Through the choice of his pro-life running-mate, Sarah Palin, John McCain and the GOP have made one point perfectly clear:

This is a single-issue election, and the issue is abortion.

The entire future of America -- our precarious economy, our critical foreign policy -- everything about this election that requires a sensible, grown-up argument with wonky, unemotional, boring facts behind it -- is being thrown under the bus.

The Republicans, in the face of Obama's ascendancy and the indefensibility of their policy decisions in the last eight years, have just pulled a desperation maneuver and hijacked what is perhaps the most important presidential elections in America's history by demoting it to an emotional cat-fight between pro-choice and pro-life women, over the one issue where neither side can be reasonable.

The rest of this election, no matter what is discussed, is essentially brain-dead.

McCain, with one stroke, has tipped all the wavering, undeclared Christians into his own till. This is brilliant political strategy, until you consider the fact that it is horrifically short-sighted. Many taxpayers who aren't conservative Christian Republicans will lose faith in this country, and abandon any hope that the nation will pull out of its current downward spiral. Many will abandon America completely rather than subject themselves and their children to the disastrous aftermath of yet another hair-raisingly corrupt and incompetent Republican administration and its policies. I believe the choice of Sarah Palin is a tacit declaration of war, by the GOP, on secular government, and a declaration of its intentions to let the highest office in the United States serve as a handmaiden to the ambitions of the Christian right.

Sarah Palin represents the ambition of evangelical Christianity to forcefully dominate, and pervert into its own ideological image and likeness, the legislature of a country that was founded on a principal of religious freedom.

John McCain has effectively declared a holy war on Americans whose religions are less dogmatic than that of evangelical Christians. The GOP seeks to put women back in chastity belts: Sarah Palin is their fit-model.

Freedom, like it or not, is synonymous with moral relativism. The whole point of American freedom is that someone else's extreme religion is disallowed from imposing its morality on personal decisions concerning our lifestyles, our sexuality, or our bodies.

We didn't pick this fight: John McCain did; abortion may be the fight, but it isn't the point. The issue at stake is our personal, civil liberties and individual rights -- particularly those of pro-choice women -- which are being directly threatened by the GOP's grasping, rapacious desire to impose a new theocratic authoritarianism on our society.

Christian evangelicals have forced America's sexual IQ to plummet even lower than the value of the American dollar. Do we really want an America where teenage girls are going to die from abortions that, once illegal, will only become an unsafe, underground economy like illegal drugs?
Do we really want our daughters to be forced to flee to liberal, civilized places like Mexico City (where abortions incidentally, are free) to terminate their unwanted pregnancies?

Freedom and hope are the greatest selling-points of America. If America sells out its freedom to Christian religious extremists, the brains of this country will go elsewhere, because freedom will go elsewhere. America will be as hopeless as a fat, poor, pregnant teen -- and just as smart a conversationalist.

Now that America is so deeply in debt, we don't get to make the rules anymore. Our future as a country now relies very uncomfortably on the perception the rest of the world has as to whether or not America will be able to bounce back after an utterly calamitous eight years of faith-based, conservative Republican administration with absolutely no sense of responsible stewardship.

With Barak Obama, there is some actual hope for America -- at least in terms of the perception of America beyond our borders -- to begin a slow, painful recovery. If John McCain and Sarah Palin win, they will accomplish more than the Taliban and al-Qaeda combined in terms of destroying the image of the United States as a free country, and a democracy that protects the civil liberties of individuals.

We cannot afford another administration with religious delusions of moral certainty in the White House. The sorry fact is that John McCain has brought this grudge match into the election booth: the future of America now hangs on the issue of choice. If abortion is made illegal, Liberty, ironically, will die.

There has been much progress in the way of infuriating right-wing Christians, (which is Googleable in all its breadth and scope if you type in "Cintra Wilson" and "Palin" ) including smackdowns from Sean Hannity, and that roly-poly man who single-handedly sucked so much Vicodin out of the prescription drug market that I can't find any at all, Mr. Rush Limbaugh.

