Lance Mannion

The boy who lived

The Linkmeister was wondering why the blog world wasn't buzzing at the opening of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Not that he's seen anyway.  If you've seen different or have a idea about why the relative---compared to the opening of Revenge of the Sith and the publication of the newest novel in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince---silence, stop in and tell the meister.

I haven't seen much blog commentary either.  My guess is that the movie's suffering from coming out in the shadow of the new novel's release this past summer. (As if the Potter franchise needs the attention of the blogs.  And don't blogs and bloggers sound like something the students at Hogwarts would learn how to deal with in their Defense Against the Dark Arts class?)    But just because bloggers might have written themselves out on all things Potter when the book came out, that doesn't mean that the series' young fans aren't excited.  Goblet of Fire is a big hit.   One of the Harry's most insightful and devoted admirers, Violet Mannion, thinks it's the best movie so far.  Here's her review.

Meanwhile, over at the American Street, at least one blogger has something to say on the subject.

Me.

I posted a review this morning, Goblet of Dying Embers.  Title suggests that I was less than enchanted, doesn't it?  It's funny.  While I was watching the movie I thought I was watching the best one of the series too.  But the more I thought about it afterwards, the more critical I became.

My review includes another gratuitous swipe at George Lucas who is becoming the King Charles' head of my blogging.  Like Mr Dick in David Copperfield who couldn't keep the beheaded Stuart out of his memorial, I can't seem to write anything anymore without the creator of Star Wars appearing out of nowhere like the shade of Obi-wan.

The 12 year old and the 9 year old liked Goblet of Fire, but they disagree with their cousin on whether it's the best in the series.  "Not enough quiditch," harumphed the 9 year old.  "And no Dursleys."  He likes the formula.  The 12 year old just likes Prisoner of Azkaban better.

Meanwhile:  Maud Newton reports that Ralph Fiennes, who plays Voldemort in Goblet of Fire, has backed out of a movie version of J.M Coetzee's Disgrace.  Fiennes thinks he's too young and sexy to be disgraceful enough.  He doesn't put it quite that way, but that's the upshot.   And he's right.

And on the subject of movies:  Claire Helene reviews the new Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of a Pride and Prejudice zealot. And Chuck Tryron looks at a mockumentary I hadn't heard of but now want to see, The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah.

Advise and Consent Redux

The coming confirmation battles over the nomination of Strip-search Sammy Alito to the Supreme Court will make a great story.

Look at the cast of characters.  A weakened, frustrated, angry and from all accounts increasingly unfocused President.  His desperate, conniving Vice-President.  His even more desperate and conniving Right Hand Man.  A weepy, emotionally unstable Senate Majority Leader cracking under the strain of his own financial scandals.  The aging, humiliated once too often chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee forced to choose yet again between standing up for his avowed principles or caving in to the bullying of his Right Wing colleagues.  The seemingly mild-mannered Minority Leader who is cagey as all get out and solid steel.

And what a plot!

Will the supposedly pro-choice Republicans stick with the President on this one?  Will the Democrats find the courage to stand up with their cagey, steely Leader?  Will they filibuster?  Will the Majority Leader go nuclear?  Will the "compromise" hold?  Will they blow up the Senate?

And, in the background, quietly, inexorably, Patrick Fitzgerald grimly prepares to bring Scooter Libby to trial and the whole lying gang into court to testify about how they ginned up a war and set out to cover up their evil schemes.

It would make a great novel, and almost certainly such a great novel will never be written.

Continued over at The American Street.

You can't read and cross the Street at the same time

I've goofed again and begun another one of my infamous mult-part postings but this time Part 1 is over on the American Street.

This one's on politics and novels.  I'm writing it as a response to Christopher Lehmann's essay in the Washington Monthly, "Why Americans Can't Write Political Fiction."

My bold reply to Lehmann is, "You're right, they can't, except when they do, but they don't do it often, and here's why, maybe."

I posted Part 1, "The Novel Writing Class," yesterday.  Part 2, "The a-political novel," will be up late Tuesday afternoon.  If you want to stop by the Steet and drop off some examples of good political novels, please do.   But you should also read Lehmann's essay first.

Street cred

I have another Sunday post up at The American Street.

Sorry to say it's not a Lance and Nance post.  Sorrier to say there probably won't be any more Nance and Lances for a while.  Nance has decided that blogging at three places, none of which pays her any money, is not the wisest course for a professional journalist, particularly one now struggling to get a non-substistance wage free-lance career up and running.  So she's cutting back on charity work.

Nance fans will have to make do with reading her four times a week on her own page, her occasional posts at the Detroit News' blog, and links she provides to articles she publishes.  Poor you.

Yesterday she wrote about the ways newspaper copy editors can be heroic---provided you accept a TV doctor show definition of heroism---and dumb---provided you accept as the definition of a dumb a New York Times copy editor's attempts to "fix" the prose of one unknown freelancer named Elmore Leonard, who's serializing a novel in the Times Sunday magazine.

Read Nance's By the book.

Meanwhile, I'm soloing over at the Street, writing on Fast Billy Bennett and the neo-racism of the Republican Party since Nixon.  Key graf:

But the outrage in the remark is in how well it exemplifies one of the most invidious of the Republican Party’s contributions to the racist resurgeance—the lie that racism is a thing of the past, except among Liberals and Democrats. We live in a color blind society now, don’t you know? The Civil Rights Movement, which the Right actually remembers the way Weimer Germans remembered the Armistace, and the attendent legislation, which the Right despises and still seeks to overturn, were wonderful, magical phenomena, as if Martin Luther King waved a wand over the whole country and we all awoke, sweet-minded and innocent, from a nightmare of slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow, lynching, Scottsboro, and Bull Connor.

Post is called Color blind.

It's not political; it's moral!

Americans have a habit of talking about politics as something apart from the normal doings of our lives.  Kind of strange of us, considering that the normal doings of our lives are only possible because of politics.  Turning on the tap to get a drink of water is a political act if only because the water flows and is relatively clean because of decisions made by politicians who owe their jobs to political decisions made by us.

Want to see what life without politics looks like?  Turn on the TV and look at the video from New Orleans before the Guard got there.

The devastation caused by the storm was the least of Louisiana and Mississippi's troubles.  All the rest of it is a result of a failure of political leadership, from the President on down to the local mayors---political leadership disappeared.  Politics stopped.

