Terry Schiavo RIP...

Y'know I rarely blog on the subject of my own feelings, after all there is scant interest in my political opinions, what I feel therefore seems bound for internet anonymity. That having been said, it is hard not to feel some rude humane sympathy for the demonstrators outside that Hospice in Florida. Few people outside the ranks of the KGB or SS can watch a fellow human being expire of dehydration and starvation and not be moved to some desire to redress the suffering. This has been a hard thing to witness no matter what your religious persuasion or lack thereof.
I have elderly parents and I shake at the thought of Michael Schiavo's decision, even if his wife effectively perished fifteen years ago. We are feeling creatures at the core, suffering especially personal suffering motivates us to generosity every time.
What I have NO sympathy for, is the spirit of absolutism, clericalism and yes-revolution that clings to this whole story like a bad odor. Last week commentators on Fox News were calling on Florida Governor Jeb Bush to send in the state police to re-connect Terry's IVs. This week worse things will be cheerfully proposed and all with a scorpion tongue.
No doubt even as I write this, grown adult men and women are crowding the podiums in congress eulogizing Terry Schiavo by screaming for blood and dynamite. Tonight on cable and radio the lowest rightical chic scum in the nation will rouse themselves to new heights of demogogic indignation, threats will be made, and vengeance on all liberals will be demanded.
Laura Ingraham will shake off her perpetual hangover to snarl "murder most foul" into the microphone-count on it!
At that moment, all those humane instincts out in front of the Hospice and in every human breast in the nation will be forgotten in a riot of retribution and political gamesmanship. We are a feeling animal but also a forgetting animal as well.
Where is the respect for the law in all this? The deference to tradition? The value of Institutions?
Nowhere. All is given over to base fury.
What is needed in this country, now more than ever is a revolution in values, which must be secular, democratic, and Jacksonian in scope..something both humane and unafraid. Something certainly beyond the corrupting reach of spin doctors, lobbyists, demagogues and professional wowsers.

Today they say anything to retain power, what happens they decide to DO anything to retain power?

Stupid is, as Stupid (Lieutenant) Governs...

Stupid is, as Stupid (Lieutenant) Governs...

How dumb is Lt. Governor Healey? Could she pass the MCAS without recourse to crib notes written by Eric Kriss?
I doubt it.
Last week Healey had this to say about the current housing crisis in Massachusetts:
"to extend tax breaks to seniors in order to keep them overhoused and isolated in the suburbs is not necessarily the right answer ... they're probably aging in homes that are too expensive or difficult for them to maintain and where the property taxes are larger than their fixed incomes. Plus, they may have three or four bedrooms and only be using one of them. There are families that need that housing"

I understand what she was trying to do, it is the old GOP two-step, ergo decline any direct influence over a particular public problem and at the same time single out some hopefully weak powerless social group as the cause of said problem. Ronald Reagan no brain he, was a master of this gambit. Hell a teachable at the Fernald School could get it down pat in about two weeks...not Healey though, the first time she tries it the whole thing ends in disaster!
She does know that retirees are renowned for voting in lockstep and in murderously high volume? This is the sort of howler associated with a rookie third party candidate for Registrar of Deed - a seasoned pro, even a seasoned failure could avoid it with ease. Not Healey though, she quite literally too dim to pound sand down a rat hole.
What does this tell you about Governor Romney’s managerial acumen that he elevated this graceless dingbat to the second position in the Commonwealth?
The woman is an amateur in an administration of hopelessly thin skinned ne’er do wells. No doubt they all talk in this depraved and ominous fashion behind closed doors, but only Kerry Healey is imbecilic enough to spout off like that in public.

Sick
Demented
Typical

Andy Card's baby brother Brad

seems to be doing well by doing good.
And Josh Marshall has the details hyar

If poor Terry Schiavo dies

before the Pope, how long before Tom Delay hauls her husband's ass before congress for the usual drumhead congressional kangaroo kourt?
I mean Delay is practically obligated to so something having called Michael Schiavo a terrorist, murderer and barbarian. Frankly it if was within Delay's power, Michael Schiavo would be behind barbed wire right now and god-damn the law and the judge's of the republic.
I think Delay has been backed into a corner here, he's reacted with the usual rightical chic emotionalism and for once the country couldn't care less. This is a fatal weakness of movement conservatism, being so ideologically sure gives them the impetus tp respond to everything in some predictably overwrought fashion. Its like the Yippies, they were always feeling first and thinking later,except this bunch is incalculably more dangerous.
So look for Michael Schiavo to be sweating it all out under the kleig lights, Delay has promised blood to the GOP's base he has to deliver.