But here's a NEW article on Sarah Palin, fresh in the Huffington Post.

Thankfully, Ms. Palin's running mate and his sophisticated ideas about how to ignore the tanking economy seem to be hobbling Palin far more effectively than I could ever dream of doing...

While that dirty little culture war is percolating.... we got fashion!

The NY Times is running my feature on Goth fashion today.

And BOING-BOING is running THE ENTIRE FIRST CHAPTER OF "CALIGULA FOR PRESIDENT" -- which is really swell of them.

It's a howling maelstrom of words out there, my fiends....please, read good ones.

Love, Cintra

"What has been called the Long War is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies. To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the Long War, but the Long War is interested in us."

-- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking in April at West Point

"(T)he afflictions ascribed to feminism are all myths. From "the man shortage" to "the infertility epidemic" to "female burnout" to "toxic day care," these so-called female crises have had their origins not in the actual conditions of women's lives but rather in a closed system that starts and ends in the media, popular culture, and advertising--and endless feedback loop that perpetuates and exaggerates its own false images of womanhood."

-- Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Susan Faludi in "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" (1991)

Lo and Behold: The New Authoritarianism is Upon Us.

While most Americans recognize that eight years of Republican hegemony has wrought economic and geopolitical disaster, it has brought about marked improvements in some areas. The Cold War, for example, is making a helluva comeback. An all-new Axis of Evil is beginning to smell the musk of its own revived puberty, now that America has proven itself to be too rife with fraud, bureaucratic constipation, self-inflicted economic calamity and incompetence to effect any positive movement anywhere at all, even at home.

" The striking thing about Russia's subjugation of uppity Georgia was not just the ease or audacity, but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback," wrote Bill Keller in the New York Times.

Anarchists -- a socially disenfranchised sect we haven't really heard from since the last time the upper class stole all of society's money in the late 1920's --
have emerged as the new anti-establishment, and are being treated with the same police-state-style brutality as civil rights activists, practicing homosexuals or war protestors during the Vietnam-era.

Breast implants, anorexia, and pregnancies among unwed teens, however saw an unprecedented upswing after enough evangelical Christian social policies were entrenched....And now we have Sarah Palin, John McCain's choice for Vice President -- and her unwed, five-months pregnant, seventeen year old daughter, Bristol.

Bristol Palin will no doubt be a fine example as a First Teen, particularly since she will be following in the tradition of unwed, pregnant Christian Hollywood child stars like Jamie Lynn Spears and Ashlee Simpson in inflicting an old fashioned shotgun wedding on the hapless, horny, condomless youth that impregnated her.

Some see the mark of Karl Rovian genius behind the unexpected choice of the young, inexperienced Palin as running mate -- a ploy to seduce undecided female voters who, they presumed, were leaning toward Hilary Clinton exclusively based on the fact that she has no penis.

Deeper investigation reveals that the initial impact of Palin's candidacy has not been exactly what the doctor ordered for the GOP. Republican moderates don't see Palin as an actual woman so much as a hyper-conservative sheep in ewe's clothing. Nobody is particularly impressed by her clown-car-like production of children; her two boys, both christened with day-glo sport-drink names: Trig! Track!
...and three girls -- Willow, Piper and Bristol -- who seem to have all been named after seasonal ales from a lesbian microbrewery.

A self-professed "Hockey Mam," Palin was eager to announce her son Track's enlistment in the military "last Septemer 11th."
Lest we forgot.
(9/11 -- Apply Directly to the Forehead. 9/11 -- Apply Directly to the Forehead.)

According to author Susan Faludi, the "backlash" against women is a historical trend that recurs every time women make "substantial gains in their efforts to obtain equal rights." Our media (which only recently began to soft-pedal its obsession with the promiscuities of scarlet starlets) still nurtures a particular mistrust for successful career women, who suffer from particularly negative media stereotypes as Dragon Ladies and loveless harridans.