Anarchy---the opposite of politics---took over.

Anyone saying that now is not the time to play politics, now is not the time to look for people to blame is either consciously or unconciously helping to shield politicians from responsibility for their failures.  You can't criticize a political leader without it being a political act.  Tell me that no political leaders here deserve criticism.

What's more, it's not a case that they failed.  They are continuing to fail.

Now they are failing in Texas as well as in Louisiana and Mississippi.  Do the Feds plan to let the cities of Houston and Dallas and San Antonio become permanent refugee camps?

FEMA director Michael Brown is not up to the job.  He needs to be fired and replaced, now.

The President has no clue.  He needs to find someone who can handle the job of rescue and recovery.  Now.

These are political statements.  They are also true.  Nobody should refrain from telling the truth because the truth might have some politics attached.

But more than the failures being political failures; they are moral failures, as well.

The failure of the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans to get more people out and stock, equip, and staff emergency shelters before Katrina hit was a moral as well as a political failure.  The people we put in office have a moral obligation to protect and to serve.  A politician who does not do a competent job of at least trying is as criminally negligent as a surgeon who shows up drunk for an operation.

Sen. Mary Landreiu going on television to thank Federal leaders while they were in the middle of letting the biggest city in her state drown wasn't just politically blockheaded, it was immoral.  It's immoral because she was reflexively being a purely political animal, trying to ingratiate herself with the Republicans to advance her own career in Washington, when she should have been standing up to give voice to the anger and heartbreak of her fellow Lousianians.

(Update:  Senator Landrieu has found her anger.  See the Times-Picayune's hurricane blog.)

Bush's lazy and half-hearted attention during the first days of the disaster was a moral failure.

His having nothing to say to people who'd lost everything except that they should go to the Salvation Army for help was a moral failure.  His jokey maundering about Trent Lott's having lost his house, revealing that the only people he can truly sympathize with are rich white guys like himself, is a moral failure.

In a week when regular Americans, reeling from the ever increasing price of gas and struggling to find the money to fill their tanks so they can go to work, opened their wallets immediately to help their brothers and sisters in New Orleans and Biloxi, Condoleeza Rice going on a shopping spree to spend thousands of dollars on shoes was a moral failure.

Denny Hastert watching people struggling for their lives on the rooftops of their flooded homes and having nothing to say about it but that those houses should be bulldozed was a moral failure.

His initial refusal to call Congress back from its vacation and his only agreeing to do it after Nancy Pelosi embarrassed him into it was a moral failure compounded.

The raving calls from Right Wing bloggers for shooting the looters on sight and worrying more about stolen television sets than about the people in the Superdome wading through their own shit to stand in line to get MREs for their hungry children---well, I don't know how you can begin to qualify the moral failures of people who have no other morality but loyalty to George W. Bush.

The same for the Right Wing Media blowhards who are trying to distract Americans from holding President Bush responsible.  Letting Bush off the hook for this one lets him off the hook for the next one.  If he is not held accountable for his failures this time, he will not change anything before the next time.  But then these are people who have never understood that sometimes criticizing a politician is an act of loyalty to that politician.  If they had been critical of Bush's screw-ups in Iraq, Bush may have been forced into actually coming up with a workable plan for the War.  If they criticize him now, they may be able to convince him that he needs to get serious about defending the homeland.  They are the ones who actually boast of their fear of another terrorist attack on the level of 9/11.  It is a moral failure on their part to let their President slide on this one.

And Democrats who are not standing up to express their outrage at all these moral failures because they are afraid of appearing to be playing politics are failing their own contituents politically and morally.

If white Democrats don't start speaking up soon, if they leave it solely or mainly to their black colleagues to voice the necessary moral outrage, they will show themselves up as cowards and be guilty of the biggest moral failure of them all.
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Steve Gilliard is irritable on a good day.  The Katrina Disaster and the ongoing moral and political failures of George Bush and company have driven him to a fury that is Biblical not just in its onrush of eloquence but in its moral outrage.  There are too many good posts to single any one out and I doubt Steve's anywheres near done.  So just go to The News Blog now.

I can't remember if it was Steve himself or one of his commenters or someone he linked to, but whoever did it has done us all a big favor by re-christening our would-be Carrie Bradshaw Secretary of State "Imelda Rice."

At the American Prospect, Jeff Dubner compares George Bush's longing for the day when he can sit on Trent Lott's rebuilt front porch to Michael Dukakis's cool as a machine reply to the infamous rape question in the 88 Presidential debates and Matt Yglesias makes the case---yeah, he's scoring political points, shame on him---that Katrina and her aftermath should remind us why Americans, Conservatives and Libertarians as well as Liberals, have chosen to have a Liberal government.

The Prospect links are both courtesy of Ezra Klein who has expressed his own outrage, soberly here, and, with a little help from his readers, satirically here.

Donate to the Red Cross here.

Donate to AmeriCares here.

See Blue Girls Page for information on how to donate Health Kits for the dispossessed.

(Cross-posted at The American Street.)

Clock out first, before you clean the blood off

Late Sunday night at the Cumberland Farms in Cornwall, New York, just south of here.  Moira Betz, 20 years old, assistant manager, working the register.  Her mother, Jacqueline, beside her behind the counter, helping out.

Customer comes to the register, man with what turns out to be about a hundred dollars worth of groceries.  Moira and her mom start ringing him up.

Moira doesn't like his looks.  Doesn't like it that he'd been in the store shopping aimlessly for 30 minutes and now he's the only customer left in the place.  Like that's what he'd been waiting for.

He'd bothered her so much, hanging around like that, that she'd become afraid he was there to rob them.  She even thought of pushing the button, the Panic Button, behind the counter that would have brought the cops in a hurry.

She didn't do it.

She told the newspaper reporter later she'd been afraid the guy might have had a gun and he'd have panicked and used it if he suddenly saw all those red lights flashing outside the store windows.

Situations like that, you tell yourself you're being paranoid, letting your imagination run away you.  You go on as if nothing's the matter, hoping for the best.  More often than not, things work out fine, and you were wrong to be worried.

Moira wasn't.

Still she was shocked when the guy pulled out a knife.

Waved it at her and her mother.  Gimme all your money!

