Dick Armey, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Political Payola

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The Revenge of Dana Loesch: The Final Nail in Breitbart's Coffin

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Let's Talk About Bain: Capitalism, Private Equity and Leveraged Buyouts

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"The Freaks Come Out at Night:" The Mourning After and an Ungracious Victory Lap

"A willing patsy." "Another elisa, programmed by it's masters to parrot the gameplan." "Wingnuthead." "Mongrel."

Those were just some of the things I was called in the comments of one post at one blog for making the entirely predictable observation that the GOP was going to get their asses handed to them last night. And my longer-term readers will know that I've been making the same prediction for years now. 

Were I not so lazy, I'd go through my archives and those of other blogs I frequent and do a full round-up of the more amusing invective directed my way for my speaking what has turned out to be prophecy. And yes, I actually am calling myself a prophet! I rather like the sound of it, and prophets have an impressive record of getting themselves laid. And so too shall I. The poontang will fall upon me from the sky, begging for my attention and redemption. I am indestructible this morning. Verily, I am golden God!

Yet I remain humble.

Of the 49 states that have so far been called (Florida, being Florida, remains undecided and should very properly be vaporized by the Strategic Air Command) I correctly called 47 of them. And I said that there was a very strong possibility that the other two would go the other way. I've been saying for months that the polls were generally right and, go figure, they were. I said that the Republicans would blow another shot at a perfectly good Senate takeover and fail to move the needle in the House.

On the other hand, I'm not bragging. I'm just demanding my due, which is that everyone who shit-talked me as ignorant, insane or both give me blowjobs. Slow, loving blowjobs. And I don't want to hear about how tired your jaw is getting, either. Like Mel Gibson before me, I deserve it! I demand satisfaction. Other than that, I'm pretty magnanimous in victory.

Look, when I put something out there, I'm not just pulling it out of my ass, even in the rare circumstance that I happen to be wrong. I do think these through and have reasons behind the predictions that I make, which I'm not exactly shy about sharing. I've been studying this nonsense, to the exclusion of almost everything else, for thirty years now.

I thought about being less of a prick about this, but then I remembered how much fun some folks have throwing my rare mistakes in my face. Rob Ford's victory comes to mind.

I couldn't resist the temptation of watching the returns on Fox News last night. Witnessing the smug narrative of whorish and wrong blowhards like Karl Rove and Dick Morris being viciously deflated in real time was just too alluring for me. If I thought things were going to go the other way, I would have watched MSNBC. Nothing nourishes me quite like the tears of my enemies, and I view almost everybody in cable news as my personal enemy. Liberal or conservative, I don't care, If you're on TV, there's a better than even chance than I'm smarter than you are.

As soon as what was happening became clear, you see the panic in their little animal eyes. I swear to God, if I wasn't relaxing with a canister of ether, I would've been as hard as a fucking rock. It was almost as if they understood that the silly notion of a loving god had been exposed for the fantasy that it is to them and that they would receive exactly the same mercy that they would show if they were on the other end of the sword.



When Fox called Ohio for the President, Rove almost systematically burned down the network from the inside, refusing to recognize the validity (to say nothing of the math) behind the decision. That resulted in 90 minutes of balls-out fucking chaos. In those 90 minutes, we learned that Megyn Kelly can talk live to someone in Benghazi, but can't hear Brett Baier from across the goddamned hall. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Fox's ethical standards being what they are, they rarely (if ever) mentioned through the campaign that Rove runs a partisan Super PAC called Crossroads GPS that had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in beating Obama. Therefore, Fox let him waste an hour and a half of their time and endless reservoirs of credibility because he was afraid his zillionaire donors were going to be pissed. It was nothing less than magical.

The real story of last night is just how full of shit the GOP and their sycophants actually are about everything they say they stand for. For decades, Republicans have declared themselves the "party of personal responsibility" and ruthlessly ran against the "Blame America First" crowd.


