Sure, the McCranky "campaign" continues to sink to unimaginable depths, and House Dems shook an angry fist at Karl Rove, but what is there to say?

"I think this is the car crash between the McCain of 2000 and the McCain of 2008."

-- Rachel Maddow, talking to Keith Olbermann about the apparent free fall of the McCranky presidential "campaign" on tonight's Countdown

"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!"

-- the shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs, alone in his workroom in the wee hours of the morning, in Act III of Wagner's Mastersingers of Nuremberg

by Ken

Talk about a crazy day! It's not that there's been no news, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to write about any of it.

Of course there's the presidential contest, but what is there to say about that? The McCranky "campaign" (I really see no alternative to using quotation marks around "campaign") now has no real issues, and so is reduced tp mindless invective and wholesale lying.

And yet 40-some percent of the electorate is thinking seriously about voting for the worthless shell of a human being that is Young Johnny McCranky.

Oh, you think he has issues? Like oil drilling. Are you a total moron? Do you really not know that there is not the slightest possibility on this earth that the oil companies will ever under any circumstances do anything to increase supply in order to lower prices. Their only interest in offshore drilling is as a hedge for the future, to maintain a supply of the stuff that they can continue to sell at ever-mounting prices, to feed their ever-mounting, unimagined-in-human-history corporate profits. Any Republican who has the chutzpah to say anything else is either lying his/her putrid guts out or is too stupid to know better -- or both.

Oh, and national security? We need Young Johnny to "win" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the War on Terror?

It's sad to think that there are Americans who have been ruthlessly hornswoggled into believing any of this rot, by people whose ignorance of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror is total. The warmongers are treating those poor folks like fecal matter, patsies for their ceaseless lies and stupidifications. The Britney Spears TV commercial??? America, they're telling you you're dumber than shit.

Now even the phony-baloney War on Terror is kaput. Today the Rand Corporation, an extremely conservative think tank, reported what has been obvious to most everyone who has had any awareness of the real reality of international events since 9/11: that the law-enforcement approach to fighting terrorism -- reflexively derided by lying or cretinous demagogues who think the American people are as stupid and dishonest as they are -- has been genuinely productive and is the obvious and only way to go. Military solutions, says the Rand report, are total bullshit. (Okay, they may not use the actual word bullshit, settling for the Rand-speak equivalent.)

Reference to "the law-enforcement approach" is used as an automatic sneer-slash-laugh line by the likes of Rudy "I'm Too Smart for My Brain" Giuliani and "The World's Tiniest George" Bush. There is irony here. Not with regard to Tiny George, of course -- it's hard to imagine much of anything even potentially ironic about his useless carcass. But Rudy built his whole career on hi record in law enforcement.

Of course that always depended on ignoring the staggering rate of reversal his prosecutorial convictions as U.S. attorney suffered on appeal, and ignoring the fundamentally pogrom-like culture of violence he bred in the New York Police Department during his time as mayor of New York. Now he's made it clear how little he understands and respects real law enforcement.

Meanwhile, as talk arises of Barack Obama's "presumptuousness" in behaving more like a president on his trip to the Middle East and Europe, the only commentators who remember that in the early stages of the senator's trip, commentators generally assumed it was just a matter of time before he committed a campaign-ending gaffe are commentators who now ridicule that kind of talk as overblown. I can't help thinking that closer examination would reveal that it's the very same commentators who (a) were lying in wait for the sure-to-happen gaffe and (b) later turned to deriding the gaffe watch.

In the interim, of course, an awful lot of people, Americans and otherwise, noticed that Senator Obama really did behave presidentially, if by "behaving presidentially" we understand behavior that doesn't leave us cringing every time he opens his mouth, or indeed moves a muscle. After all, by that modest definition, it's been almost eight years since we had a president capable of behaving presidentially.

Okay, so you see why I'm stumped for anything to write about the presidential campaign. So how about the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives displaying historic courage in voting to cite Karl Rove for contempt of Congress?

Oh yeah, great. I'll bet our Karl is shivering in his shoes.

Meanwhile the scandals pile up. And I don't mean charges or accusations. I mean the steadily growing pile of Inspector General reports, like the one from the Bush regime's notoriously gutless Justice Department IG, which nevertheless rips the Bush DoJ to shreds, making clear -- and adding some pungent detail to -- what most of us knew for years now: that the Bush DoJ was fundamentally a criminal enterprise, a betrayal of historic proportions of the department's basic criminal-justice function. Every second of every day of the Bush regime, its Justice Department (and the people who illegally and unethically manipulated it from the White House for partisan enforcement) was first and foremost devoted to transforming the U.S. into a dictatorship of the Far Right.

And Karl Rove was at the center of that wildly illegal as well as unethical and unprincipled deformation. As he was in transforming to primarily political function every agency of the federal government he could get his slimy mitts on. Worse still, if it's possible to imagine anything worse, we have substantial indications -- still awaiting proper investigation for actual evidence -- that our Karl engineered the overthrow of the legitimate government of the state of Alabama and successfully railroaded its governor into a prison sentence.

So the Dems on House Judiciary screwed up their courage and rose in righteous wrath, declaring, "Bad Karl!" Let's say the House goes ahead and actually votes for their contempt citation. Woo! Just ask Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers how scary that is.

The whole fucking Bush Justice Department should be under indictment, not to mention Rove and the whole of "Big Dick" Cheney's senior staff. Not to mention several hundred senior stooges who have infested the executive branch in this regime. Now it's more or less official: We can't lay a glove on any of youse bums.

So you see what I mean? It wasn't exactly a no-news day. But what is there to say about it all?

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