When Did God Throw the Dart?

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed while giving a speech Thursday at the Federalist Society dinner at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. (CNN)

  • “Most notably, the President has appointed two members of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito… Both of these remarkably accomplished justices will continue to serve the Nation for many years to come.”
  • “Since September 11th, Al Qaeda has not managed to launch a single act of terrorism in the United States. This is a remarkable achievement that no one could have predicted in the days following the September 11th attacks… Much of that credit also goes to the President; in this area, as in many others, leadership and resolve matter.”

  • “We have become victims of our own success. In the eyes of these critics, if Al Qaeda has not struck our homeland for seven years, then perhaps it never posed much of a threat after all and we didn’t need these counterterrorism policies.”
  • “Before conducting interrogations, the CIA officials sought the advice of the Department of Justice, and I am aware of no evidence that these DOJ attorneys provided anything other than their best judgment of what the law required.”
  • “If you listen only to the critics, you might assume… that this Administration, by asserting that habeas corpus did not apply to alien enemy combatants, had tried to deprive the judiciary of a time-honored role in second-guessing our military commanders’ decisions concerning whom to detain on foreign battlefields.”
  • “This Administration has displayed a strong commitment to the rule of law.”
Attorney general collapses while giving speech [CNN]

Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Federalist Society [MarketWatch]

Image: ConstitutionTP.com

27 Comments

Each time I hear about the Federalist Law Society, I get the impression they’re little more than angry Nazees with law degrees.

Poor guy – the cognitive dissonance got to him.

As Sarah might say, “We got a downer!”

Surely this is the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

This is precisely what I thought when I heard the news late last night. Then they played some of the audio on NPR, poor guy actually gurgled, it was awesome in a sad way. The other side’s god sure is calling in his chips, eh wot?

So it is true what my mother said about lying. Huh.

@homofascist: Now, don’t forget that other thing she said. Hairy palms and all.

homofascist: Kind of late, however. I mean, for all the falsehoods that Fleischmann / McClellan / Snow / Perino have flung at the world, you would kind of expect the Briefing Room to be still smoldering from the continual pounding on the “SMITE” button.

@chicago bureau:
If Jeff Murdock from BBC’s Coupling were to be believed, all those lies turned the privates of the men into innies while Dana is hung like a horse.

And…. the Corner is in. And the message, of course, is that if you do not ascribe to everything that this person ever said, then you are a horrible person who wants him to die a horrible, painful death because you are an awful, heartless person. Observe this drivel from Andy McCarthy:

The Attorney General … is one of the greatest men I have ever known. Not just a great judge or a great attorney-general. A great man. A man who loves this country and inspires those around him to see and understand her greatness. A man for whom loving America has always meant serving America, selflessly. [Emphasis his.]

Of course, credit is due to Mukasey. He isn’t as painfully, astoundingly awful as John Aschroft was, or as Alberto Gonzales was. He’s better than them. Admit it. You know it’s true.

TJ: An omnibus list of stores shuttering and closing. There is something very wrong when dollar stores are closing. I know the print is small on this but it is a dire warning. Pam’s House Blend has it in more legible form.

@chicago bureau: He’s better than them. Admit it. You know it’s true.

It’s called the “Bush Threshold”, but yeah, Mukasey is competent. But not get-out-the-kneepads competent, as McCarthy seems to think.

@rptrcub: I know I must sound like a broken record, but this is what I have been seeing for over a month and it has me terrified, truly, really scared. I work for a retail trade association, and all sales died, retail fell off a cliff, right about the beginning of October. I started screaming then, that it would not be seen for a month, in the economic stats, but that something horrible happened. Now its beeing seen in the weekly unemployment numbers, and in these closings and bankruptcies.

It started as a financial crisis because the loans they never should have made started to go bad, but what is happening now is a complete melt-down of every sector of the economy like never has happened in our lives. What is going to happen now is these millions of newly unemployed are gonna start defaulting on their mortgages, which were good loans, prime loans, because they are out of work, and then will begin a second financial crisis, while the retail industry gets worse and worse, and yes, we will see deflation and depression. Its hard to see any way this does not spiral, each piece of bad news has a ripple effect, a multiplier effect, each person thrown out of a job by these closings, by the closing auto dealerships I see every day, will be defaulting on their loans and not buying things, and then more poeple are laid off and more stores close. I suppose its good that most of the closing factories will be in other countries, does that make us better off?

This is deep shit, this is, this “Bush Depression” will be the worst thing ever in our lives.

@Prommie: I remember your first hollers in the wilderness, Prom, and thought about cracking snarky and calling you our Rabbit Angstrom.

Now I realize you were our canary in the coal mine, and rather than the lastest in barrel and suspenders fashion we should be looking for shopping carts.