So Norm Mineta and Mitt Romney say...

ignore the iceberg and the rushing water, the Big Dig is SAFE!
Good lord how would either of them know??
Mineta hasn't been heard from since 9-11 and the Bush Admin treats Willard like a red headed step child!
Frankly, they'd be the last to know anything!
Andy Hiller over at Newspanic Seven said this about the Big Dig last night "The Worst is Yet to Come".
YOWZA!
Well keep in mind Channel Seven's Local News operation builds every gentle breeze into a hundred year storm and or a doomsday gale...so we might be able to whistle past Hiller's bombast.

Might....

It occcurs to me...

that if Terry Schiavo was some homeless wretch living in a ditch next to some Florida Interstate, congress couldn't have cared less if she lived or died. But let the right wowsers get ahold of her cause and start up their irritating yelping, and watch those clowns in Washington jump through the hoop of fire trying to outlaw death with a sort of pro-life bill of attainder.

The whole situation is too sickening to contemplate. Every day in America life support machines get turned off by sons, daughters, spouses, lawyers, and in Texas, thanks of bill signed by then governor George Bush, the hospital's accountants can pull the plug if you haven't got the shekels to pay for the juice. So whats the big deal if Terry Schiavo leaves this mortal coil?

Sadly hundred of people in similar straits die every day by decision of a loved one. Thanks to mixture of advanced medical technology, and primitive health financing, its a decision we will ALL have have to make or our loved one will have to make for us.

Hell Congress just passed a bankruptcy law that all but revives debtors prison, and a budget that cuts alls sorts of medical programs...thus you can turn off mom's respirator just in time to have your assets seized by the Feds who are now apparently gonna become the financial industry's own repo-men.

Somehow though, NONE of this registers with the Praetorian Class. Poor persistently vegetative Terry Schiavo has become a glittering political symbol to the ever restive GOP base-an opportunity like "Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth". Alas we are burdened with a congress of uplifters and utopians, sky grifters and wowsers, snitches and busybodies, pimps and corruptards. their every rotten little political fantasy has become concentrated in the wasted body of that poor woman.

We will no doubt see more of this kind of thing in congress ere long, every time that miserable spite little brat Randall Terry (remember him!?) has some cause celeb he ants to push, Frist and Delay will roll over like hogs in a pen-count on it.

Containing Containment, RIP George Kennan...

George Kennan, proposer-creator of our postwar policy of containment died last week at the age of 101.

Containment was of course, a policy to confine marxism-leninism to the Eurasian land mass via proxy warfare, economic development, and military alliances. It was designed to “wait out” Soviet expansionist policy until frustrated by the limitations imposed from without, cooler heads more willing to negotiate in good faith prevailed in the Kremlin.

Containment was hammered together and subsequently sold to an electorate still thought to be given to isolationism. It kept a weather eye on domestic politics from the git-go - few commentators recall that in these days of deficit triumphalism. As such, the beauty of such a policy being that it allowed for a degree of cultural economic normalcy at home whilst pursuing an activist program abroad. In some respects containment was hoped to deter Soviet aggression without imposing irksome wartime restrictions on the U.S. citizenry.

All this depended on a consensus between the major parties here at home. This would be a consensus that would have to function & perpetuate itself over time because containment would have no definite expiration date. In the 1960’s this vague promise of fruitful future negotiations bought at the price of present intransigence would prove the crux of both rightist and leftist critiques of containment.

All this was consequence Kennan’s famous 1947 “Mr. X” article in which he presciently described the inherent structural weaknesses of Soviet Society and accurately predicted a time when want and economic stagnation at home would compel the USSR to negotiate with the West.