They gave it to him.  Everything that was in the drawer.  Got away with $257.

$182 more than Cumberland Farms thought he should have been able to get away with.

Thursday an executive from the company fired Moira and her mother.

Company has a policy.  No more than $75 in the register drawer at any time.  Moment the count goes a penny over, you're supposed to pop it in the safe, I guess.  Seems impractical and unworkable.  Store gets busy, you get a line of customers, even if you can keep track of how much you've got in the drawer, you can't stop ringing people up to count up and count out and drop it it into the safe every time it looks to you like there might be more than 75 bucks in the till.

In practice the policy has to be "Whenever you get a free moment and you see there's a lot of money in the drawer, take out everything but 75 dollars and put it in the safe."  Which means that from time to time during the day there's going to more than 75 dollars in the register and it's going to happen that during one of those times something bad might happen that's going to make you wish you'd had the chance to empty the register before.  Like a robbery.

So maybe what it was was Moria had gone too long without doing a transfer.  There's a log.  Maybe the extra cash had been piling up in the drawer all night long.   She had plenty of chances to put the money in the safe.

Maybe.

But you'd think.  You've got a 20 year old girl working at eleven o'clock at night in your store, your convenience store---it's not unheard of, convenience store getting robbed late at night; in fact, that's why you have the no more than 75 dollars in the register rule---a thug wanders in, quite possibly a thug high on something makes him stupid enough and desperate enough to risk serious jail time for what even in his wildest dreams he can't believe is going to be more than a few hundred bucks, threatens the girl with a knife, this girl who even though she's assistant manager you're not paying a royal salary, she's lucky she takes home in a week as much as is in that drawer at the moment, she could have been hurt, she could have been killed, she could have died protecting your money---suppose she had followed the rules, suppose there was only 75 dollars in the drawer, and suppose the thug with the jones and the knife wanted more than that and didn't believe her she couldn't open the safe?

You fire her?

Of course you do.  Who is she anyway?  Peon.  Working a shit job at shit wages?  She was worth anything to anybody she'd have a real job, she'd work in an office, she'd be like me.

She's lucky we kept her on this long.

Maybe it didn't happen that way.  Maybe there's more to it.  Trouble is the company won't explain itself.   Their spokeswoman couldn't, or wouldn't, confirm or refute Moira's version of why she and her mother were fired.

Me, I'm inclined to believe Moira.  I've worked my share of shit jobs for shit wages and I've known a few managers and regional managers who cared far more for company rules than for the people they paid minimum wage to follow those rules.

One time, back in college, when I was working as an usher at a movie theater, friend of mine was behind the candy counter during a rush when all of sudden a girl on the other side of the counter, boosted herself up on the glass, reached over, and put her hand in the cash drawer.

My friend saw it.  She lunged for the girl's hand.  My friend was five feet nothing.  The girl had about 8 inches on her and 50 pounds.  My friend pulled the girl over the counter.  They fell to the floor together and wrestled around.  The girl socked my friend in the nose, pulled herself away, hopped back over the counter, and ran from the theater with a fist full of bills but not as much as she'd have gotten if my friend hadn't fought her for it.

My friend's uniform was torn.  Her nose was bloody.  She was all over sticky from the spilled popcorn butter and soda on the floor behind the counter.  She was crying.  Our manager, who was a good guy, took her in his arms.  He helped wipe her off, calm her down.  "Go in my office and get yourself together, ok?"  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a 20 dollar bill, "Then you go out, buy yourself some dinner, have a nice glass of wine, on me."

Nice story.  Except it happened that the district manager was there at the time.

"Make sure she makes a count of the drawer first," the district manager said.  "We need to know how much was taken."

"I'll do it," one of the other cashiers volunteered.

The manager said fine and told my friend once more to go clean up, relax for a bit, then go have dinner.

The district manager chimed in, "Clock out first."

Company policy.  No paid dinner breaks.  My friend, she didn't clock out, spent a whole hour eating her meal, might have taken the company for $3.25 she hadn't earned.

Fighting off a thug trying to rob the company?  All in a day's work.  That's how she earned the $3.25 she made this past hour.   What more does she want?

For crying out loud.

She's lucky she had the job.

(Cross-posted at The American Street.)

A smaller and purer church, my eye!

Lance and Nance, together again at last!

Finally, Nancy Nall and I have another post at the American Street.

Did you hear the one about the priest, the secretary, and the hot tub?

It's my fault that we didn't have one last week.  Nance was ready and raring to go.  She'd written her half last Saturday night, but I just couldn't get started on mine, even though we had a topic that as a former altar boy I could devote a year's worth of blogging to---sex scandals in the Catholic Church---and I should have been able to dash off my contribution in my sleep.  But I couldn't settle myself down to work, and by Monday I'd figured out why.  I was coming down with whatever it was that I came down with.  I'm all better now.  But that's why the Nance and Lance show might seem a little behind the curve.  The Beauty and the Priest was the week before last's headlines.

Still, it's never out of date to talk about sex or about the crisis the Church has brought upon itself because of sex, and I mean the sex it let the pederasts get away with all those years and the sex it officially forbids its priests to have---one reason the bishops might have been so morally callous in dealing with the pederasts is that Church has a thousand year old tradition of looking the other way when her priests break their vows of celibacy.  Priests abusing children and priests fooling around with grown women are two very different classes of sinners (not to mention that the first class are also criminals) but a millenium-long institutional habit of winking at priestly peccadillos might have grown so relfexive, and so corrupting, that a world-weary shrug in the face of any vice might have become the best the Church can muster.

As you can see, I'm making a direct connection between the Church's demand that priests remain celibate and the molestations---by driving away potential priests with normal sexual desires (among which I include gay as well as straight men, although the Church disagrees with me on that one), a much smaller and much less well-adjusted recruitment pool presents itself to draw from.

But beyond that there's the fact that the sexually normal priests were probably prevented from confronting the pederasts by their own sins and hypocrisies!  The pastor who is seeing a married woman on the side doesn't have the best moral footing when facing down the curate who's been spending too much time with another woman's 12 year old son.

