And On Friday, the Rude Pundit Came:
Rush Limbaugh was arrested (as part of a settlement with prosecutors). Now for a cigarette.

Fucked New Orleans:
New Orleans is fucked, yes, it is true, and it needs to be said again and again. New Orleans is fucked because rabid right wing Republicans run the federal government, and all the rabid right wing knows is destruction and denial. Social Security, massive housing programs, Medicare, man on the goddamn moon, all done or initiated under Democrats. Interstate highway system, under Ike, no miserable attack dog conservative. And look at the one attempt at something constructive by the Bush administration, the fucked Medicare prescription drug program. Yeah, New Orleans is fucked for the White House and its lackeys in Congress simply have no idea how to accomplish anything that doesn't involve blowing shit up, tearing shit down, or telling people to sit down and shut up.

New Orleans is fucked, yeah, you know it, because its sewers are fucked. Big damn Katrina ripped up those old sewage collection pipes, 5000 miles of 'em, and took down treatment plants. And since Americans generally enjoy the privilege of shitting in toilets that flush, you can't rebuild a community if there's no place for its shit to go. It's gonna cost another billion or so to make sure that New Orleanians aren't just dumpin' raw or semi-raw sewage into the mighty Mississippi River. And any money from, say, utilities is flowing in the same direction because, well, no toilets means no people means no one paying the water bill.

New Orleans is fucked, in ways large and small, because the judicial system is in shambles. There's seven public defenders where there used to be 42. There's no money 'cause the money came from parking tickets and there's no money comin' from that 'cause, well, no people means no cars means less tickets, and the city's legal office that used to represent the poor or 85% of New Orleans defendants "is barely standing. It hasn't received a nickel from traffic court since before Katrina."

New Orleans is fucked, so very fucked, because it "has lost 77 percent of its primary-care doctors, 70 percent of its dentists, and 89 percent of its psychiatrists." So in a city filled with crazy sick people with rotting teeth before Katrina, now there's hardly anyone available should you wish to be sane, safe and shiny-toothed. And if you get shot? Damn, man, you better hope you know basic surgery. (Let's not even get into the nightmare of New Orleans in the summer, with the late spring mosquito explosion and the insane heat.)

No matter where you look, the signs are there about how fucked New Orleans really, truly is. For the levees will not be ready for this hurricane season. And even if they are supposedly back to strength, fuck the Army Corps of Engineers: the earth itself might just make sure the levees fail, with a geologic fault, assisted by oil drilling and wetlands loss, upping the chances of more catastrophe. Oh, and three of the drainage pumps, the ones that get rid of flood waters, caught fire after a little rainstorm. They may be up and running by June.

In New Orleans yesterday, his arm around a prop black woman, President Bush declared, "I told the Governor and the Mayor earlier on that we would work to have these levees pre-Katrina -- better than pre-Katrina by June 1st," barely even blinking because lies come to him as naturally as drool on the chins of babies. Over in Slidell, a FEMA trailer blew up because of a leaky propane line, killing one person and destroying the rest of their belongings. It's the second trailer explosion in the area.

New Orleans is fucked because, a few days ago, Secretary of Housing Alphonso Jackson declared, "Only the best residents should return" to the public housing projects of the city, like "[t]hose who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked." So if you were, say, unemployed or were late with the rent, that means for Alphonso Jackson that you are not one of the "best" and you shouldn't get to live in government housing, which was established for, among others, people who didn't have jobs or were unable to pay the rent. And the fine, fine New Orleans projects, crime-ridden, underbuilt, underpoliced shitholes, have residents begging to get back to their decimated homes because some home is better than none.

In New Orleans the President said, "We've got a strategy to help the good folks down here rebuild. Part of it has to do with funding; part of it has to do with housing; and a lot of it has to do with encouraging volunteers from around the United States," which is code for saying, "You're on your own, motherfuckers." Jazz Fest is gonna be a blast this year.

(The most pathetic thing is that this is only scratching the surface. Georgia10 at DailyKos has more.)

Elmo Doesn't Like It When Daddy Screams In His Sleep:
The Rude Pundit is not criticizing the Sesame Workshop, the producers of, you know, Sesame Street, and Wal-Mart, demonic force of capitalistic evil, for creating a bilingual DVD to help kids cope with parents who are deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. No, no, not at all. The DVD, in production now, will be targeted at children under five, and it will feature Elmo, the red furry monster with the high-pitched whine who refers to himself in the third person, and Elmo's father, who looks like Elmo filtered through an El Greco painting. The Rude Pundit's not sure about the plot of Talk, Listen, Connect: Helping Families Cope with Military Deployment, but certainly it would be dishonest if it wasn't about Elmo's father (or possibly his mother) being sent overseas to fight in a war.

No, no, the Rude Pundit believes it's a fine thing for puppets or cartoons to teach children about the reality of war, like Smurfs getting the blue living fuck bombed out of their teeny town. And, certainly, the Muppets have a track record of tackling heavy issues, from being HIV-positive to interracial relationships to the innate difficulties of being green. So, yeah, Elmo may be the proper figure to handle such a weighty issue.

'Cause, you know, it'll be great when Elmodaddy comes home from his twice-stop-loss-extended tour of duty after suffering a concussive head injury. How charming it'll be when Elmo runs up to his injured father on those creepy Muppet legs and his father doesn't recognize him; how we'll all smile a knowing smile when Elmo says, "Elmo loves his daddy," and his father looks around for this Elmo the little red monster kid on his lap is speaking of. How poignant it'll be when Elmodaddy asks where Elmo is and Elmo says, "Elmo is right in front of you" and Elmodaddy asks where, getting addled, confused, thinking he's going blind, flashing back to rapid gunfire around him, and Elmo says, "Elmo wants to take his daddy home," which, of course, freaks the shit out of Elmodaddy, who thinks he's about to be dragged away by strangers for who knows what kind of tortures committed by "El-mo," which sounds like a haji name anyways. It'll be like "Who's On First," except with scars and shrapnel.

Then how cute it'll be when Elmodaddy discovers he's got no job he can possibly do, being so fucked up from his injuries, and so he starts to drink, which doesn't help the nightmares, the way he's gotta get up every night to walk the perimeter inside his own home, and the fact that he can't fuck Elmomommy anymore, and Elmo disappears ever more into his fantasy land of psychic goldfish, smiling computers, and strange bow-tied men and women who mime their misunderstanding of basic language outside his window.

Of course, that all might be wishful thinking. The whole thing could end with Elmodaddy being ripped to cloth and stuffing shreds by an IED because his government couldn't afford to equip him with the armor he needed to protect his red fuzzy ass. Then we can watch as Elmo radicalizes, marches, and chants, "One, two, three, four, Elmo doesn't want your fucking war." And, hey, he'll still be teaching the children how to count.

A Mash Note For Tony Snow:
Oh, Tony Snow, you disarmingly smiley sucker of cock, yes, you wrote this week about how all over the media you have been told who you are, what you do, and where you can stick this spiky dildo the Rude Pundit keeps on hand for chatty little tools like you. Oh, sweet Tony, how you write about "venom" and "insult" in contemporary media, as if asking for everyone to be nice to you as you ascend to the position of lead scornmonger of the sneering Bush administration. But, seriously, Tony, now that you have to shift your head from Rupert Mudoch's rotting crotch to George W. Bush's, come up for a breath while you have a chance, for, indeed, the President likes to be blown right after he's done biking for the day. So you won't be long for fresh air in this life.

Of course you'll fit right in with the cretinous pseudo-utopians at the White House, you who so recently opined about the resurrection of Christ at Easter, "It is too preposterous, too outrageous, too incredible not to be true, and not to be the key to a much larger truth." Goddamn right, and it's that kind of fine, fine syllogistic thinking that'll keep us battling WMD chimeras and nuclear phantoms until we're tossing abstinence-only-trained virgins into pits of fire to appease unseen, unknown gods.

