reliving doonesbury's watergate

only the names have changed ...

original 1973 artwork © g.b. trudeau:

help us obi-wan, part trois

i think CNN may be trying to kill us. they have announced who has been invited to their september 12th debate, and it includes, rather inexplicably, two "candidates" who aren't currently even running for the office:

in a statement, CNN announces its line-up for the september 12 tea party express co-sponsored debate in tampa: gov. rick perry, rep. michele bachmann, gov. mitt romney, rep. ron paul, newt gingrich, herman cain, rick santorum, and jon huntsman. the network adds that rudy giuliani and sarah palin were invited: "giuliani declined the debate invitation, while a palin representative has yet to respond to it."

you've got to be kidding me, right? we're still pretending rick santorum is somehow worthy of inclusion over, say, gary johnson or buddy roemer, but somehow CNN is still so hard up for slots that they're inviting two republicans who aren't even running? are we all that hard up for sarah palin news, that CNN is desperate to generate some whether she's running or not?

a noun, a verb and ...

ok, so if newly-crowned pageant-winner joe biden goes all the way through to november without saying

... a noun, a verb and pee-oh-dubya!

to john mccain's face, then i'm sorry, i gotta call obama's pick a failure.

hard to believe it was only 10 months ago that america's mayor!™, rudy giuliani, was busy turning his dubious 9-11 cred into a tiresome morbid fetish. rudy was counting on his fellow republicans' unwholesome and unrelenting sanctification of 9-11 and the democrats' paralyzing fear of committing blasphemy to grant himself wholesale license to beat everyone else over the head with it.

that is, until then-fellow-presidential-hopeful joe biden finally stepped up to the plate and smacked some silly off him:

"there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11!"

so here we are 10 months later and mcHulk is on a rampage, gratuitously dealing a sickly-green cockslap to any puny human foolish enough to even fart in his general direction.

just check out some of the swings at his critics during just the last seven days:

the mccain campaign is road-testing a new argument in responding to obama's criticism of his number-of-houses gaffe, an approach the mccain camp has never tried before: the houses gaffe doesn't matter because ... he was a pow! "this is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison," spokesman brian rogers told the washington post.

... mr. mccain’s performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of mr. obama, that he was not as isolated during the obama interview as mr. warren implied. nicolle wallace, a spokeswoman for mr. mccain, said on sunday night that mr. mccain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions. "the insinuation from the obama campaign that john mccain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous," ms. wallace said.

the mccain campaign has offered a novel defense against critics who hit him for offering up his wife cindy as a contestant at a topless biker beauty pageant: he was a pow! ... the wall st. journal reports that mccain spokesman brian rogers fired back by saying that americans "know that john mccain's faith and character were tested and forged in ways few can fathom."

for decades it's been part of our hallowed washington mythos that the straight-talking-john-mcsame™ "doesn't like to talk about" (read: exploit) his years as a p.o.w. — if that was ever true.

so here we are two months out from the finish line, and look who's turned his ticket stub from the hanoi hilton into his all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.

he needs to have it revoked — with extreme prejudice. it's like he's bloody chokin' for it, my friends.

so if biden doesn't do it, who will ... ?

giuliani campaign '08: r.i.p.

to all but the very last of his desperate disciples, the ruination of giuliani's ascension to washington was all but foretold in scripture. it is only fitting that the trajectory of his heavenly rise and meteoric fall be properly documented, if only in part, to the best of my mortal powers, in this humble shrine:

(i) the adoration of the magi mayor:

moses ... or rudy, america's mayor, has come down from the mountaintop with "the twelve committments" ...

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(ii) the gospel according to you-know-who:

bryan wiliams: ... these frequent — some would say constant — mentions of 9-11, you've trailed off a little bit lately ... rudy: y'know — y'know, bryan, i don't, i don't think that's correct.