Would be Vice President Palin is the GOP's newly minted, social prototype for a Christian-approved, conservative Stepford Career-Wife. She is the anti-Hilary, the anti-Oprah, the anti-Martha Stewart. She doesn't believe in her own right to choose. She loves the NRA. In her support for women on women's issues, she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision. The Right-wing media, meanwhile, is trying to paint her as a wall of protection that has kept the Cossacks from trying to reclaim Alaska as part of Soviet Union II: Existential Payback.

But long wars are what the old cold warriors and Christians feel most comfortable with. We should always sacrifice the welfare of our nation to build new instruments of death, and ladies, even if they are Vice President, should always look pretty, worship their husbands in the fear of God, and never, ever resist invasions from unwanted sperm.

It's McCain's world, girls: You'll just live in it.

Here's the big difference between pro-life and pro-choice:

As someone who is pro-choice, I don't want to prevent anyone who is pro-life from making decisions about their own bodies. I want to protect their right to act in a manner befitting their convictions. This is the ideological freedom upon which America was founded.

Pro-lifers seek to prevent me from making my own decisions about my body. This makes pro-lifers, by their own tacit admission, incapable of making seasoned, moral adult decisions for themselves, and incapable of tolerating the decisions and convictions of other people that are different than theirs.

Critics (pro-lifers and feminists alike!) have been deriding me for using profanity, but personally, I think their trying to force a crucifix up the collective female fanny is rude, insulting, and an intense violation of our humanity.

Pro-life women, if you were on the verge of being raped (not to mention impregnated by rape or incest, and then criminalized for getting an abortion) -- the ones among you not brain-damaged from huffing feminine deodorant spray might use a few choice four-letter words yourselves.

Squeal all you like, just stay out my underpants. You're not my type.

Here's the text of my Sarah Palin article on Salon.com, which seems to be arousing the ire of backwater, atavistic, evangelical Christian Taliban zealots everywhere.

Pro-Lifers, if I've made any of you finally see the light, your next abortion is on me.

Love, Cintra

| Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain't no woman.

I confess, it was pretty riveting when John McCain trotted out Sarah Palin for the first time. Like many people, I thought, "Damn, a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a 'sexy librarian' costume -- as a vice president? That's a brilliant stroke of horrifyingly cynical pandering to the Christian right. Karl Rove must be behind it."

Palin may have been a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP (and according to an ABC/Washington Post poll she has created a boost in McCain's standing among white women to a 53 over Obama's 41). But ideologically, she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread, revealing the ugliest underside of Republican ambitions -- their insanely zealous and cynical drive to win power by any means necessary, even at the cost of actual leadership.

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she's so hot to cut is that of all American women.

I don't want Sarah Palin being the representative leader and custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country any more than I want polygamist compound leader Warren Jeffs baby-sitting for my preteen goddaughters.

As a woman who does not believe what Palin believes, the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House -- in the Cheney chair, no less -- is akin to ideological brain rape. What this Republican blowup doll does with her own insides in accord with her own faith is her business. But, like the worst and most terrifying of religious extremists, she seems very comfortable with the idea of imposing her own views on everyone else.

I did not think that women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel would be a pressing concern in my lifetime. I thought it was like polio, or witch burning -- an inhumane error that had already been corrected. But after eight years of Republican hegemony, and now the potential ascendance of this sheep in ewe's clothing, I am so mortally offended I feel like it is really time for women to be angry, hardcore and disgusted again. Not just with old white Christian patriarchs and their hopelessly calcified, religiously condoned misogyny, but also with the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies whose ambitions and eagerness to please the powerful males of their tribe are so desperate that they would sell out their sovereignty over their own bodies. And yours too.