And, Tony, you know that if those girls aren't virgins just what to do should they get pregnant. Writing about how cool it was that South Dakota completely outlawed abortion, you said it was awesome that the state had rejected "the popular rape-and-incest exception." Explaining this seemingly cruel, vicious, and punitive action, you justified, "If one argues that a woman would suffer trauma by bringing such babies to term, what would prevent other women from citing trauma as an equally cogent reason for their abortions? Trauma introduces an obligation to pay special heed to the victims of rape or incest." And we wouldn't wanna do that. Bitch gets raped by Daddy, bitch is becomin' mom and grandma at once, right, Tony? (Yes, you do offer the humane hand-out of "counseling," which is not unlike offering a mint to someone who got run over by a car.)

Motherfucker, you are hardcore. The Rude Pundit bets that in the locker room at Fox "News," when you creep in to listen to Hume, Hannity, and O'Reilly talk about how nutzoid right wing they're gonna be that day, you figure out how to go even nuttier. You're like the craziest hooker at the whorehouse, the one who knows she's not the prettiest, not the tightest pussy, but she wants to be the most popular whore there so she decides she's the one who'll do any fuckin' kind of fucking that people ask. Someone wants the snowball, hot Karl, dirty Sanchez, felching mudslide, golden showers, and/or pukey Jack, you are the go-to girl. You may go back to your room every morning covered in cum, shit, piss, blood, and/or Crisco, but no other piece of ass is gonna out-fuck you.

In one fuckin' column, you called removing the feeding tube from a comatose girl "capital punishment," used a fraudulent researcher as a way of discrediting embryonic stem cell research, and paid tribute to the "March for Life" in D.C. Shit, man, toss in your great big Christmas "Tony loves the Jesusbaby" column, and, dude, the base just got itself a little hors d'oeuvre to keep its tummy quiet until the midterms.

And the worst part of it all, Tony, is that when you were at Fox "News," you got paid by your pimps for the quality of your rim jobs. Now, the Rude Pundit's helping to pay your fuckin' salary, as is every tax-shoveling American. Yup, we're paying you to abuse the press, lie to us, and pretend you have the interests of more than one man at heart. Just like back at the old job.

Re-Re-Re-Re-Justifying the Iraq War:
Yesterday was one of those mind-boggling, stomach-churning, oh-shit-he's-really-our-leader days. In what was billed as a speech on "Comprehensive Immigration Reform," Bush spent half his time re-re-re-re-justifying the invasion of Iraq. Here he is, our goddamned President, having an acid flashback to 2002, talking about why we're at war: "[H]ere's the danger of having an enemy with a safe haven in Iraq, Iraq has got wealth. Iraq has -- had weapons of mass destruction and has the knowledge as to how to produce weapons of mass destruction. And the confluence of a terrorist network with weapons of mass destruction is the biggest threat the United States of America faces. They have said it's just a matter of time."

Who the fuck is the "they" there? Intelligence analysts? His cabinet? Or are "they" the terrorists themselves? 'Cause, like, that'd mean that a bunch of sexually repressed crazed religious fundamentalists are setting our foreign policy and dictating massive spending and loss of life on the part of the United States and...oh, fuck, the irony just made the Rude Pundit's nuts retreat into his body cavity in fear.

After having his WMD Tourette's moment, Bush put it out there about who's really runnin' the White House: "I based a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty, and secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free." Ergo, Jeeezus sez free the peoples so the peoples must be freed and Bush, with the big ol' earthly army, he's gots to do the freein' that Jeeezus (under the guise of his code name, "The Almighty") wants him to be doin'. C'mon, motherfuckers, does the man have to get the Rascals to spell it out for you? "Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be/ Nat'ral situation for a man to be free."

So here's where we are: a religious belief is the basis for Bush to wage war on Islamic radicals. Or, in other words, and here's the sphincter-reducing horror of it all: when Bush speaks to his base about the war, he simply confirms everything that forever-on-the-lam(b) Osama bin Laden said in his little "Nyah-nyah" to the West the other day.

But the President, he's a student of history, you know. Iraq needs itself some time, 'cause it's like the United States back in its beginnings. Spaketh Bush, "My Secretary of State's relatives were enslaved in the United States even though we had a Constitution that said all were -- that believed in the dignity, or at least proclaimed to believe in the dignity of all." Get it? Condi's black. Dunno what that has to do with forming a working government in Iraq, but, yup, Condi's black. Bush did not note that that same Constitution proclaimed that Condoleezza Rice's "relatives" were only worth 3/5 of a white person. The implication, of course, is that a nation, a people, indeed, individuals, recognize error and failings, taking steps to right what was wrong.

And Bush was given another opportunity to acknowledge mistakes when an audience member tossed him the softball question, "Now that you are President, and you've had a chance to go through the experience and you're in your second term, candidly, if you had it to do over, would there be anything that you'd do differently?"

Watching the President stumble through an answer to this was a little like watching a blind man left alone in the middle of an empty warehouse, seeing him move around like he's about to trip over something until he reaches the sweet safety of the constant wall he can lean against. First he threatened that he would still run for office. Then he fumbled around, saying, "I have enjoyed this experience in a way that's hard for me to describe to you. Listen, there have been some rough moments. But it is an incredible honor to serve our country." And then, aw, fuck, thank Christ, he found the wall, and turned the whole question into whether or not he'd've sent troops to Iraq, going on for-fucking-ever on how it was "the hardest decision" and how he tried to solve it "diplomatically," but, yeah, sure, there were some errors in "tactics," but, oh, sorry, he's getting into "minutia," which is just code for "I'm not answering your fuckin' quesion."

And then he went into monkeyfuck crazy land: "The fundamental question on the Iraq theater, though, is did we put enough troops in there in the first place. That's the debate in Washington. I'm sure you've heard about it. Let me just tell you what happened. I called Tommy Franks in with Don Rumsfeld and said, Tommy, if we're going in, you design the plan and you got what you need. I said -- I remember the era when politicians were trying to run wars, people trying to fine-tune this or fine-tune that. One the lessons of Vietnam, it seemed like to me -- still does -- is that people tried to make decisions on behalf of the military, which I think is a terrible precedent to make if you're the Commander-in-Chief. By the way, you can't run a war, you can't make decisions based upon polls and focus groups, either."

Really, and, c'mon, what else do you need to know?

When the President Visited the Ex-President:
It took some convincing, but Gerald Ford was able to pry President Bush away from the Secret Service detail for some private time. Betty entertained the agents with mai tais and a wobbly rendition of her famous fan dance, something she used to do for the swine flu suffering soldiers at Fort Dix. Of course, back then, in the mid-1970s, the whole thing would end with a nude, drunk Betty Ford with her face down in the lap of a corporal or a Soviet diplomat, with someone having to pry her clenched jaw off the erect cock of the poor, screaming, horrified man. Thank god that the press was suffering from the beginning of its post-Watergate malaise, or someone might have written about the time that Betty Ford almost de-dicked the Yugoslav ambassador.

The President visited the ex-President at Ford's modest home in Rancho Mirage, California, on the edge of a golf course this past weekend. Gerald Ford is not long for this world, so it was, indeed, a possible last chance to gain some wisdom from the elder Oval Office dweller. It was a fairly super-secret part of Bush's schedule, like an unannounced trip to Iraq, but the two spoke at length. After shooing away the Secret Service, Ford gestured for Bush to follow him. Bush smirked. He knew what was coming - he'd spent enough time with old men on golf courses to know that Ford was gonna show him some old trophies or a special club, maybe even a ball autographed by Sam Snead.

Ford locked the wooden door and rifled around in the bottom of his largest desk drawer. "Here it is," he said. "Help me with this." Bush reached in and grabbed a box made of gun metal. "Goddamn hands," Ford spat at his shaking fingers. "Open it." Slowly, cautiously, a little paranoid, but still thinking this was all a senile fucker's simple game, Bush opened the creaky-hinged, half-rusted box. Bush recoiled. The stink hit him first, the musty, old leather-like smell. Then he realized what he was looking at - body parts - scalps, fingers, balls. Some in baggies, some just sitting there.

"What the fuck--" Bush muttered as he tried to back away. The old center for Michigan grabbed the President's hand in one of those senior death grips and pulled him forward.

