The Bush regime sends Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" forth with a message: You can't touch us, suckers! (Unless maybe we can get Miss Marple on the case)

"You must once more become that goddess of retribution and righteous anger, once more be Nemesis. 'Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream.'"
--Miss Marple's mission (if she chooses to accept it), as inscribed on a gramophone record by her late friend Jason Rafiel, a lifelong seeker after justice, in the new televisualization of Agatha Christie's Nemesis [the "justice" quotation in the recorded message, which is also engraved on Mr. Rafiel's headstone, is from Amos, 5:24, according to the Nemesis teleplay--what the heck would I know about stuff like this?]

I'm hearing that our old pal Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales, our one and only U.S. attorney general, put on yet another humdinger of a show in his latest belly-flop slapstick appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I saw some clips on Countdown, including Sen. Arlen Specter showering his contempt on the Little Fella, and it was pretty rank.

But I seem to have a different view from most folks regarding the significance of the event. Everyone seems to think it was some sort of embarrassment to the Bush regime. I think the regime was sending its critics a message, and that message is, approximately:

"You faggots can't touch us. From now till doomsday, no matter what you pathetic pansies do, you can't lay the fruitiest little pinky on us. Eat doody, suckers!"

The message, of course, is intended to cover not just the massive, flagrant constitutional breach of the U.S.-attorney firings. It is meant to cover the entire panoply of Constitution-shredding criminality, corruption, and totalitarianization that has been the unbroken record of this regime.

It was as if the vilest scumbuckets of the regime had stood before their fellow Americans, dropped their trousers, and taken a massive dump on us. "Let them eat doody" is the rallying cry, and then they mean to rub our faces in their putrid fecal matter. "We can do any frigging thing we please, absolutely anything, and all you can do about it is wallow in our contaminated excrement."

Yes, they can do anything. Launch a war of no rational purpose, sending our military men and women off to be butchered by the thousands so that tens of thousands of semihuman towelheads can be slaughtered. And warehouse all our combat casualties so they can be as resolutely ignored as our combat fatalities.

Meanwhile under cover of war they have nearly completed their transformation of all government institutions into ward heelers on behalf of the Party of Privilege, Greed, and World Domination, propped up by the armed hordes of the dimwitted and psychopathic. And we can't touch them.

Oh sure, the Republicans may continue to take some election hits, but that will be a temporary ritual of purification, since there are no Democrats capable of rallying our fellow Americans to a truly different vision of government and society. They either cower in fear of their GOP masters or actively imitate them.

What we need, it occurred to me watching the latest entry in the latest round of Miss Marple screen renderings, in fact perhaps our only hope, is Jane Marple as Nemesis, the role in which she learns she has been cast by her just-deceased old friend Jason Rafiel, a refugee from Hitler's Germany (where they burned his books), whose driving passion was the pursuit of justice.

Bring it on, Miss M! Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream--to coin a phrase.

[In the photo, Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple is seen with Richard E. Grant as her nephew, the popular novelist Raymond West, whom she enlists as Nemesis's traveling companion on her coach journey to justice.]