But even before Ohio was called, from Sarah Palin all the way down to the lowliest shithead commenter at Erick Erickson's Red State, they refused to recognize what a magnificent fuck-up their party has become and blamed the country for the loss. As I've been saying for years, these people are congenitally incapable of accepting responsibility for anything. And why should they? After all, it's much easier to simply lie.

It was the pollsters' fault. It was the media's fault (which is hilarious, when you also consider that they're never shy about reminding us that the "Lamestream Media" is irrelevant when they're not also the most effective conspirators in all of Christendom,) then it was Chris Christie's fault for not abandoning his hurricane-devastated state for some fool's errand in Pennsylvania and finally, it was the American people's fault.

Of course, if you're Bill O'Reilly, you acknowledge the disappearance of the "white establishment," which is hard to describe as anything other than racist. And that's a hard thing for me to say. When was the last time you heard me describe anyone as racist? That's a card that I'm proud of never pulling. But I'm a conservative cat and I believe that words actually mean something. O'Reilly wasn't saying anything that he absolutely doesn't believe. I nearly choked on my drink when I heard the words "white establishment" fly out of my TV last night, but I'm not going to pretend that he didn't say them.



What happened last night wasn't just a beating, it was a systematic fucking assassination of both the Romney campaign and the Tea Party as a whole. Some of the biggest names in the Tea Party; including Joe Walsh (not the cool one from the James Gang) and everybody's favorite war criminal, Allen West, found themselves  horse-whipped right out of office. Michele Bachmann only hung on by her fingernails. Their "rising stars," like Mia Love, were convincingly beaten. Even Paul Ryan had the closest race in his district of his entire career. If you want to understand how much trouble these people are in, look no further than that.

In all honesty, I can't for the life of me figure out what these goddamned cretins thought was going to happen. They built a national campaign based almost entirely on demonstrable lies, social issues that were settled at least forty years ago, and economic plans that could only have come from an acid flashback.

Poll after poll after poll for at least the last two years told the GOP that even most Republican voters thought that it was time for the Bush tax cuts to expire, so what did Romney-Ryan do? They said that not only would they make them permanent, they'd further cut rates by another 20% with no plausible way to pay for it. But like most polls, Republican fuckheads saw them as "skewed."

They painted Latinos as criminal and vaginas as selfish, yet they were surprised when Hispanics lashed out in record numbers and only the most delusional cunts lined up behind them. They were running in an alternate reality and when voters pointed that out to them, they got pissed at America.

And these assholes aren't done. Not by a friggin' long shot. Internationally famous punchline and guy who managed to bankrupt a casino, Donald Trump went to Twitter to demand a "revolution." Yes, Trump might be so unaware of history that he actually doesn't understand what traditionally happens to plutocratic shitheads like him in revolutions. Maybe his hair helmet will protect him from the guillotine, but it might not.

But my all time favorite talking head from last night was Charles Krauthammer, who has turned out to be every bit as good at political prognostication as he is at diving.



Never mind that Obama has twice won more Electoral College votes than George W. Bush ever did, he has no "mandate." Bush, according to Krauthammer, did get a mandate in 2004, despite a considerably more shallow Electoral College victory. Indeed, Bush's 2004 "endorsement was resounding." But not for Obama.

If you folks aren't getting my subtlety, I'll spell it out for you. Charles Krauthammer is a fucking psychiatrist who is insisting that the Republican party do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, and insist that it's something other than insanity. That, my friends, is your GOP!

Was I being more than a little churlish and cunty in the first eight paragraphs of this post? Sure I was, if only for comedic effect. But the difference is that I was right. I've taken endless shit over it for years, but I won.

The people who lost, on the other hand, are being even more delusionally arrogant and stupid than I am, and they aren't pretending to be adorable and funny. Those bloviating, lying cocksuckers really do believe that they would have won, if only the country hadn't stabbed them in the back. And you know what? I've seen that attitude before. It was in Hitler's Mein Kampf, describing Germany's loss of the First World War.

