WHY ARE DEMENTED SLEAZE-O-CRATS LIKE CONDOLEEZA RUNNING AROUND GIVING OTHER COUNTRIES ADVICE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This vile gang of inept psychos that stole our government out from under us is actually surprised when countries like Egypt object to their arrogant instructions on how to achieve a more perfect society.

Here’s a coven of creepoids that steals the presidency and instantly dumbs down the government by 40 IQ points, leaving us wide open for a terrorist strike. Then they wage the wrong war against the wrong people so they can achieve their personal, financial, and pathological objectives. They establish a gulag of secret prisons whose operatives torture even unto death, smack down habeas corpus, read our mail without court approval, refuse to abide by the Geneva Convention, and drop uranium-depleted shells on civilians while ordering a second helping of apple-cranberry tarts. And after our troops using third-rate gear get their limbs blown off, they're screwed again by an administration that denies them their rightful benefits.

Meanwhile, Condoleeza Rice, fresh off the bestiality circuit, parachutes into Cairo, and get this -- she gets in a snit over proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution because they don’t meet her standards of democracy. Well, there are subjects on which Rice’s suggestions are worth listening to -- for example, if you’d like to alienate the whole world, poach the Earth over a slow flame, or learn how best to fasten electrodes to someone’s genitals. These are all subjects on which she has more than casual knowledge. But when you’re tinkering with a Constitution, you don’t want her in the same time zone.

Our country has lost the right to make suggestions on civil rights, democracy, or standards of decency. Yet demented dolts like Rice scamper around the Earth like roaches with a license to kill, telling everyone else how to live. Banana republics run better elections than we do. Even when no one’s stealing them, they’re not fair. San Jose, one of California's smaller cities, has approximately twice as many residents as all of Wyoming. Yet each state gets the same number of senators? Gimme a break. Then we pollute this shaky structure of ours further by allowing a shadowy elite to choose leaders according to how much money they can raise for their campaigns. And after they take office, these morality-challenged creatures spend the rest of their terms paying back their contributors with policies that smell like rotting flesh. A country that kills the inheritance tax on billionaires while it fails to establish a civilized health care system and cuts aid to college students is crumbling. Even Egypt can see that.

WILL GONZALEZ BE THE RAT THAT LEADS US TO THE BLOOD TRAILS?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This Alberto Gonzalez character – a shameless wretch who perfectly fits the role of chief law enforcement officer for this administration -- would, under normal circumstances, have already been thrown into the street with his belongings in a cardboard box. After all, he’s been caught lying blatantly and fluidly to Congress, therefore drawing way too much heat on the deluded sleazeballs and sociopaths with whom he consorts. The next time he goes up the Hill to testify -- and Cabinet members can’t hide behind executive privilege -- it won’t require much labor for Democrats to compare the transcripts of his previous testimony (“I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons,” blah, blah, blah) with the text of those damning emails.

So why hasn’t the White House made a patsy out of him and tossed him out? All they have to do is leak it around that Gonzalez lost his moorings and though he did so with the best of intentions, committed these atrocities all on his own. And Gonzalez, following the usual pattern, would then tell us he wants to spend more time with his family. That's that.

Yet he remains in the fold. Could it be that behind the White House gates, the chief swine are running scared? Fearful he’ll spill what he knows about the inner workings of the Dark Side? Maybe he's got so much on them they can’t afford to keep him and they can’t afford to have him out there spilling his guts.

The longer Gonzalez hangs around, the more likely that’s the case. That would mean he’s already led them to believe they can't count on him to behave like that guy who apologized to Cheney for getting shot in the face. He may be hinting that if they hang him out there alone he'll finger others – perhaps even members of the untouchable troika – Bush, Cheney, and Rove. Scooter Libby, counting on a pardon, didn’t take them down. Gonzalez might have other ideas.

The Democratic committee chairs in the Congress have barely begun sifting through the vileness and criminality of this administration. Armed with the power of subpoena, they’re going to find lots, lots more. For all we know, Gonzalez is a short cut to bigger cases, to a pattern of felonies around the globe. After all, he fired prosecutors who were exposing Republican crimes.

This could unlock the room where they keep the evidence of fixed contracts, payoffs, traded favors, war profiteering, body parts. We’re in a race to see whether these cowardly thugs who stole our country can reach January '09 before Congress finds the blood trails. At some point they'll begin turning on one another. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years, all right. Yet it’s impossible to enjoy them while people are still dying in Iraq.

To let these schmucks pursue their madness overseas in the midst of these revelations is crazy. It’s like letting some deranged nut wearing a cape and no pants perform heart surgery on one of your family members while he's also having phone sex with a congressional page.