Republicans have -- in a P.T. Barnum, sucker-born-every-minute kind of way -- successfully framed themselves as the custodians of Christian ethics and conservative family values. This stance successfully masks their wholesale class war against the majority of their supporters, who continue to vote blatantly against their own economic interests in thrall to this deliberate emotional manipulation. It was the media critic Douglas Rushkoff who pointed out, several years ago, that Republican politicians were employing marketing techniques perfected by Clotaire Rapaille. Rapaille, broadly paraphrased, introduced a theory that approximately 80 percent of all decision making is done at the level of the limbic system -- our lowest, most colorless, reptilian emotional level. Republican strategies are consistent with a belief that the voting process, for most people, is full of feelings -- but devoid of reason.

Sarah Palin, in this light, makes so little sense that she makes perfect sense. She speciously represents a new power paradigm of the Nice Mommy: the opposite of Hillary (the Mean Mommy), the opposite of Oprah (black, and therefore foreign), the opposite of Martha Stewart (another Mean Mommy). In her support for women on women's issues, she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision. She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles -- like Old Testament-style old. Her morality is fixed, predictable and inflexible. There are those who will find comfort in the fact that they will know exactly what can be expected from Palin: Free will subordinated to obedience of an airtight, evangelical interpretation of the demands of God, country and Republican men.

The choice of Palin represents what the Christian right is really saying to the women of America. The subtext: It's a Faustian bargain, girls. To elevate your sex to power and respectability, you must first give us the keys to your chastity belt.

It is unsurprising that the morally compromised fraternity of corruption-infested Republican robber barons and war profiteers came up with this stunt, but we must regard it in the same light as the rest of their treasonous, criminal behavior. We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP -- an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance.

It is a kind of eerie coincidence that Sarah Palin is being sprung on the public at the same time as the bimbo/frat-boy titty comedy "House Bunny," which features a poster of a beautiful young lady with Playmate-style bunny ears, big, stupid eyes and her mouth hanging open like someone just punched her.

Sarah Palin is the White House bunny -- the most nauseating novelty confection of the evangelical mind-set since Southern "chastity balls," wherein teen girls pledge abstinence from premarital sex by ceremonially faux-marrying their own fathers.

Sarah Palin is the sexual front of the culture war and the embodiment of the bold social engineering stance of the new authoritarianism that Republicans have been employing ever since they stole the election in 2000. As a result of conservative Republican policies, America has proved itself to be too rife with fraud, bureaucratic constipation, self-inflicted economic calamity, cronyism and incompetence to effect any positive movement anywhere at all, even at home.

But, the Republicans seem to be saying, at least we can offer you the hope of putting women back in their place.

Bristol Palin will no doubt be a fine example as a first teen, particularly now that her mother is inflicting an old-fashioned shotgun wedding on the hapless, horny, condomless youth who impregnated her.

The Republicans are, in effect, saying: We're not going to win this race on the basis of being the better candidates. Barack Obama is going to make you think. You don't like thinking. Here's an It Girl vice president who is easy on the eyes, you stodgy old white baby boomer. She's like a grown-up version of Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island." She embodies the raw conviction that everything the Republicans have ever done has been right. She'll make you feel better about yourself for voting for Bush. Twice.

Relax: The war is God's plan. (Or whatever.) Women, even if they are vice president, can always look pretty, worship their husbands in the fear of God and never, ever resist invasions from unwanted sperm.

Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.

She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she's anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.

She should, however, be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.

We've been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America's women don't need to do the same.

If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.

It's McCain's world, girls: You'd just live in it.

Hey, while we're at it, welcome back to the Cold War!