Sure, Germany "rose again," but it very quickly found itself smacked down even harder that it could've possibly imagined shortly thereafter. The supposed "conservative movement" exactly mirrors the lack of self-awareness that the German people did between 1918 and 1945. And that tells me that precisely the same fate is going to befall them.

There's just no helping people that won't help themselves. And the GOP is in no mood to do the hard work that might actually make them fit to govern again. There was literally no end to the appeals to the identity politics that liberals made famous last night. Nor was there an end to the whining, bitching, moaning and blaming everybody else that defined the Democratic Party between 1968 and '88 last night.

It was nothing short of a catastrophe. But it wasn't the fault of Barack Obama, pollsters, the media or the American people. It was the fault of a movement that actually seems to believe that the John Birch Society and prevalent, rampant and seemingly contagious ignorance were positive forces in American life.

If you expect that's going to change anytime soon without some serious self-examination, you're part of the problem, and not the solution. If the attitude I saw last night persists, it doesn't matter how much of a disaster Obama's second term is going to be. I seriously believe that there could be another FDR-like era of twenty-year, one party rule.

I don't expect the Republican party to survive it. The GOP returned to prominence after the war because it had a pragmatic figure in Dwight Eisenhower to lead them out of the darkness and into the light. Figures like Eisenhower are punished in today's conservative movement, condemning the movement to feed off of it's own inbred stupidity until it finally dies.


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Epilogue: I would be remiss if I didn't share with you the funniest and most prescient I thing I read on the Internet last night, if not ever.

It comes from my friend and beloved spiritual mentor, the great and good Dr. Reverend's Twitter feed. He spoke about the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock wing of the party, which has come to dominate it, in ways that I wish I had thought of first.

(Click to embiggen)

 

The Ballad of Dick and Sarah

In case you haven't been paying attention for the last several decades, former Vice President Dick Cheney is a nasty fucking piece of work. He's easily the most dangerous person to have inhabited the executive branch since at least A. Mitchell Palmer or J. Edgar Hoover.

There's no shortage of people who'll tell you that Richard Nixon was, but there's also no shortage of people who don't know what they're talking about. For all of Nixon's malfeasance, he was continually frustrated by the bureaucracy and ultimately betrayed by his own co-conspirators.

That wasn't true of Cheney. Having learned at the feet of his mentor, the master of bureaucratic infighting, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney bent not only the bureaucracy, but even the Cabinet and the President of the United States to his will throughout the first Bush term. Anyone who's interested in seeing multiple examples of how he did this should read Barton Gellman's invaluable book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

It was only in Bush's second term; when the unmitigated disaster of Iraq had become clear, the Valarie Plame scandal that resulted in Scooter Libby's indictment and conviction, and the 2006 off-year elections that ended 12 years of Republican rule in Congress, that the vice president's influence waned supplanted by that of Condoleeza Rice, Josh Bolten and, finally, Bob Gates. In his recent memoir, Cheney himself tells of a National Security Council meeting regarding the possibility of a preventative strike on Iran. The vice president was the only official present in favour of one.

That hasn't stopped Dick from being an all-around asshole, though. If he reminds me of anyone, it's former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau in his retirement. Like Trudeau, Cheney believes that there's really one guy qualified to hold and exercise power, which would be him. And like Trudeau, Cheney won't shut the fuck up about it.

However, for the last four years, Cheney focused himself on undermining the Democrats generally and the Obama Administration, in particular.

That's changing. Now he's focusing his fire on the 2008 ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.



Now, it's an open secret that Cheney and McCain have a longstanding hatred for each other. And, to be fair, Cheney's remarks are much more of a shot against McCain's judgement than they are against Palin. But most folks aren't going to see it that way, and the last few days have shown that they haven't.

Cheney's attempt to sew himself to President Ford's legacy is also worthy of comment. Firstly, as then-White House Chief of Staff, Cheney wasn't principally responsible for the 1976 campaign, James Baker was. The selection of Bob Dole after Nelson Rockefeller was dumped from ticket was a campaign decision, not a White House one. And that's especially true given the very real possibility of a brokered convention resulting from Reagan's challenge for the nomination. We also now know that Ford told both Bob Woodward and Tom DeFrank that he thought that Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had lost their fucking minds in the Bush Administration.