"Not so fast, Georgie. You walk away now, and I'll put in my last memoirs about all the times your Dad had to have the CIA disappear hookers and coke dealers you wouldn't pay." Bush relaxed, straightened his tie, and glared at the old man, remembering his father's fond talk about being able to easily manipulate Ford. "Half the bastards in your administration committed their first evil in my name-Cheney, Rumsfeld. You think they learned their shit in a vacuum? We faced the fuckin' Khmer Rouge, motherfuckers who make Saddam Hussein look like the dime-a-goddamn-dozen tinpot dictator he was. We faced the Soviet fuckin' Union, with its thousands of nukes pointing right at us, so organized and filled with hate for America that it makes al-Qaeda look like back stall of the shithouse group it actually is. And you think you have bad ass motherfuckers around? I had Kissinger. Cocksucker used to eat East Timorese babies for breakfast and Chilean mothers for midnight snacks. So a little goddamn respect, you little shit."

Bush tried to suppress his anger and his desire to shove the 92-year old out of his way, which made him twitch his jaw and sneer before smirking again. "What's that shit in the box?" he asked, relaxing, realizing the best thing he could do was just pause and wait for Ford to be done.

"The past, the present, and the future," Ford said. He shakily reached into the box and pulled out a scalp, shriveled with hair clinging to it. "Taken from a Japanese POW in the Philippines. I was there, in the thick of it, taking on fire. Got half a dozen of these babies. Wore them on my belt. Used to scare the shit out of the Japs. The past. Every goddamn thing you are not." He put it back in the box and pulled out fingers. "From a Marine trying to help other Americans get the fuck out of Saigon at the tail end of Operation Frequent Wind. He lost these on a 'copter blade just airlifting contractors and civilians back to the Midway. He gave them to me as a gift, said it was a way to remember to never again do this to our troops. It's what you face now, Georgie. Your present. Whether you like it or not. History's like that big goddamned hurricane - you can't do a thing to stop it. Wanna touch them?" Bush didn't answer. "Didn't thinks so." Ford put the fingers back. He pulled out a plastic baggy. "And these? Nixon's balls. I told him I wanted them after he died in exchange for his pardon. A real man would've faced the music and gone to jail. Not Dick, though. Craven and selfish to the end." He waved the baggy at Bush. "Your future. Someone's gonna own your balls someday, son." He laughed as he put the baggy back in the box. "Put it away," Ford ordered the younger President, gesturing at the box.

As he did so, Bush mumbled, "And you're showin' me this why?"

Ford sighed, "'Cause I'm Jacob Fucking Marley, you idiot. Here's my chains. Stupid loyalty to lost causes is a weakness. As is loyalty to lost people. It's too late for me. It's why I backed Rumsfeld the other day. Force of habit. But there's still time--" The Secret Service knocked on the door. Time to go.

Bush smirked. "Been nice, Jerry. A real trip down memory lane. I'll tell Dad you send your love. Now, be a good guy, and let's go say hello to the reporters."

Outside, Bush and Ford stood next to each other. The older man said, "We solved all the problems, didn't we?"

Bush flinched and hastily added, "That's right, you sure did."

After the motorcade left, Ford headed back into the house, the maid cleaning up the feathers that fell off Betty's much-used fans. He took out his speech on foreign policy, where he talked about the end of a useless war, about the growing dependence of the United States on foreign oil, on the need to allow intelligence services to work unencumbered by too much oversight. In his shaking hands, in his dwindling eyesight, all Gerald Ford could think was "Damned to repeat."

(Fucked Blogger: Blogger's been down. Now it's up. Enjoy the merriment.)

Hu Are You (A Haiku in Honor of President Bush's Apology to the Chinese President Because a Chinese Woman Yelled in Protest at the Chinese President During His Arrival Ceremony at the White House):
If only one could
Drag Helen Thomas out by
Her heels and hair, eh?

Note: The Rude Pundit's on the road. Back to full-length rudeness on Monday.

Note Two: Yeah, yeah, haiku's Japanese. It's also short. Wanna make something of it?

A Brief Lecture On the Function of Press Releases (With a Side Note On the Need To Cage Michelle Malkin Like a Rabid Shih-Tzu):
Here's a quick and easy lesson regarding press releases: the "Contact" information is actually for the reporter or writer receiving the release. It is not a part of the information you want generally published or announced. The implication is "If you need more info or find this interesting enough to write a longer article, you can get in touch with someone here, at this phone number or this e-mail address." It's a kind of trust between the person sending the release and the person receiving it.

Whenever the Rude Pundit has sent out a press release, he makes sure that the contact phone number ain't a home or cell or that the e-mail address ain't a personal one. Why? Because, inevitably, some stupid fuck at a newspaper will think that it's part of the release itself and print the contact information. And then, even if you're announcing a knitting circle fer kittens, you will get phone calls from some loudmouth wad of fuck who wants to know what business you have knittin' fer kittens or what you're knittin' and will it hurt kittens.

So, yeah, the UC-Santa Cruz students who put out a press release for their Students Against War protest against military recruiters on their campus have learned their lesson. And that lesson is that vile, savage cunt-beasts who disagree with your politics will gleefully destroy your personal life to demonstrate the petty power they hold over the pathetic trolls who read said cunt-beasts' columns and who masturbate furiously when one cunt-beast or another appears on Fox "News" (motto: "Cunt-Beasts have a home at Fox").

And while the Rude Pundit does not encourage the publicizing of the personal info of political writers, well, fuck, what's good fer the goose is good fer the gander, ya know? If big bad bloggress Michelle Malkin, who really needs to be caged like a rabid shih-tzu, wants to play with people's lives away from the protests and the SAW meetings, then she shouldn't expect to be treated any better. Do unto others and all that shit is what the Christians say. Or so the Rude Pundit hears.

(Note: The Rude Pundit is out on the highways and byways of Uhmerka and will have shorter posts. Back to full rude force on Monday.)

Mainlining Those Nukes:
Ask any shaky, scabby, snotty addict shitting himself in the corner of a filthy room strewn with cigarette butts and bloody Kleenex and he'll give you the same answer: Marijuana wasn't the gateway, you asshole. It was the legal shit, the sweet esophagal burn of alcohol that led him down this path. 'Cause it was the alcohol that led to the pot, and once you make your first illegal connection, once you're a buyer and not just a party toker, it's not that far a leap to ask what else the dealer's got or to get curious about what the next high is like. Yep, the worst, the path to full-on fiendom, is to get that jones for bigger and better highs. Yeah, ganja's great, but what about 'shrooms? 'Shrooms are nice, but what about ecstasy? Cool shit, man, but how about coke? Aw, fuck, coke's sick, motherfucker, but howzabout some heroin? And the next thing you know, you're cravin' speedballs and you are so, so very fucked.

Yesterday President Bush answered a Nedra Pickler-tickler of a question about "the possibility of a nuclear strike" on Iran, with a not-quite-reassuring "All options are on the table," and you just knew that Bush was hearing the siren call of the bigger and harder high. Yeah, man, blowin' shit up in Afghanistan was fun, but Bush needed more, motherfucker. So a big-ass (but not big-ass enough) invasion of Iraq was awesome, a rush, but that buzz is old news. What the Bush administration is cravin' is the big high: nukin' some shit. You can see it the eyes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. The jones, the curiosity, the chance to leave one big motherfuckin' footprint on history.

And we who have entered that room with that dopester, hopin' for that next good rush, we know he's a hopeless case, we know that it's the short slide to doom. We can only hope that stupid fucker ODs before he hurts someone else.

Note: Before there's any goddamn e-mail about it, the Rude Pundit is not saying that everyone who drinks or lights up is on the fast path to crack whore.

Another note: The Rude Pundit is on the road; shorter posts for the next coupla days.