I bet you thought that show was over. Hahaha, no. That was just a long intermission. Now that you have your popcorn and Jujubes and everyone has had a bathroom break, it's time for life to start sucking again, the way it did in the 1950's...only worse.
We never thought we'd see this happen again in our clueless American lives: wiley Russia, such a short spell after the Berlin Wall was hammered into tourist souvenirs, so newly enriched by the power of Western-style klepto-capitalism that they'd be emboldened enough to beat up and conquer their neighbor -- i.e., civilized, democratic Georgia, who just a few months ago even had a fighting chance at being admitted to NATO.
Vlad Putin just shoulder-checked snot-nosed King George in the nightclub hallway of foreign policy thug-life. Well, George...don't hate the player, hate the game. You tried to roll with the real pimps. Now your gull-wing Hummer has a broken window, one of those humiliating, undersize spare tires, and is stuck in the parking lot with a Denver Boot and full of sleeping homeless people, because nobody can afford to drive it anymore.
You can't blame career gangstas like Putin (who isn't Russia's President anymore, um,*cough*) for stealing third base after noticing that our geopolitical monkey- thumbs were wedged firmly up our own backside.
We can't complain: Invading a sovereign nation that hadn't provoked war is exactly what our President Cheney, aka Nosferatu the Genocidal Petro-Imperialist Vampire, did in Iraq. Big talk of some mysterious, shapeless retribution toward Russia is not only pointless, but idiotic and perhaps even needlessly dangerous -- we just don't have the economic, moral, or military authority to talk down to anyone anymore. More Texas style, rodeo-clown bluffery is only going to make powerful countries angry.
Not that anyone really cares in this White House, who apparently saw the American casualties of 9/11 as a nice starting point.
The remainder of our American lives will be under constant nuclear threat; we will have to learn how to shut up. That loose coalition of mutually interested global corporations known as the military industrial complex, and the greedy human slimeballs it directly enriches, simply believes that countless (and therefore uncounted, uncountable, and unaccounted for) civilian lives - are there to be sacrificed to their glory.
Hey, whatever: they're foreign; they worship the wrong God. Why shouldn't Halliburton be allowed to sate its libido with any less savagery and barbarism than say, Toltec King Mizcoatl? The Aztecs had no problem with child sacrifice. Blood offerings have been a vital ingredient of imperial enterprise since the dawn of tyranny.
When this administration was given the wheel of the big global car, they let everyone know as quickly as possible that your life is cheap and dispensable, and that our real National Defense Strategy isn't actually about defense, but picking fights and generating arguments for the constant generation of new war machinery. America isn't so much interested in protecting the constitution or the American way of life, but in bullying its way into the lawless outback Beyond Thunderdome to steal gasoline, and plunder whatever else those backward tribes have that looks shiny. Your individual needs as a citizen? Not a priority. Your quality of life? Not an issue. Your votes don't count, because you're poor and stupid (unless you're just poor and stupid enough to be a Republican). It's every sucker for himself; the boys at the top refuse to nurse hapless schoolchildren and the elderly at the federal teat anymore, because they're too busy stealing everything they can lay their claws on, including the middle class. Hey: rich guys need more money. Polar bears and the ocean are collateral damage. Got a problem?
Get thee to Gitmo, domestic terrorist.
We can directly attribute Russia's new confidence to our unnecessary and immoral war of choice in Iraq -- which has hogtied and humiliated us exactly as Vietnam did (which is exactly what all the defense intellectuals who weren't neoconservative ideological lunatics like Bill Kristol were tearing their hair out and shrieking long before the invasion).
Americans have never known what it's like to losers, but it is the dawn of a new age. The Olympics (apart from the coddled professionals on our men's swim team) are good practice for our new future as a B-rate nation.
On both the American male and female gymnastic teams, metaphors were abounding: half of the members were wounded and absent (American gymnasts Paul and Morgan Hamm, most notably). The leader of the girl's gymnastic team cracked under the pressure, made horrible miscalculations and fell down at the outset of both of her routines, effectively crowbarring the rest of her teammates in the knees.
China's gymnasts, however, were alarmingly perfect -- particularly Chen Yibing, on the rings, who was almost transcendental in his execution of graceful, disciplined, artful moves that just a few short years ago were considered physically impossible.

