Ol’ Bobbie knows a thing or two about dressing down a man, you betcha. Imagine if even half this enthusiasm and fire had been present in 1996? He might have won. . . a few states, anyway.

But guys like Scott McClellan really drop a deuce in the old bran flakes for guys like Bob. Writing a tell-all book about a potentially criminal president instead of taking action is worse than interrupting Matlock to televise a Gay Pride parade. But in fairness to Bob, he is right, of course: if you know the country’s being led by a potential criminal, you should probably resign at minimum.

Jonathan Martin’s Blog: Bob Dole unloads on McClellan - Politico.com

Dole assures McClellan that he won’t read the book — “because if all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high profile job”

“That would have taken integrity and courage but then you would have had credibility and your complaints could have been aired objectively,” Dole concludes. “You’re a hot ticket now but don’t you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?”

However, as is equally clear from some of the lines quoted in the book so far, there remains to this day in Scottie a certain quasi-homosexual, sycophantic obsession with George Bush that allows him to blame nearly every single thing on anyone else but Bush. It’s the same “cult of personality” effect that seems to have kept things pretty well in check, and defections to a minimum, in the Bush Administration up till now. Even in the cocaine discussion - where I’ve been willing to give him a lot more credit than the MSM - Scott prefers to wallow in the kind of pop-psych bull typically reserved for crying teenage girls pouring out their hearts to their friends over a Haagen-Dazs.

All these revelations from the new Scott McClellan book! From conspiratorial asides between Scooter and Karl to the assertion that the press went easy on the war effort - which has subsequently led to one reporter outing her bosses for exactly that - this is probably the barn-burner of the litterae apologia coming out of former administration officials.

But its funny how the media’s aggressions against Scott McClellan - the administration’s frustrating little bitch-bot throughout Plamegate and the early parts of the Iraq War - are helping to paint the picture of McClellan as a hopeless boob. Take, for example, what should be a much bigger story about George Bush’s alleged cocaine use, mostly painted as Scottie’s clueless virginal silliness:

Scott McClellan: George W. Bush ‘couldn’t remember if he took cocaine’ : Telegraph Blogs

According to McClellan: “‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’”"I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Hmmm? How indeed? It seems like such an incredibly naive thing to say. But that’s mostly because the quote is incomplete. The above linked article includes more important details:

Scott McClellan : Telegraph Blogs

Bush, McClellan writes, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie”. Therefore “I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”{{snippage}}

McClellan links the way Bush handled the cocaine rumours with selling the Iraq war and other controversial policies. “It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy. But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare.”

Well, that’s a much different kind of statement, isn’t it? The phraseology may seem a bit naive, but the reality is that Scott is pointing out how Bush uses his supposedly fuzzy memory to evade serious inquiry about subjects he’d rather not discuss. Cocaine isn’t the type of substance people try just once and never go back to. Bush can’t pawn this off as something he did once at a party, but he’s trying to.

And while this blog will not needlessly engage in accusation directly without at least some equally direct evidence, I feel compelled to point out that my lifestyle as a musician, particularly after high school, definitely qualifies me as something of an expert on elicit drug use and its evidences. This will not be the last time that George W. Bush’s alleged cocaine use and the Iraq War will be linked in some way.

And in honor of Scottie, here’s a blast from the past, and to my knowledge, the only funny part of Eurotrip:

Picked up via TPM, Jessica Yellin, formerly of ABC News states unequivocally that “executives” edited stories, pushed her stories in specific directions and otherwise forced Bush-positive coverage at every turn during the runup to the war.  Not that we’re surprised about any of this - despite Anderson Cooper’s feigned shock - but it’s good to hear one brave woman actually report on what happened, however briefly.

And despite that enormous revelation, Cooper pointedly moves on without further explanation.

Let’s all breathe a sigh of relief that multi-national banking firm UBS is signaling that the worst is over, for them:

AFP: UBS chief says worst is now over

“I definitely think that the worst is behind us,” UBS chief executive Marcel Rohner told Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

“There will certainly be plenty of things for banks to clear up over the next two years but as far as systemic risks are concerned, we’ve got over the hardest part,” he said.

So, where’s the “thank you” for the lack of regulation that made all this possible? There’s no indication of *how* the bank got the worst of it behind them, other than to say that they’ve “written down” 37 billion dollars in “bad investments.” Wonder what happened to that 37 billion dollars of homes? They don’t.

And neither does John McCain and his adviser, Phil Gramm, former lobbyist for UBS. In fact, it was Phil Gramm’s relentless deregulation of the banking industry during his time as Senator that partially set the disaster in motion, removing safeguards placed on banking after the Great Depression.

Way to go, Phil! We look forward to your ample guidance should John McCain win the presidency, and will remind people of it every single day till November.

Here’s a story I’ve been asleep at the switch on. One of John McCain’s chief economic advisers is none other than former Senator Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm was the father of the modern bank deregulation era that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. And more than that, he’s a lobbyist for UBS, one of the largest transnational corporations embroiled in the subprime mess:

Talking Points Memo | Great Company He Keeps

On the McCain/Gramm/UBS front (noted in yesterday evenings posts), it seems that not only is Sen. McCain’s top economics advisor, fmr Sen. Gramm, lobby and work for UBS, but according to today’s Financial Times the company is advising members of its private banking team not to step foot in the United States in order to avoid indictment.