'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS & BY THE WAY, WHEN DID YOU STOP BEATING YOUR WIFE?'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

“Whatever our differences in Washington, our troops and their families deserve the appreciation and the support of our entire nation.”

Those were Bush’s words in his nationwide address today. Our warrior prince asked for patience because heck, we’re just getting started. Give us a chance. If you weasels don’t like me, at least support our troops. His meaning and purpose were to perpetuate the “support our troops” device that worked so well so long. Three ghoulish words that are an accusation tangled inside a threat, pretending to exemplify sweet, positive thinking when in fact they’re an attack, an admonition, an ugly masquerade.

The three words on the stickers shitheads love to slap on their vehicles announce there are Americans out there who don’t support our troops, who wish evil things on our brave boys and girls, so maybe if the saintly, the right-minded, the true patriots all stand up and declare their loyalty, we can unmask these treasonous, terrorist-loving louts. Either you're with me, Bush tells us, or you're against the troops.

George Orwell, who predicted the next totalitarians would tell us that war is peace and freedom is slavery, would enjoy the perfect irony of “Support our troops,” a lie of demonic magnificence. It’s the Orwellian shield behind which the hard-core rockhead coalition of avid chicken hawks, pro-torture evangelicals, gun-o-maniacs, racists, anti-tax greedheads, and other disturbed geeks work out their little deals to bite off a bigger piece of the action for themselves while they feed our troops into the Iraqi trash compactor.

Today, the fourth anniversary of the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of our republic, is a good day to stand up to those words.

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS CONGRESS WILL OK NEW FUNDING FOR BUSH'S HECK OF A JOB IN IRAQ? BELIEVE IT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Monday marks four years since our self-anointed wartime leader, mounted on a stuffed pony atop the hill, raised his hand Sitting-Bull style and sent the Coalition of the Willing across the frontier into Iraq. Demonstrators will mark the anniversary on Saturday, but they won’t be numerous because there’s no military draft. The message from the public is if someone from your family loses a life or a limb or something over there, hey, you took your chances. Besides, I'm doing my part; I've got a Support Our Troops sticker on my vehicle.

What ever happened to the report from that bipartisan panel led by Daddy's consigliere James A. Baker III? The one that said start pulling out and go heavy on diplomacy? It got big play for a while, but now it's another forgotten news story, this year's Tanya Harding, only not, of course, as big as the already-forgotten death of Anna Nicole Smith. Remember the surge? It's going on right now and no one pays much attention.

Invading Iraq was a kind of neocon dream but never an actual plan. It was more like a 5-year-old kid saying he wants to be an astronaut. It’s something he might want, but he has no idea what’s involved in getting there – science, math aeronautics, that sort of stuff. He just thinks astronauts wear cool space suits.

So neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith and their weak-minded convert Bush Junior didn’t concern themselves with Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis, Iran, or any of the details. They wouldn't even bother to read a State Department report warning them of the danger, and when they found out they didn't have sufficient troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq they pulled troops out of Afghanistan.

Their duplicity, incompetence, and endless lying has been proved so many times in so many ways, there have been so many insiders who jumped ship and ratted out their former colleagues, that at this point answering the war's supporters is like arguing with the Flat Earth Society.

When it all fell apart – no ties to Bin Laden, no WMD – the Bush-o-ramusses went into a huddle and came up with a new goal they’d send other people’s kids to die for – establishing democracy in Iraq, making it a beacon of sweetness and light for all the Muslim world to see.

In the meantime the invasion and occupation of the oilfields infused crazies all across the Mideast – in Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt – with new strength. Also, Iran and North Korea decided they better really get moving on those nuclear bombs because they figured correctly that, ironically, if Saddam really had nukes, the U.S. would never have invaded. This new guy in Washington was so crazy he attacked countries just because he didn’t like them, kind of like the character in Johnny Cash’s song who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

It’s hard to believe that after all the these failures the chicken hawks atop our government stay on-message with their loony non-policy of endless occupation. As Zbigniew Brzezinski testified in the Senate, his greatest fear about an administration secret plan "is that there is no secret plan." The dead and wounded are still piling up, for which we pay somewhere above $6 billion a month, enough to finance a seriously good universal health care system, fight systemic poverty, and do something real to stop poisoning the Earth.

Bush, just before this damnable anniversary, sent down a new Iraq appropriations bill. Amazingly, Congress will approve it. All the Democrats could muster in opposition was a bill that sets the goal of ending the war in eighteen more months and is so full of loopholes that even when September 2008 arrives, ignoring the deadline will carry no consequences. Those members, like Nancy Pelosi, for instance, who say no to the war and yes to its new funding are basically taking a stand against cannibalism while writing a check (from our account) to buy Hannibal Lector new cutlery.

