Evaporation Nation

—through all these different crises, what you see is, the government wasn’t there at a time when it was supposed to be there.

There are different reasons in all those cases. In Iraq, certainly there was a lot of violence. Certainly, it was difficult to get people to go over to Iraq and pay attention. With Madoff, we’ll see what the Securities and Exchange Commission has to say about why they weren’t adequately regulating that issue. But time and again, the issue is, we’ve had a government which has been really shrunk and hollowed out in terms of its ability to oversee and regulate private businesses, private corporations and what it is they’re doing. And that is the function of government, is to make sure that everybody plays fair. They’re referees. And if there’s not enough referees around, the game gets ugly. T. Christian Miller on DN

The filters we weave

Odd to find this blog high in the listings for "rebuilt pool cage." Odder in that this fact surfaced just as I had finished watching this (via Paynter) and thought to blog it.

Bless my Hagee.

Greeks called it 'hamartia' (ἁμαρτία)

we'll settle for s-t-u-p-i-d:

97 percent of the deaths of US soldiers have occurred after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

Hedges on theology of despair

Chris Hedges wrote American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He applies his experience of fundamentalism and totalitarianism to the conversion sales mechanism of the theology of despair:

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives... #

And:

this theology of despair . . . says that nothing in the world is worth saving. #

Despair was there long before Mr. Bush, aka the USian Scion of Nihilism, arrived. He simply punched it up. Softened up the targets, readied them.

The only answerable mode for Bush and the fascist pearl forming in his pud is a language that does not feed upon despair, anxiety, terror. That means an end to media as usual.

Spectacular Moyers

Buying the War would seem a pretty sharp piece of journalism. Packed with stats, interviews, glimpses of the USian press in denial, in suckage, in syncophancy, in DanRatherism, in policy diktats that show, in the case of MSNBC and mineshaft canary Phil Donohue, that Joe McCarthy could rest quietly instead of having to rise up and hold public hearings. Unelected powers were sufficient to put terror of the number into the heart of corporate media.

Moyers' critique was well constructed journalism, sufficiently devastating to the NY Times and its ilk to be news. It didn't make the Times' previews.

The spectacle continues to make a spectacle of itself.