And what the hell, all this became our foreign policy practically down to the present day. Still and all that Kennan couldn’t keep up with his own formulation, especially as it passed into the hands of less adept policy makers. By 1955 he’d be calling for a renewed approach to the Warsaw Pact on the basis of little else than the death of Josef Stalin. This contradicted his own elegant notions of “no war and no concessions” circa 1947...but hey the man was a thinker first and foremost,and a democrat, practically a dying breed in modern America.

Truman sent him to Moscow as Ambassador, Kennedy would send him to Yugoslavia seeking a few cracks in the socialist bloc and in the meantime he piled up two Pulitzer Prizes for varied books and memoirs. Still and all that events ran away from him, as they do from all of us. By 1984 he’d be exclaiming in essays that it was a “sin” to construct a nuclear weapon and wallowing in mea culpas.

Still and all that, he was a serious man in all respects a last living link to the quaint drowsy law office style at the Department of State, now swept away by mass politics and ever more massive communications.

What will be the core topic of Jeff Jacoby's

Boston Sunday Globe column tomorrow?
I have some ideas:

1.) Terry Schiavo and a ringing defense of pro-life "bills of attainder" and congress' right to regulate every aspect of our lives, how we enter into it and now how we leave it. Jeff LOVES the phrase "culture of life", he thinks it resonates with local catholics a group he patronizes at every opportunity. HE thinks the peasants, serfs, and their popish priests will love him as a Prince of the Earth if he uses it often enough.

2.) "My Dearest Caleb" We are LONG overdue for one of these lugubrious exercises in sentiment. Jeff wallows in treacle thick and sure describing his hopes for his five year old son. Jeff if you are reading this, remember what happened when Hank Ketchum made an icon out of his son Dennis aka "Dennis the Menace" they ended up at each other's throats Dude!

3.) Triumphalism, you know Jeff can't stay away from it any more than the town drunk and stay out of taverns. Another already high five and a reflexive pat on the back for conservatism, no matter how high we can pile up the bodies nor how huge the deficit, history is moving the freeper's way so sez Jeff Jacoby.

4.) Pinkos on Campus and their simultaneous hopeless spinelessness and creeping blackshirtism. Many a played out hack on the far right has kept body and soul together for decades after the wellspring on creativity has run dry with this one precious topic.

5.) "Why isn't anyone paying attention to the TORTURE scandal?" Jeff's already promised part one of a two part anti-torture column, surely the latter piece will run tomorrow when the Globe's circulation is at it's highest? Of course, Jeff is right to denounce torture at the US controlled Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, but its equally worthwhile to note that this story broke last year and Jacoby kept a decorous silence all throughout the fall campaign. So while his willingness to break ranks is laudable, his timing speaks volumes about his true priorities. And then again, this is Jeff Jacoby, he may still try and pin it all on John Kerry.

My money is on #5 but we will see.
:)

Fact-esque

A "Reality Based Blog" was kind enough to highlight my posting on Dan Rather last week. Herein I render thanks and return the favor.

For those who are interested, the policy here at Chimes at Midnight, is to link to them what links to us-absent certain compelling exceptions.
Anyhow...all hail Fact-esque and all like that.

My Esteemed and Honorable Ancestors...

were beaten, starved, disenfranchised, driven off their lands, traded like Pokemon Cards, ethnically cleansed, reviled, humiliated,brutally exploited, and used as a greasy substitute for fire wood. To commemorate that history of tragedy and woe, somewhere, tonight, in America a "Teenie Weenie, Greenie Bikini" contest is being held.
Aye...Somwhere in America tonight, Willard Mitt Romney wears a green plastic bowler and grins like a mongoloid.
Happy Saint Patrick's Day to all.
:)

Whoops!

Turns out George Will DECLINED to come out loud for Jus Gladii at the Heritage Foundation Yesterday. So the Globe tells it he left his Tribune's uniform at home and called the proposed revision to the Senate rules (AKA "the nuclear option") inappropriate "at the present time".
Dopey Me!
:)
So either the shreds of his conscience were bothering him or else George is bidding up his support. Since I am a christian and gentleman I'll believe the former until the latter becomes a matter of record.
:)

Is Conservatism Dead?

And did George Will help kill it?