His criticism of Palin is odd, as well. If he had said that Governor Palin was a whiny retard, consumed with identity politics and who shouldn't even be allowed in the White House as a goddamned tourist, most reasonable people would have agreed with him. Instead, he focused on her readiness to be president.

I'll grant you that anyone who got higher than a C in high school civics was more prepared for tthe presidency than Sarah Palin. As a matter of fact, Lisa Ann is more ready to be president than Palin was or is.

But the Republican litmus test is usually "executive experience," and that's something that Dick Cheney himself was profoundly lacking in. He went into government almost immediately after college. His positions as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense were administrative, policy was decided at a higher pay grade than his, especially in the Ford and first Bush Administrations. He was the first and only member of the congressional leadership that I'm aware of who held Congress in open contempt. Cheney didn't actually run anything until he went to Halliburton when he was 54 years old.

The second I saw Cheney's remarks on Sunday morning, I know the real fun was going to start. McCain blew Cheney off rather gracefully and with no shortage of humour on Monday morning. But Palin is famous for her inability to keep her mouth shut, and for the rather unorthodox things that come out of it when open.

On Monday night, she unloaded.



That interview is nothing short of hilarious. Neither of those broads could have been more delusional if they were stuffed full of magic mushrooms and horse tranquilizer.

Let's get one thing straight right off the top. Sarah Palin came by her "86-87% approval rating" as governor the old-fashioned way - she fucking bought it. In her first year in office, she jacked up the royalty the state takes from the oil companies and gave every man woman and child in the state $1,300.  A family of four got $5,200 in free money from Sarah Palin's "spreading the wealth around." Given that, it's sort of an indictment that her approval wasn't at 115%.

Moreover, after the 2008 campaign, she couldn't quit as governor - for reasons that no one fluent in the English language can understand to this day - fast enough.  Actually, that's not true. She wanted the fast, easy money that only the freakshows of reality TV and Fox News can bring.

The Van Sustern interview reinforced the single most prominent quality of Palin: her utter denial of personal responsibility for anything. That was something I first noticed in her mostly unreadable book It's All Nicole Wallace's Fucking Fault, but it's a theme that she hasn't let up on and one that her Fox cohorts continually enable. Remember, this a woman who characterized a query about what newspapers she read as "gotcha question" and therefore Katie Couric's fault. And I actually dare you to find someone more inoffensive in journalism today than Katie fucking Couric.

For a century the GOP portrayed itself as the party of rugged individualism, but they just can't stop embracing self-declared victims of everyone as their standard-bearers. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan never pissed and moaned in public about the "lamestream media." But the overwhelming majority of modern conservatives actually want to present themselves as a put-upon underclass while at the same time saying that they're the only ones capable of leadership. While she didn't invent it, Palin embodies that.

Far be it from Greta to break the former governor of her delusions. She cites polling from before the collapse of Lehman Brothers that's supposed to show how entirely made of awesome Sarah is. But those numbers are misleading.

First, the "Celebrity" ad - released just before the Democratic convention - softened Obama's numbers, as even the Obama campaign admitted after the election. It was the only thing that McCain did to panic them throughout the entire campaign, and it denied them a convention bounce. It was even worse because Obama's "Greek pillars in a fucking football stadium" played directly into the narrative of "Celebrity."

Second, Palin energized the Democrats every bit as much as she did the Republicans. Campaign manager David Plouffe details that in his book The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory. Much was made of the fact that the McCain campaign raised some $3 million within 24 hours of Palin's convention speech. Plouffe revealed that Obama raised just as much from liberals that hated her, especially liberal women. No one healed the hurt liberal chicks suffered from Hillary Clinton's loss quite like Sarah Palin.

Third, she committed the cardinal sin or any vice presidential candidate: she made herself the story. Palin can bitch all she wants about the "lamestream media," but it was her singular determination to be unprepared for the Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews that changed the narrative from her being an "exciting Maverick" to someone that might actually be a moron.

