logic behind it.

Henry Kissinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post this past Friday which makes other prescient points. There is a decided absence of consensus, both in the United States and the international community, about yet another war in a Muslim country. And after the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it isn't clear that the American military has the resources to bring a Syrian conflict to a conclusion that isn't far worse than it is now.

A full-scale civil war might not necessarily result in more babies being shot in the head at point-blank range, but it almost certainly will result in mass starvation of those babies and a refugee nightmare for the countries surrounding Syria. Where will those people flee to? Iraq? Lebanon? Turkey? Israel? Can they all go to the summer cottages of those calling for intervention in the first place? They might like being near a cool lake. But only on the weekends that you're not there, of course.

I don't want to minimize the horror of what happened in Houla. But I also refuse pretend that it's as simple as   "confront (ing) the meanness in this world", which is a simplistic and silly view of the world. And to suggest that anyone who prefers to think long and hard before making things worse is trafficking in "chronic misanthropic indifference" is nothing more than cheap propaganda, counter-productive, and likely to kill more innocent Syrian babies if it's even halfway successful, rather than less.

What some people on both sides of the political spectrum don't get is that war shouldn't be about talking points, particularly on the left, which spent the last decade decrying exactly that.

But if you have a head for selective war, may I suggest the following: Start campaigning for a military draft in all of the NATO countries. Asking American volunteers to get dead over the last line of a Bruce Springsteen song is pretty easy when you and your kids have no skin in the game. When you're willing to sacrifice the lives of your children in a mission that will almost certainly kill more Syrian children than it saves, you might be worthy of being taken seriously on foreign and military affairs.

If fighting universal evil in the world is the new raison d'etre of the Left and the Neocon Right, then maybe it's time you start dressing up your kids and teach them to march because there all kinds of it out there. If and when you're prepared to do that, I also expect you to stop the constant fucking whining about tax increases and domestic spending cuts that war demands.

War is a serious fucking business. And it if you ultimately want less of it, it should start being treated as such. If you want to go to war, Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught you one thing. You need need to expect to spend a lot more in blood and treasure than the "experts" say you will and you need to sacrifice something,

Nothing was more frustrating to me - and I've spent eight years saying this - than Republicans proclaiming that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the American way of life and that all that 99.5% of the population had to do to support "freedom" was enjoy their tax cuts and go shopping.

If progressives start picking up this mantra, we're all doomed as a society. Between them, there will be no end to wars that accomplish their stated ends, and no end to the debt they accumulate.

Unless war starts meaning something other than a partisan talking point, we're fucked.