Bullet trains, my fiends. China has them. They bring people to work in the cities from dying suburbs. But the petro-vampires aren't done sucking your blood. They're not rich enough yet. You'll have to wait.

WELL, here on the verge of total human annihilation (""Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,"...um, *gag*), I thought it best to give the site a much-needed update...

HE'S ALREADY WON

Please excuse the long-stretches of violent inattention of late; I thought I was going to AFGHANISTAN and was hustling to assemble hideous Taliban-friendly couture, but the Army had other ideas...

Meanwhile, a fairly ill-tempered review of the store, OAK, appeared in the New York Times, and there's a semi-fresh Dregulator over there.

MORE as it happens...

Love CW

-- Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, quoted in Think Progress

A day of something like judgment is sort of upon them. It's not as satisfying as seeing them get strapped naked to lamp-posts in Dupont Circle to be eaten by crows, but it might turn into a little bit of crow-eating, if we're lucky.

U.S. District judge (and new congressional rock-star) John D. Bates upended the White House assertion that Harriet Miers, John Bolton (and nobody has explicitly said it yet but, uh, *cough,* KARL ROVE, *cough*) were "absolutely immune from compelled congressional process." Judge Bates, in a landmark fist-pumper of a 93-page opinion declared, in essence, immunity-schmimmunity.
Claims of 'executive privilege' are, at least in this case, malarkey.
Miers and Bolton don't get to ignore their congressional subpoenas in regard to the investigation of politically motivations for the U.S. attorney firings (which effectively turned the Department of Justice into the equivalent of a private judicial delicatessen serving up fresh, handmade laws however the White House felt like eating them that day).
Many are hoping that this opinion paves the road toward actual enforcement of contempt citations, and that this will compel Terrence W. Gainer, the 38th and current Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate, to go over to Karl Rove's house and pistol-whip him into compliance.

The gold nuggets of Bates' opinion, as panned from the silt by constitutional law guru Marty Lederman on the Balkinization website:

"There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress's legitimate interest in inquiry could be easily thwarted. . . . [I]f the Executive's absolute immunity argument were to prevail, Congress could be left with no recourse to obtain information that is plainly not subject to any colorable claim of executive privilege....The Executive's proposed absolute immunity would thus deprive Congress of even non-privileged information. That is an unacceptable result."

So: now we know -- Congress does actually have a job to do, after all, besides raise campaign money for themselves and accept valuable prizes from lobbyists.

Meanwhile, back in the utterly meaningless world of Hollywood, mildewed zombie entertainment creatures from the blue lagoon are rising from their shallow narcissistic fishbowl-graves to spread fear and alarmist political rhetoric throughout the land:

"The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way," screeched has-been actor Jon Voight, in an op-ed in the Washington Times. "If, God forbid, we live to see Mr. Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way."

Politico.com commenter Ernestine Bass responded to the actor, notable exclusively of late for his role as the estranged father of Angelina Jolie,

"YO!, 'Midnight Cowboy'...seen your grandkids lately?

Didn't think so."

Meanwhile, back over by Crawford Ranch, Exxon set a record quarterly profit -- a net income of $11.7 billion. A walloping 14% increase.

The Dregulator recalls a little news item from the San Francisco Chronicle by Carla Marinucci in May of 2001, concerning the name change of a certain 129,000 ton oil tanker, (four months before 9/11, even!) from the "Condoleezza Rice" -- a longtime Chevron board member -- to the more nebulous and Star Trek-sounding "Altair Voyager."

This was to ensure that critics wouldn't leap to conclusions about the Bush administration's enduring love for big oil companies.

"(T)he White House had faced questions over the appropriateness of the tanker's name -- particularly as California struggled with the effects of an energy crisis," wrote Marinucci, who probably wasn't aware at that point that the "crisis" was actually due to Enron's deliberately manipulating California's energy markets to deliberately create 400% energy cost increases for consumers.

Hmm....Gasoline at $4 a gallon. It was only a dollar-something eight years ago. Hmm.