At any rate, Nance, a Catholic girl who did not start much too late, but who didn't go to Catholic school and wasn't an altar girl---when she was a kid girls weren't allowed to be altar servers---and who therefore hasn't gotten to know as many priests personally as this former altar boy and proud holder of the Cathlic Cub Scouts' Parvuli Dei medal, expresses her amazement at Msgr. John Clark's multiple hypocrisies.

Clark has been named as the "other man" in a divorce suit filed by the husband of Clark's secretary.  Clark and the secretary were caught on video entering a motel together and then coming out several hours later, dressed in different clothes than the ones they wore going in.   They were also, allegedly, caught by the secretary's 14 year old daughter in a hot tub together not wearing very much in the way of any kind of clothes at all.

Clark is a darling of the Political and Religious Right because he's a public scold who blames every act of sexual transgression on Liberals.

So Nance is also amused at yet another paragon of Family Values valuing one member of somebody else's family a little too hightly.

Me, I got cynical about this sort of thing when I was an altar boy.  Just about every priest who passed through our parish either had a girlfriend at one time or another or left the priesthood to get married to the woman he'd been seeing on the side.

For more of my cynicism and Nance's shock and dismay, see our post Did you hear the one about the priest, the secretary, and the hot tub?
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Related bloggage for your Sunday morning reading pleasure:

Nance, whose mind and personality are so large that they can't be contained within two blogs, let alone one, has taken up a third.  She's blogging for the Detroit News.  Here are her first two posts:  The first is on John Roberts, comic writer.  The second is on Bill Frist, who is not funny in the least.

Totally unrelated other bloggage for your Sunday morning reading pleasure:

At Republic of Dogs, Res, frustrated at his friends and family's expectations that he use his professional technical expertise to fix and maintain their computers, wonders if the friends and families of brain surgeons expect free surgery and asks whether or not he should start charging for what he's getting a little tired of doing as favors.

 

Tin Man

Tom Watson, back from his vacation, reinvigorated and renewed, tackles the question of how much grief does the President feel and when does he feel it?

One of Tom's regular commentators, another Tom, Tom K., cries foul, arguing that we can't know what's in the President's heart and so have no grounds to judge just how much pain he feels at having sent all those soldiers and Marines to their deaths.

I agree.  We don't know.  He may cry himself to sleep every night. He may have moments when the heartbreaking burden becomes almost too much to bear and he has to slip out of a meeting so that his aides don't see him break down and weep.  We don't know, although it would sure help if the ravages of the war's cost showed up a little bit in his face, as the Civil War marked Lincoln's, and he didn't grin when he talked about how much grief he feels and how heavy the troops' sacrifices weigh on his mind.

Tom K. thinks we should focus our arguments on the President's policy and not spend time debating whether Bush is the Tin Man before or after his visit to the Wizard---and did I hear someone point out that with and without a heart the Tin Man was still hollow?

But the degree of the President's grief and compassion would not be a question if an absolute public indifference to death wasn't part of the foundation of the administration's Iraq policy.  Right from the start, the Bush Leaguers proceeded as if the war was practically a training exercise, such an easy job, requiring a minimum of effort and costing hardly anything, in money or blood, that it would be a waste of time for voters to pay any attention---except when the President was on TV being cheered by the troops and declaring premature victory.  As I wrote in Tom Watson's comments, this studied public callousness has been part and parcel of the running of the War---"Nothing to see here, folks.  Move along."---and it is one of the many stupid decisions they made about Iraq.

Besides the fact that by selling the war on the basis that nothing could go wrong, they set themselves up to have to explain away every little thing that did go wrong, put themselves in the position of having to explain why each and every soldier or Marine's death wasn't a mistake and a sign their War wasn't going according to plan---they created Cindy Sheehan as a problem for themselves this way---besides that, they made it impossible for themselves to ask for more.

They can't ask for more troops---which won't necessarily stop them from finding them somehow---and they can't ask for more time.

But on top of all that, they also made it very difficult for Bush to suddenly start caring.  Even if he's sorrowing at the war's cost as deeply as Lincoln grieved for the dead of the Civil War, Bush cannot show it, because to show it would be to admit that the original plan failed.  Things haven't gone as they were supposed to.  Things are in fact out of control.  As I said, death wasn't part of the original equation.  To suddenly acknowledge it now would be to say, "My fellow Americans, I was wrong, terribly, terribly wrong."

It's not that Bush is personally incapable of admitting a mistake, although his whole career has been a case study in how to succeed by never acknowledging failure.  It's that Bush, who has never been truly popular, is now demonstrably unpopular, and growing more unpopular. The only people supporting him are his base and his popularity with his base has always depended on their sense that Bush is infallible.

Their faith in the man is the faith of the religious in their holy man.   Bush doesn't dare do anything that might shake that faith.

One of the lines from the Wizard of Oz that has always bothered me, bothered me even when I was a kid, was when the Wizard says, presenting the "testimonial" to the Tin Man, "Remember, my sentimental friend.  A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others."

This has always sounded wrong to me.  When I was younger it didn't sound right because it seemed to suggest that a person didn't need to have a good and loving heart in order to be judged to be good and loving.  When I got older and had learned a few things about human nature and human history, it sounded just plain foolish because I knew that many people who did not deserve to be loved were not only loved by others but absolutely adored by them.

Obviously the Wizard means that the Tin Man must realize that he has to earn other people's love.  It's not enough to say I love you and then expect the person you just declared yourself to to fling themselves into your arms---it's a lesson for young lovers and children who want to make friends.

But grown-up politicians, especially charismatic politicians who succeed and lead on the basis of their personal magnetism, are judged by how much they are loved by others, and judge themselves accordingly too.

You don't have to find Bush charismatic personally to know that he is primarily a charismatic leader.  He has succeeded because he has sold voters an image, an image that doesn't have much to do with his policies and programs and actual achievements.  He can't change that image now.  Doesn't dare.

So he's stuck with a public pose of heartlessness, and he's stuck with Cindy Sheehan.

Meeting with Sheehan would go a long way with the general public, but it would not play well with his base.  Karl Rove knows that although Bush's poll numbers might improve a bit if he'd do the decent thing and just invite Sheehan in for a cold drink and a short chat, the next grieving mother who rises up to demand to know why her son or daughter had to die for a lie will drag those numbers right back down.

And Rove also knows that if the President appears to admit he's made a mistake, any sort of mistake, in Iraq, people among his base might start to wonder if their faith in the man was misplaced and if even a small percentage of the base changes their mind about him, it's all over for the Republicans.

