Shorter Elephant: "Waaaah!!! Boo-hoo-hoo (sob!) Old Europe is so UNFAIR."

Cry me a river; or better yet, try to find someone who cares. See you back here for more tears when it's time for poor little convicted felon Scooter Libby's sentencing. And try not to think about how many will die in Iraq in the meantime. Better yet, tell us once again how the last six years are really all Bill Clinton's fault; seriously, you'll feel much better.

Elephant is STILL trying to jinn up sympathy for this devil? Whatever. But if his job is to "resolutely defend" all things Bush-Cheney, he's not trying very hard, given his failure to respond to Glenn Greewald's blog on impeachable offenses such as illegal wiretapping, etc.

It is preposterous that Wolfie und Bushie und Cheney fought tooth and nail to save Wolfie's job, only for him resign despite having done nothing wrong. No sale, Elephant; and the only reason I'm not debating Woflie's case is because I could not care less.

I can't resist pointing out, however, that "unfairness" is a word best not applied to Wolfie. "Unfair" is when your non-health insurance-providing boss fires you for not being on time to work when your kid is in the emergency room. "Unfair" is being brutally tortured and then kept in Gitmo for six years without being charged with anything, simply because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Unfair" is NOT being forced to leave a $250,000 per year sinecure for another equally or better paying sinecure before jetting off into cushy retirement because details came to light about a tawdry affair you were having with a subordinate and her exorbitant salary.

I am fascinated by the tenacity of Wofie's defenders, who are so eager to litigate this with us. They're just dying for a chance to lawyer us and to lawyer the truth by proving in the court of Salon's letters pages that Wolfie's apology wasn't really an admission of guilt and that the Bank was so terribly, tragically wrong when it found he broke their rules, and we are all being so mean to their Wolfie, who isn't really a petty scumbag. Oh the humanity!

Except that I don't care. I don't care how "unfair" the world is to poor little Wolfie, and I don't care how "unfair" the world is to the poor little neocons, whose war would've been such a big success if not for traitors and terrorist appeasers like us Libs and Old Europe. I don't want to be lawyered anymore by the neocons, not then, not now, not ever. I hope Wolfie & Shaha's humiliation is just the beginning of the Gop's comeuppance -- big time.

Elephantdung: "What the hell. Who cares about fighting African poverty when they have an image to protect?" -- Ironic, considering Wolfie made the Bank a joke in his desperate attempt to salvage the last tattered shreds of his own reputation and respectability.

Sadly for the neocons and their apologists, that train has sailed. Woflie's credibility as well as any illusion as to his competency vanished when he sold a war based on falsified intel; predicted the occupation of Iraq would last "four to six months;" and testifed that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

He's either an imbecile or a madman, or both, and in any event had no business heading the World Bank. History is not kind to evildoers who start failed wars based on lies.

"You may know people who will still defend the Iraq war (although they're less and less eager to talk about it). But who do you know who will defend the current method of healthcare delivery, administered by insurance companies whose central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return?" -- Andrew O'Hehir

I smiled when I read that. Andrew O. obviously does not spend much time consuming corporate media or monitoring right-wing talk radio. If he did, he would know there is a small but angry corps of dittoheads -- 28% of American voters at most -- who reflexively defend corporate power as a matter of faith with the righteous fervor of religious zealots.

For the most part these right-wingers have never been to or known anyone from the UK, France, or Canada; and thus they believe the corporate propaganda that portrays those nations as socialist prisons whose unarmed populations spend their lives waiting in line to hand over their meager wages to The State. What's the Matter With Kansas? indeed.

These people, some of whom are already busily engaged in attacking Michael Moore in Salon's letters pages, will never see 'Sicko'; but they are certain Moore is lying, and that "socialized medicine" doesn't work. Impervious to all evidence, they are more than eager to tell you how America would've "won" in Iraq but for Teh Left and the "liberal media."

I hope Michael Moore's next film explores the pathology of right-wing authoritarianism, and how it is used in America to further enrich the rich and empower the powerful.

I just came across a most excellent quote in a back issue (Nov. 2006) of Vanity Fair. It's James Wolcott, in part quoting Norman Mailer, on modern America's political discourse:

"Under Karl Rove's sorcerer's spell, republicans learned how to exploit the intelligence gap . . . '[Bush Jr.] understood stupid people well. They were not dumb, their minds were not physically crippled in any way. They had chosen to be stupid because that offered its own kind of power. To win a great many small contests of will, they needed only to ignore all evidence. Bright people would break down trying to argue with them.' It's like trying to reason with a box of rocks . . . . America may well devolve into the moronic dystopia of Mike Judge's movie 'Idiocracy' -- a mentally handicapped superpower buried under a mountain of garbage where the Fox News Channel is the sole source of information."

Thus health care; thus the occupation of Iraq; thus the Bush-Cheney presidency; etc.