Three Signs That Your Superpower Is Becoming a Cheap Rip-Off of the Soviet Union:
1. Members of the party in power pledge allegiance to their party's own symbol. At a GOP dinner in San Diego, the fine Republican attendees stood like good meerkats and began to say the Pledge of Allegiance until some observant Pavlovian diner noticed that there was no, you know, American flag to pledge to. "Pledge to the elephant," shouted one quick-thinking GOPer, and all the pledgers, including weepy Rep. Darrell Issa, turned to say the pledge to a starred and striped elephant banner.

2. Children sing songs in praise of the government, no matter how incompetent and dangerous they've been to those children. At the gay-infused White House Easter egg hunt, a group of "Katrina Kids" sang a song about how major great President Bush, Congress, and FEMA have been in helping them. It's a little like a National Guard member thanking Bush for sending him to Iraq 'cause it gets him out of the house. Except creepier. The song was sung to the tune of that song of blind optimism by Cy Coleman, "Hey, Look Me Over," which has the prescient line, "I figure whenever you’re down and out, the only way is up." Truer words, motherfuckers, truer words.

3. The government creates guidelines telling adults what they can and can't do with their bodies. The Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families has defined "abstinence" for abstinence-only programs seeking federal grants. That definition says abstinence ain't just a bullshit lie that conservatives tell teenagers. Nope, see, now the only time you can fuck is in a man-woman marriage. Otherwise, no fucking, of any sort: no single sex, no gay sex, no Scalia-approved orgies, no under the desk blow jobs, no on top of the desk anal, no muff-diving, no rim jobs, no hand jobs, no backward daisy chain monkey in the middles with a butterfly twist. No sexual stimulation between two people unless one's a guy, one's a gal, and they're miserably united in connubial bliss.

Hey, all we need is morning bread lines, absurd government secrecy, spying on citizens, a foreign policy of militarily imposing our ideology on others, and soaring fuel prices...oh, shit. Scratch that. All we need is morning bread lines, and then welcome to the Politburo's America.

Joe Klein Hearts Newt Gingrich. A Lot:
Really, and c'mon, was it necessary for Time magazine writer Joe Klein to get down on his knees and gratifyingly suck Newt Gingrich's cock? For in his latest column (if by "column," you mean, "pitiful cries for attention from a self-hating moderate begging for continued relevance"), Klein gives such an enthusiastic hummer to the disgraced former Speaker of the House (and, please, gang, let's never forget that that round turd with the white mop top was run out of DC) that one wonders if he did it all in one breath, the sign of the well-practiced fellater. Gurgled Klein as he deep-throated the entirety of the Gingrich johnson, "It's almost always a joy listening to Gingrich when he's on a tear. And he's almost always on a tear of some sort." Klein is explaining his title, "Why Newt Is So Much Fun To Watch (While He's Balls Deep in My Face)."

Was it necessary for Klein to go even further, to lick the waxy folds of Newt Gingrich's balls clean with all the joy of a big-titted, coked-out groupie girl offering to let each ZZ Top roadie jack off on her if she can have ten minutes alone with Billy? Because the image one gets is of Newt Gingrich, pants around his ankles, fists on his waist like a cheap Superman rip-off, gazing at an American flag in the distance as Joe Klein tongue bathes the balls of the man who was so brave, he dumped his cancer-ridden wife while she was in the hospital. Lapped Klein, "We might even create a new federal position to accommodate him, sort of like party ideologist in the old Soviet Union, except that the U.S. job would be the opposite of what it was in the U.S.S.R. Instead of imposing orthodoxy, the party idea-ologist—ideology is so un-American—would propose unorthodoxy." Parse that motherfucker if you dare.

Joe Klein has taken long swallows of Gingrich's man-goo in the past. Back in 1995 in Newsweek, writing then, as now, about Gingrich possibly running for President, Klein gulped, "'Newt Gingrich has been acting more like the president of the United States than the president himself,' Lamar Alexander said before Oklahoma City. And it was true. Gingrich's prime-time speech at the end of the hundred days...seemed far more convincing than anything Clinton had done since the election." Ahh, that's the Klein we know and love, so full of loathing for Bill Clinton, like the good, soothing "liberal" who lets the Republicans sleep at night because he wants them to like him so fucking much. 'Cause, you know, a liberal can't be credible unless he or she attacks the left and demonstrates they love them some conservatives, too.

Like Klein in the April 25, 1994 Newsweek, when he wrote a line that could come straight out of his column this week: "He barrels through our national life with grand exuberance and flying elbows. He's a brilliant player, energetic and innovative." Yes, when a man loves a man, it's a beautiful thing. Klein has criticized Gingrich, too, but it's got the petty air of a man who has just spent the morning picking dried Newt semen out of his beard, waiting mournfully for a phone call that never rings.

So, yeah, Joe Klein can't help himself. He can't get enough of Newt Gingrich's cock. Klein dreams about it, leaning back at his desk in deep contemplation of the feel, the contour, the delicious moments he spends licking it clean when Newt makes a mouth deposit. "Newt may be carrying too much baggage to be President, but wouldn't it be fun—and a boon for our democracy—to have him onstage in the coming debate?" Klein writes, deludedly, madly, monomaniacally focused, his mind so full of man-love that he can't recognize that what he's really asking is if the convicted child molester would like to come back to work at the day care.

Maryscott O'Connor, My Left Wing, and the Rude Pundit in the Washington Post Today:
The front page article, by David Finkel, is focused on My Left Wing founder (and Kossack) Maryscott O'Connor, about whom the Rude Pundit has long held dear a dream of a crazed weekend in a hotel suite in Santa Fe, with mezcal, peyote, and a live trio of tribal drummers. Finkel seeks to define "the Angry Left" through O'Connor, who will no doubt come across as crazy and bitchy to the cowering posers on the right. Finkel came up with the phrase his little ol' self, and while he occasionally seems as if he wants to pigeonhole O'Connor (and, by implication, the entire left), Maryscott's passion, commitment, and humanity come through. Which means Finkel was not out to demonize her. (Although let's not get into the photo editor.)

Along the way, the Rude Pundit gets quoted. Which is strange, since the Rude Pundit is full of love bones for everyone.

(Oh, by the way, long as we're tossin' out the linky love, check out Dark Syde's broadside against fundamentalism over on O'Connor's old digs, Daily Kos. It'll fill you with Easter bunny fuzziness.)

Mercy for the Moussaoui Jurors:
Let's say, and why not, that you are a juror in the Zacharias Moussaoui penalty trial. You have been placed in a locked room with a couple of dozen people. And while in that locked room, you are forced to listen, for hours and hours, to recordings from victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. You're forced to hear the sounds of airline pilots of United Flight 93 gurgling through their slit throats. You're forced to listen to dozens of cell phone calls from people about to die or in the process of dying, including the nightmarish final screams of people in the World Trade Center as the buildings collapsed. You have to look at photos of charred Pentagon corpses, human jerky, and pictures of the exploded water balloon bodies of people who leapt from 90 stories high. You are forced to listen to a parade of testimony from people talking about trying to save others, including tales of heroic rescuers who couldn't hold onto victims because the burned skin kept sliding off in their hands. You hear stories from people who survived, from the families of those who died, about children wanting their parents or uncles. It goes on, day after day, images and descriptions of people leaping, people scrambling, people dying. You, though, are locked in the room. You can't get up and leave. You can't turn the page, click over to the comics, change the channel. And all of it is being paraded in front of you so you can decide whether or not the bugfuck insane egomaniac in the defendant's chair should be executed.

In essence, the prosecution's approach has been to take out a crowbar and beat the jurors bloody and unconscious until they can do nothing but drool and piss their acquiescence to the revenge that the government wants to enact on Moussaoui. The whole ridiculous, overemotional exercise of the prosecution has even been criticized by William F. Buckley. In his most recent column in his ongoing series "Clenched Patrician Anuses Can't Be Pried Open Even With Silver Spoons," Buckley barely moves his thin lips to say, "Thought renders unintelligible what the prosecution is up to in describing the luridities of 9/11 on Flight 93. The only explanation for what they are doing is that they are covert agents for the movie United 93, which is simultaneously going out from Hollywood."