"(The 'Condoleezza Rice' tanker) does underscore that there's never been an administration in power in this country that has been so close to a single industry -- in this instance, the oil-and-gas industry," said Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity in May, 2001.

And this was before the planet had begun to bleed black and wobble on its axis; when America was still a place to be proud of and its guardians hadn't yet sold it into prostitution to pay for its dirty little habits.

Sergeant at Arms: do your duty.

In the last fortnight, seventeen-year-old fame-casualty Jamie Lynn Spears ignominiously celebrated the birth of Maddie Briann -- the third Spears baby in recent years to be given the deep Southern equivalent of an anthropomorphic Disney chipmunk-name. Democrats in Congress bewildered supporters by allocating another $162 billion to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until next June, while Democratic Presidential nominee Barak Obama bewildered supporters by drifting far enough into the creamy center of the political Oreo to change his last name to Lieberman. Meanwhile, the world waits with baited breath to view the newest acquisitions in the Jolie-Pitt signature child collection.

Two men perhaps illustrate the current persona of the United States better than anyone else.

On Thursday, June 26 (the "World Day in Support of Victims of Torture"), there was a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hearing, featuring Dick Cheney's chief of staff and former legal counsel David Addington, and former U.S. Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, the legal spin-art geniuses largely responsible for the infamous Torture Memo and Unitary Executive Doctrine (sometimes called the 'Yoo Doctrine' since nobody else wants to take any credit for it).

Yoo, and the elusive Mr. Addington (referred to by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank as "Cheney's Cheney") were subpoenaed in order to answer questions about the Bush administration's interrogation rules. Yoo and Addington are, ostensibly, the last human shields protecting the executive office from the full weight of accountability for these policies.

The two men, who have arguably performed more radical and bizarre leaps in legal interpretations of the Constitution than an entire Federalist Society full of crackheads, made their case by being snide, nasty and rudely dismissive on the stand in a way that seemed melodramatically excessive even for archetypal Scooby Doo villains.

"Think of Addington as the id of the Bush White House," wrote Milbank.
"Though his hidden hand is often merely suspected -- in signing statements, torture policy and other brazen assertions of executive power -- Addington's unbridled hostility was live and unfiltered..."

Addington has long been legendary for being able to emit nearly lethal malodorant toxins from his personality glands, but both he and Yoo seemed to be resorting to the time-honored teenage male technique of being unbearably personally unpleasant in order to wear down their opposition, in an apparent effort to make the authority figures in the subcommittee throw up their hands and stomp into the kitchen in frustration from a desire to strangle them.

It was lame behavior unbecoming of even a Walmart shoplifter with any self-respect. Instead of putting on a display of stunning legal pyrotechnics to stun and silence their critics, the men, supposed legal geniuses, resorted to the cheapest, most classic, lowball, legal shyster and Busted Tween techniques available - hoary old reindeer games such as the 'Conveniently Forgetting Everything That Ever Happened' -gambit, and the 'Questioning the Definitions of Even Real Simple Words Like "Implement"' - ruse. All they needed to complete their image of cartoonish evil was waxed, black Snidely Whiplash mustaches.

It was a war of attrition, with the subcommittee ultimately failing to get anywhere as the lawyers found all kinds of ways not to actually answer any questions and to casually insult the persons asking them.

"Yoo has described his role as a lawyer advising a client, in this case the CIA, NSA and other federal agencies, not as a policymaker," wrote John Bresnahan for CBS News. "Yoo has also repeatedly said that he has been told by the Justice Dept. that he cannot answer specifics of what went on within the Bush administration regarding debates over interrogation policy. Yoo has cited attorney-client privilege, or said he would be forced to divulge classified information in order to respond."

In short: I'd tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you.

