Maverick power elites on parade

What a spectacle, Washington power elites praising other Washington power elites for the benefit of the hardscrabble Grand Old Party grassroots True Believers, who seemed to be eating it up, despite the weird dissonance.

'We're going to rearrange the Washington power elites,' cried the mavericky Washington power elites, one after another.

"Country First!" the Party Faithful exulted at the Party Convention, while outside, police arrested the journalist Amy Goodman on suspicion of exercising her First Amendment rights.

A seemingly befuddled George W. Bush, appearing live via hologram, was generously allotted a few brief moments to offer his obligatory support for the Republican candidate, John McCain.

Any more than those few minutes and it would have dawned on the Party revelers that not only has the War President's approval rating been hovering around 25% for ages, but that more than one-quarter of Americans polled consider him the worst U.S. president in history.

In their defense, they haven't seen Sarah Palin yet.

President Bush, who is also the Leader of the Republican Party, had barely gasped his final empty platitude when the control booth erased his familiar deer-in-the-headlights visage from the giant screen. Whew! Glad we got that over with.

And while Bush may be radioactive in the Plutonium-239 sense, an atomic half-life of 24,000 years is but a geological instant compared with Dick "Rubidium" Cheney, who will remain safely encased in his concrete bunker throughout the GOP convention.

Next up was Fred Thompson, the elite but sleepy Hollywood star who mounted his own reluctantly half-assed presidential bid for a week or two, and who the GOP has recently dragged from the mothballs to make the circuit. Unfortunately the Party organizers didn't see fit to provide Sleepy Fred with a noise gate for his microphone.

Thompson's folksy harangue was devoted to describing John McCain's harrowing experiences as a Vietnam prisoner of war in considerable detail, right down to the size of the boils underneath McCain's armpits (9 to 9.25 inches in circumference).

But in spite of this eidetic narrative, Sleepy Fred concluded, having been a POW does not a president make, although it may excuse you from not knowing how many houses and condominiums you own.

This was interesting, because when Wesley Clark, a 4-star general and decorated Vietnam veteran in his own right made precisely that identical observation, he was widely and loudly shouted down by the very same Party Faithful.

So evidently if you're an elite Hollywood star like Fred Thompson or Sean Penn, you can get away with it and indeed, be awarded with raucous applause (and some annoying goof in the front row yelling "Yeah!" throughout — why couldn't they have arrested him?).

But it turns out the Party Faithful's latest "Country First!" hero is none other than Country Joe Lieberman, an elite United States Senator of ancient and deeply entrenched standing from Stamford, Connecticut, which ranks Country First! in the nation among States by highest per capita personal income.

Joe Lieberman, it may be recalled, is a registered Democrat who, along with the widely despised Albert Gore, Jr., popularly defeated the Cheney/Bush ticket just eight years ago before the U.S. Supreme Court, in an admirable exercise of "judicial restraint," elitely stepped in to order Florida elections canvassers to stop counting votes just in case they found any more marked for Lieberman.

Lieberman — who Republicans used to call "Loserman" and "LIE-berman" — justifed the latter epithet when he related a tall tale from his Senate days "when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground," a deliberate falsehood.

As its 29th most senior member, Lieberman knows better than most how the Senate works, and how bills circulate with various related and unrelated attachments. Most of all, he knows Obama never voted to "cut off funding for our troops on the ground," and he understands full well that the one vote in question had to do with the attachment of timetables that Congress was wrangling over in the spring of '07.

Even more bizarre was Lieberman's effusive praise for Sarah Palin, a former village mayor from Alaska currently the subject of a legislative investigation into an alleged abuse of the awesome power of that State's governorship. Lieberman had reportedly just met Palin for the first time only hours before. He's a quick study, I guess.

Either that or he doesn't read the news.

And as if Republicans are the only Americans who put "Country First." Isn't it odd that the GOP invited a registered Democrat, one from among they who impliedly put their country last, to prove the GOP's own key convention slogan wrong, and even present Joe Lieberman the opportunity to argue why it's wrong. Given more time to do so, in fact, than they provided the Leader of their own Party.

They can have him, and he can happily allow himself to be strummed like a violin. He's convinced himself to vote for McCain and his sidekick village mayor, that's clear. Whether he convinced anyone else is highly questionable. Although there's little doubt he's convinced many of his shameless political opportunism. And naturally the True Believers didn't need any convincing in the first place.

Earlier, local laughing stock Michele Bachmann offered further evidence that conservatives are generally immune to irony.

If I recall correctly, the cable news networks devoted very little time to actually broadcasting the speeches from last week's Democratic convention, concentrating only on the final speakers of each evening.

But last night, the same networks showed uninterrupted footage of at least the last four or five Washington power elites, including the sentimental videotaped homage to Saint Ronald Reagan.

That would be your liberal media in action.

Tonight's feature: A noun, a verb, and Rudy 91u1an1.