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(iii) the crucifixtion and burial:

tom brokaw: ... that whole conventional wisdom that he made a mistake in not going into iowa and new hampshire — i think he might have been out earlier if he had gone to iowa or new hampshire, or even to south carolina. look, he had a lot of baggage that began to develop ...

bob wright and francis fukuyama:

francis fukuyama: ... and [giuliani] has built his entire candidacy out of a kind of morbid 9-11 nostalgia ... saying [chuckling] if you really liked, uh, if you like 9-11, y'know, and everything that's happened since then, you'll get more of it with me ...

gotta love bob's reaction ...

josh marshall:

... the funny thing about rudy is that while he ran on 'staying on offense' against islamic bad guys, his whole race was defined by running away from fights. we've talked a lot about his alleged 'strategy' of ignoring the early races and focusing all his energy on florida which would launch him to glory on super tuesday. and it's an open secret that this 'strategy' was really more a work-in-progress rationalization for his collapse of support in the early states. rudy, i believe, outspent everyone in new hampshire. and he campaigned there a lot. but it's more than that. if you look closely, every time it didn't look like it was going to be an easy victory in a state, rudy's campaign packed up and left. or not quite packed up, but basically backed out, made an occasional visit, said it'd be nice to win but that it wasn't really necessary. it was somewhat the case in iowa, totally the case in new hampshire and the same in south carolina too. i think it was the same basically in michigan, though i'm not as familiar with the particulars there. ... with rudy, he just finally ran out of places to run.

abc news:

[fellow former new york mayor] ed koch, who has feuded with giuliani for years, was delighted with giuliani's crushing defeat in florida. he crowed, before the final votes were even tallied, that he was certain the verdict by florida's voters "will drive a stake through his heart. the beast is dead."

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(iv) the resurrection:

i don't anticipate one. quite possibly the greatest story never to be told.

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update: from the l.a. times ... (h/t josh marshall)

the failed campaign of rudolph w. giuliani can claim one distinction: the worst bang for the buck 1 of any delegate winner in presidential politics history. the former new york mayor, who dropped his republican bid for the presidency this week, disclosed thursday in a filing with the federal election commission that he raised $58.5 million and spent $48.8 million in 2007. with his donors' money, giuliani captured a single national delegate, in nevada. at that rate, it would have taken close to $60 billion in spending to capture the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination.

1 to be fair to "america's mayor", anyone who spent money on the nomination who failed to get any delegates at all would have a worse bang for their buck.

!!!JUST WATCH!!!

i just had to save this prediction for january 29:

ALL OF THE TALKING HEADS LIKE DICK MORRIS, ARE QUICK TO WRITE RUDY OFF. THEY ARE ALL TRYING TO PUSH JOHN McCAIN NOW BECAUSE HE WON NEW HAMPSHIRE (4 ELECTORAL VOTES) AND HE WILL PROBABLY WIN MICHIGAN (17 ELECTORAL VOTES) AND MAY EVEN WIN SOUTH CAROLINA, OH MY!! WITH (8) ELECTORAL VOTES! AND NOW IT SEEMS TO ME LIKE THEY ARE TRYING TO SQUEW THE POLL TO SAY RUDY IS BEHIND IN FLORIDA! RUDY’S SUPPORT IS WIDE AND IT IS DEEP, NOT SUPERFICIAL LIKE JOHN McCAIN’S! HE WON’T HAVE THE INDEPENDENTS TO HELP HIM IN FLORIDA, AND THERE ARE ENOUGH 911 ERA EX-NEW YORKERS TO PUT IT AWAY FOR RUDY. TO BORROW A LINE FROM A FAMOUS GENERAL: RUDY IS EXACTLY THE RIGHT MAN, IN EXACTLY THE RIGHT MOMENT IN HISTORY, IN EXACTLY THE RIGHT PLACE, AND ALL HE NEEDS IS OUR VOTES! WITH FLORIDA’S (27) ELECTORAL VOTES UNDER HIS BELT, JUST WATCH THE POLLS SHOOT HIM RIGHT BACK UP TO THE TOP! McCAIN, HUCKABEE, ROMNEY, OR ANY OF THE OTHERS CANNOT BEAT HILLARY CLINTON! WHY DO YOU THINK THE PRESS IS PUSHING McCAIN SO HARD! IF HE GETS THE NOMINATION WITH HIS RECORD ON IMMIGRATION, TAXES AND FLIP FLOPPING ALL OVER THE MAP ON IRAQ AND TAXES, HE WILL BE EASY MEAT FOR HILLARY! RUDY IS THE ONLY, I REPEAT, THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO CAN WIN NEW YORK FOR THE REPUBLICANS, AND IF THAT HAPPENS FOLKS, I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU! HILLARY CAN’T WIN! IF SHE LOSES NEW YORK OR CALIFORNIA OR PENNSYLVANIA, MATHIMATICALLY, SHE CAN’T WIN! AND THE TALKING HEADS, WHO ARE LARGELY LIBERAL, KNOW THIS! CAN McCAIN WIN NEW YORK? NOT A CHANCE! CAN HUCKABEE WIN NEW YORK? GET REAL! HECK, THE LAST POLL I SAW STILL HAS JOHN McCAIN 5 POINTS BEHIND RUDY IN HIS HOME SENATE SEAT STATE OF ARIZONA!! THAT SHOULD SPEAK VOLUMES! WE ALL JUST NEED TO “STAY THE COURSE” AS RONALD REGAN USED TO STAY, AND WE WILL WIN IN FLORIDA, AND START “THE DRIVE UP 95″ AND TO THE NOMINATION FOR RUDY! NOW GET OUT THERE AND VOTE, AND FIND 10 MORE PEOPLE TO VOTE TOO! AND ON JANUARY 28TH, WE CAN WATCH THE PUNDITS TRY TO WIPE THE EGG OFF THEIR FACES! YOU CAN VOTE EARLY, TOO!

