The White House Channels Chamillionaire:
It's always the saddest story, the one where we learn that a young girl or boy has been chained in a closet, fed scraps, regularly beaten, maybe sexually abused, but more often just left with open, festering sores, undernourished bones sticking through pale skin, crazed brain thinking that she or he deserves this for some reason. And the culprits always turn out to be some variation on Mom and Dad. Maybe it's Mom and skanky piece-of-shit boyfriend. Maybe it's Dad and his religious sister. Who knows. And then you find out the other part. That social services had been called to check on the kid before, that someone, somewhere walked around the house and decided not to do jackshit. Then the uproar when a neighbor sees the kid scouring her garbage for anything edible. It's always the same, a combination of neglect and active harm, but, truly, does it matter when the end result is so fucked up. We all learn the same lesson over and over: someone should have taken that child away, arrested the parents and/or guardians, done something to make sure that the young boy or girl doesn't have to live a life of deprivation and torture until he or she is on the verge of psychokiller status.

The Rude Pundit's said it before (yesterday, even), and he ain't just one of yer nutzoidal arm-flappers telling everyone to look at the bird shit to see that the sky is falling. But we have reached a point where the Bush administration is actively harming the majority of citizens in the United States. Not only are they spying on Americans and sending soldiers to die in a war they know is unwinnable (how do we know they know that? Because they're making political decisions on withdrawal), but now, as we've learned, they've allowed the real enemy to regroup and become at least as strong as it was prior to its last attack on the United States, that despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars, we have not even weakened al Qaeda (whatever, really, that is). There's no way to spin this, however desperately the right will try: the policies of the Bush administration are harming us. It couldn't be worse if Dick Cheney personally walked from house to house to shoot our faces full of buckshot. Shit, that'd take longer than it took al Qaeda (which is really a pretty vague, undefinable enemy to begin with) to gain back its strength, like at the end of Godzilla movies when the fire-breathing motherfucker would head back into the ocean to rest and regroup before wrecking Tokyo again.

And let's toss in the White House's completely reckless and random approach to adherence to the rule of law. Presidencies set examples. Bill Clinton made blow jobs en vogue (and able to be declared "not sex," thus doing more for saving marriages than all the couples counselors in the nation). Nixon made everyone wanna tape record each other. Taft made it cool to eat an entire buffalo in a single sitting. So if the White House can prevent creepy she-Bush Harriet Miers from even showing up to answer a Congressional subpoena and if it can proudly keep creepy Hispano-Bush Alberto Gonzales employed, then, certainly, we should all be listening to Chamillionaire and proudly declare the United States a "No Snitchin'" zone. For what else is Karl Rove declaring to any former staffers or wayward Republican members of Congress but "Russian Roulette, yep nigga bet the barrel will spin/ You hear that, yea nigga thats the sound of revenge" (sic, motherfuckers, sic). And if you're not snitchin', you're actually aiding and abetting crime, which makes you a fuckin' criminal. But in outlaw America, where the President gets to pick and choose which laws he follows, it's just the code of the street, gangsta, the code of the street. Voter roll purges or crack dealing, it doesn't matter.

When Sara Taylor, the latest blonde DoJ quasi-hottie we've met, quasi-testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she made what was not a Freudian slip, but was, rather, insight into the White House's sense of itself: "'I took an oath the president, and I take that oath very seriously,' Sara Taylor said in answer to a question early in the hearing.

"And right after a break, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked her if she was sure about that. 'Did you mean, perhaps, you took an oath to the Constitution?' Leahy asked."

No, she might say. One can imagine she was told her loyalty was to Bush. And as for that undernourished child? When is someone going to take her away from her incompetent, evil parents?