Nail That Ass: Was McClellan Really Tarred & Feathered?

Like many in my age bracket, I no longer tune in to those quarterly state of whatever speeches/ infomercials beamed out to the populace every couple of months (or whenever a scandal arises) because I've read that book and seen the movie played out twice in two gulfs -- the Tonkin and the Persian ones: there's only so much abuse my synapses can take from pointing out the cyclical nature of history to "true believers" who drank the Kool-Ade back in 2000, adopted to selectively perceive what's been happening to our country and have continued to do so since...in light of what's transpired in the latest news cycle, I had to say this...


I didn't get a chance to catch any of the scuttlebut on the TV yesterday but I've been reading that White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan got a rigorous televised paddling by journalists during a press conference in which he attempted to explain his administration's position on the recent turn of events surrounding Karl Rove, who's now been revealed [by his own lawyer] as Matt Cooper's source of the leak for the Time Magazine article that outed Valerie Plame, Ambassador Joseph "no yellow cake in Niger" Wilson's wife, as a spook for the Agency -- with no thanks given to Robert Novak and Judith "Go Directly to Jail" Miller. Rove is beginning to come off like the crooked Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption (guess we're seeing now why Bush I, nailed his ass to the floorboards and fired him back in '92). However, now that that political rock has been kicked over and the fire-ants have started swarming all over it, I still wonder if any of this will pan out in the media...or will it still be "just-us" as usual?


This latest fracas out of D.C. might help call the past half decade's laissez-faire style governance into question, yo. Yesterday as I read aboutMcClellan getting handed his ass by the White House press corp -- a group I'd written off years ago as a bunch of spineless yes-men afraid to get on this here administration's bad side -- I could swear I heard a collective sigh of vindication shoot across the prairie of progressive minds. I revelled as the speaker was boxed into a corner by vexed reporters like David Gregory who slipped McClellan the stones in regards to Rove getting caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar and statements that he and the POTUS had made years back vis-a-vis the "firing of whomever the leaker once his/her was once their identity was "discovered" which never came to fruition...because the investigation's "still an ongoing-going-on-that-can't be discussed-at the moment -- because it's still-going...how convenient. The blood was in the water and, to my amazement, the peanut gallery wasn't having it anymore and called him out on it...


While reading transcripts of what took place, the image of Scott's skin leaking (while flashbulbs popped all around him) as he was getting dressed down washed over me like a speedball. Call them crocodile tears or say it's schadenfruede if you must but it seemed that for once, in far too great a while, the press began to grow a set by asking the burning questions about the e-mail exchange that resulted in Plame's outing -- a shameless political reprisal aimed at Joseph Wilson for releasing his findings in Niger (that there was nary a slice of yellow cake to be found that could be sold to a rogue nation looking to construct nuclear weapons, rendering a search and destroy mission moot) which contravened the administration's drumbeat for invading Iraq in search of WMD's and everything that has happened since. While all of this was well and good, I caught myself thinking "what am I missing in the big picture?"


Remember that shameless aircraft carrier landing/ photo op, the looped footage of the falling statue and how Rummy stared directly into the camera in a manner evoking John Wayne's "Rooster Cogburn", shrugged and crowed "c'est la vie" while looking the other way as looters stole priceless and irreplaceable historic Mesopotamian artifacts from those museums? The horror. One might recall that there was an uglier truth that all of this had hidden from view -- or many people were seeing only what they wanted to see...

I couldn't help but wonder aloud, while Scott twisted in the wind if this was another case of a Bushco. chieftain falling on his sword to draw the American public's attention away from some other flaming turd in the punch-bowl -- Supreme Court nominations anyone? I'll crib a quote from Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now: "The shit piles up so fast...you needed wings to stay on top of it." Slowly, the mis-adventures in the Middle East have proven to be the mother-of-all-land grabs orchestrated from behind the scenes by cowboy-hatted beltway insiders and corporate lobbyists making cash register sounds with dollar signs dancing in their pupils. Here, the press corps has finally gotten the minerals to pull back the red-velvet cord on the men behind the curtains to shed a little light on the unbridled geo-political bum rush camoflaged with patriotic shibboleths and then garnished with buzzwords like "freedom", "resolve" and "democracy" while a fife-choir of pre-screened soldiers whistles "When MyJohnny Comes Marching Home." Maybe this administration's dependence on the common American's short-attention span has finally backfired...


I pray that the veil is finally lifting but the above reminds me of that scene in Gladiator when the newly christened emperor's duplicitous aide describes the hunting tactics of a sea snake that pretends to be dead to lure out its enemies and when the scavengers emerge from the shadows, the snake strikes at will. That's what the whole yellow-cake payback was all about. The way everything's been going for the past five years, it seemed as if reality itself had been turned on its ear but now, apparently, the scenario can be loosely described as an object example of executive-level inefficiency gone wild. It's been a bizarro world version of Robin Hood & his Merry Men tear-assing around the sand dunes of Baghdad, wearing ten-gallon stetsons of denial and spurs of arrogance that jingle-jangle-jingle -- armed to the teeth, the lot of them, with gatling guns of far-reaching political connections, corporate silver bullets and feckless foreign policy...

The flames have been fanned by the uxorious lip service and ad hominem chanting of a conservative echo chamber bound by ideology in an unholy matrimony of the "haves" versus the "have-notiest" members of society; they're talking heads bloviating ad infinitum about a fetus' right to life as they push forward an agenda of warfare, trickle-down economics and a de-regulated "investment market" non of which includes the castes forced to fight their extensions of diplomacy in foxholes all over the planet. They implicate themselves as the "unofficial voice" of a non existent silent majority while parroting static poll results that tell the masses nothing, even though the data sources/think tanks are consistently well-funded by like-minded conservatives -- yet they wonder why progressives question their motives. I can only hope that the paint's beginning to chip away on the picket fences of this Potemkin Village. Years ago Ken Star got daily coverage in prime time TV for his "due diligence" while building a case against Bill Clinton as he tried to connect the spooge trail on a blue dress to an Oval Office B.J. -- an act that didn't cause thousands of lives last time I checked...

As of this writing, the Grand Old Party has circled its wagons and even their infamous talking points are weak as water -- despite having a whole weekend to canoodle 'n conspire which in the past has proven to be ample time to get their lies straight for sound bites...Maybe their Svengali has been a tucked up with personal "Barney Rubbles" (troubles)...Let's see if common sense can get a toe-hold now...I don't know if the tea leaves are forecasting a cabinet-level frog march toward the gray-bar hotel or a handcuffed sashay into the backseat of a waiting squad car headed for the stony lonesome, still, I don't want to get ahead of myself... I can dream, can't I?...Laters...