WAGING 'CLASS WARFARE’ ISN’T SUCH A BAD IDEA

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

If trust-buster Theodore Roosevelt, who managed to rein in the most blatant corruption of his day, saw how politicians operate today -- touring haunts of the super-rich where they openly beg for alms and then perform huge favors for them at the expense of everyone else -- Teddy would call in federal marshals. But then he’d discover that in most instances the bribes are legal.

The bribe-takers have long since cemented legislation in place designed to keep them out of the penitentiary while their gratuities roll in. Everybody knows what’s going on, but we’ve been taught to pretend the gifts have no influence on takers. They buy only “access.” At least that’s the story the givers and takers tell. Not coincidentally, the U.S. distribution of wealth is the absolute worst in the Western World and getting worse all the time. Nearly 50 million Americans were walking around without health insurance at the same time Prince George and Congress, including many Democrats such as Diane Feinstein, killed the inheritance tax.

These crazy excesses look very much like what was going on during the years preceding Teddy’s reforms. But nowadays the lower classes aren’t offended by the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. They just want to join the club. All across America people have taken out second mortgages to buy 8,000-pound, $90,000 SUVs to drive to the 7-Eleven for a quart of milk so they can pretend they're not desperate losers.

This new Gilded Age weirdly concides with a period of great religious awakening in America, the most religious country in the Western World. Curiously, the Christian Right, which is attempting and in many ways succeeding in putting its zombie legions in charge of schools, health, and science, is allied with conspicuous consumers like my neighbor Deepak Chopra, who's building a 20,000-square-foot home on the next hill. The church fascists provide a welcoming governmental environment for all the Fools on all the Hills. (See my March 2 LEISURE CLASS GOING BONKERS WITH EXCESS two posts below this one.)

“The politics of envy” is one of those hammers that hired hands for the super-rich start swinging whenever they run into someone who hints that lust for possessions has gone over the top, that perhaps corporate executives worth hundreds of millions who steal more hundreds of millions from their shareholders are a symptom of systemic disease. Their lackeys – authors, Supreme Court judges, senators, Fox newscasters, and the like -- are quick to batter us with slogans they apply to anyone applying rational thought to these bizarre phenomena. By using the same words, they can make their falsehoods seem more true.

For instance, they like to accuse critics of waging “class warfare.” In my case, they’re correct. I’m a proud, card-carrying warrior in the war between the classes, or at least I would be if such a war existed in this country. It can’t because whenever pollsters ask people about their status in the socio-economic structure, just about everybody says they belong to the middle class. That includes the very, very rich as well as people in trailer courts. And I’m not talking about the nice trailer courts with brave, well-tended little gardens. I mean the ones where the man of the trailer watches TV twirling a 14-shot, nine-millimeter pistol and sometimes can be seen on reality cop shows getting dragged out in an undershirt and handcuffs for cooking meth or beating his significant other.

Ask those guys being stuffed into the back seat of the patrol car if they’re middle class and they’ll probably say yes. The cop who’s doing the stuffing would tell you he’s middle-class, too – same league, but on a different team. Americans who can’t even identify their location in the economy are useless dingbats in the political world, sitting silently while politicans working for tips kick them farther down the ladder.

TO SWITCH WEIRDLY CONFIGURED POWER COUPLES, GIVE CLINTONS ANOTHER TURN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

What’s the matter, Bunky? Empty-suited President got you down? Sick of all the lying, posturing, faking, the theft of planeloads of cash, not to mention a six-figure death toll in a pointless war while the Gulf Coast remains a twisted mess of trash? Uncertain what to do about becoming in just a few short years the most hated country on Earth?

Tired of all the relentless ineptitude twinned with the most tenacious arrogance since DeGaulle tried to stare down Churchill and Roosevelt? Afraid to turn on the news because you’ll just hear about more dead and disfigured G.I.s in Iraq while Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Halliburton and all their parasitic pals romp through the oil fields? Are you bent out of shape by religious crazies who use government funds to convert new batches of religious crazies so they can attain new heights of church-statism, a Justice Department that fires people for doing their jobs, and an EPA whose goal is to wreck itself?

Well, don’t do anything real, like following the Constitution and impeaching this insufferable tyrant and his dangerously demented vice president. Don’t even stop funding the war that is not a war but really a madhouse of homicidal factions the simple-minded White House can’t even hope to understand.

Instead, step up and get not one, but two Clintons for the price of one. While they last. Not available in stores. Fresh out of the box.