The Boston Globe reports today that George Will, clad no doubt in the glittering uniform of a Tribune of the Praetorian Guard, plans to announce his support for an end to the filibuster in the US Senate. He gives as his reason "anger" over the Supreme Court's disposal of the Juvenile Death Penalty.
Good Ghod that I've lived to see such abominations!
George Will has degenerated into a vain, pompous, death-addicted old nag, a querulous hangman. Somehow without the threat of gallows, Middle Schools all over America will burn...thus George mounts the Rostrum at the Heritage Foundation to scream for blood and power! His beloved Praetorian Class MUST have it's judges, their own snooping cohort of busybodies and Inquistors with which to punish the polity.
Isn't there something ugly and childish about demanding a revolution in Senate affairs because one Supreme Court decision made you "angry"?
Apparently not when you are George Will.
THIS is conservatism...? To seize control of the judiciary, to punish the Supreme Court, and to consolidate the legislature under the whip hand of Bill Frist and the Fred Van Ackerman-esque Rick Santorum, two hundred years of Senate mores is to be expunged.
Lyndon Johnson didn't need to destroy the filibuster to put through the Great Society...FDR required no "reform" of the US Senate to ring in the New Deal. But to put some witchburning wowser on the Court of Appeals, all the rules must bow down!
Where is the respect for law, tradition, and institutions here? Wasn't that once the Holy Trinity of thinkers like Peter Viereck?
All gone now, a surfeit of power has driven these people Caligula-mad quite frankly.

Hope Chests and Dope Slaps...

Jeff Jacoby was back on his high horse yesterday criticizing criticizing same sex marriage with his usual gay abandon.
A less subtle blogger than I might ask where a notoriously pious Jew gets off legislating anyone else's marital status given the fact that his nation was treated like diseased cattle through two thousand years of European history. Hell back in the bucolic liberal days of Renaissance Venice, Jews couldn't own property, had to live in Ghettos, their lives were proscribed by unfair laws and bullying local customs. A less subtle blogger than I might ask "Who is Jeff to get in anyone's face about marriage given the lamentable history of anti-semitism in the West"?
Fortunately though, I am NOT that blogger. Jeff's religion is his own business, and he'll have to honor his history in his own fashion.
I do try in my little way to build up secular civilization, to make it a seemly thing for all citizens-thats my thang. If Jeff wants to tear it all down on behalf of some book he thinks divine, well so be it. A man's religion is his own business.
There is one simple question though, that Jeff ought to answer. Forget all his usual blather about judicial elites, media snobs or pinkos on campus.

Can he tell us, clearly and concisely, under what terms will gays be allowed to live in our civil society?

And why does he and his fellow true believers feel themselves qualified to set terms for a minority of the electorate?

I think he owes us a list here, what shall they be permitted to do, what shall be withheld by force of law?
That is what it really comes down to as I see it.

I think Jacoby could do it in a single column...but of course you'll never read such a thing to put his thoughts out there so plainly violates all the tenets of the modern conservative punditariat.

The Man We Need...

is Adlai Ewing Stevenson...for Governor of course.

Someone realistic, diligent, with a lofty sense of purpose, an appointer of honest public servants, and with a stern incorruptible nature.
THAT is the kind of man to take on the gubernatorial sinecure on Beacon Hill.
A man of duty, not carnal ambition.
A man who will exchange value for the public dollar, not some tax fixated retardate.
Someone who loves Massachusetts, and not the wowsers of Alabama and Missouri.
And lastly, a man who cannot be BOUGHT, not by Bechtel, Bush, or the Brokerage Industry.
Someone like Adlai in other words.
Hell he cleaned up Illinois in just four short years, shaped up the state police, chased the loafers out of Civil Service, and kept a weather eye on the budget. Frankly, he did TOO good a job as Governor, by 1952 the whole of the democratic party was prostrate at his feet begging him to run for the White House. Like Cincinnatus, he had to dragged off the plow so to speak to make the race...when was the last time anyone in public life was so modest?
Certainly not Romney, does anyone else recall the unseemly haste he made to Boston to shoulder Jingle Money Swift aside when Christy Mihos showed him a favorable poll?
Its the same unseemingly and revolting haste Romney is making now to all these out of state political appearances wherein little is expressed save a savage disdain for our Commonwealth.
no...let us have Adlai or someone like him, hardworking, modest, dedicated to our interests...that is the man or woman to elect in 2006.

