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Things in politico that make me want to mainline antifreeze, part the infinity - Marlene Zenker - 15-07-2014
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Politico_Dances_With_The_Devils
THINGS IN POLITICO THAT MAKE ME WANT TO MAINLINE ANTIFREEZE, PART THE INFINITY
By Charles P. Pierce on July 15, 2014- [*=center]85[URL="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?original_referer=http://www.esquire.com&text=Things%20In%20Politico%20That%20Make%20Me%20Want%20To%20Mainline%20Antifreeze,%20Part%20The%20Infinity&url=http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Politico_Dances_With_The_Devils%3Fsrc%3Dsoc_twtr&via=EsquireMag&related=EsquireMag"]
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Close it down.
Its puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d'erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He's made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.
It's not just that TBOTP invited the Manson Family of American geopolitics to come together for an exercise in ensemble prevarication. It's not just that the account of said exercise is written in the kind of cacophonous cutesy-poo necessary to drown out the screams of the innocent dead, and to distract the assembled crowd from the blood that has dripped from the wallet of the celebrity war-criminal leading the public display. And it's not as though this was a mere interviewa "get" that could help you "win the morning (!)." In that, it might have been marginally excusable. No, this was one of Mike Allen's little grift-o-rama special eventsa "Playbook lunch," sponsored by that noted mortgage fraud concern Bank Of America. There's an upcoming TBOTP "event" in L.A. that is sponsored by J.P. Morgan. I know what Mike Allen is, but I am so goddamn tired of haggling about the price. Here's how TBOTP's own account of the event begins.
Sing it with us: "Here's the story of a man named Cheney ..." Dick, Lynne and Liz Cheney had a message they wanted to send with their appearance at POLITICO's Playbook lunch on Monday: We're a family, we're happy together, we joke together, and we're beating the drum for an aggressive foreign policy together. It's almost as if the Cheneys were the Brady Bunchif the Brady Bunch had started a hawkish think tank and were warning the country about the failures of President Barack Obama's leadership around the world.
Yes, and if Mike were an authoritarian greed-monkey with a borrowed heart that he declined to employ in any meaningful sense, if Carol were a lifelong scold and nuisance pretending to be a historian, and if Marcia were a talentless clown who, if it weren't for the largesse of Mike's friends and their foundations, would be selling phony subprime packages to the blind from a strip-mall in Kannapolis. Also, whatever editor it was who passed on the tone of this account should be sent back to the oyster cannery where they found him.There's just one problem: this Brady Bunch wasn't all together. Mary Cheneythe former vice president's other daughter, who famously broke with her sister Liz over same-sex marriagewasn't there. And her absence was obvious every time she came up in the conversation, even as the other Cheneys pleasantly included her in all the family stories they spun. This was a Brady Bunch with an empty squareand the rest of the family spent the lunch hour trying to pretend it wasn't empty.
That's the freaking problem? That Dad and Mom and Exemptionette got together, but The Gay One didn't show up. The problem was not that your publication decided to publicize itself, and suck up some of that sweet sponsorship cash from Wall Street, by putting a coward and a torturer on display with the more unpleasant members of his family? The problem was not that the alleged journalists running your place decided to give a platform to a man whose only public appearances in the near future should be unsponsored events at the Hague?They even laughed together as the inevitable Code Pink protesters interrupted the lunch, with Lynne Cheney joking, "I wondered why the line was so long" to get into the event. (Dick Cheney sat more uncomfortably, laughing slightly but turning away from the protesters.)
Oh, those silly protestors. They are, how you say, so recherche? More than 4000 American soldiers, and over 100,000 Iraqis, also might have shown up, inconveniencing the Bride Of Dracula even further, but they were otherwise occupied with being dead because of the war into which hubby lied the country so he could line his pockets. Tres amusante, non?The most awkward parts of the event, however, were when POLITICO's Mike Allen asked about the absence of Mary, who called Liz "dead wrong" for opposing same-sex marriage during her short-lived Wyoming Senate campaign. (Mary is married to her longtime partner, Heather Poe, and it remains unclear whether the two have actually patched up their relationship.) Liz drew a deep breath when the question came up, but then laughed easily when Allen read Mary's diplomatic email response about why she wouldn't be able to come to the event. Then she delivered her own smooth, practiced answer to the question that was sure to come up. "I love Mary very much and Heather and the kids, and this is an issue we disagree on, and I'm not going to add anything new to that," she said. Lynne Cheney added her own, motherly way of acknowledging the tensions: If she were in the shoes of one of the Cheney children or grandchildren, she said, "the last thing I would want is my mother in a public forum commenting on personal differences within the family."
Oh, that Mike Allen is so dead butch. The "most awkward part" of the event did not have anything to do with official mendacity, torture, and the deaths of thousands. It did not have to do with selling the country's energy policy to your pals and then locking up the account of how you did it. It did not have to do with cashing in other people's children as chips. Oh, no. It had to do with the internal dynamics of America's worst family, who apparently now are fighting over issues beyond whose coffin gets the freshest earth every morning when the sun comes up.Dick Cheney sat silently through the whole exchange, taking it all in without saying a word.