Van Sustren  makes the snide and incredibly counter-productive assertion that Cheney "isn't afraid to say things about the women," citing his "little slap at Condolezza Rice." Instead of hitting back on that, Palin lets it reinforce her "Poor, poor Sarah: Victim of sexism" narrative.

Look, if women want to play the "defenseless little girl" who can't take a "little slap" victim role, maybe it's better that they stay out of politics entirely. You don't achieve equality by changing the rules of the game to better suit your strengths. You change your strengths to better suit the rules of the fucking game. I'm annoyed beyond words when liberal women take that manipulative route, but I actually despise it when conservatives do it.  To quote Palin herself, she should "man up" or shut the the fuck up. Nothing is more disgusting than conservative victimology.

And you know what?  If you want to play the victim yourself while preaching rugged individualism for everyone else, you're a hypocritical cunt, regardless of your gender. For the last four years, I've listened to Republican assholes decrying "sexism," even though they were often the same people who made sixteen years worth of jokes about Hillary Clinton, and sometimes even Chelsea.

The "poor, put-upon Sarah" act is further undermined by her twice mentioning Cheney's "misfires," a half-clever reference to his blowing giant holes into Harry Whittington. To my mind, that almost equalled Palin's deeply offensive and wildly stupid "blood libel" spectacle after the Gabby Giffords shooting in it's sleaziness. You either get to play the victim or go for the easy shot to the balls, but you don't get to do both.

Everybody who knows anything about Dick Cheney knows that he isn't a sexist, he's a misanthropist. To know love requires having a heart, and spent the better part of a year being plugged into a wall like a friggin' smart car precisely because he didn't have one. After leaving office, Cheney wouldn't keep quiet about his disagreements with the president he was supposed to loyally serve. Why in the fuck does anyone think he wouldn't give a half-wit like Sarah Palin "a little slap?"

Palin failed miserably at re-branding herself as the face of the movement when she had a very clear shot at doing so. She could've taken a year or two to have learned something about the issues and become a serious spokesperson for the cause. Instead, she went for the easy money and became a more fuckable Snooki instead. And even that glory is fleeting. She's increasingly marginalized in the Tea Party and you don't even see her on Fox News as much as you used to.

Cheney's got bigger plans. He was around for the fall and resurrection of Richard Nixon, and I think he has something similar in mind. He knows that after pulling off the almost impossible task of being less popular than George W. Bush, he won't make many gains in popular esteem. But he very much can re-invent himself as a power within the party.He's working with the Romney's vice-presidential selection team for that very reason. If Romney wins, the reasoning goes, Cheney might find himself a consigliere of sorts in a Romney White House.

But even there, Cheney will fail in the eyes of history. Nixon thought much bigger than that. After his resignation, he picked a very few issues - all related to foreign policy - that he chose to care about and work with any president that would listen on them, regardless of party. It's only in the last few months that we've learned just how close Nixon had become to Bill Clinton.

Nixon lived for just shy of twenty years after resigning. There's little chance that Cheney will. It's actually a shame that Cheney is devoting the time left to him to public partisan politics instead of doing what Nixon did, furthering issues that he cares about. Very few people know more about the mechanical operation of the executive branch than Dick Cheney does. He could be an invaluable resource to future presidents of both parties, but he's almost adamantly insisting on being a failed political hack.

In that, he and Sarah Palin aren't all that different.

Bill Kristol's Fairy Tale - Updated

I hadn't heard of The Washington Free Beacon until about ten minutes ago, when The Drudge Report linked to this article. And I had mostly forgotten about the Emergency Committee for Israel. But when I looked into both, one name connected the two: Bill Kristol's.

Mr. Kristol is among the dumbest motherfuckers on earth, which shouldn't surprise anyone, since he became famous as the guy whose only government job was making Dan Quayle look smart. Notice how well that worked out?