As Buckley says (and, really, it makes the Rude Pundit want to head off for a morning vodka and ecstasy binge that'll end up with him face down in the gutter after being blown and rolled by some hooker or other by noon to say he agrees even partially with Buckley), Moussaoui's been found guilty. What's following is merely blood sport for the sake of blood sport, a real-world rendition of films like Wolf Creek and The Devil's Rejects, where the idea is to see how far the blood and gore and screams can push the audience. Except there the audience decides to go. The Moussaoui jury is trapped in a house of horrors that serves no purpose except to horrify them, to raise their bloodlust, to make them want to enact ancient tortures of tearing Moussaoui limb from limb with their bare hands for having even tangentially been a part of the nightmare they have been forced to experience again and again.

The Rude Pundit has no pity for Zacharias Moussaoui, who should be locked up in the basement of Bedlam in a straitjacket and rubber room where he can shit himself and mutter endlessly about Allah wantin' him to go all jihad on Western asses. He is merely the latest in an eons-long line of deluded wannabe religious martyrs, from every goddamn faith. To execute Moussaoui would be something akin to lashing a masochistic thief - sure, it might make you feel better, make you feel like you're doin' something for the greater good, but, really, you're just givin' him exactly what he wants. That's not to mention the whole "barbarism" factor of capital punishment, but we're not allowed to discuss that anymore, are we.

No, fuck Moussaoui. The Rude Pundit wonders at what point does the jury in the Zacharias Moussaoui trial get to stop being tortured? If this was being done to prisoners at Gitmo, we'd be up in arms. 'Cause the trial's gonna end, soon, and they're gonna leave that locked room, and then we have a dozen or so people who have to go on with their lives hearing the echoes of those cries, those screams, closing their eyes and seeing those corpses. And for what good? In the end, none. Just another stage in our ongoing fetishization of 9/11, our American mourning that we're never allowed to move on from.

Bush Adminstration Says, "Screw Science and Wiccan Soldiers":
Sometimes one's daily life in George W. Bush's America makes you feel like Sonny Corleone at the right tollbooth at the wrong damn time. You pick up yer morning newspaper or turn on yer NPR and it's like a troop of mobsters just appear out of nowhere and start strafing your sorry ass with machine gun fire, feeling the quick burn and drive of the bullets burrowing into your flesh and meat, the number of 'em coming at you so fast that the force of the bullets actually keeps your dead body upright, turning you into a scarlet Swiss cheese puppet, dancin' that macabre ballet until you finally just collapse into yourself and bleed out. And, like a good Sisyphus, like a damned Prometheus, the next day you gotta do it again.

But then there's also the times you dig around a little bit, like readin' Fark Politics or Think Progress, and on top of the daily hit job, while you're sittin' and waitin' for yer blood to pool in the gravel around you, it's like out of nowhere a dwarf walks up to you and starts kickin' you in the nuts. He's not a particularly strong dwarf, but he's kickin' hard enough to really hurt your balls, which sucks, since you're already full of lead, pissin' yourself, hopin' for the sweet kiss of death. You're not even strong enough to swat the creepy little fucker away. All you can think is, "C'mon, do you gotta kick me in the nuts while I'm already down?" But this is a moot question, for this is the era of the George W. Bush, and, down or not, your balls are fair game for dwarf-punting.

For instance, this week Secretary of Energy Samuel "I Could Not Look More Like an Avaricious CEO If I Tried" Bodman shitcanned the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. The SEAB is an "independent" body set up in one form in 1978 and in its current form in 1990 "to provide advice, information, and recommendations to the Secretary of Energy on the Department's basic and applied research activities, economic and national security policy, educational issues, laboratory management, and activities and operations of the Department of Energy as the Secretary may direct." Its members "include two Nobel Laureates, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and senior representatives from academia, business, public and environmental groups, labor, and federal/state government." And, as such, is completely useless to the Bush Administration.

In fact, according to a brief mention in the New York Times, the board and its independent research and advice are unneeded since the President laid out an agenda in his State of the Union. Sighed Bodman's spokesperson, the Secretary "believes that we have a strong agenda moving forward with the American Competitiveness and Advanced Energy Initiatives put forth by the White House." 'Cause, you know, with 3 buck a gallon gas just around the corner and no real movement towards anything like an energy policy that doesn't involve getting fucked by the oil conglomerates who don't even offer Americans the good graces of a reacharound, who needs some tweedy board offering "reports" on "science" and "technology"?

Another scrotum bludgeoning is courtesy of the Department of Veteran's Affairs, which, in case you didn't know, has a list of approved religious markers for headstones for dead soldiers for its cemeteries and memorials. Christian, Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, Tenrikyo, you die for your country, and the symbol of your faith can be displayed for all eternity on your grave. Fuck, if you're an atheist, they got a symbol for that - looks like a nuclear atom, but, what the hell, you know. Except if you're a Wiccan.

Yep, if you're a nature-worshippin' pagan, motherfucker, doesn't matter if you left half your internal organs festering on the hillsides of Afghanistan. Your star in a circle ain't welcome on your memorial. So when Wiccan soldier Patrick Stewart of Nevada died when his Chinook helicopter was shot down by an RPG, his family wanted to emblazon his plaque on the memorial wall for Nevada vets with the Wiccan pentacle. Turns out, though, for Veterans Affairs, freedom of religion means the agency decides how you're free to worship. They were told, "Nope. Not on the approved list. Go fuck a tree."

Sure, sure, this'll all be solved soon when the right forms go through the right offices and the right stamps are placed on the right documents, but, still, and all, is this censorship really something the government oughta be involved in at any level?

No, no, it's not as big a deal as Scooter or the bio-labs or Iran or Italy or immigration or hundreds of other searing bullets that fly at us every day. But it's another kick in the nuts. A reminder of the ludicrous times in which we live, the slide into absurdity we are descending.

Correction: Yesterday, the Rude Pundit described Durham, NC as "mostly black." This is not correct. The Rude Pundit should have said "mostly non-white." Durham's only 44% black. according to the 2000 census. It is 48% white. Poin o' the day award to rude reader Alice fer the heads up.

The Duke Distraction:
Over at CNNMSNBCFox, a great, huge sigh of relief must have gone up a couple of weeks ago when a young black woman from a traditionally black college in a mostly black town accused the assholes on the lacrosse team at very white, very rich Duke University of rape at one of their asshole parties where they get to pretend they're not all really jonesin' to fuck each other by maybe raping the evening's stripper. With Natalee Holloway becoming a memory of the Aruban tides and no missing white children to worry about, there was a very real possibility that CNNMSNBCFox may have had to cover the news.

Like this morning, you could actually see the moment where CNN's American Morning's Soledad O'Brien unclenched her sphincter muscles when she moved on quickly: "A little bit of movement to tell you about on immigration this morning. Republican leaders, Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert, are backing off provisions in their bills that would make illegal immigration a felony. That's been a big complaint of both Democrats and protesters in the streets, as well. And despite an apparent lack of DNA evidence, the rape case against Duke University's lacrosse players may be far from over. CNN's Amanda Rosseter is live for us at Duke University in Durham this morning." Oh, shit, you could see in her doe eyes, lemme swim through the mire and shit of hard national news to get to the blissful liferaft of local crime. (This was right after Miles O'Brien quickly glossed over the Washington Post report that President Bush lied about the so-called Iraqi biological weapons mobile homes o' mass destruction he crowed about in 2003. It was the only mention of it the entire morning.)

Sweet Christ, how the news net anchors must be making sacrifices of virgin interns at the grave of Morton Downey, Jr. for thanks that Durham D.A. Mike Nifong has decided to press on with the case, despite the failure of DNA tests to link any players to the alleged victim. For, indeed, without the raped body of a black woman to exploit, Anderson Cooper might have to ask more about Seymour Hersh's New Yorker report that the United States is considering the use of nukes in Iran than "When you hear of tactical nukes, what do you think?" Which was all that Cooper pursued the issue with former Brigadier General David Grange. 'Cause, you know, the mainstream media wouldn't want to actually think about what it might mean if the U.S. nukes Iran. (And all you cats and kids out there over thirty, doesn't this whole bombing Iran thing seem even more retro than blowing the shit out of Iraq?)