This is why I think the President grins when he's asked about Cindy Sheehan.  He's embarrassed as all get out.   He wants to say more and he's been told he needs to say less and so he can't help but just feel foolish when her name comes up.

Unless it is the case that the "testimonial" is really only a cheap clock, and the only thing inside his chest is a beautiful echo.

(Cross-posted at The American Street.)

Orc logic

Sometimes I wish we bloggers on the Left would just ignore those on the Right.  There's no gain in it.  A moment or two of easy feelings of moral and intellectual superiority bracketed by a lot of frustration, anger, and utter dismay that people of such low standards and stunted emotional growth command a hearing and boast large, loyal followings.

We know what they are, and there's no arguing with them.

It's not just their illogic, their mean-spiritedness, their placing of anything that looks like a fact out of bounds.  Not just their many and varied hypocrisies and their ability to change opinions at the drop of a hat---or a nod from Karl Rove---totally contradicting what they were ready to go to the wall for only last week if that's what serves the Agenda this week.

And it's not just that they really don't represent anything in themselves.  They are no more responsible for the "ideas" they spout than a secretary running the Xerox machine is responsible for what's in the latest memo from the boss.

It's not just all that.

It is their bloody evil-mindedness.

They think like the squabbling orcs in The Two Towers who start a conversation cursing the elf warrior they've imagined has left the paralyzed Frodo to be eaten by Shelob---"regular elvish trick"---and finish it laughing about the time they left a paralyzed comrade to be eaten by Shelob.

"D'you remember old Ufthak?  We lost him for days.  Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed!  She'd forgotten him, maybe, but we didn't touch him---no good interfering with Her..."

Orc-like they hate in their enemies what they love in themselves. Or, in other words, what they hate most is catching sight of themselves in mirrors of their own devising that they have fumblingly held up to their own faces.

The orcs are at it with Cindy Sheehan, hating her for making them confront the reflections of their own chickenhawkery and political hackishness.

She's using her son's death for political ends!  Regular elvish trick!  How dare anybody use something like a war to advance their own political cause!

How can you argue with such intellectual perversity?  Much better, I often think, to pay them no mind and stick to attacking and arguing with their leaders who are at least out in the open and caught on the public record making stupid, perverse, and evil arguments for their losing War.

Leaders like Sen. George Allen who says that the President should meet with Cindy Sheehan and in answer to her questions tell her that her son died a hero.

Well, she knows her son's a hero, you fatuous windbag!   She's already proud of her son!  She was proud of him and thought he was a hero while he was alive!  She wants to know why he isn't alive.  She wants to know why the President feels it was necessary for her son to become a dead hero instead of leaving him alone to go on being a live hero to her. And the Freedom, Democracy, War on Terror bullshit will not answer her, because she's heard it and she knows it to be lies!  What she wants is for the President to admit he lied, or at least that he goofed.  She doesn't want to hear him continue to lie, hear him promise to continue to screw-up and kill other mothers' sons and daughters!

She doesn't want an empty-hearted sermon, Senator.  She wants an honest answer.

Which she knows Bush can't give.

So I'd rather focus on the likes of George Allen, and George Bush, and Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice.  I'd rather focus on the real writers in the real media, and forget about people who think that calling themselves Hindrocket makes them sound macho and cool.

But it's like saying a virus is a virus and will be a virus no matter what, so we should just ignore it and leave it alone to be a virus.  Can't do it.  We hold the vaccine.  We can put up the signs that say This House is Quarantined Until Reason and Sanity are Restored.

(Plus, if we all gave it up we'd lose out on the pleasure of reading Roy Edroso's summarizations of their latest madhattery.  For instance, here's Roy catching the Right Wing Intellectual types' new strategy for regaining public support for their war:  "When I want your opinion, I'll tell it to you!")

The main trope in the attacks on Cindy Sheehan is the image of her dead hero son hanging his head in shame over what she's doing.

(Our Pepper pinches her nose and holds up a good example by the tail.  The Heretik lifts a rock and finds another one by a nitwit calling himself the Confederate Yankee.  Funny what these people are proud of.)

Forget the illogic of invoking the old "so and so is turning over in his grave" cliche in this case.  The behavior meant to be shamed would not be necessary if that so and so was alive to condemn it.  If Casey Sheehan was alive to scold his mother for camping out in Crawford she would not be camping out in Crawford.

Forget also the childishness of it, the way talking about Casey Sheehan as if he was alive saves them from having to face the fact of his death, of Death itself.  Soldiers don't die, they just take up residency in Vallhalla.  We don't have to mourn them.  We don't have to question why they died.  They're happy there!  They want to be there! O Death where is thy sting, and mommy, leave the light on, please?

And forget the narcissism of it, the way they are admiring and congratulating themselves by imagining that Sheehan would be automatically on their side, the way they are feeling tough and brave by identifying with a dead hero, the way they refuse to imagine the ghost of Casey Sheehan turning to those among them young enough to serve and demanding to know, "Why weren't you there with me?  Why didn't you have my back?"

Forget all that and look at the orckish evil mindedness of their assuming that a son would turn on his mother because of her political opinions.

You see the mirror they're holding up?  Loyalty to the right political idea---to their idea---trumps all, family loyalty and a son's love for his mother included.

What's reflected in that mirror are people who have no respect for anything, not a dead solider, not a mother's grief, certainly not truth, not even themselves, no respect for anything but an idea.

The idea being that George Bush does no wrong.

Orcs terrified of the Nazgul aren't any more slavish to the Eye.

(Cross-posted on the American Street.)

The Aristocrats

No, not the movie.

Not the joke itself either.

The field of candidates for President in 2008 that is assembling itself at the moment.

Come the winter of 2007-2008, fanning out across Iowa and New Hampshire will be a Clinton, a Bush, a Romney, a Bayh, and, possibly, a Gore, all of them having had to greater or lesser degrees political careers predicated upon their famous last names.

This bothers me probably more than it should.  Nobody should be barred from office because of who their parents were, and that should work for the children of the rich and famous as well as the anonymous orphan.  And at a certain point in all professions people travel as much or more on the connections they've made than on their merits or the resumes they've assembled.