After being kicked out of government in 1992, Kristol established The Weekly Standard, mostly as a forum for demanding that the United States go to war with everyone and insisting that it would go just fine. You can see him being similarly (and smugly) wrong every week on Fox News Sunday. Oh, and he was also the first person to bring Sarah Palin to national prominence, so we can thank him for that, too.

Matthew Continetti was an associate editor at the Standard until he established the Free Beacon this past February.

Kristol is also on the board of, and appears to be the main spokesman for, the Emergency Committee for Israel, a 501(c)(4) that seems to exist for the sole purpose of flacking for Israel's Likud Party and it's policies in the United States. It is only because of massive loopholes in the law that the Emergency Committee and groups like it manage to avoid having to register as agents of foreign governments under American lobbying laws. If Mike Deaver was that smart when he was illegally lobbying for Canada, he could've made his life a lot easier.

Anyhow, the Emergency Committee created this ad, which the Free Beacon dutifully posted and the Drudge Report linked to it under the headline "OBAMA BLASTED FOR FAILURE TO VISIT ISRAEL."

 

ECI also ran this print ad in a bunch of Jewish newspapers.

At this point, some recent history necessary to explain what's going on. And that history shows that Barack Obama is far more tolerant of Israel than other presidents with actual balls have been.

In March  of 2010, Vice President Biden visited Jerusalem and reaffirmed America's "unyielding support" for Israel's security, which was sort of important, given the question of Iran's nuclear program. Within hours - and with Biden still in the country - the Israeli Interior Ministry announced an expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem.

That's been sort of a thing with the U.S since the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Building settlements on occupied territory is kind of illegal under international law. And everyone recognizes East Jerusalem as occupied territory. Worse still for the Americans, they provide loan guarantees to Israel for the settlements, which itself is of questionable legality when Israel actually brings in immigrants to populate them.

If any other country - and especially an ally dependent on U.S foreign aid -  did something like this, I have no doubt that the United States would use every diplomatic resource at its disposal to retaliate. It's difficult to underscore what an insult that announcement by the Interior Ministry was, let alone how it complicated American relations with Israel's Arab neighbors, who rely on the United States to be an "honest broker."

Actually, no it isn't. That's because something similar happened during the first Bush administration in the fall of 1990.  Former secretary of state James Baker told the story in his 1995 memoir, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War & Peace, 1989-1992 on pages 543-44.

In the months leading up to the first Gulf War, Israel's then-foreign minister, David Levy, assured Baker that his country wouldn't move recent Soviet immigrants into planned East Jerusalem settlements for which American loan guarantees had been extended. Five weeks later, Yitzak Shamir's government reneged on that pledge.

Secretary Baker then very publicly cancelled the loan guarantees and told the world why. After the war, when the Bush administration was trying to bring the Arabs to the Madrid Peace Conference (one of the diplomatic promises Baker and Bush made to ensure Arab participation in the war on Iraq,) Shamir yet again made the settlements an issue. Baker yet again publicly slapped Israel down.

Oh, cute fact. You know who was a fairly prominent member of the Bush administration in 1990-'91?

Bill Kristol, that's who! Did Kristol have anything negative to say about that at the same or thereafter? Certainly not that I'm aware of.

If anything, Israel's current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been an even greater thorn in the side of American foreign policy than even Shamir was. And, by the way, it is the duly elected president of the United States that decides U.S foreign policy, not the prime minister of Israel.

Compared to the reaction of Secretary Baker and the first President Bush to Israeli intransigence, President Obama has been downright tepid, given the humiliation that Netanyahu brought upon the administration when Biden was visiting. In fact, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have  given Israel a de facto nuclear guarantee against an Iranian attack.

If the worst thing that Obama has done is simply not visit Israel, where God knows what else Netanyahu will do to embarrass him or further complicate American policy, Israel has done well, indeed.

And you know who knows that? Bill Kristol. Just don't expect him to tell you the truth about that. It isn't his strong suit.


Extra Special Update: The good folks at Mediate were kind enough to compile a listing of the travels to Israel of recent presidents. As it turns out, Democrats fare pretty well in their sojourns to the  Holy Land. Republicans, not so much.