Because he doesn't give a fck. He's got his, Jack.How do you break the tensions with the Cheneys?
Shackles? Thumbscrews?Just turn it all back to foreign policy.
Oh, good. Expertise.The three were much happier and at ease when talking about their national security views, with a particular closeness between Lynne and Liz, as they elaborated on each other's answers and jokingly offered to let each other answer questions. Dick Cheney chuckled at most of the same jokes, but showed more of a physical distance as he leaned away from the other two. (Metaphor alert: he spent most of the afternoon leaning to his right.)
Jesus H. Christ on a Big Wheel, somebody take the crayons away from this child before he writes his next piece on the wall of the upstairs hallway.The former vice president naturally came prepared with his blistering critiques of Obama's foreign policy, warning that the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is, "if anything, bigger than any threat we've faced since before 9/11."
You cheap fraud. You people didn't "face" any threat before 9/11. Every damn one of you fell asleep at the switch. You abandoned counterterrorism in favor of chasing porn merchants and Tommy Chong. You exiled Richard Clarke. You started worrying about missile defense. Your boss took a vacation and blew off his CIA briefings and failed to read his presidential daily briefings. You watched the towers fall, at least partly through your sheer dereliction of duty, and you turned a national tragedy into a personal opportunity to get rich.He acknowledged that "you can't blame [Obama] for the entire problem developing," but insisted that Obama has "never admitted his problem" because he sees Iraq as more stable after the withdrawal of U.S. troops than it actually is. "The world's not getting safer, it's getting far more dangerous," he said, as Lynne nodded in agreement.
Not for you people, and not for the families of anyone you know. It would be nice to know at this point what Allen was doing. Was he struck dumb by the sheer audacity of this family of lycanthropic liars, or was he formulating another hard-hitting question about why The Gay One wasn't there? Or was he sitting there like a cigarstore Indian, counting the house.The former vice president didn't take the bait, at first. "I don't plan today to endorse any candidates for president," he said. But Liz - the co-founder of the Cheneys' new think tank, the Alliance for a Strong America - didn't show any such restraint. Obviously Senator Paul leaves something to be desired in terms of national security policy," she said, adding that he wanted to retreat behind "fortress America." That was enough to warm her father up to the task - a bit. "I did express the view that isolationism is crazy," Cheney said later. "Anyone who thinks after 9/11 that we can retreat behind the safety of our oceans, I'm sorry, but they're out to lunch."
You cheap fraud. Nobody with any brains thinks we can "retreat behind the safety of our oceans," 9/11 or not. (How'd that work out for the Aztecs?) However, the alternative is not to kick over a country, enrich your pals, and then unleash chaos for the rest of the world to sort out. I think we can maybe find a middle ground behind hiding behind our oceans and making Dick Cheney rich.When they were asked about Megyn Kelly's tough interview on Fox News, where she suggested that the former vice president was wrong about many things in Iraq too, he got a pained look on his facebut Liz kept a poker face.
So that's how all that Iraq unpleasantness came up? As a question about Megyn Kelly'sfaux-tough-gal reference to Dick Cheney's bungling? If that is not a perfect fractal of TBOTP's overall corruption, I don't know what is."It's not about lecturing, it's really about saying why we are where we are today," she said. "We've walked away from Iraq, and we're seeing the rise of the most serious threat since 9/11, I think ... You can't be responsible about the future if you don't understand what happened in the past."
I understand the past well enough to know that your father should be in leg irons. What else do I need to know?Foreign policy is just one way to bring peace to the Cheneys, though. The other is a limited-government view that's so strongly held that it extends even to a defense of congressional gridlock. When asked what the Republican Party should do about climate change, Liz responded, "nothing" - arguing that the bigger threat was the growth of EPA regulations. Neither of the other Cheneys challenged her on that view. In fact, Dick Cheney, a former congressman himself, even defended Congress from the extreme unpopularity it has suffered as it has been unable to take on many of the nation's challenges. "I don't think it's necessarily a bad year when Congress doesn't do anything," he said.
You cheap fraud. Of course you don't want Congress to do anythinglike hold hearings into which of your friends stole the national economy, or into which of your aides is leaking the names of covert CIA operatives for the purposes of political revenge, or into the negligence before the 9/11 attacks and/or the profiteering that followed them, or into barbered intelligence. When you were in Congress, you didn't think it should look into illegal arms sales to the Iranian mullahs. Even with our current Congress, there is something uncomfortably democratic about the legislature for someone whose entire worldview is bounded by the boardroom, and whose conscience has been in an undisclosed location for three decades. You're an authoritarian poltroon, and your daughter's an unelectable dunce. And Tiger Beat On The Potomac should rediscover shame as something to be valued. Or it should close. This afternoon. Journalismand the democracy that it is supposed to serveshould demand no less.Bartender, another drip-bottle to this gurney, and see what the pundits in the backroom will have.
Things in politico that make me want to mainline antifreeze, part the infinity - Marlene Zenker - 15-07-2014
As if we didn't know exactly what/who Politico was from day one.