Goddamn, it's so great that Duke sophomore, lacrosse player, and asshole Ryan McFadyen wrote an e-mail where he said the team, in a bizarre bonding ritual, would kill and skin strippers as a way of demonstrating, one presumes, that they really like fucking women instead of deeply desiring to feel each other's cocks in each other's mouths. Because what the fuck would Rita Crosby, Dan Abrams, Joe Scarborough and myriad other bottom feeders have to talk about? Issues? Things that matter to more than just a single community? Would CNNMSNBCFox have to create shows that aren't merely plagues upon all of us, sucking our attention spans dry so that our heads are so full of Laci and Natalee and who-the-fuck-ever that we don't have time to think about, say, the ongoing clusterfuck of failure that is the response to Hurricane Katrina? One imagines that if Greta Van Susteren didn't have a dead or damaged female to parade around, she'd go out and whack the first blonde she saw (watch out, E.D.).

Yeah, between the Duke rape investigation and the ludicrously overwrought Zacharias Moussaoui sentencing trial, there's not much time left for real explorations of real ideas, conflicts, failures, fuck-ups, and destruction. It's not like any of that shit matters when there's a murdered or battered woman to thrust out there, shining that spotlight on her and everyone around her, making sure that we know more about the Dutch guys accused of doing something some night with Natalee Holloway than we know about our nation's plans for future, unending war, for which, if a draft has to happen, might thin the ranks of the assholes on the Duke lacrosse team.

The Crazed Right Tries To Deal With a Rising Tide:
Conservatives are going bugfuck nutzoid at the immigration protests yesterday. To read and/or watch the right wing punditry is to witness the bittersweet sight of a pack of rabid mongrels drowning in a flooded alleyway. Yeah, it's kind of painful to see them suffer, paws trying to desperately find solid ground, whines coming through their foaming mouths, but, you know, fuck 'em - all they did was rip up the garbage, chase the children, and spread disease.

Rush Limbaugh, a man who should be fed his own oxycontin-infused liposuctioned fat, offers us his insights on what people might be thinking when they see the protests: "'Look at all the yard work not being done. Look at all the bathrooms in Los Angeles not being cleaned today. Don't they have jobs?'" But Limbaugh is clever, like the guy who says, "I have a friend who's so fuckin' fat and stoned all the time that he can't get an erection to save his life or his relationship with a hot news anchoress. What d'ya suggest?" and you're thinkin', "Sure, yeah, your friend, huh?" See, Limbaugh says that "some of you say" the openly racist shit, as if, no, it's not him, he's only the voice of the people, if by "people," you mean "slavering monkeys for whom discourse is flinging their own shit outside their cages."

Limbaugh's also in a tizzy because, according to the bloated bloviator, Democrats not only see the protests as an opportunity for voters already here, but see amnesty as a means to "a permanent Democratic majority." Without even getting into the mind-blowing hypocrisy of a Republican, a supporter of Tom DeLay, decrying the tactics of a party for going for a permanent majority, let's just let the man twist in the wind himself: "You're looking at a demand for the recreation of the welfare state. You're looking at a marched demand, a protested demand, for the recreation of statism, big government socialism. You had people marching today basically for socialism...Hell's bells, folks, these people are being promised socialism. These people are promised they can vote, and they're being promised benefits. They're going to be able to suckle the giant teat of the federal pig, and that's what they know, and that's one of the reasons -- not all, but there's a good number of them that are coming for that reason. The electoral system is under assault here. The Democrats want to legalize felon voting. They want to now legalize the voting of illegals, voting rights for illegals." Goddamn, it must suck to have to fill three hours every day with the sound of your own madness. You just say shit, even if what you're saying Democrats want to do would require amending the U.S. Constitution without, you know, pointing that out.

In any sane nation, Rush Limbaugh would be a homeless junkie, shouting on street corners before he pissed himself again. If Rush Limbaugh was in a crack house, havin' those jittery rock comedowns, the shakes before the pipe, the other crackheads would be screaming at him to shut the fuck up or someone's gonna shove a cock in his mouth.

Which leads, quite naturally, to Michelle Malkin, who really does need to be caged like a rabid shih-tzu. Malkin has been doing the whole "lookie-here-who's-a-protestin'" thing, showing that in groups of hundreds of thousands of marchers, there's gonna be some fringe elements that Malkin's gonna use to discredit the entire movement. Oooh, look, some Larouche supporters, some Black Panthers, some Communistas, oh, my. Oh, no, someone's sayin' somethin' bad about poor ol' Lou Dobbs. You know, could someone introduce Malkin to a group of white white supremacists and see what they have to say to her Asian ass?

The most bizarre thing Malkin and Limbaugh both trotted out was the fact that Ted Kennedy spoke at the DC protest. Shocked, shocked they were that the man who co-wrote the Senate Judiciary Committee's original bill on immigration reform might actually have something to say on the subject. Read Kennedy's speech - it's rhetorically pretty mild, but energetic as hell.

Malkin, Limbaugh, and the rest have to discredit the protests. Because the water's risin' fast, and the last bits of debris are floatin' by, and all the diseased mongrels have to figure out what they're gonna cling to so they can ride it out or just plunge under the water.

Update on Carlos Gutierrez: Still working on answering the question the Rude Pundit posed yesterday.

A Rude Question: Was Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez an Illegal Alien?:
The Rude Pundit does not have an answer to this question: When Secretary of Commerce and former CEO of Kellogg's Carlos Gutierrez was a young boy, were he and his family in the United States illegally during the early 1960s?

See, in 1959, when Castro took over in Cuba, Gutierrez's father was a successful pineapple exporter, and the family was quite wealthy. But Papa Gutierrez pissed off Che Guevara, the business was taken by Castro, and the family fled in 1960, when Carlos was only six years-old. They arrived in Miami with, according to various reports, somewhere between two and eight thousand dollars and somewhere between 22 and 25 suitcases. They left Cuba, as about 200,000 others did, on a regular flight, something Castro stopped in 1962. The Gutierrez family thought it would be temporary. Gutierrez told Hispanic Magazine in February 2004, "It felt to me like we were on a holiday, a vacation. We thought things would change in Cuba and we could return." The United States, in its Cold War mania, welcomed the Cuban refugees, especially the rich ones.

But things didn't change, and the family stayed in the United States, moving around to try to repeat the success they had in Cuba. And while some Cubans were granted special permission (called "parole") to enter the country, they were not allowed residency. In fact, until 1966, in essence, the Cubans who fled Castro were a large population of illegal immigrants, including the Gutierrez family.

In 1966, the Cuban Adjustment Act was passed. It reads, in part, "[T]he status of any alien who is a native or citizen of Cuba and who has been inspected and admitted or paroled into the United States subsequent to January 1, 1959 and has been physically present in the United States for at least one year, may be adjusted by the Attorney General, in his discretion and under such regulations as he may prescribe, to that of an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence if the alien makes an application for such adjustment, and the alien is eligible to receive an immigrant visa and is admissible to the United States for permanent residence." It is this act, as much as anything, that encouraged defection of Cubans, including the dangerous passage of the rafting immigrants, to the United States. It is as blanket an amnesty as any immigrant group has ever been granted.

When he nominated Gutierrez in November 2004, President Bush said this about the man, "Carlos's family came to America from Cuba when he was a boy. He learned English from a bellhop in a Miami hotel, and later became an American citizen." But Bush left out that the path to citizenship included amnesty. Montana Senator Conrad Burns said, who opposes anything that even smells like a distant amnesty for illegal immigrants, said not a word opposing Gutierrez in the Commerce Committee's hearing in January 2005. On the floor of the Senate, he praised Gutierrez and proudly supported the nominee.

So the Rude Pundit is left with this conundrum: if the Gutierrez family, and all those Cubans who came to the United States in those early days of the Castro regime, were legally in America, the Cuban Adjustment Act would not have been needed. So was Carlos Gutierrez an illegal alien living in the United States until he was granted amnesty in 1966? And if so, isn't this something that we ought to know as we proceed on the rocky road of immigration "reform"?

