Why We Invaded Iraq, with apologies to Lewis Carroll

Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee agreed to rig a battle
For Tweedle said Saddam Hussein ignored his righteous prattle;
Just then, down flew some Saudi gents,
Shrub’s papa used to diddle,
Which frightened all the people so,
They put Dum in the saddle.

M.F., with apologies to Lewis Carroll

Turdblossom, Meet the Original "Shit in a Silk Stocking"

Whenever I am tempted to despair at the worldly success of men like Karl Rove, I shall remind myself that President Bush's beloved "Turdblossom" is only at the top of the heap for a few months more, 657 days at this counting. Thoreau tells us to "read not the times, but the eternities", and a look at the career of the 19th century diplomat Talleyrand shows us that the Bush minions are mere amateurs, and failed amateurs at that, when it comes to kissing up to power, squeezing out the profits, then dropping your patron like a used wrapper and ducking out the back door a moment before the cops arrive. An excellent profile of Talleyrand here at The New Criterion inspired these reflections.

Rove is despised by two-thirds of the country, and hangs on to power only by the indulgence of his boss and staying a step ahead of the hounds. Talleyrand, by comparison, kept the mass of men bamboozled as to his true motives, and even on the occasions when he had to skip town, never missed a meal or a paycheck-- then switched sides and was back in business with the same people who'd been calling for his head.

Napoleon called him "shit in a silk stocking", which outdoes "Turdblossom" as a lasting sobriquet. Talleyrand could take a bite out of your donut and be wiping the powdered sugar from his lips while asking with a straight face, "Donut? What donut?"

He did get off some good lines about power, politics and human nature:

"War is too serious to be left to military men."

"They [the aristocracy] remember everything and learn nothing."


Apt to our purpose today, "I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep."

and out-Roving Rove, “Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.”

... But never forget he was a shitheel, through and through, who got a lot of other people killed and profited enormously to the end of his days. He died in bed aged eighty-three, still collecting paychecks from both sides. Like Meyer Lansky, Talleyrand was a successful gangster, unlike the flashier failures like Capone and Napoleon, who both made headlines but died in prison with the clap.

Sometimes Mean Is All You've Got

Karl Rove, known to the president as Turd Blossom, is not especially worried about the midterm election. He even claims to have done the math to predict "a Republican House and a Republican Senate"; that is, in spite of all the public expressions of disgust, that disgust won't actually translate into votes for Democrats.

I hope he's wrong, but won't be surprised if there are no substantial changes in the governance of our country. The reporters of the popular press no longer think, they swarm like schools of small fish, and they've got themselves convinced that the Democrats are going to win the House, take the Senate, and act as a control on Boy King George.

I'm expecting a few seats to change hands, but not nearly enough to inspire a sea change. The Democrats will congratulate themselves on election night, and on the following morning there will bitter accusations from the losers, but when the dust clears, there will still be quislings voting with the president.

We need a two-thirds majority to override presidential vetoes and restore habeas corpus. I'm not sure we'll get that.

So Rove smiles his Uriah Heep smile and fingers the lettering on his "I LOVE DIEBOLD BECAUSE DIEBOLD LOVES ME" gift mug. The nation is in peril and a majority of Americans despise this administration, but when you're an ugly wet rat trapped in a corner, all you've got left is mean-- and Rove and the Bush family have never been wanting for meanness of spirit.

[See Also Put Not Your Faith in Foley]

FASCIST IS AS FASCIST DOES

If right-wingers are too quick to use epithets against an argument they don't like, the left is just as guilty for throwing the word "fascist" around too quickly.

Now the White House speechwriters are tossing the f-bomb around on a PR offensive featuring the president talking to the VA--tough crowd, gutsy move. Apparently he's asking the rest of us to help him clean up the mess he himself made, a familiar litany in this man's life. The Donald (Rumsfeld) is using it too, talking about "a new type of fascism" and honking about appeasement, the broad hint being that anyone who opposes Rumsfeld must be an appeaser and a Very Bad Person.

Rove’s Republicans must have been concerned that the left still had one powerful word left in their quiver. Now every neo-con from Bush to Rumsfeld to Tony Snow to Rick “I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator”Santorum to Majority Leader Bill “Cat Killer” Frist is evoking the shade of Chamberlain at Munich.

I try to stay close to the word's etymology: those who emulate a bundle of sticks or "fasces", a political organization wherein the individual is subordinate to the state, and things get damned uncomfortable for the sticks that don't quite fit.

The irony is that nothing resembles modern fascism quite so much as the Bush administration’s insistence on a monolithic point of view. The Japanese phrase “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” fairly describes the national dialogue during the rush to invade Iraq. Digby’s Hullabaloo has called them on it, and the Los Angeles Times are drop kicking the analogy as well. The Christian Science Monitor lets the word speak for itself. If this propaganda initiative fails, I wonder what vile phrase the Rover Boys will next tie to their test balloons.

Keith Olbermann has articulated as well as anyone why we refer to this administration as "fascistic”. I first saw Olbermann as a hockey reporter on ESPN, and still miss the phrase “drop the chalupa”, but an essay like this is worth his disappearance into the shadows of MSNBC.

God-damnit, Turdblossom, git on out of there now... One of you fellas want to give me a hand? He's crawled up there to hide and he won't come out.