"The Office" (Workstation series) 38 (D-minus-One edition)

Leave tomorrow AM, spending nearly all day on planes or sitting in airports to get here. Fortunately, Southwest Airlines flying into Austin is unlike just about any other airline/airport experience I know (with the exception of First Class on some Far-East airlines). Going into and out of Austin with a musical instrument, you're actually treated like a VIP: Austin has figured out that musicians, and the tourists they bring to the city, are about the only worthwhile import/export they've got, and so they treat us well. Free wireless helps too--I'll be blogging from the road.

Tough anniversary yesterday: 9/11 plus loss of Joe Zawinul. I'm glad that large percentages of the mainstream media--in addition to we DFH's in the blogosphere--are not trusting the Kabuki play put on by the White House's pet general on Capitol Hill.

They're not leaving Iraq until Junior can walk away and blame his catastrophic failures, as he has done throughout his entire career, on his successors. I have come to believe that he is a true sociopath--that is, as a result of upbringing, genes, experience of privilege, programming in the towel-snapping homophobia of Yale fraternities and Skull-and-Bones, the experience of being a "dry" (as opposed to "recovering") alcoholic and coke head, the insane level of protection his grandfather's money provided him--he is psychologically incapable of understanding others' suffering. That's true whether he's making fun of some vision-impaired reporter in the Rose Garden, laughing when some woman in a meet & greet tells him she has to work 3 jobs to make a living, playing "where's those danged WMD's?" at the WH Press Correspondents' Dinner: he is so psychologically damaged that he does not comprehend others' suffering.

He's turned out to be the ideal public face for the fascist oligarchy, made up from an unholy alliance between religious fanatics and international corporations (including many run by those who sent in the 9/11 hijackers), which has wrecked our military, destroyed our economy, created a permanent chasm between rich versus poor and educated versus uneducated, and oh, by the way, killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. And he, and they, will never, never answer for it.

Not a very cheery anniversary.