The White Noise of Scandal:
What's it gonna take for the general public to be shocked anymore? 'Cause, really, and, c'mon, this week's news alone ought to be enough to make the head of even the most casual observer of the nascent Washington scandals explode into a shower of skull and viscera, raining down on the ignorant. The White House knew the levee hadn't held and that New Orleans was being drowned a day earlier than previously admitted? Scooter Libby was told by Dick Cheney and other "superiors" to break the law and leak classified information? Tom DeLay is put on the House subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department, while said department is investigating DeLay's buddy, Jack Abramoff?

What's it gonna take to surprise anyone? At this point, we could discover that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney rape Iranian village pre-teen girls and then the President, ashamed of the sinful actions of his two close advisors, as well as of the defiled children, kills the girls, gutting them, cutting them up, and feeding the press corps a buffet of pate' and meatloaf made from the bodies, catered, of course, by Halliburton, while Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Orrin Hatch, and Bill Frist use the blood to write voodoo bills that magically allow the government to spy on your toilet without a shit warrant, and Donald Rumsfeld freeze-dries the girls' organs to grind up into a powder for his cognac because he believes it's an aphrodisiac that he needs in order to get it up so he can head over to a VA hospital to jack off on the stumps of comatose Iraq War wounded, rubbing his dick on the bandages so he can say that he "feels their pain," as Rove and Cheney think about moving on to the captured missing children of Hurricane Katrina they keep hidden in a bunker buried in the Vice President's Maryland mansion's yard.

And you know what? CNN would still balance the facts of the story with the demonic visage of Scott McClellan spinning it away, calling it ludicrous and ridiculous and "beyond the pale to suggest" yet never really denying all the fucking and gutting and grinding and rubbing, although if it had been done, it was for security reasons that are classified. Sure, there'd be many of us who'd say, "C'mon, it's obvious it's true," and the mainstream media would poo-poo the idea, with guests and articles that echo the administration's non-denial denial. But the facts'd be out there, and when it came out that, hey, all that shit you were saying about the complete animalistic barbarism of the Republicans? Damn if you weren't right all along. But then, the real facts had always been around, like the lyrics to a song whose beat you've been bouncing along to for months: when you pay attention to the words, you think, "Oh, cool, I thought that's what it was saying. What's the next track?"

The confirmation of all the shit many on the left have been saying about Katrina, about DeLay, about Libby and leaks ought to be another of those massive tipping points. But no one's suprised. It's just become too hard to process it all, you know. It's just traffic sounds, so many crickets, so much white noise.