"And I would have waterboarded all of the children of our enemy combatants and buried them alive, too - if it weren't for you meddling kids," Addington didn't say, but may as well have said, given the impression he left with everyone who still cares about stuff like common courtesy and politesse.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Washington Monument, Amnesty International opened their "Guantanamo prison cell replica" on the National Mall, because nothing fights torture like a diorama.

Perhaps next year, Amnesty International can convince Brad and Angelina to adopt a Guantanamo detainee - until then, fiends, few people will really be very aware of any of this.

But in the scheme of things, it's all just part of America's awkward coming-of-age. But if Lindsay Lohan can turn over a new leaf, perhaps so can the White House.

Congress, for example, has been wearing their 'angry eyes' at Attorney General Mike Mukasey, while pretending to cite him for contempt of congress.But it's OK - they're not actually angry, and won't mean anything unless congress starts exercising 'inherent contempt' -- i.e. sending the Sergeant of Arms over to the homes of Mike Mukasey, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalesand all the other kids that used "executive privilege" to ignore their subpoenas -- and pistol-whipping them into compliance.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote a droll piece about congress, and the way they put on a funny show of talking to Mr. Rove, who wore his Cloak of Invisibility during the ongoing flim-flam thingy about Valerie Plame Wilson.Karl didn't actually show up for the hearing, because he is far too important, but he did send along a note from Fred Fielding, which apparently said something like, "Mr. Rove is on a tropical island.He ate all the FBI files and White House hard-drives with fava beans and a Virginia Chianti.You'll never catch him alive, bwah hah ha ha ha ha."

Our congress was so sporting, they took this kooky puppet show that used to be democracy all the way... and dove even further through the looking glass, by actually addressing their proceedings to an empty chair with Karl Rove's name on it! According to Milbank, they actually scolded Rove's chair...which is sort of like wagging your finger at him in effigy.  Ho ho! Ha ha!

You can get toy congressional subpoenas for the kids, now, in pink and light green and blue razzleberry.It's sort of like going to one of those Wild West booths in an amusement park and putting on a black handlebar mustache and getting photographed behind bars with a gun that shoots a little flag that says "Bang!" Congressional subpoenas are fun now that they don't mean anything anymore -- sort of like twenty-dollar bills.

But if you're a kid from nine to ninety who really thinks the rule of law is more fun than Silly Sand, there's "Mr. Kucinich's Fraktabulous Make-Believe Impeachment-Hearing," which will be exactly like a real live impeachment hearing, if you use the power of imagination... and even like a real live dog and a pony show,if you bring your own dog, and a plastic Pegasus with a long, combable mane, and you drink enough sippy-cups brimming with Seagrams Gin n' Juice to believe that the dogs and ponies actually do things after a while.
(But they won't do things, really; you'll just be drunk.)

Nancy Pelosi has assured Americans that nothing will happen as a result of articles of impeachment being brought to the judiciary committee. Silly Americans: the House won't vote on impeachment.The hearings will focus on"general abuses of power"--"abuses" being different from actual "crimes,"in that they're not actually impeachable offenses, at least in wacky wiggly moon-man lawyer-talk. So everyone is going to enjoy themselves performing this bit of community theater, and afterward they'll go out and eat banana splits with little paper American flags and sparklers all over them.

Finally, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, play-acting at journalistic bravery, just like Geraldo Rivera, and went and got himself"waterboarded" so he could weigh in with the definitive statement about whether or not "waterboarding" is actually"torture."You'll all be relieved to know that Hitchins, who cleverly deduced earlier this year that women aren't funny,has declared that, in fact, waterboarding is torture!He should know; he tried it twice (because he sort of wimped out too fast the first time and decided that he'd better try it again, and, you know,  really make sure it was torture). This is great news for our enemy combatants - because if whining, over-soft half-men like Christopher Hitchins can endure waterboarding, it really can't be that bad.Waterboarding is probably going to be the next bungee-jumping.

Heck, they'll probably have the Wii -version out next year.

And we'll all stand in line for hours to buy it, won't we, fiends; because it's American.