Po' ol' Harold Ford...workin' his hands to the bone—for absolutely nothin'.
About a week ago, I found myself in the supermarket. Grabbed some pasta. Grabbed butter, and then...I picked up a carton of milk, and placed it into the basket. I looked at it and immediately thought about the poor, missing kids you often see on the sides of the container. You cluck your tongue, you shake your head sadly, and mutter a pity-filled “Oh, that poor child! What could have become of him?”, and then you go on with your day as best you can.
Imagine my surprise when the very next day, a certain “missing” kid—disappeared from the face of the earth it seemed—lost since last November actually—miraculously turned up! I'd found him! I'd found him! Crawling around in the dankest sewers of TV! Thank God for John Amato at Crooks and Liars and his flashlight which helped me find him!
The new chairman of the DLC said he doesn’t know who’s been right about the Iraq war. No, I’m not kidding. And he wonders why most of the presidential candidates stopped at YKos and left the DLC conference blowing in the wind. He was there (on FOX!—ed. note from LM )to talk about Obama’s foreign policy ideas and answered this way on Hannity and Colmes last night:
Colmes: Barack Obama had a great point when he said those who voted for the war in Iraq and then had to apologize for that vote should probably be the last people to criticize he—who was right about the war in Iraq all along.
Ford: I don’t know who’s been right about this war all along…
Colmes: Sure you do…
Ford: That’s open for dispute.
Colmes: You don’t know who’s been right about the war all along?
Ford: One thing is clear. What we’re doing now is not working.
Okay...I love Crooks and Liars, but I swear, I almost wanted to bop John over the head with his trusty media flashlight until the batteries exploded out, for his exposing me—us—to the reason why the pitiful, toadying, little gnome that is Harold Ford, was away for so long.
He wasn't missing. He was “away”” of his own volition evidently—hiding under a fucking rock with the rest of the pillbugs, and worms and all manner of many-legged creatures/pests you never see until you trip over said rock, and “ewwwwwww!”, there they are, exposed—all slimy and twitchy, and crawling around until you can get that rock back on top of 'em—hard, thank you very much—so you don't have to see them again.
Alas, not only didn't we get the rock back down—HARD!—quickly enough to re-acquaint ol' Harold with his natural habitat, but apparently, the annoying little bug wants to hang out in the light for awhile, and is scuttling for all he's worth to stay there. See, he'd been under that rock since November—after progressives, liberals, dirty fucking hippies—and yes, a few right-tacking opportunists rode the lefty wave in, and shifted the balance of power in Congress from those compassionate wingnuts who let Ford's and his DLC'ers suckle at its diseased teat—to people who rather openly detested said DLC'ers and their teat—and other appendage suckling.
So, as the election—while still far off—still nears, what with the uncommonly early ramp-up of interest, much focus has shifted to the Netroots, and the activist/activated wing of the Democratic party, which is driving the debate these days. So much so, that the ridicule we once drew—“Tin-foil ha-aaaats! Tin-foil ha-aaaats! What have you won?"—has now shifted to a scorched-earth campaign to destroy us entirely. Recall those thrilling days of three weeks ago, during O'Reilly's cartoonish, exploding-cigar-in-his-own-mouth of a campaign to “destroy” YearlyKos '07 and its namesake Markos. ?
I sure do. And so too, does Harold. You see, the shit backfired on O'Reilly and the right so badly that it ended up turning Kos into an even bigger celebrity—and honestly, much to Kos's chagrin, more of a power-broker, thanks to one unfortunate side-effect of YearlyKos '07.
Um, well...it's like this—you know the DLC? Well, they kinda like...had a convention scheduled for the week after YearlyKos, and uh... heh! The damndest thing—all the candidates who showed up at YearlyKos? Not a one of 'em showed as much as a stray kinky hair or millimeter of cleavage at the DLC's fine, little shindig, leaving the what—six attendees or so, to watch as Joe Lieberman and Harold Ford were the lone participants in that convention's three-legged race and roll-over-on-your-back-like-a-punk-ass-bitch competition at its all-day picnic.
Owee!
But with that, and the general ash-heaping of even the “need” for a DLC in today's anti-GOP climate, all manner of warning bells, sirens and batshit-screaming Connecticut losers down at capitulation central went off.