As it happens, no Republican president went to Israel at all between June of 1974 and January of 2008. That means that Presidents Gerald R, Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush never made an official state visit there over the course of some thirty-three years and six months.

After I published this post, I remembered the rather hostile relationship that President Reagan had with Israel, which I intially wrote about here.

During Israel's 1982 siege of Beriut, Reagan twice described the military offensive to Menachem Begin as a "Holocaust" and said that if it continued "our entire future relationship (meaning America and Israel's) was endangered (see The Reagan Diaries, page 98.) It was perhaps the most controversial and confrontational communication between an American president and an Israeli prime minister. It was also one that Reagan was deeply proud of, highlighting it in his memoir, An American Life. 

Can you imagine how people like Kristol or Liz Cheney would react if Barack Obama used rhetoric toward Israel that came anywhere close to Reagan's?

You probably can't, but I can.

Jason Kenney's Unintended Consequences

One of the most beautiful things you'll ever see is idiots demonstrating what good people they are. It's usually a source of constant amusement for me. Then they get elected to something and it's no longer quite as funny.

For the longest time, this was the domain of liberals. But conservatives increasingly have decided that they can be just as empty-headed, largely because they've seen how effectively liberals have been at ward-heeling like that.

Politicking this way is effective because voters are simpletons and singularly incapable of independent thinking. As everything goes to shit in the world, I can't really blame the politicians all that much. After all, in a democracy, we're supposed to be calling the shots and we couldn't be more obstinate in our refusal to use our fucking heads once in awhile.

A good example of this is the issue of "sex trafficking." As properly defined - the employment of women as prostitutes by force or coercion - is something that all right-thinking people are against. The law, the conventional thinking goes, should absolutely do more to stop it.

It's only when you start thinking about it that a very different picture starts to emerge. Here's how.

Ask yourself what the most common elements of sex trafficking are. You'll answer that they are assault, kidnapping, forcible confinement, uttering death threats, rape, sometimes blackmail and extortion and, because more than one person is usually involved, conspiracy. You'll also notice something else. Those things are all already against the law. As a matter of fact, they're among the most serious charges a defendant can face. And they get more serious still when the victim is a minor.

The laws that have been on the books for well over a century are more than adequate to combat sex trafficking. But cops are lazy, politicians want to be seen as "doing something," and the public is too fucking dumb to know the difference. The friggin' media is certainly no help because all too often their determination to be a populist "voice of the underdog" serves to actually enable and reinforce the stupidity of its audience.

This is true of both sides of the political spectrum. The left wants you to know that they "care" and the right wants to demonstrate that they're "tough on crime." The police, off on the sidelines, always want new and ever more intrusive powers. So despite the fact that every single element of sex trafficking is already addressed by multiple criminal statutes, we wind up with new laws.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his slack-jawed ward-heeler of an immigration minister, Jason Kenney, decided that they were going to use Canada's immigration laws to pretend that they're attacking the problem. They did this by refusing to renew the visas of foreign strippers in Canada.

Despite the fact that stripping is not only legal in Canada, but a constitutionally protected form of speech, and despite the fact that there's no evidence that legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, Harper and Kenney are doing something, by God!

Of course, I have a theory why the Tories are doing this. On top of their moronic "tough on crime" image, they're playing to their retard base. The Harper Conservatives are altogether too smart to go after abortion and same-sex marriage, which their social conservative base is enormously pissed at them about. So they'll give them the next best thing, an assault on the legal "sex trade."

There's no evidence that the legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, and even if they were, that a violation of existing immigration law and the other sections of the Criminal Code that I cited earlier. And let's say that they are being trafficked. How is deporting the victims the answer?

What the bill does do is create a giant hole in the perfectly legal adult entertainment industry, which that industry is going to fill one way or another. And this is where the Law of Unintended Consequences takes over in a breathtakingly hilarious way.