I want a governor who says and means stuff like this:

"The job of creating a sense of respect for public office and public officeholders among our young is the most important work we have in hand"

Bush Hatred Etc...

Gregory Mankiw, opines in the current New Republic that democratic emnity towards's the President's social security privatization plans is induced by "Bush Hatred".
Fair enough, it is hard not to hate someone so untalented and yet so smug at the same time, and that disdain tends to take on some weird aspects-this I freely admit.

Yet there is little serious discussion out there about the policy consequences of what I like to call "Busholatry" ergo Bush Idolatry, literally making a religion out of the incumbent President. However, there really can't be any substantive debate on the matter until we collect some hard facts. Therefore I'd like to propose that some public spirited entity conduct a survey research project to determine just what percentage of the voting public believes that the President is of divine origin. Whether he is thought to be a sort of Messiah or the embodiment of the Godhead, whatever it is, we need those numbers.

I'm guessing that about fourteen percent of the electorate thinks Bush is a modern Prophet and thus divinely wired or else they think he is the Second Coming of Christ Almighty. That number might trend upwards to twenty percent...but probably no higher, although I'm prepared to be surprised here one way or another. Of course designing such a survey research schedule will be a king hell nightmare, but the project is of critical importance for all thinking persons nation-wide.

You do the Math...

In today's Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby sez the following:

"For those of us in the War Party, by contrast, these are heady days. If you've agreed with President Bush all along that the way to fight the cancer of Islamist terrorism is with the chemotherapy of freedom and democracy, the temptation to issue I-told-you-so's can be hard to resist."

AP by way of the AOL News Summary also displays the following as of 8:03pm EST:

MOSUL, Iraq (March 10) - A suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners Thursday, splattering blood and body parts over rows of overturned white plastic chairs. The attack, which killed 47 and wounded more than 100, came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.

I really do think the FBI ough to investigate to determine if the Fedayeen are using Jeff's column to co-ordinate their bombing campaign.
:)

What is the Frequency Dan?

Dan Rather, last of monolithic super anchors, signed off from the center desk at CBS Evening News Tonight. It was a tense affair, Dan tried to be relaxed and sentimental, but he has been trying to relax since the Tet Offensive with no discernable results. Tight lipped to the last and with a suppressed sense of anxiety I kept waiting for Rather to break the ice one last time by showing us how many lit cigarettes he could cram into his mouth.
Give Dan credit though, he tried to hold onto the myth of the lone reporter-anchor well into an age dominated by vacuous robots (Tom Brokaw) and naive' frauds (Brian Williams). Ah but what were the great anchor men really? Merely the physical manifestation of the Big Three Network's nigh Soviet style domination of the American zeitgeist. The news has changed, a single anchor is no longer a cost effective filter for the days events, not with everyone from Joshua Micah Marshall to Eric Alterman turning themselves into do-it-yourself commentators.

Dan came in back in the Early 1970's when the motif' was "The Beverly Hillbillies", he departs on a night given over to the gruesome antics of real life drunken heiress Paris Hilton. And for a while there he was also the anchorman the rightical chic loved to hate. On a good day somewhere in America some shameless shit like Laura Ingraham was blaming him for the "loss" of South Viet Nam, Nixon's resignation, and Reagan's senescence.
Rather hardly seemed up to the job being to humorless and constrained by the network's interests to answer his critics. But then this is the American Right we are talking about, none of whom ever went bankrupt from an excess of beating up on an easy target.
Still and all that, he TRIED to hold together the vanishing general interest in "objective" journalism. A few weeks of Brian Williams' droning and buzzing will soon enough fill us with a poignant nostalgia for Dan Rather at his twitchiest.

Such is the Kingdom of Heaven,
On the Congressionally Licensed Airwaves
And Elsewhere
3-9-05 7:55pm EST
God Save the Commonwealth
God Save the Republic.

Note to the Laity,

I start a new job tomorrow, so the good times with six daily posts a week will regrettably come to an end. Just as well, who can produce reasonable material on that kind of schedule? Certainly not I. Anyhow, the Chimes at Midnight will go on, but not on a daily basis.
At least not for the near term.
Wish me luck, God Save the Commonwealth, God Save the Republic, etc etc.

