So now the great reporter Murray Waas, who probably discovered more than anyone else about the Plame "scandal," gets access to e-mails that have been illegally withheld from Congress by the Justice Department--e-mails confirming that Gonzales and the White House knew all along about the firing scheme and conspired to cover it up, e-mails which therefore prove that Gonzales has been lying in every word of his "testimony."

(For more information, go to talkingpointsmemo.com. For some reason blogger isn't letting me post links right now.)

Of course we knew this, but this kind of "revelation" is so clear that it would seem to promise immediate resignations and the total humiliation of the entire administration.

Where have I heard that before?

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At this point, it seems like these "revelations" are MORE destructive than not. It's as if we had a recording of Gonzales being played behind him--live in Congress, as he "testifies"--in which he can be heard to declare, "I hate this country, I want to kill Americans, I need Bush's penis in my asshole at all times, murder is fun, lying before Congress is my only purpose, shit tastes good, fuck God, I am not Hispanic and in fact hate all wetbacks, three cheers for Cho Seung-hui, etc., etc., etc...."

I guess you could call this sort of "news story" another confirmation of the Katrina Principle, which holds that the absolutely irrefutable announcement of the government's criminality and incompetence in effect neutralizes "scandal." The "revelations" are immediately complete, the suspense is dissipated, and "we" (and "the press") are left with the only apparently simple task of doing something about the fact that animated shit-sculptures fill every office of the executive branch.

The apparent unassailability of the system is most clearly revealed when its bankruptcy is perfectly manifest, and yet it persists intact. Each "revelation" is another nail in the already-sealed coffin of American constitutional government.

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In fact, nothing that I'm saying here is new. From the beginning (I said this in a 2003 post called "I am shit," and Finchy and Blicero and I have theorized this to death) Bush's power has been inseparable from his grotesquely obvious and inescapable criminal dementia. The very fact that such a piece of shit could be president proves that the office of the presidency, and the entire apparatus of government by spectacle, is inconceivably powerful and immoveable. The one who is "presidential" is the one who is said to be "president" and who fits into the "president"-slot in the image stream. The very fact that a manifestly unpresidential piece of shit could be made "presidential" by his placement in the "president"-slot proves that the real power resides in the unknowable flow of the image-stream itself, over and through all of us. Sweet.

Did anyone notice today's front-page WaPo story on NRCC chair Tom Cole, titled "A New Pitchman -- and a New Pitch"?

If so, were you, like me, wondering what the GOP's "new pitch" would be? Well, here it is:

It is Cole's job to accommodate both wings [sic] of the party, and he thinks it can be done by attacking Democrats -- as tax-and-spenders and blame-America-first defeatists.

How's that for a political reinvention? Ingenious! Onward to '08!

A Missouri blogger over at Kos, appealing for general help, describes the state of "politics" in Missouri's Republican-controlled state government:

During one session of the house, the Speaker of the House screamed "no" into a microphone over and over during the Democratic period of a debate on education. In another, the speaker stopped Democrats by making farting sounds -- drawing a lot of laughter from Republicans. In another session, Republican legislators interrupted a health care speech from Democratic legislator by making animal noises.

Sweet. And when these people aren't making farting sounds or animal noises, they are passing "madatory death penalty" legislation.

Wow. Just wow. According to the AP:

WASHINGTON - An odd-looking Canadian quarter with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a false espionage warning from the Defense Department about mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned.

The harmless "poppy quarter" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.
...

The supposed nano-technology on the coin actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

And here's the best part:

The Defense Security Service never examined the suspicious coins, spokeswoman Cindy McGovern said.

Sounds like someone got a hold of a "poppy quarter" up there, if you know what I mean, and then got a major case of the fear.

If I were advising my compatriot Rudy, I'd have the campaign immediately mail Canadian currency to all Americans in the GOP voter vault, thereby triggering a wave of demented panic that sweeps him into office.