@nabisco: One of my favorite songs of all time, Dramarama, “Work for Food,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqBjG2PnFTQ

Speaking of shopping carts.

Hell, I like it this much:

Yeah well no one really understands,
why my shopping cart is filled with cans,
And a top hat, and a snare drum, and a horn
And a poster and some magazines
With my picture, and some magic beans
And a blanket that I got when I was born

Different people do the same things everyday
And I just look the other way
But I keep on rollin’,I keep on rollin’…..
I deny a problem with my attitude
Cause I won’t work for food
Yeah I keep on rollin’, I keep on rollin’…..

I wasn’t always pararnoid,
Sang a song on Uncle Floyd,
But the records, never sold, and that was bad.
And my Mommy still took care of me,
Till I was almost thirty-three
Now she’s gone up to heaven, to see Dad.

Sheriffs came with pistols and on their starry sleeves
Gimme thirty days to leave
And I keep on rollin’, I keep on rollin’…..
No one wants to pay for me my broken heart
So now I’ve got this shopping cart
And I keep on rollin’, I jeep on rollin’….
I can’t live without eternal gratitude
cause I won’t work for food
and I keep on rollin, keep on rollin’ on and on and on
On..on,and on,and on,and on,and on…

Yeah well no one really understands,
A shopping cart is filled with cans,
And a top hat, and a snare drum, and a horn
And a poster and some magazines
With my picture, and some magic beans
And a blanket that I got when I was born

Different people do the same things everyday
I just look the other way
And I keep on rollin’, I keep on rollin’….

And I keep on rollin’, I keep on rollin’…
On…on,and on and on,and on,and on…

See, this guy almost made it, but not quite, his band got so close, but not quite, they played on Uncle Floyd in the 80s when Uncle Floyd had people like The Replacements on, but “the records didn’t sell” and he is imagining himself years from now as a crazy street person with a shopping cart filled with the mementos of his music career, with nothing but his pride, he won’t work for food jkust food, the spirit requires more. he’s a local guy here and plays all around, one night I found that I was standing in front of his mom and dad as they had come to see him play.

@nabisco: Rabbit Angstrom

I tried reading the first one back in 1981, but at that moment I wasn’t sure enough of my judgment to realize that Updike sucks.

@nojo: I had an American lit prof friend who, when stoned, would go on and on about how very very clever it was that Updike had given his title character a name of something very very small. I really enjoyed one of the later books that featured some twisted three-way action but mostly because I knew that my dad had actually recommended the book to me and in consequence must have been pointing the way for me in a life of gratuitous carnal fulfillment.

The Updike hook to Prom was mostly because Angstrom was not just a car salesman but the first Toyota salesman in, I think, New Jersey.

@Prommie: I saw the Ramones on Uncle Floyd a number of times. Uncle Floyd was teh awesome. Any of our leftcoasters know about Lil Arts Poker Party?

@nojo: Its the narcissim, isn’t it? That sucked, updike’s and his character’s. Is John Irving a lowbrow Updike? Nah, he has a sense of humor; maybe he is Wes Anderson, is Wes Anderson doing anything but pumping out one after another re-write of The Hotel New Hampshire?

@Prommie: Oh gawd, Irving. Dude getting his dick bit off because he was being sucked when his car crashed was admittedly clever, but that’s a lot of Garp to wade through before you get there.

The last Great American Novel was Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey gave up after that, and the culture moved on.

@nojo:

I liked The World According to Garp, though, it was vaguely soothing and promoted restful sleep. What was the other one, the one about the family and brother/sister incest? Is the Hotel New Hampshire? Am I remembering it right? I read these years ago when I was trying to be respected for my mind instead of my abs…

There are two kinds of fiction readers in the world, those who prefer Updike, Irving, and the Bronte Sisters, and those who prefer Vonnegut, Stephen King, and Charles Dickens. I am the latter, I think.

Nevar the twain, and all that…

@nojo: Dude, this brings me back to Cormac McCarthy and The Road from another thread. All of his stuff is awesome, albeit heavy on the Texas border mythology, but the Road is fucking great. As for other modern American fictionists (?), I’ll read anything by Annie Proulx or T.C. Boyle and like it.

Good to see this place ain’t too classy to use free sample images from stock photography suppliers.

@flippin eck: Hey, hey, hey. That TP is from the site that sells the product. I usually just rip off something from Google image search.

@nojo: Iz jus messing with you, sweetie! I work at a job where I have to look at those damn stock images all day, so it always fills me with glee to see the infamous watermark show up when someone is “borrowing” an image!

@flippin eck: I’m no stranger to istockphoto in my freelance life, but I’m not gonna suffer a watermark here unless there’s a good reason for it.

And hey, I credited it. I only do that when it’s easily traceable anyway.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: But I love John Irving, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens…so where does that put me? In both camps? Bi-literate?

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