The Praetorian Class in Myth and War...

Make no mistake about it, there is a cultural counter-revolution going on this country. Centrism of the bargain-minded Joe Lieberman variety is dead. There is no center; the center is nothing but a corpse being fought over a few hyenas. The Praetorian class knows this instinctively, in a time of maximum ideological ferment; the center is a particular electoral cohort to be dragged as far to the right as possible-nothing more.

And yet the above counter-revolution has many of the aspects of an old-fashioned civil war-one directed by and large at the so-called “baby boom generation”. Generational conflict, the need to humble and disenfranchise and entire electoral cohort forms the crux of Praetorian ideology. This war has two axes, an assault on the entitlements expected by said generation, notably their social security benefits, and the perennial fight against the egalitarian ideas espoused by the Woodstock Nation.

The Praetorian Class sees what happens here at home to be a perfect extension of their bumptious and bellicose foreign policy notions. Martial, and even strident, the Praetorians themselves as individuals are curiously light in combat experience. This however does not prevent them from questioning the patriotism of men shot and tortured in service to the republic. They can do this because, as a class they are inheritors of a periodic domestic war psychosis…they are fighting the “enemy within” and therefore are allowed any excess.

As ideology goes, the Praetorian Class is less animated by ideas than by an interlocking series of cherished myths.

There is the myth of Small Government: This is a notion that somewhat contradictory, movement conservative leadership is supposed to somehow shirt the alleged federal colossus down to a size where is will somehow function efficiently, or else said government will become so emasculated the polity will somehow “go elsewhere” for services once provided by the public sector. Neither notion has much basis in reality, most small government is preached as a justification to either rig the tax code in favor of the rich or simply abolish taxation as means of public funding.

There is the myth of Christian Politics: SOMEHOW, the New Testament with its Praetors and Pharisees is an infallible guide to contemporary politics right down to the micro level. This is an absurd notion in every way. Revealed religion in this context is mostly used as get-out-the-vote/fundraising engine. The Praetorians love Christian Politics precisely because of its blind zeal and simplicity. The Praetorian intelligentsia is also all about zeal over critical thinking so this is a good match.

There is the myth of Rugged Individualism: Freed of the chains of statism, man is supposed to become a sort of free market superman, seeking profit and growing the economy at no expense to anyone. Rugged Individualism is a old American faith going back to Rutherford B. Hayes. Its biggest supporters tend to be market worshipping autistics….but many entirely normally people buy into it without delving too deeply into what it all means.

And there is the myth of Grievance: Somehow the Praetorian Class has acquired a belief that they have been discriminated against by certain ever changing elites. Grievance also cloaks the pseudo-populism that infects the Praetorians especially around election time. To hear them tell it this collection of millionaires, radio talk show tyrants, “embattled” columnists, fixers, and politicians are a marked hunted breed.

All these myths, run together in hopes that this will produce a New Kind of Man, a “homo conservatus”. This would be a sort of ideology-forged American Robot infused with perfect moral transcendence via conservative values.

None of this is ever going to happen, any more than Snoopy the Easter Beagle will come dancing up my front stairs some Sunday Morning. But it’s the actions the myths relentlessly inspire that is the key here. A lot of our money is going to be wasted and many lives ruined before the myth of “homo conservatus” is laid to rest.

The Great Weaseling?

Maybe Romney really is looking to do a big fade before campaign 06’? According to today’s Globe Decaf has been overcome by a fit of nuanced coyness about his re-election plans.
Instead of simply saying “Yeah I’m in” Romney is saying strangely passive aggressive things like “Plan on it” or “Plan on my being there”. This is an odd choice of words if you think about it.
Even if he declined to run in 2006, he’d still have to “be there” in order to jimmy whatever slaphappy loser the GOP nominated into office. In other words, he has to “be there” whether he is in the race or not. And just what the hell does “plan on it” really mean anyway?
We can plan on a lot of things, we can conceivably bet the farm on Hubert Horatio Humphrey rising from the dead and leading Custer’s Seventh Cavalry on a death charge up the State House steps for that matter. Doesn’t mean it will happen, “plan on it,” sounds awfully sneaky and disingenuous the more I think about it.
Who would Romney gin up to replace him? Kerry Healey, oh lord that’ll be the day! Mitt has made his bones in the Commonwealth stomping on women politicians of both parties, you can bet he will shove the Lt. Governor aside in favor of some feckless ass-hole when the time comes.
Of course all this may come to nothing. More than likely he will run. Romney is just keeping his numerous options open and doesn't care a fig if it makes him look like a greedy dishonest hack.