Recruiters of teenage strippers may soon be scouring Toronto high schools in search of female students who can be groomed into disrobing part-time as exotic dancers to earn college tuition.

A flyer praising the benefits of the burlesque trade has been put together to target students in high schools, colleges and universities in the Toronto-area, says a group representing dancers and club owners.

The brochure claims working as a dancer pays well, offers flexible hours and makes a “great part-time job to raise college tuition.”

A scramble is underway by the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada to fill a demand for dancers after Ottawa this month stopped issuing visas or extensions for foreign strippers to work here. There are up to 800 foreign strippers in Canada and most vow to go underground and work in the sex trade if they can’t dance legally.

Of course, like almost everything you'll ever see in Sun Media, this is written in a highly misleading way.

Strip joints are holders of Ontario liquor licenses and the drinking age here is 19. The law pretty clearly says that no one under the age of 18 can work in an establishment whose primary product is booze. The Sun makes it sound like you're going to wind up with ninth and tenth graders getting twenties shoved in their cooters, and that just ain't the case.

But nobody does shithead outrage quite like Sun Media. If you've never read their newspapers or watched their version of the Fox News Channel, you really should. Don't get me wrong, you won't learn anything, but I can guarantee that you'll get mad at something. If you're halfway smart, you'll get mad at yourself.

The Tories managed to pass an ineffective law that does nothing to address a serious issue (if you assume that new laws are even needed, which I don't) to what end? Well, younger and younger Canadian girls are going to be drawn into stripping and there isn't a goddamned thing the government can do about it. And this is going to get Harper's social conservative based even more pissed at him if that base chooses to be even halfway honest. Remember, none of this would have happened were it not for Kenney's genius decision not to renew the visas.

This might be the most perfect storm of stupidity out of this government yet. This is fucking brilliant!

Although I've only been to a peeler joint twice in the last ten years, I have very fond memories of foreign strippers. And not just the obvious ones. They do tend to be much nicer people than their native born co-workers, who can be a spectacular pain in the ass. Canadian girls in the business often think that they're above what they're doing for a living, but the immigrants seem to be genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be here.

So what happens to them?

Caroline, 28, and Nicola, 25, have been dancing in a downtown Toronto club for more than a year and have tasted the good life and now don’t want to return to their native Hungary.

“We are not happy that visas are no longer being issued to us,” Caroline said. “I am very disappointed and afraid of what may happen to me in the future.”

The women say they work long hours and send most of their earnings back home to their families.

“We did not do anything wrong in Canada,” she said. “They should not be sending us back home.”

Nicola said she’s stressed out and hasn’t been able to eat since hearing news of the visa revocation.

“My visa is almost expired and I am very scared,” she said. “I am very shattered that I may no longer be able to work and help my family back home.”

(...)

Foreign dancers say they’re willing to get married to a Canadian citizen or file refugee claims to stay here.

Plans are in place to seek Canadian men to marry some of the strippers whose visas are on the verge of expiry, which will force them to go underground and into the hands of organized crime to work in the sex trade.

Did I mention the unintended consequences? Some of them aren't so funny.  Jason Kenney, in his peculiarly Jason Kenney way, may have managed to create a new wave of sex trafficking victims because he's such a magnificent shithead.

Fortunately, the government knows enough about irony to keep Vic Towes as far away from this issue as they can possibly can.

But you know what? I'm a helpful cat and I love nothing more than beautiful girls with cute accents. Those just happen to be a couple of my favorite things.

Perhaps, like a more celebrated Foreigner, you want to know what love is. And maybe, just maybe, you want me to show you.

If you happen to be a foreign dancer in Toronto with an expiring visa, get in touch with me at skippystalinATgmail.com. There's a better than even chance that I'll immediately fall in love with you and propose. I'm really romantic and tend to propose marriage 36 times a day, as my long-time readers will confirm. All you have to do is say yes!

I'm so in love with love that it's actually infectious! You won't be able to help yourself from wanting to join me in holy matrimony. People like Minister Kenney might be skeptical about love at first sight, but I think we can prove them wrong.

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.