meanwhile, at this moment in history (in case you hadn't heard already), the "right man in the right place" got a whopping 3% of michiganders to pull for him, just one point above "uncommitted".

for "america's mayor" it's florida or bust ...

a moment of clarity

well yeah. i was just sitting here, eating my muffin, drinking my coffee, when i had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity. — hitman jules winnfield, pulp fiction (1994)

finally.

after spending the last six years crazy drunk on all fear all the time!^®, has the mainstream media sobered up?

matthews: well, i'll tell ya one thing — i agree with what fareed zakaria wrote in newsweek this week, which is: terrorism isn't explosions and death. terrorism is when you change your society because of those explosions. and you become fearful to the point where you shut out immigration. you shut out student exchanges. you shut people out of buildings. you begin to act in almost a fascist manner because you're afraid of what might happen to you. that's when terrorism becomes real and frighteningly successful. that's what i believe, and that why i question the way giuliani has raised this issue. he raises it as a spectre. in a weird way he helps the bad guys.

tough guys don't carry umbrellas

we can all sense that the war is coming. it is vital for america to seize the initiative and fight it on our terms, when we have the maximum advantage. it's five minutes to midnight. the time to strike iran is now. — robert tracinski, "five minutes to midnight: the war is coming, no matter how hard we try to evade it."

tracinski tries his level best to sound calming and reasoned, yet still strident and imperative — but james wolcott, left blogistan's resident ginsu expert, knows the sound of trash talk when he hears it:

i have a theory on why the war party rhetoric has gone skittish and skyhigh, a theory based on casual observation of new york streetfights (streetfights everywhere, really). what i've noticed is that the trash talk in a street altercation escalates in proportion to the expanding distance between the two protagonists. when two potential fighters are almost literally in each other's faces, their words are few, their expressions fierce. it's when the fist fight has been avoided (or tabled) and they're putting distance between each other that the taunting becomes louder and more florid. "get back in my face again, motherfucker, and i'll pound your face into hamburger meat, motherfucker." "come back and say that to my face, lame-ass motherfucker." etc. you can supply your own david mamet expletives and challenges. one of my favorite verbal showdowns occurred on 14th street one rainy day when two non-pugilists kept up the trash talk until one of them said, "you're carrying an umbrella, motherfucker — how tough can you be?" which i must say got quite a chortle from us idle bystanders. now what has this to do with the posings of our militaristic muscle mouths? this: it is an index of the frustration and impotence they're experiencing at not getting their way. they're waging rhetorical escalation because de-escalation is the unacknowledged order of the day, and there's nothing they can do about it. steve clemons published a dispatch from the nelson report indicating that despite all of the cheneyesque bluster, the bush administration is pursuing the diplomatic route with iran. to the dismay of the hard nosers, bush is also reeling back his use of "islamic fascists", which will be interpreted as a capitulation to political correctness. you even have rumself whining that his recent appeasement slur was taken "out of context," and calling for "constructive" dialogue regarding the situation in iraq. and then there's the happy novelty of rudy giuliani blowing the whistle and calling a foul on "partisan bickering", which will not endear him to the more strident dickheads in his party. there has been a major shift in the mood climate, one which the war party and its bloggers are resisting at the top of their lungs. but resistance is futile. as john robb writes in an important post at global guerrillas, "playing at war", we're not going to the get the grand, conclusive world war iii (or iv) that same [sic] neocon ideologues crave.

newt gingrich: look at all the different connectivity. you'd have to say to yourself, "this is in fact world war iii." john gibson: world war iii. bill o'reilly: world war iii, right? john gibson: this is world war iii. sean hannity: ... world war iii. the start of world war iii! michael leeden: more like world war iv ...