Yes, starting in January 2009 you can wake up to the same tired old faces from the first eight Clinton years. Go backwards! That’s what monarchy’s all about. Comforting, isn’t it? Everybody gets it. That’s why it can work. Stop torturing yourself trying to choose leaders. Instead, just switch royal families! Give the other one a turn.

Because America doesn’t have just one set of imperial bounders. Heck no, fresh out of New York and Washington, following their previous rave engagements in the boondocks of Arkansas and straight off the cover of People, etc., we give you the Clintons! With Obama and Edwards hot on the heels of Hillary’s twisted pronouncements that don’t say what they appear to say, the desperate dynamic Clinton duo has proclaimed for all the world (at the civil rights commemoration in Selma and at various fund-raisers) that yes indeed, they’re a package!

This time you don’t get the puppet-puppeteer weirdly Oedipal kind of duo you suffered with the Bush-Cheney shared-power arrangement. Instead you get this one-time, unique opportunity to install a feuding, scheming two-headed hydra kind of president. Even Fox will be happier as it descends to record depths interviewing therapists, astrologers, feng shui experts, you name it, to speculate about the presidential sleeping arrangements, tortured decision-making processes, and who knows what else eight more years of monarchy will bring? Sleep together? Heck, we can't even guarantee the Clintons like each other. Doesn't that make it all the more exciting?

Operators are standing by.

LEISURE CLASS GOING BONKERS WITH EXCESS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

My neighbor on the next hill is building a 20,000-square-foot home. I haven't seen the blueprints, but that's big enough to house a multi-plex theater and a commercial bowling alley. The owner, Deepak Chopra, is a physician out of India who hit it big on the American self-help guru circuit.

His website says, “Dr. Chopra's work is changing the way the world views physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness.” The structure Chopra is building to tune up his personal mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness will spread over several lots, with fantastic shoreline views over the 25-mile stretch from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Malibu. Even without a telescope, Chopra will be able to pick out distant mansions of similar ilk that have been multiplying like giant rats and are now landmarks for jetliners flying in and out of Los Angeles International Airport. Among them would be the Brentwood mansion of environmental sympathizer Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his bride Maria Shriver, whose garage holds a fleet of Hummers.

Also down there are car dealers selling million-dollar Bugattis and Beverly Hills jewelry stores where you can pick up a $300,000 Patek-Philippe or order a specialty watch for over a million.
Of course this is not just a California phenomenon. All around the globe the super-rich are jumping into an arms race of purchases, but displaying obscene wealth is especially okay in America, where everybody figures he or she can be the next Donald Trump, only with a better haircut.

Ron Perelman, defined by the news media as a financier, sold his oceanfront estate in Palm Beach for over $70 million. He didn’t leave it for a bungalow. Yachts keep getting bigger and bigger. In late 2004, The Wall Street Journal, beginning to focus on the phenomenon of excess, discovered boat builders were slapping together plenty of pleasure craft longer than 200 feet on special order from buyers willing to put up $100 million or more.

All those adjoining lots purchased by my neighbor so he could spread out and be more comfortable had to be worth at least $3 million apiece. Figure in architect’s fees, gymnasium, marble floors, chandeliers, a place to store the lawn mower, and all the other what-nots and extras that go into such elephantine habitats, and we’re looking at something like $50 million for a single-family residence. For the record, my family and I live in a four-bedroom house that takes up 1,834 square feet. Years ago we lived in 3,000 square feet. To me the home seemed as big as Montana, and there I quickly discovered how inconvenient it was to live in a place where sometimes the inhabitants aren’t in shouting range of each other. I found myself wandering through too many rooms to find the damn newspaper.

In further irony, the owners of these monstrous mansions generally camouflage them with shrubbery, fences, and other architectural shields. They want the rabble to know they're in there, but don't trust them with the details. If you’re anything like me, you stand puzzled by all this grasping for stuff that has no use. I like luxury as well as the next person, but clearly at some point it crosses the line into Goofyland. “How much better can you eat?” Detective Gittes asked super-rich incest-monger Noah Cross in Robert Towne’s splendid script for Chinatown. “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”

This culture of the absurd was examined with precision and derision in 1899 when philosopher and economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it, he coined the terms “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” and took a piercing, wry look at what the ruling class of his time was doing with its immense wealth. He discovered that these people were infatuated with owning goods that had absolutely no use whatsoever other than to advertise to everyone else that they could afford to waste valuable resources on utterly useless stuff. They also, Veblen decided, had a secondary purpose – trying to make everyone who couldn’t afford expensive, useless stuff eat their livers. Ridiculously huge mansions filled with servants were among his many examples of such conspicuous consumption of useless stuff, along with stables full of riding horses and jeweled walking sticks. Inverse snob Veblen failed to see that some owners may have been caring souls pursuing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness.