The Witching Hour

While "lying or incompetent" describes the administration's every action rather nicely, and the Republican party has become so eerily predictable that you can use a few simple sentences to keep on top of things (If they accuse others of something they're doing it themselves; If it's their fault they'll claim it's Clinton's fault, etc), there's a new mantra I've been thinking about quite a bit these days.

It's along the same lines as the gag about adding "...in bed" to the end of fortune cookie fortunes. But it's scary as hell. The next time you see some alarming statement, such as 'the GOP has turned the US Department of Justice into an extension of their election committee,' just tack on "...and no-one cares." Yes, whether it's a lazy press, your conservative relatives, or an unmotivated populace, it's guaranteed to make the flesh crawl right off of your bones. Here's a great example:

Neoconservative icon NormanPodhoretz followed up his Commentary article titled "The case for bombing Iran" -- excerpts of which were re-published in The Wall St. Journal -- with an interview elaborating on why he "hopes and prays" that we bomb Iran and how he envisions the bombings. . .

Any doubts about what Norman Podhoretz is -- and what the movement is which reveres him -- ought to be forever dispelled by his answer, given in the same interview, to the question of what the British should have done in response to the detention of 15 of their sailors by Iran:
"They should have threatened to bomb the Iranians into smithereens if the sailors weren't returned immediately. They should have threatened it. Whether they would have had to carry out the threat, I doubt, maybe they would have.". . .

Unsurprisingly, it is Norm's son, John, who -- beyond his garden-variety excitement over bombing Iran -- made one of the most reprehensible and deranged (though illustrative) statements of the entire Bush presidency:

"What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?"

And there you have it two men considered to be at the top of the "conservative intellectual" heap, and their prescription is indiscriminate bombing of civilians and/or a targeted campaign to eradicate an entire demographic-- a 'controlled genocide,' you might say-- and no-one cares.

I won't even get into the morality of it-- these two conservative luminaries have a grasp of international relations and war that's so banal, so moronic, and so devoid of actual thought that their true calling in life is apparently stalking mammoths with Ogg. Instead, they're taken perfectly seriously as political commentators and pundits. And no-one cares.