If you have a definitive answer on the immigrant status of the Gutierrez family in the early 1960s, the Rude Pundit will publish it, including the accompanying crowing in triumph or eating of crow.

A Couple o' Random Thoughts Regarding Leaky Libby:
On the Bush-Cheney-Libby Confluence:
Anonymous Liberal over at Glenn Greenwald's place is right: something doesn't add up here. Here's the exact quote from the court document filed by Patrick Fitzgerald: "Defendant's participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8...occurred only after the Vice President advised that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE." So Libby never heard it from Bush, only that Cheney said that Bush said so.

Now here's Cheney back in February, talking about shooting faces and leaked secrets with Fox "News" host Brit Hume: "There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President." This was in response to Hume asking Cheney if he had ever declassified material "unilaterally." So Cheney was asserting that he had the power to classify and declassify material without the President's "okay." By the way, the executive order itself says that the Vice President may do the classification voodoo dance "in the performance of executive duties." In other words, Cheney's own words imply that he could have given Libby the go-ahead without Bush's approval and remained in the realm of "legal" (especially considering that the White House is asserting that the President can't really "leak" anything, an absurdist defense discussed below). Perhaps someone can connect these magical dots.

The Rude Pundit believes this at the bottom: Cheney's a lying piece of shit and the President is a rube and an idiot of titanic proportions (fuck all those people who say, "No, he's really not that dumb"). Either Cheney outright lied to Libby about Bush giving the thumbs-up or the conversation went something like this: Dick Cheney slithered into the Oval Office and said, "George, listen, there's some shit I'm gonna get Scooter to do. You don't give a happy ratfuck, right?" And the President said it was fine, whatever, lemme play more Madden. So Bush "knew" in the sense that he was told, but "knowing" and "Bush-knowing" is a little like the difference between telling your husband you love him while lying in bed awake together or while he's in a coma.

On the President Not Being Able To "Leak":
Let's say, and why not, that you are a dopehead living in Amsterdam and you are one ganja-smokin' motherfucker. You wake and bake; you do a three-toke lunch; you head over to one of the many fine, fine "coffeeshops" every evening to meet up with hookah-suckin' friends to get toasted, toasted, nice 'n roasted on the latest greenhouse-grown organic shit. And it's all cool, man, 'cause pot's legal in Amsterdam. But let's say you run a website that's specifically targeting Americans in America, tellin' 'em not to smoke pot. In fact, the website is all about how bad it is, how it should not only remain criminalized, but the penalties oughta be more severe, how smokin' marijuana is a gateway drug, even though you've never found yourself suckin' a glass crack pipe or stickin' needles in your arm.

Let's say that eventually you are outed, that someone says you are, in fact, a number one stoner, not the model of drug free living you advocate. Now, the proper response would be to hang your head in shame as you are beaten with sticks like a rabid cur, chased down the street until you disappear over the horizon. But, no. Instead, you simply state that no, you are not like American dopesters 'cause it's legal for you. You never broke the law, unlike all those fuckin' tokers in the USA.

When "senior White House officials" declare that President Bush can't "leak" classified material because he, in fact, is in charge of declassifying it, despite having said repeatedly that Bush would take any leakers in his administration, rip out their tongues and shove them up their own assholes, well, shit, it's still time to break out the sticks and clear the road for the horizon's beckoning.

Republicans Hate the Children:
Why do Republicans hate the children so much? Why must they take joy in seeing the children suffer? Why do they want to rape the children, putting their foul Republican penises in the innocent orifices of the children, masturbating furiously in Republican rage at images of the children? Why, God, Jesus, Allah, whoever, or no one, why do Republicans want the children to die of brain tumors by forcing them to go to inferior hospitals? Why do Republicans want the children of the poor to starve and then receive little or no medical care? Why do Republican judges want to strip search them and/or send them to jail for eating french fries on the subways of the mighty cities? It should make us all weep, weep, the Rude Pundit says, bitter tears at the craven depravity with which Republicans assault the children on a continual basis.

For instance, what kind of fucked up pit o' pedophilia is running out of the Department of Homeland Security, where creepy deputy press secretary Brian Doyle worked before being arrested for (among other things) soliciting nude pictures from a 14-year old girl (who, in a motif for the day, was said to have been a cancer survivor) who happened to really be a male Florida detective with larger boobs than the fantasy adolescent might have had; where the guy who ran DHS's Operation Predator, assigned to catch child sex criminals, Frank Figueroa, pleaded no contest to charges that he jacked off in front of a 16 year old girl for ten minutes at an Orlando mall (the kicker here being that he had been arrested before in 1977 for a similar crime in New York); and Michael Burks, begging a cop for mercy and swearing on his St. Michael medallion that he wasn't gonna fuck a child in California. Wondering if the agents of the DHS are gonna fuck your kids is a little like wondering if your vet's gonna fuck your dog - sure, it's possible, but you kinda trust it not to happen or else what are you gonna believe in this paranoid world?

But it's not just fucking the children that make Republicans such haters. Sanctimonious bag of douche Curt Weldon, the bugfuck insane Representative from Pennsylvania, criticized his Democratic opponent, Joe Sestak, for getting treatment for his 5-year old daughter for brain cancer at a Washington, DC hospital as opposed to a Pennsylvania one. This would be the same Curt Weldon who said he would release an "army of Curt" on Sestak. Although, when speaking of Weldon, one might be better off saying an "army of cunt," since Weldon cast the deciding vote in the House in favor of the savage budget that cut food stamps, Medicaid, and student loans, among other things that might have helped the children.

But, really, he's just acting like a Republican, is he not? People who would like to break up families because the children are Americans and the parents are not, who want to arrest kids for listening to bad music or writing bad things. People who would, it seems, rather trawl the Internet, looking for children to exploit, rape, and abuse.

(By the way, this massive extrapolation on innate Republican child hatred is brought to you via the "logic" of Ann Coulter, who, in her latest column - if by "column," you mean "pathetic gurgles of a choad-drinker" - says, "Liberals spit out all these names [like Tom DeLay] with more venom than they've ever been able to muster for names like 'Saddam Hussein' and 'Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.'" In such a Coulteresque world of hyperbole, applied to Republicans, one could say that Dick Cheney fucks the corpses of Sunni children killed by white phosphorous while Donald Rumsfeld gets his prostate tickled by the tiny tongues of ululating Afghani boys and George Bush enjoys a nice fellating from Mexican girls who offer to lick his balls for citizenship.)

The Mainstream Media's Niggering of Cynthia McKinney:
The Rude Pundit wasn't going to write about the incident where Representative Cynthia McKinney sauntered past security at the Capitol, didn't answer calls for her to stop, and then struck a DC cop who touched her arm to stop her. McKinney's a showboating publicity whore, has been for a long time, and the cop's actions, however justified, were a gift, like a drag queen finding a trashed stash of Judy Garland's boas - such unexpected joy in the most unexpected places. And McKinney's pathetic press conferences to tout the racism and sexism of the cops asking her to stop and plaintive cries that her hair style may have radically changed, but her face did not were and are laughable, distracting, and meaningless. Besides, Aravosis dealt with it over at Americablog, puttin' that puppy to sleep and tossin' it in the dumpster.

Yet there was still an uncomfortable taste left by the whole rigamarole. It wasn't that Neil "I Can Swallow This Here Pig Whole" Boortz said that McKinney looked like a "ghetto slut," which he later apologized for, although he had previous said that McKinney is "the cutest little Islamic jihadist." One expects such things from idiotic wads of fuck like Boortz, people whose talk radio studios are so filled with the piquant stench of their own farts that the crew has to wear gas masks to adjust the mikes.