The original story from MSNBC’s Countdown is here for your entertainment. Gramm was a tireless lobbyist against just about any reform measures or relief measures the Congress wanted to pass in the wake of the economic disaster he was largely responsible for. So now we know why John McCain’s economic policy where the subprime situation is concerned was, “you’re on your own, losers.”

I was going to write this post last night, but opted to leave well enough alone, in hopes that anyone who might have visited the page yesterday would have seen my Memorial Day video tribute.

But now the holiday is over, so let us begin. If at the opening of the new Indiana Jones movie you were confused as to how a fifties car could drive 65+ miles an hour through brush desert without leaving it’s wheels in a rut or it’s oil pan on a rock, you wouldn’t be alone. If when the kids in said vehicle pulled up on a desert road amongst a military convoy and challenged the lead driver to race you wondered why any kid of reasonable intelligence would do such a thing in the mid Fifties - the height of McCarthyism, the height of the Red Scare, the height of Ike’s military-industrial complex - you doubtless would have been in good company. And if, when the soldiers revealed themselves to be Ruskies posing as U.S. soldiers, you wondered why the hell they would do something as trivial as actually take the kids up on the race, well then my friend, you have taken your first baby steps into a larger world of idiocy that is Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

I’m no movie critic and generally take critic’s assessments of movies with a very large grain of salt. Indeed, when I read a review of this movie on MSNBC that said this movie was “all the stuff you expect out of Indiana Jones movies, but nothing interesting,” I naturally assumed that this person was a typically snobbish movie critic. In point of fact, this movie was ten times worse than he described it and I have to wonder if he didn’t step out of the theatre half way through to go play with his Star Wars figures. I wish I would have done the same.

Because I certainly don’t expect much of an Indiana Jones movie other than plain good fun, but I’d like the plot line to at least make some limited sense and I’d like the stunts to seem at least mildly physically possible. Sadly, neither came to be in this movie. And while I would never recommend anyone take safety tips from Indie, I do have to make a special note: kids, if you find yourself in the middle of a nuclear blast site moments before impact (George Bush still has a few months to make that dream a reality) you’re going to want to find yourself a better shelter than a Fifties refrigerator. It won’t work like it did - beyond all reason - for Indie.

And the movie just keeps going like this, from improbable plot line to impossible stunt, for two hours, three locations and three crypts of near exact decor. It gets to the point that you just stop really watching and just start observing. Even worse, in direct contradiction of the afore-mentioned review, there is one overriding missing element that could have made this movie a bit more livable: some gratuitous, comically gratuitous violence and gore. No one’s face melted, no one’s back was thrashed into an airplane’s propeller, no one got crushed in a big wheel thing, no one’s still-beating heart was removed. . . I mean, what’s the point?

For chrissakes, they didn’t even pop any rotten corpses out at anybody in the temples. What the hell is an Indiana Jones movie without corpses? And bugs. Lots of creepy, crawly bugs. All there was were a couple of lame-ass scorpions. What? Were the beetles too expensive? There was one snake, whose introduction was the most flaccid, ineffectual moment of silliness in the entire movie.

But I begin to believe that all my childhood sci-fi directorial heroes have gone senile and become doddering old fools, parodying their own works. From the insufferable dialogue in the Star Wars prequels to the juvenile impossibility of the new Indie movie, it makes me think the best policy going forward is to avoid anything associated with Skywalker Ranch.

If anything, please take this post as a warning to at least avoid this movie, lest the entire Indie franchise be tarnished for you as it is for me.

Late Note: Perhaps the most telling thing about the movie is the fact that every single promotional image - from movie posters to Snickers kiosks - features images of Harrison Ford from twenty years ago.  Instead of a fun movie where we could have a little fun with the aged Indy taking over his dad’s role, we have a movie equivalent of Harrison Ford’s second childhood.

I saw this memorial in my new home town of East Rochester and decided to put together some video in honor of our fallen soldiers.  There’s lots of bigger memorials in the area, but this one is so admirable precisely because of its modesty.  I hope I captured some of that in the video.  The song is “Was My Brother In the Battle,” a traditional Civil War era piece as sung by Kate and Anna McGarrigle for the Ken Burns Civil War PBS documentary, for those of you who can remember that far back.

Please enjoy:

Sarah and I taped the landing show on the Science Channel. Thank god we did: it was the worst live television either of us can remember watching. They had some dude that was apparently Canada’s Wolf Blitzer, dubbed by my wife “Grizzly Blitzer.”

But the good news is: the Phoenix probe is safely down on the Martian polar cap, it’s solar panels are deployed and it is relaying it’s first pictures. This is sooooo cool!:

Phoenix Sends First Photos From Martian Arctic Surface | Wired Science from Wired.com

The Phoenix Lander has successfully transmitted a series of photographs from the arctic surface of Mars.

The pictures show the solar panels have deployed fully. Without the solar panels the lander would have run out of power within a few hours. Other photos show Martian terrain and a lander foot pad.

She said, “Four feet high and risin’”

Seems that Vancouver is having a bit of a problem with discarded feet washing ashore. I hate it when that happens:

Mystery deepens as 4th severed foot found | Oddly Enough | Reuters

The foot, still wearing a shoe, was discovered on Thursday on a small uninhabited island south of Vancouver in the Strait of Georgia, and is the fourth discovered in the region in the past 10 months.