Just so long as they don't end up on a wall in Moscow, right?

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favorite Living Canadian)

We seem to be getting closer faster to the moment where we see classified photos of U.S. nuclear weapons labs framed and on the wall of the royal palace in Riyadh. From the AP (via madison.com):

Empty folders marked as classified, you say? Provocative.

Every day, in every way, we get closer to that wall in Riyadh. Or Moscow.

Lord knows, I respect the way that chairman Bennie Thompson and his special House committee have gone about their business investigating the events of January 6, 2021. But, please, Mr. Chairman. If this comes off, sell tickets. Pay-per-view revenues alone would finance your committee’s work for the next three years. From the Washington Post:

Since the Republican tolerance for Gingrich’s brand of vandal politics led directly to the Republican tolerance for Trump’s brand of destructo-politics, this would be a richly deserved comeuppance for the former Speaker of the House, most recently d/b/a an ambassador’s spouse. It would fill in a large gap in the DNA of the virus causing the prion disease that has consumed conservatism’s higher functions. And it would be boffo box office. Watching, say, Jaime Raskin stick pins into Gingrich’s over-inflated sense of self would be something a lot of folks have been praying for since 1994. I guarantee there’s a nice old couple in Chappaqua who’d pay full price.

The speech, and the post-game spin, brought a serious problem for my business into sharp relief. Ever since crooked Richard Nixon and his crooked VP Spiro Agnew, went to war against the media, there has been a sense that the elite political media flinches when the conservative beast twitches. This feeling is not entirely unwarranted, as many people have noted over the past half-century. (In fact, it is a barely concealed subtext throughout Tim Crouse’s landmark study, The Boys On The Bus and it is described in great detail in Mark Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee, a study of the media’s largely supine posture during the Reagan years.) If we were still in a normal political era, this would be an occasion for sheer mockery.

Here's the problem for the elite political media today: To cover the threat to the republic truthfully, they're going to have to write/broadcast things that have collateral benefits to the Democratic Party. No way around it. The point is not to worry about that. It is not necessary while covering the crazy to get a quote from the crazy denying that it’s as obviously crazy as it is.

The old rules are an impediment to the media’s role in protecting the republic. In fact, “objectivity” now conforms to the great Flann O’Brien’s assessment of of blasphemy — If there is no god, it’s stupid and unnecessary and if there is one, it’s dangerous. The old rules are broken and the vandals are in plain sight.

The president’s speech Wednesday night did disappoint me in one small way. There was a golden opportunity to turn the rhetorical knife on the Republicans, and the president, or his speechwriters, muffed the chance. For years, every Republican candidate for every office above dogcatcher has used one quote from the departed archangel Ronald Reagan.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

I mean, seriously, how great would it have been to hear him use that against Republicans, especially since they’ve used it against things like school lunches and the Affordable Care Act, whereas he would have turned the knife on an issue of actual sedition. If he’d have given me the speechwriting gig I applied for back in 1976, I’d have been all over this for him.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “It’s Too Late” (Tarheel Slim and Little Ann): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archive: Here, from 1927, is a 100-1 shot named Piastoon winning the Sydney Cup. If you’re wondering, and you know you were, the name is a combination of the names of his parents, Piastre and Zaratoon. And, if you haven’t spent the last piaster you can borrow, you can still buy his framed picture online for 159 American dollars and 99 American cents. His owner, R.H. Eadkins ,served in the 26th battalion of the Australian Imperial Force, which caught the tail end of the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign, covering the evacuation of what troops were still alive, and then fought on the Western Front for the rest of the war, playing a key role in the brutal stalemate at Arras. When Eadkins returned to Queensland after Piastoon’s victory, according to the Western Champion, “His health was drunk with musical honors”, which is the only way to go. Two decades later, Piastoon’s name was hijacked by an anonymous tout writing for the Brisbane Courier-Mail. History is so cool.

Hey, CBC, Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Hadrosaurs were big, dumb duckbills often called the “cows of the Cretaceous,” which is unfortunate. Recently, I’ve noticed that there are companies dealing in what they call “prehistoric wood” as a luxury decorative item. Which makes me glad that fossilized Dinos with skin, such as the one in the CBC story, are so rare. Otherwise, some idiots would make wallets out of them, and all they did was live then to make us happy now, not so we could turn a buck by robbing their graves.

Special Holiday Extra Dino News: From the BBC:

This old Dino evolutionary prototype needs to buy a damn vowel.

Have a great Labor Day weekend, y’all. Here’s a little tune to get you in the mood from Ms. Florence Reece of Harlan County, Kentucky. And another, from Ms. Joan Baez, which you might have missed because you took the brown acid. Anyway, I’ll be back on Tuesday with the latest from various legal venues. Also Congress is allegedly coming back to town, but since everybody’s running for re-election, minds will be elsewhere. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line. Wear the damn mask. Get the damn shots, especially the damn boosters, and especially the new booster when it becomes available. And spare a thought for the people of Ukraine, and of Jackson, Mississippi, and of Pakistan.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has his three children.

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