It was the contrast between the mainstream media's treatment of McKinney and of the fallen Tom DeLay. This morning, the Rude Pundit was watching that hilarious parody of a news program on Fox called Fox and Friends, and while mostly enjoying the delicious undercurrent of gay male tension between Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade (try and figger out which one is the pitcher or catcher between those two), the Rude Pundit was struck by the way that Kilmeade aggressively interviewed McKinney, a guest on the show, and who, like every fuckin' politician out there, stuck to her idiotic talking points instead of answering the questions. Kilmeade dogged McKinney, asking her repeatedly if McKinney had struck the cop. And that made the Rude Pundit wonder: did anyone ever on one of the "news" networks go after Tom DeLay and ask him over and over, directly, if he had laundered money in Texas, even during his farewell interviews last night?

For example: Here's CNN's Wolf "My Manly White Stubble Can Sand Wood" Blitzer with McKinney on Monday: "Congresswoman McKinney, did you strike one of those Capitol Police officers during this incident on Capitol Hill?" McKinney, of course, did not answer.

Now, here's Blitzer with Tom DeLay last night: "How worried are you that these former aides of yours might say something or provide some sort of evidence or suggestion that could further cause you grave, serious legal problems?" and "What would you have done differently involving your relationship with the now-indicted Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist? Looking back on that relationship that you had with him, what would you have done differently given what you know right now?" DeLay, of couse, said he would do nothing differently and he's done nothing wrong. (This is not to mention Blitzer's later comment to DeLay, "But everybody makes mistakes, right? You're not perfect," the verbal equivalent of a reach-around.)

Which one of these members of Congress has been indicted for a felony? Which one is being treated like a felon?

Let's see if we can hold a few seemingly contradictory thoughts in our heads at once. Yes, Cynthia McKinney is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing shithead who deserves whatever backlash is coming her way. Yes, Tom DeLay is a skeevy cocksucker who has pissed in and poisoned the already-putrid wells of Washington. And both should be treated with contempt and pursued aggressively to show the cynicism and greed - for power, money, and/or attention - that drives them.

But you wanna know where the racism and sexism is here? It ain't with the Capitol cops (in this case), who are in a crappy position under the stress of terrorism neurosis that pervades everything. It's with the media, who act with deference towards a white male thrice-admonished alleged felon who has intimate connections with convicted felons and who feel free to attack the black woman who has yet to be charged with anything.

Oh, and that's not to mention that McKinney's a Democrat and DeLay's a Republican.

Dealing With an Infested House - Advice For a Post-Tom DeLay DC:
There are various schools of thought on how best to get rid of an infestation of Eastern subterranean termites in your house. Basically it depends on the severity of the damage already done. Termites are persistent insects, chewing through the soft parts of the wood in your house, leaving behind a honeycombed shell of the great, sturdy place it used to be. Really, what termites are doing is creating a place where they can live and feed and wreak more and more destruction, taking the solid wood and transforming it into a moist, muddy network of tunnels and tubes. It's the best environment for termites.

A termite colony is a caste-driven society, with a king and, most importantly, a queen at the top. The colony depends on the queen for its survival, as she can lay 2000 eggs a day. The queen can live for up to 25 years. Do the math. That's a hell of a lot of vermin. The worker termites make up the largest caste, and they live up to that moniker, maintaining the tunnels, catering to the needs of the queen, gathering the food. Workers are essential to a well-run destruction wrought by the colony. Then there are the soldiers, with their mighty mandibles and sticky chemicals, always at the ready to kill and crush any ant that might attack the colony. Then there are the swarmers, the termites that leave the colony to find mates with which they can start new colonies. Destruction, you know, is a neverending project.

As revolting as all termites are, especially when you see them in their creeping, crawling swarms, the most disgusting by far is the queen termite. Its gooey white sac is often bloated with eggs, its progeny slipping out of her in a neverending spewing of slimy, larva-engorged mucus balls. She's so filled with the burgeoning termites, ready to be catered to and then set loose to eat and corrupt the stability of the very house that surrounds them, that she's an easy target, too fat to move, too single-purposed in her existence.

So the schools of thought on saving your house are this: if found early enough, before too much damage has been done, you may be able to get away with just killing the queen. However, most pest control experts would say that it's a fool's errand to pursue the queen alone and think that the infestation will be taken care of. Really, in the end, to be safe, to make sure your house isn't gutted from the inside, it's best to just kill the entire colony. Otherwise, they'll just find a new way to breed and destroy, breed and destroy. So wipe 'em out. You'll be happy you did. And you may discover that your house can remain standing longer than you ever expected.

Jill Carroll Is a Cowardly Whore and Other Things the Rude Pundit Learned From the Conservative Punditry:
You know what's fuckin' funny? Thinking about what, say, Jonah Goldberg would have done with a gun in his face after being kidnapped from the streets of Baghdad after he just saw his translator shot dead. That pissant little bitch would have shit himself and begged to be filmed blowing the lead kidnapper, pausing only to shout into the camera, "I loves me some mujahideen cock; now please rape my Jew ass, Osama." For, indeed, it seems that for Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and other scumsucking reactionaries, Carroll would not be a traitor to America only if she had ripped off her veil and yelled, "Lick my clit, you stinky Allah-fuckers" before she was wasted. Then she'd've been a hero and we could make up wonderful, splendiferous lies about her.

Yeah, that bald piece of shit, Bernard McGuirk, who spends his life making sure Don Imus's colostomy bag is licked clean, called Carroll "Taliban Jill" for giving an interview to secure her freedom and for wearing a veil while in captivity, saying Carroll put on weight while in captivity because she's "carrying Habib's baby." 'Cause you know that if McGuirk had been kidnapped, sure, he might've tried to be the tough guy for just a second or two until he tasted the oil and metal of a locked and loaded Kalashnikov shoved into his yappin' mouth. Then, after yowling like gang-raped street cat, McGuirk would have been writin' his own script praisin' al-Zarqawi, the insurgents, Mullah Omar, who-the-fuck-ever, lookin' to "Habib" for the approval he only gets when the I-man rubs his scalp to tell him, "Good job on wipin' my ass."

Because many of us in the home of the brave are brave only from distances. Like Hugh Hewitt, who was interviewing Time magazine's Michael Ware, a reporter who has spent time behind enemy lines interviewing insurgents in Iraq. "Spent time" here means the better part of the last three years. Hewitt attempted to explain to Ware why the reporter may be aiding the enemy: "I'm really fascinated by the question of whether or not it's ever good journalism to consort with the enemy in search of interesting stories...I'm just wondering whether or not there's a line that you have in your mind reconciled yourself to crossing not once, but scores and scores of times, to report on the enemy, and whether or not that's a good thing."

Ware pointed out that Hewitt was in a comfy studio while he was shitting in sand pits in Iraq, but Hewitt interrupted Ware to correct the reporter: "I'm sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I'm sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it's not comfortable, although it's a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that's...civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago."

At this point, Ware may have wanted to say, "You know what, you cunt? I wanna see you walkin' around armed Islamic militants wearin' nothin' but a diaper on your ass with a picture of Muhammed on it. I'll try to talk 'em into givin' you a five-minute head start to see if you can make it to good ol' loyal Pakistan before you're gunned down like so many captured quail."

But instead, later in the interview, Ware offered this polite bitch-slapping, "[I]n the course of this war, we've had a translator assassinated four blocks from our house. Our house has been hit by, or subject to car bombs twice. I've had two of my stringers who deal with the insurgency kidnapped, one of whom was rescued by the Marines when they overran Fallujah in November, 2004. The other one was tortured for five days as al Qaeda tried to get information on me before he was finally released, when they became convinced that he was innocent of any kind of crime. I had another translator of mine, who when al Qaeda targeted him to get information on me and our operation and he refused, they blew up his car. We had to fly him to Jordan, get last ditch surgery to save his arm, and he's now been granted refugee status in Australia. My staff have been in firefights. Their lives have been threatened. I'm not sure that that's been an easy ride."

Hewitt, of course, was undeterred from trying to paint Ware as somehow a willing accomplice of the insurgency. Much like others on the right attempted to do with Carroll. Because courage is a cheap commodity in these nasty times, and the arbiters of bravery and cowardice buy and sell it like tons of shifting sand and blowing wind.

(Note: the Hewitt story's been everywhere in Left Blogsylvania. The Rude Pundit first read about it at Kevin Drum's Political Animal.)