A hardworking nobody from a family of no particular social standing or connections can earn his way into a prestigious college, like Georgetown, distinguish himself well enough to catch the eye of, say, a United States Senator---say William Fullbright---and from that point be on his way to governor of his home state---call it Arkansas---and then President.

And while connections do matter, and can matter most of all, talent will still out.  Sofia Coppola only got to direct movies because of who her father is, but she will get to direct more because she made Lost in Translation.

Her father's connections plus her own talent made her a director.  But his connections could not make her an actress.  Seen Godfather III?

And politics can be the family business as much as a movie studio, a law firm, or a dry cleaner's.

George W. Bush's career is dismaying to contemplate because he is someone who has survived and thrived solely because of who his father was.

But that isn't the case with his brother Jeb, and it certainly wasn't the case with their father.

And the 2008 Presidential race will also include John Edwards, John McCain, Bill Frist, Wes Clark, Chuck Hagel, and probably some others, who can be considered self-made men in the American Grain.  And to be fair, the fathers of Evan Bayh, Mitt Romney, and Al Gore are pretty much forgotten characters now, their names' gave their sons a big leg up but it's been all the sons' efforts ever since that have brought them to national prominence and made plausible their becoming President.

In fact, it's unlikely that Mitt Romney's father's having been the Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s and a failed Presidential candidate in 1968, did much to help him in Massachusetts in 2001 and I can't see his old man's name or reputation giving him any boost at all nationally in 2008.  I can even see it hurting him in the Republican primaries.  I won't be surprised if whichever candidate Karl Rove ends up working for makes sure that the film of George Romney saying he was brainwashed on Vietnam makes the rounds among the Right Wing faithful.

Being the son of a Mormon liberal who wussed out on the war won't win Mitt many votes.

The gathering of so many legacies is a statistical and historical fluke not an ominous trend.   A quick glance at the list of 20th Century Presidents proves that Americans are much more likely to elect a commoner than an aristocrat.    Our Presidents have been one lived-out Horatio Alger tale after another.

Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton are all, for better or worse, exemplary American success stories.

A survey of all the men who have been their Party's nominees reveals that in every election that did not include a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, or a Bush, the match-ups pitted commoner against commoner.

So I shouldn't worry too much.

Still, I do.

There is no guarantee that the Republic will last forever, that we won't go the way of others before us and devolve into dictatorship or monarchy.  It seems to me that Americans are increasingly more impressed by wealth and celebrity, increasingly more willing to live as spectators to their own governance, increasingly less interested in and concerned about our history and the principles on which the nation was built and by which it survives.

The media that is supposed to be our watchdog is even more slavishly fawning towards celebrity and treats it as a virtue in itself.  And it is utterly bored with the whole notion of free and open government.

Lots of headlines the last few days screaming the fact that a baseball player lied about using steroids.

How many of even half the size have you seen about the fact that the President lied us into a war?

The media would be happiest if the next Presidential election starred Arnold Schwatzenegger going up against Tom Hanks.  Since that won't happen, they seem to be pushing at us another celebrity slug-fest, one legacy against another, and in that contest, I'm afraid Democrats are at a big disadvantage.

As Erik Loomis puts it, what we could get in 2008 is "a race between the more competent Bush and the less charismatic Clinton."

Now, when I think it over, objectively, I don't believe there is much chance of a showdown between Hillary and Jeb.

I'm pretty sure that, barring a second born-again experience for George Bush, one in which this time instead of sobering him up, Jesus wises him up and teaches him how to be President, the name Bush will make all but the most rabid of Right Wingers' nauseous.

On top of which I think Jeb himself will look at the wreckage his brother's left all around him and decide he'd be better off waiting until 2012 or even 2016 for it all to blow over.

So what I'm really worried about is that the Democrats will nominate their celebrity/legacy.

I won't vote for Hillary in the primaries.   I have several reasons, one of which is that her main qualification for the job is that the Clinton we really want to be President can't run again.  But my main reason is that I think she'll get whupped badly in the general election.  People have been making too much of those polls that show her being very popular in odd places, like parts of Texas.  What those polls are showing is that she's famous.

People love her as a celebrity.  That doesn't mean they're going to rush out to vote for her as a candidate.

And 2008 is still three years away, and over that time her husband's star will dim.  It's hard for me to see what she can do to make her own star that much brighter---I mean among voters at large, as she will certainly be wooing and winning over lots of the party faithful.

Erik's post links to posts by Matt Yglesias and Scott Lemieux looking at Hillary's major weakness as a candidate---she is a moderate that everyone thinks is an ultra-liberal.  But I think her being who she is is a pretty big handicap too.  The Republicans are going to be vicious to whoever the Democrats run, and Hillary can stand up to it, I'm sure, but I don't believe she'll be able to overcome it.

She will be running on her name and she will have nothing to offer over and above her name when the Republicans set out to ruin her for her name.

Gore has experience, Clark has his military career, Edwards has his charm and his background.

Hillary just has Bill.

A lot of smart people think she can win anyway.  Maybe.  But I wouldn't look forward to a Hillary Clinton Presidency because although she might succeed despite her divisiveness as a candidate I don't see her being a particularly unifying President.

To be a success, the next Democratic President has to hope that the Party will have taken back both houses of Congress by the time he, or she, is inaugurated.

I can see that happening.  But I can't see it happening by much.  I think that by 2009, if the Democrats have majorities, they will be the slimmest of majorities.

I can't see Hillary doing a better job of keeping her Party in line than her husband did in 1993.  And I can't see her meeting outstretched arms when she reaches across the aisle for the Republican votes.

The next President we get better be a great one.  He, or she, had better be able to unite Americans in an heroic effort to put back together what George Bush has smashed.

I don't believe Hillary will be able to do that.

Family connections can only carry you so far.

(Cross-posted at The American Street.  I'm volunteering myself to fill in for Neddie Jingo on Wednesdays there.  He's going to be busy for a while.)

Energize

The Nance and Lance Show is still on hiatus at the American Street.  Last week I was traveling.  This week Nance and I didn't get our heads together to come up with a topic.  Next week, I hope.

But I have a post up.  It's called "Scotty, I need warp speed in three minutes or we'll all dead."  Yep.  It's about Star Trek.  In the course of things I note some parallels between George W. Bush and Khan Noonien Singh---both overestimate their abilities, neither one listens to advice that contradicts what he wants to do, both underestimate their enemies, neither one learns from mistakes---but that's all in passing.

