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"  Close it down. Its puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d&amp;#039;erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He&amp;#039;s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle. It&amp;#039;s not just that TBOTP invited the Manson Family of American geopolitics to come together for an exercise in ensemble prevarication. It&amp;#039;s not just that the account of said exercise is written in the kind of cacophonous cutesy-poo necessary to drown out the screams of the innocent dead, and to distract the assembled crowd from the blood that has dripped from the wallet of the celebrity war-criminal leading the public display. And it&amp;#039;s not as though this was a mere interview\u2014a &amp;quot;get&amp;quot; that could help you &amp;quot;win the morning (!).&amp;quot; In that, it might have been marginally excusable. No, this was one of Mike Allen&amp;#039;s little grift-o-rama special events\u2014a &amp;quot;Playbook lunch,&amp;quot; sponsored by that noted mortgage fraud concern Bank Of America. There&amp;#039;s an upcoming TBOTP &amp;quot;event&amp;quot; in L.A. that is sponsored by J.P. Morgan. I know what Mike Allen is, but I am so goddamn tired of haggling about the price. Here&amp;#039;s how TBOTP&amp;#039;s own account of the event begins.  Yes, and if Mike were an authoritarian greed-monkey with a borrowed heart that he declined to employ in any meaningful sense, if Carol were a lifelong scold and nuisance pretending to be a historian, and if Marcia were a talentless clown who, if it weren&amp;#039;t for the largesse of Mike&amp;#039;s friends and their foundations, would be selling phony subprime packages to the blind from a strip-mall in Kannapolis. Also, whatever editor it was who passed on the tone of this account should be sent back to the oyster cannery where they found him.  That&amp;#039;s the freaking problem? That Dad and Mom and Exemptionette got together, but The Gay One didn&amp;#039;t show up. The problem was not that your publication decided to publicize itself, and suck up some of that sweet sponsorship cash from Wall Street, by putting a coward and a torturer on display with the more unpleasant members of his family? The problem was not that the alleged journalists running your place decided to give a platform to a man whose only public appearances in the near future should be unsponsored events at the Hague?  Oh, those silly protestors. They are, how you say, so recherche? More than 4000 American soldiers, and over 100,000 Iraqis, also might have shown up, inconveniencing the Bride Of Dracula even further, but they were otherwise occupied with being dead because of the war into which hubby lied the country so he could line his pockets. Tres amusante, non?  Oh, that Mike Allen is so dead butch. The &amp;quot;most awkward part&amp;quot; of the event did not have anything to do with official mendacity, torture, and the deaths of thousands. It did not have to do with selling the country&amp;#039;s energy policy to your pals and then locking up the account of how you did it. It did not have to do with cashing in other people&amp;#039;s children as chips. Oh, no. It had to do with the internal dynamics of America&amp;#039;s worst family, who apparently now are fighting over issues beyond whose coffin gets the freshest earth every morning when the sun comes up.  Because he doesn&amp;#039;t give a fck. He&amp;#039;s got his, Jack.  Shackles? Thumbscrews?  Oh, good. Expertise.  Jesus H. Christ on a Big Wheel, somebody take the crayons away from this child before he writes his next piece on the wall of the upstairs hallway.  You cheap fraud. You people didn&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;face&amp;quot; any threat before 9/11. Every damn one of you fell asleep at the switch. You abandoned counterterrorism in favor of chasing porn merchants and Tommy Chong. You exiled Richard Clarke. You started worrying about missile defense. Your boss took a vacation and blew off his CIA briefings and failed to read his presidential daily briefings. You watched the towers fall, at least partly through your sheer dereliction of duty, and you turned a national tragedy into a personal opportunity to get rich.  Not for you people, and not for the families of anyone you know. It would be nice to know at this point what Allen was doing. Was he struck dumb by the sheer audacity of this family of lycanthropic liars, or was he formulating another hard-hitting question about why The Gay One wasn&amp;#039;t there? Or was he sitting there like a cigarstore Indian, counting the house.  You cheap fraud. Nobody with any brains thinks we can &amp;quot;retreat behind the safety of our oceans,&amp;quot; 9/11 or not. (How&amp;#039;d that work out for the Aztecs?) However, the alternative is not to kick over a country, enrich your pals, and then unleash chaos for the rest of the world to sort out. I think we can maybe find a middle ground behind hiding behind our oceans and making Dick Cheney rich.  So that&amp;#039;s how all that Iraq unpleasantness came up? As a question about Megyn Kelly&amp;#039;s faux-tough-gal reference to Dick Cheney&amp;#039;s bungling? If that is not a perfect fractal of TBOTP&amp;#039;s overall corruption, I don&amp;#039;t know what is.  I understand the past well enough to know that your father should be in leg irons. What else do I need to know?  You cheap fraud. Of course you don&amp;#039;t want Congress to do anything\u2014like hold hearings into which of your friends stole the national economy, or into which of your aides is leaking the names of covert CIA operatives for the purposes of political revenge, or into the negligence before the 9/11 attacks and/or the profiteering that followed them, or into barbered intelligence. When you were in Congress, you didn&amp;#039;t think it should look into illegal arms sales to the Iranian mullahs. Even with our current Congress, there is something uncomfortably democratic about the legislature for someone whose entire worldview is bounded by the boardroom, and whose conscience has been in an undisclosed location for three decades. You&amp;#039;re an authoritarian poltroon, and your daughter&amp;#039;s an unelectable dunce. And Tiger Beat On The Potomac should rediscover shame as something to be valued. Or it should close. This afternoon. Journalism\u2014and the democracy that it is supposed to serve\u2014should demand no less. Bartender, another drip-bottle to this gurney, and see what the pundits in the backroom will have. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21185/politico-dances-with-the-devils/>