Jacoby "eulogizes" Thompson

Good Ghod But Jeff Jacoby is a ruthless little praetorian bastard isn’t he? There are never any inappropriate times to wallow in one’s agenda with that guy.
He has an “obit” today for the late Hunter S. Thompson that is utterly churlish in every way. Jeff seems rotten glad that Thompson died and postively gleeful that it was a suicide as it gives the Globe columnist a chance to sanctimoniously lecture the serfs about the evils of suicide and the drug culture.
Forget about respect for the dead, the man who sermonized a few short weeks ago on the evils of “Bush Hatred” now dumps all over the Thompson family in their hour of grief. Jeff is a shrill little toady there are no other words for it. Jeff simply doesn't approve of their reaction to his suicide, and so much be chastised in the public prints. Jacoby, that laughing young senescence, demands sacerdotal respect for his idols but all others are fair game.
Pricks like Jeff need to ideologically colonize all debates no matter how tasteless it may seem. Why else would he end today’s column with a preposterous comparison between the Pope’s quiet suffering and Hunter S. Thompson’s “death wish”? This was a notion first bandied about by Michael Medved on BCTV last Saturday, clearly jeff has nothing better to do on the weekends but look for column ideas from Mother Angelica.
There is just no point in demanding fairness or adherence to the rules of debate from these people. The Marquis of Queenberry's elegant are wasted on the Jeff Jacoby's of this world. Drunk on triumph, they are loud, cruel, and boorish.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Alas poor Hunter though. It is a world run by vicious reptiles and wild dogs these days. And even the worst of these whipped curs will come out from their rat holes to tear at the flesh of a aging freak from Colorado.

Er-um belay dat order...

I actually start my new job Monday at 8:30am. So there are two more working days to fill this, the little blog that cried, with ever more gross and incontinent calumny-with the weekend thrown in as well!

Anyone got a good rumor about Bush, Romney or some other rightical chic miscreant, drop me a note at:
Eliasnugator@yahoo.com

Meanwhile...

I start my new job tomorrow, so after seven full months of unemployment I am finally back on the job. Consequently this blog may become updated on a irregular basis-we will see how it goes.
However, Joshua Micah Marshall is making a great deal of sense as usual so by all mean check out his blog.

Dan Kennedy and Scot Lehigh are both

conjuring with the notion that Mitt Romney will NOT be running for re-election next year. In Scot's case I suspect he is simply trying to remind the Viceroy and his henchpeople to stay focused on 2006 not 2008. As for Dan Kennedy, I dunno he is pretty smart, so he could be on to something.
I for one doubt Decaf will bail on us in the end. The only way to be quit of Romney is to vote his boney ass out of office. It creates way too much political chaos for Mitt to turn tail this early. And if the governorship fell to the democrats next year, Mitt would have a lot of splainin' to do up in the snowy wilds of New Hampshire.
Nope, its to much of a leap into the unknown and ginnin' up Michael Sullivan or Kerry "La Poodle" Healey is plain crazy.
BUT
IF
Romney did drop out next year...how long before Joe Kennedy's giant computerized lucite map of Massachusetts got lit up in his private bunker down in Hyannisport? I doubt even forty eight hours would pass before his many loyalists would drag out their grenadier uniforms, run up the "JPK" flag up the pole, and swear have no other for governor.
Trust me though, Mitt is in, we will never be rid of him that easily.
Never...

Hate to play the parrot but...

The "Romney is a Fraud" blog makes a succinct case against the governor in their latest entry. It is the sort of argument that would take me five or so fusty paragraphs before I reached the point.
So check it out, as always RiaF is doing the lord's work.
:)