Today’s NY Daily News story is flying around the blogosphere, and justly so, since it alleges that the president of the United States has had guilty knowledge of felonies committed inside his own White House for over two years:

If the story is true — and Josh Marshall has the lowdown on its author’s long-standing ties to Bush insiders — then Bush has been lying for over two years.  (Josh’s site, incidentally, is all over this story like nobody else today.  One-stop shopping.  Go.  Read lots.  Guy’s terrific.)

Note that Bush was originally not pissed about the crime, which sabotaged national security for short-term political gain.  He was just upset that it wasn’t committed elegantly.

Playing I-told-you-so for a moment, this certainly explains Bush’s strange unprovoked proclamations of ignorance which caught my ear in July.

He’d have good reason.  When you’ve had people on your own staff committing crimes, and you’ve been lying about your own guilty knowledge for years, sticking to your story would be the only chance of evading unindicted co-conspirator status.  Or worse.

For anyone who doesn’t follow what this is all about — maybe you only watch the teevee news, which Jon pulls apart today nicely for the umpteenth time — there’s a fairly exhaustive look at the case at Wikipedia.

I hear that another guy hears that this afternoon somebody else is going to report the name of someone saying stuff we can’t hear in an investigation nobody knows all that much about.

Just couldn’t resist adding the extra level of meta there.

If any other bloggers want to add one more, I think we’ll reach nirvana.

What’s the upside if Bush has gone back to drinking?
Yet another President Bush gets to barf in some prime minister’s lap
757   41.9%
Chris Hitchens gets someone to talk to at night
425   23.5%
$200 million no-bid breathalyzer contract for Halliburton
364   20.2%
Slurred speech could cause a full-scale invasion of Shmeeria
260   14.4%

Ah, but what will you be watching on your Video iPod?  Personally, I can’t imagine watching anything on a 2.5" screen.  (I think the real deal for Apple here is getting licensing agreements to repurpose existing ABC and Disney shows, which people can watch on regular TVs when the iPod is in its cradle.  If this model catches on someday, TiVo, look out.)

Until then, what’s worth watching on the teeny screen?  New poll at upper left.

My buddy Chris, who is a film director who got nominated for an Emmy last year and thus has an eye for beauty, just got back from a trip through Madagascar, Egypt, and Kenya.

He took this picture while in the latter:

Wild dik-diks!

They were a little stuck-up, as all dik-diks are, and mostly just interested in talking about Demi and Ashton and Tori Spelling getting a divorce.  They thought Valerie Plame was the name of a runner-up on America’s Next Top Model.

But still.  Wild dik-diks.

Gotta go to Kenya now.

Several of you have asked for my take on the Harriet Miers
appointment.  I am flattered by this, as it indicates that you are
starting to consider my opinion important on matters about which there
is no reason to believe I know anything.

Bwah-HAH-ha-ha-ha-haaa.  My plans for creating a cult of personality,
enticing hundreds of you to join me in a remote colony with bribeable
law enforcement and numerous biting insects, drugging your meager
rations, and committing unspeakable acts upon the weakest of the group
for my personal pleasure are thus well underway.  Excellent.

But back to Harriet Miers.

Actually, it’s kinda the same thing in a way.  I have spent my entire
adult life watching the nation I grew up believing in being
increasingly overrun by a lunatic cult which believes in things like an
"invisible hand" magically transforming millions of people acting
purely out of self-interest into an engine of responsible long-term societal planning.

Which, if you haven’t yet noticed, is insane.

Bizarrely, members of the cult also somehow believe that as a nation America — hundreds of millions of people who should
be thinking only of their own self-interest, because, hey, that’s the
path to social justice — somehow forms its foreign policy out of the
kindest altruism.  And elected leaders, who have committed their lives
to the economics of self-interest and carry decades-long indisputable
records of consistently acting to advance their own agendas at public
expense, are shining beacons of Christian charity.

The "Christian" part, of course, is key.  Because inside the cult,
Americanism = belief = Christianity = devotion to the cult.  (No matter, of course, what
Christ himself might have said.  "Blessed are the meek" hardly lives up
to one’s fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, after all.)  Inside
the cult, all crimes can be forgiven and hypocrisies
forgotten — infidelities, drug addictions, sexual harassment, shady payoffs, support for the killing and torture of civilians, advocacy of genocide, absolute lies by the score, it
doesn’t matter — as long as the cult itself is not questioned.  Disagreement,
however, is unAmerican, unChristian, and the only true sin.

If you’re in the cult, what I just wrote made you want to scream and
call me names.  If you’re not in the cult, what I just wrote is (or
should be)
thuddingly obvious.

Harriet, as far as I can tell, is not only in the cult, but one of the people knocking on doors at 7 am with an armful of literature.

Her position on abortion or gay rights might be muddy, but her record
as a Bush crony and attorney for corporate criminals is unambiguous. 
(Read here and here and here.  There’s a really nice roundup here.)

Bottom line: if Exxon thought there was oil in your trigeminal valve
and decided to slant-drill in from your shoulder blades, and you took
them to court, filing whatever legal papers might be required to say in
elegant Latin "oh holy f*ck get this thing out of me, for the love of God!" Harriet Miers
would be the kind of person sitting with Exxon at the defense table.

With a flag pin in her lapel, a Bible in her briefcase, and a smile of undeserved certainty.

On top of all that, the woman has said some deeply weird things in
defense of the Monkey King, things that make me question her sanity. 
(Bush is the most brilliant man she has ever met?  What island of
enchanted lesbians has she been trapped on all these years?)

Does that mean lefties should oppose her?  That’s a tactical question,
translating to: are the alternatives even worse?  Well, yes.  Very much
so.  Harriet Miers seems not to be 100% committed to the cult’s position on personal issues.  Thus the screaming from the rest of the cult: the only true sin, of course, is disagreement.

If Miers doesn’t break the tape, everyone from Priscilla Owens to Karla Homolka would be back in the race (or would if Karla wasn’t Canadian).  Shit, Robert Bork is
still running around.  Somebody might clone Roger Taney.  Anything
could happen.

But I’d say letting somebody like this onto the court without a fight is the worst alternative of all.

Reasonable people will disagree.

Unreasonable people will disagree in All Caps.

Me, I’ll be out with my own cult, which is just as rational and
ethical.  It’s two islands down from the enchanted lesbians, across
from the small sandy spit with a tree on it which has been declared a
$200 billion tax haven, one up from the jetty that sells all the
illegal fireworks.  I’ll be covered in black market smart bombs and
hypnotized virgins, wearing a small flag on my lapel and waving a Bible
in the air and proclaiming the moral high ground.