Twelfth Month

The grinding mendacity of the Republicans has become boring and absurd, and, I keep hoping, so obvious to my fellow Americans that they will start to react negatively to all of it. Last night I watched an hilarious bit of the Dobbs show on Fox. He was talking to two "experts" concerning the effort to reduce tensions with Iran, prefacing the segment with critical quotes from Henry Kissinger and George Schultz (remember them?--you're more or less as old as me then). His experts were Judith Miller, disgraced shill of the Bush Administration and Scooter Libby, and Professor Walid Phares. Dobbs quoted the Schultz/Kissinger remarks, expecting Miller and Phares to jump in with hobbed nailed boots.

They didn't, even when Dobbs paraphrased the Kissinger comments as "two adults correcting rash and not too intelligent adolescents at play in the White House." Here's the segment:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/lou-dobbs-tonight/index.html#/v/2890839022001

As you can see for yourself, Dobbs was unable to brow-beat his own "experts" into a full-on attack of what is clearly a very circumscribed and modest effort by the United States State Department to make some headway with Iran on the issue of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Even when he resorts to what must be his nuclear rhetorical weapon: "bloody hell!" Ms Miller remains firm. "Let's wait and see," she responds. That is exactly the Administration's modest position.

Later, of course, we found Mr. O'Reilly brow-beating Alan Colmes on the health care reform issue. Nothing's changed over there. Out of a group including O'Reilly, Krauthammer, and one of the many blonde newsreaders of Fox (who might as well wear Hooters teeshirts to work, since this is exactly their function in the Fox system), only Colmes opined that it was too early to know how the health insurance reform was going to play out. O'Reilly even invoked numbers: "but you're in the minority here, four to one." Colmes refrained from pointing out that this was exactly his horrible function at Fox--a Washington General along with Juan Williams, forever being dribbled into the opposite basket by louts and girls with Hooter teeshirts.

Maybe Ms. Miller feels the same way. She once, after all, was an esteemed member of the press corps of the New York Times. But in that moment with Dobbs, she stood her ground, and was articulate. It was a small, hopeful sign, and I looked out into the darkness at the Cone, lit once again in our now-annual Xmas Rite. So what if we can't have an indoor Christmas Tree with 5 cats living here. We have the Cone.