My real point is the importance of Scotty to Gene Rodenberry's vision of the future.

Not long before the show went on the air President Kennedy had said, “Our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man.”

He went on:

And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable–and we believe they can do it again.

Star Trek seemed designed as an illustration of what a future based on JFK’s hopeful speech would look like.

Scotty was the embodiment of the idea that human beings could solve humanity's problems.  He also stood for the idea that while technology was not reliable, people could always be counted on.

And that was Rodenberry’s most progressive idea. In the future he envisioned, everybody mattered. Everybody had an important job. Nobody was redundant. Nobody was a mere cog in the machine. What were all those people doing on the Enterprise, anyway? By the mid 1960s it was possible to see how computers would come to be able to do many jobs that people then did but do those jobs faster and more reliably and with fewer errors, with the bonus that the computers would not need to be paid.

Rodenberry saw such a future as a nightmare.

But it’s his nightmare that is becoming the world we live in.

Our homes are full of technology that we need but we can’t rely on and which cannot be fixed when it fails. We are more and more dependent on the corporations that make the devices and less and less dependent on the devices themselves, and certainly less and less dependent on our own abilities and skills.

And our economy is more and more based on the notion that people aren’t just redundant, they are a nuisance.

You get the picture.  I hope you'll beam over to the Street and take a look.  While you're there, you should take a look at the post Jean Schmidt and Me by Barbara O'Brien of Mahablog.  Barbara's writing about the special Congressional election in Ohio that pits Democrat Paul Hackett, a marine and Iraq War vet, against a Republican phony named Jean Schmidt, who has made the claim that Hackett's having served in the military and fought in a war actually disqualifies him for Congress.

Turns out O'Brien knew Schmidt when they were both young, which puts in her in the position to reveal just how big a phony Schmidt is.

And how typical a Republican candidate she is.

Never apologize, never explain

Update:  The post is up.

The Nance and Lance show will be playing today at the American Street, but it's an evening performance.

Hey, I'm on vacation here!

We're discussing nannies, not because either one of us is having problems with our kids' nanny, it's an issue we both know only second-hand, but because Helaine Olen wrote a column for the New York Times the other day explaining why she fired her children's nanny.

Never apologize, never explain.  Olen's ex-nanny had blog.  Olen read the blog.  Olen did not like what she read on the blog.  She and her husband fired the nanny because of the blog.   Their right, and their call.  But Olen, who didn't like it that the nanny was exposing the Olens' personal lives on the web, thought it was fine for her to expose the nanny's personal life in the New York Times.  This in itself was the act of a bully.  But it was also the act of a person with very little self-awareness, because the portrait she paints of herself is far worse than the sketch the nanny drew on her blog.

Plus, the nanny responded on her blog, and the nanny is a better writer.

Amanda Marcotte and Dr B both have interesting posts on the story.

Amanda's take is that Olen, in trying to defend hersef against the idea she might have fired the nanny not because of the blog but because the blog revealed that the nanny was having the sort of happy and sexually active single life that middle-aged moms have no time for and Olen was jealous, Olen actually reveals herself to be even more jealous than she denies having been.

Dr B thinks that Olen was actually hurt and offended that the nanny didn't write more about the Olens.   What bothered Olen more than anything, says Dr B, was discovering that the nanny was a person in her own right and as a person with thoughts and feelings and concerns of her own, she didn't have much interest in the Olens when she was off-duty.

My feeling is that both Amanda and Dr B could be right, one or the other could be right, and both could be wrong.   Neither Olen nor the nanny can be known as real human beings from the column or the blog.   They are characters in each other's stories.  What I do think is that both stories have something to say about the problematic nature of the nanny-parent relationship.

I'm waiting for Nance's response, but based on our phone conversation this morning, I predict that she doesn't have much sympathy with either Olen or the nanny.

Tune in tonight at the Street.

Not the teacher's pet

I think my half of yesterday's Lance and Nance post at The American Street proves that I don't know nuthin about nuthin when it comes to Supreme Court Justices.  So I wouldn't listen to me about this if I were you.  But:  If I were in George Bush's position right now I would not be planning to appoint Alberto Gonzales to the Supreme Court.

This isn't a good time to have Gonzales on national television answering questions about torture again.

It's also not a good time for Bush to have to nominate another Attorney General who, in addition to having to answer questions about torture, would have to answer them about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame and the Downing Street Memos and whether or not the President broke the law in lying the country into a war.

Trickier and perhaps more dangerous for Republicans, if not for Bush himself, Gonzales would also have to answer questions about abortion.  The word is that his honest answers on the subject would not endear him to the Right Wing Christians who expect to have vetting power over all Bush's important judicial nominees.

Gonzales could try to lie his way through.  Clarence Thomas managed it.  During his nomination hearings Thomas claimed to have no opinion on Roe v. Wade and to have never even discussed it with anyone, not even when he was back in law school when the original decision was handed down.

Fortunately for Thomas he was facing a Senate controlled by Democrats who were desperate not to have to vote against a black man.

Gonzales would not just face Pro-choice Democrats who might be willing to let him fudge his postion.  He'd face some Right Wing Republicans who would be out to try to make him promise that he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.  They wouldn't let him fudge.  It's all or nothing with them.

As of yesterday, though, I was half-hoping Bush would go with him.  Gonzales is likely the best we can hope for from Bush.  My impression of him had been that he was not so much a Right Wing idealogogue as he was a teacher's pet.  There are different kinds of A students.  One type is the kid who figures out that the best way to do well is to always give his teachers exactly what they want.  There is something about Gonzales that made me think he is one of that kind of A student who never grew up.  His whole career, in Texas and in Washington, has been spent as George W. Bush's brightest student and most devoted apple-polisher.

If that's the case, then it would be possible that his appointment to the Supreme Court would affect him as a kind of graduation.  He would finally move up from Bush's class and be an adult, free to think and make decisions for himself without having to worry about how they would hurt or help his grade or whether or not they would please or displease teacher.

In which case the Republicans would have been in for an unpleasant surprise like the kind they got from David Souter, another teacher's pet who grew up as soon as he was sworn in.

