One monkey don't stop no show

"Thanks for taking the bullet for me, Gonzo"

The cabal that runs the White House must have thanked whatever dark lords presently preside over this country when former Attorney General John Ashcroft quit.

Ashcroft is no pushover. In fact, he is a deeply religious and somewhat morally rigid man, who would no longer put up with the neocons' immoral shenanigans and interference with his Justice Department. He announced that he was out of there.

The neocons were at a loss; they desperately needed a frontman to help push their consolidation of presidential power and John Yoo was occupied elsewhere spinning webs of lies and deceit. But - low and behold! - right there in their midst was a weak-willed, shifty, and easily manipulable sycophant that they could plop into the Attorney General's chair. He would do what he was told, and then conveniently forget about it: Gonzo the Forgetful.

It wasn't just that this guy possessed no critical faculties - which he doesn't - but his brain had grown so mushy in the dank and fetid air of the underground West Wing office that he occupied as counsel to the President that, like Golum, he could no longer tell right from wrong, or yesterday from the month before.

Yesterday's performance before the Senate Judiciary Oversight committee was beautiful - a tour de force of the high political drama of lies, evasions, prevarications, and just downright stupidity that is the modus operandi of the neocon architects of the New American Century.

It's not that the neocons don't think that their stupid ideas are stupid and won't hold up under close scrutiny, it's that they can't be bothered having to explain their vision of a Pax Americana to the likes of you or me, or for that matter, to the Congress. So they just go and do what they do: kidnap and torture suspected enemies of the state, lie about their reasons for invading foreign countries, fire federal prosecutors when they get too close to the money, and - when finally questioned by previously supine Congress-critters - shove a fall guy out in front. When their stupidity is exposed they simply (like Rumsfeld) move down the hall, or (like Paul Wolfowitz) bail and take up posts at the World Bank, where they try to pull the same shit all over again. Except the World Bank is not staffed by myopic political dirtbags; it's run by hard-nosed moneymen who don't tolerate fucking with their institutional reputations.

So the Gonzo sideshow is over, but the circus hasn't left town yet. There's lots more demonstrations of levitation and porous memory to come, and possibly another Shock and Awe waiting in the wings. And don't be too surprised if a major city is vaporized by a stolen nuclear bomb (they still haven't found any of the missing 20-100 nuclear devices from the former Soviet Union stockpile). Finding those missing nukes (or bin Laden, for that matter) would be doing their job, a distraction from spreading their fungus over Washington.

As for us patsies, don't expect Congress to do it's job and impeach these criminal assholes; that would be too real, and there's a 1% chance they might not get reelected as a result, which for them is the center ring and the only thing that really counts.

Have a great weekend.