“Oh fuck—I mean fiddlesticks!—we're civil, remember? The Netroots is drawing all the heat! O'Reilly's after 'em, and it's only making them look tougher...stronger...more formidable! Ain't nobody thinking about our jackleg shit—er..stuff anymore! What do we do?”
“I've got it! let's send Harold out on a whirlwind tour to champion and defend our tepid...bull-defecation! Yeah, that'll work!”
And thus, we got the sad spectacle of Harold Ford, sitting there glassy-eyed and slack-jawed—wanly defending his atrophied wing of the party's stance on the war, as noted above. It was sad, watching him in the clip. Out there, ass hanging in the breeze, with no reasoning whatsoever to back him up. Just contrarian bullshit for the sake of contrarian bullshit. In that moment, Ford annoyingly became John Cleese in the infamous Monty Python "Argument Clinic” skit. Arguing his point(?) not out of any sense of conviction—but because it is his job, a job he desperately covets—to do so.
Yes Harold, you've become–or rather, matured into a whole new level of farce—in your attempt to make the DLC fucking matter again. I laughed at the Joe Klein article in Time about the horror of the DLC being deemed a ”pariah” by many in the Democratic party, and I'm sure you piddled your J. Press khakis when your boy Joe dared out that out there for public consumption, too. It's real...and true. And you're desperate. You know what's coming in '08, and you've gotta try to do something to make your crew at least appear to be players again when your patrons on the right are moved into super-minority status. So, you come out with this shit...on the one cable news net that you're most comfortable on—FOX, of course. Came out swingin' too...with soft, downy pillows. Mewling your lukewarm-dishwater natterings on the things that really matter.
And then, you upped the ante. You got booked on “Meet The Press” opposite Kos. Which must've galled you to no end, man. You guys are about a year apart age-wise, yet for all your so-called “youthfulness”, you came off as hip, and as tuned in to the political landscape as Grover-fucking-Cleveland had he been time-snatched by Bill and Ted.
You tried to play the gravitas card—which failed.
You played the “Hey! It was the DLC what won the '06's!”, which was almost “I'm Rick James, bitch!”, in terms of hilarity.
You stumbled badly with your “I'm a truly honest Dem” shit, when you wouldn't back off of going on FOX to criticize fellow Democrats.
And when you realized how bad you looked, how woefully out of step you were, you went to the Lieberpublican/Foxocrat playbook of snippy bitch talking points:
MOULITSAS: Will you stop going on FOXNews and attacking Harry Reid for abandoning the troops, betraying the troops? Because you just did that a couple of days ago…
FORD: Markos, in all fairness, your site has posted awful things about Jewish Americans…
MOULITSAS: That’s not true…
FORD: Your site has…now you have a site about…something about Cindy Sheehan, she uses it as a…she has a heavy presence there in talking about running against….
MOULITSAS: It’s called “democracy.” If you don’t like regular people, hundreds of thousands of people…you’re gonna have…
FORD: No, I love it…but you can’t be critical of us…
MOULITSAS: Of course…you’re not going to control hundreds of thousands of voices. Your organization has a dozen people, you CAN control that message. And you don’t need to attack Democrats.
You sad, silly, fucking boy. You even went back on FOX two days later (back to the minors-tsk-tsk!) where the even the bubble-headed Laura Ingraham schooled your ass on the idiocy of your middle-playing.
And it was then that it hit me—what the deal was with you, and how you're acting these days and why.
You Harold, are the poor, dumb fool who took over your boss's grand, old horse-shoeing business, thinking you had it made!—You da man, now, br'uh! Woo-hooo!— except...except...well...
Nobody really rides horses anymore, Harold.
You're mad about it. So...you throw your archaic, little horseshoes at the passing cars. You whip 'em at the anti-war left, at the Netroots, and at Kos—Kos, the peppy, ascendant yang to your tired-ass yin.
And still, they pass you by. Vrrroooooooom!
I get it. We get it. You fucked up and now, now?...Now you have to justify your existence. “Protect your phony-baloney job! Harrrumph!”
Somehow, you've gotta move all of those stupid-ass horseshoes you bought.
Well...I suppose there's one saving grace.
FOX "News” demographic is just the crowd you can unload 'em on. I hear it's a real popular game at the old folks homes. :)
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