Pure crazy is gaining momentum by the hour, even as the entire structure of mankind’s latest reincarnation of civilization is breaking apart like an Arkansas outhouse hit by an F5 tornado.
And the crazies who are in charge of running this so-called civilization haven’t enough sense to scramble away from that outhouse, but instead scream there’s no danger.

Beyond ironic crazy is the hacking of the hacker: The hacker gang LulzSec, after declaring retirement last month, cracked the Rupert Murdoch–owned New Times on Monday and used it to host a fake news story declaring that the embattled media mogul had been found dead at his home.

(Illustration found here).

And today, the living Murdoch, his fancy-faced, red-haired heroine, Rebekah Brooks (arrested over the weekend, but released on bond) and young Murdoch junior, Jimmy, will come before the UK’s House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee (an all-encompassing-name for frivolity) to testify on the shit-storm sprayed across the phone-hacking world.
This trio of elitist twits will undergo the Dick Nixon inquiry mode: What did they know, and when did they know it — ‘it’ of course being all the jacking-off telephone hacking that comprised journalism at Murdoch’s News Corps.
Should be fun.

One real crazy item that caught my eye this morning induced a trip down the “what if” path.
At AlterNet, writer and anti-war activist Fred Branfman muses on what would have happened if Jackboot John McCain would have won in 2008, and instead of Barack Obama in the White House, it’d be the maverick of mavericks.
Branfman ledes:

Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced.
And they were right.
McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes:

— He would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions, and even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected.
Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.

The big problem with Branfman’s imagined synopsis is that he doesn’t discuss McCain being a self-centered, mental case without a brain or a moral compass — the US and the world would be in far worse shape as all our current troubles would have stacked themselves up against a guy unable to comprehend reality.
We’d currently be right in the middle of the horror still awaiting us just a few months down the road.

Obama, however, does have some failed surprises.
Yesterday, he bypassed Elizabeth Warren to head the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (a department she thought up and developed) and instead named some legal bureaucrat as the bureau’s chief.
Michelle should have bitch-slapped her husband while screaming, “Barry, you dumb ass!”
Warren has come across as one of the extremely-few people in the DC swamp-hole with any sense and integrity — and now apparently her only recourse is to become one of the swamp people herself and run for the US Senate in Massachusetts.

Life is just bat-shit crazy.