Over at AMERICAblog, Joe in DC reports that the Right Wing Christianish types share my old suspicions about Gonzales.  Which is why I suddenly don't have those suspicions anymore.

This is not reflexive contrarianism on my part.  "If James Dobson thinks it, it can't be so."

The Right Wing Christianish types will be suspicious of any nominees who haven't publicly and repeatedly announced their determination to overturn Roe v. Wade and rule that abortion is murder and a fetus is a human being from the moment a husband and wife discuss having a child.

Nope, it's seeing the story in print that makes me suspicious.  Members of the Washington Press Corps may be showing signs of developing consciences and backbones but they are still in the tadpole stage and for the moment the National Media is still a tool.  The question is, who's using the tool here?

Who's pushing the story?

I don't believe it's the Religious Right.

The Senate "Moderates," those Democrats and Republicans who wish more than anything never ever to have to make the choice between doing the right thing and offending the President will be looking for any and every excuse they can to weasel out of a fight.

The Republican "Moderates" don't want to be forced into the position of reneging on their own compromise or, even more horrifying to them, having to enforce it.  The Democrats don't want to have to watch Bill Frist go nuclear.  If Alberto Gonzales is a closet "moderate" or at least offensive to the most radical members of the Radical Right then his nomination isn't an extraordinary circumstance warranting a fillibuster.

And I'm sure there are more than a few "Liberal" Democrats who would be grateful for any excuse not to have to vote against an Hispanic nomineee.

If the word is that Gonzales is a David Souter in Bush's clothing, or at least a Sandra Day O'Connor in drag, a lot of Democrats will breathe easier.

So the story feels like a Rovian plant to me.  Disinformation.  So as of today I suspect that Gonzales' secret progressive leanings are so much Nigerian yellow cake.

But like I said.  What do I know?

I think PZ Myers would argue that the Bush Leaguers don't need to bother.  He believes the Democrats won't put up a fight no matter what sort of Right Wing kook Bush nominates.

I have this looming fear that the inconceivable is going to happen, and that Bush is going to select some far-right wing religious extremist to pander to his base, and he's going to gleefully rip this country apart.

Or rather, it would rip the country apart if the Democratic party had any principled liberals who would be willing to stand up and fight.  I have another fear, that they're all going to just make excuses and roll over, and we'll take another step towards that third-world status to which the Republican party has been aspiring.

(Cross-posted at The American Street.)

The race is not to the swift

(This was originally posted Wednesday at The American Street.  Revised slightly here.)

Journalists don’t read the Bible.

Definitely they aren’t familiar with the Book of Ecclesiastes, wherein thus saith the Preacher:

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.

American journalists, TV and print, routinely react to events as if the act of winning is proof of brains, skill, strength, and God’s favor. This is especially true of sportswriters and announcers who are quick to pronounce every winner a genius or a hero. But it’s also true of the reporters covering politics inside the Beltway, which explains how a thief and a thug like Tom DeLay managed to operate as if he was the Republican Tip O’Neill, only less partisan, and how an obvious con artist and snake oil salesman like Karl Rove gets pronounced a genius.

I’ll get to the President in a minute.

Rove’s m.o., which has always been simply to lie, lie big, lie often, and when caught lie again, is the oldest trick in the hack politician’s bag of tricks, yet for years now he’s been celebrated in the media as a political wizard rivaling Metternich, Tallyrand, and Lyndon Johnson. Everything Rove knows he learned from Lee Atwater, who was far from an original sleazemeister, but if you listened to all the talk about “Bush’s Brain,” you’d think Rove invented the art of political skullduggery and that it was a good thing, a boon to humanity.

Maybe after Tuesday night’s desperate charade at Fort Bragg some of the shine will be rubbed off of Rove’s star. After all, how boneheaded was it to put Bush on TV standing in front of a lot of (not very enthusiastically applauding) soldiers to tell the world what everybody and his brother knows is not true, that things are going well in Iraq? You couldn’t help thinking of the last time the President stood in front of a cheering crowd of military personnel to announce the good news. They didn’t put a Mission Accomplished banner behind him, but everybody watching saw one in their mind’s eye.

But it won’t be because the stunt was obviously a stunt, and a foolish, grasping at straws sort of stunt that Rove will come in for criticism. It will be because the stunt didn’t do the trick. Didn’t rescue Bush in the polls. In other words, Rove didn’t win with it.

As for Bush himself, well, Kathy Flake at What Do I Know is hopeful that at last the media will finally begin to notice that the Emperor has no clothes!

The Heretik thinks it doesn't matter what he's wearing, he's done with, finished, washed up.  Stick a fork in him, saith the Heretik.

I hope so.  But what baffles me is why they ever thought the man was well-dressed to begin with.

I’ve heard it argued that after 9/11, because the country needed a wise and strong leader and we obviously didn’t have one, the media decided to treat W. as if he was what he wasn’t to keep up the nation’s morale, scare our enemies, and maybe help W. grow into being what we needed him to be. This is a plausible argument, but I don’t buy it because the dressing up of W. by the media began way before 9/11, before he became president.

W. first came to my attention, and therefore must have come to the national media’s notice or how else would I have heard of him, twenty years ago as the angry, spoiled, less than bright, and still drunken, son of the Vice President, throwing his weight around his father’s office. He left an impression that shouldn’t have been easy to shake, especially when he decided to run for president and which should have sunk him when his main challenger for the Republican nomination was John McCain. It was amazing that any one in the media could take W. seriously when he was standing besides McCain. But they did.

Not only that, after he had trounced McCain, by letting Rove go to work on McCain’s reputation as a war hero—and how did John Kerry miss that one and not prepare better for when his time came?—the media seemed to jump on W.’s bandwagon and set out to make him President. I don’t know why. I can’t imagine why. They didn’t like his father much and W. wasn’t even close to being the man George H.W. was. I think it finally has something to do with the media’s intense jealousy and hatred of Bill Clinton. W. somehow became the anti-Bill.and his invented I’m Not Billness became his chief virtue in the media’s eyes.

I can’t explain it, except as more proof that along with not having read Ecclesiastes they’ve never read the Proverbs either.

There are six things which the Lord hates,
   seven which are an abonination to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
   and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
   feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
   and a man who sows discord among brothers.

That would have warned them about Rove, too, wouldn’t it?