L8r N8r H8rz

Ordinarily sensible and erudite SF Chron movie critic Mick LaSalle just can't help himself when it comes to Ralph Nader, apparently. It's not just him, of course; many people still can't. I just didn't expect this sort of thing in, you know, 2007:

First of all, I find all the ways that people defend Nader's actions in 2000 to be bogus. One thing they say, for example, is, "No one knew Bush would be quite this bad." You didn't? I knew. All you had to do was pay attention. He lied about McCain in the primaries, and he lied through the general election. It was clear that he had character problems and was intellectually limited. So it's not exactly like Nader threw the election to Bob Dole, who might have made a decent president. Nader went on an ego trip, got cheered at by a lot of idealistic (and curiously all white) college students. Hung out with movie stars. And gave us the Iraq war. Good going Ralph. And you think we're supposed to remember you for what? Seat belts?

Okay, full disclosure here. First of all, I voted for Nader in 2000, which I will elaborate on. Second, I am "Tek Jansen" in the comments of LaSalle's post, if you can't already tell by the overgrown hedges of angry clauses there.

Now, as to LaSalle's comments about how he "knew" that Bush would be "this bad" because he "paid attention". Well, I paid attention as well. I saw and read up on all the rotten shit Bush pulled on McCain in the South Carolina primary. The portion of history that was on the record was problematic enough; the parts that were only hinted at bespoke even worse character flaws. It was pretty obvious, as LaSalle says, that Bush was intellectually and temperamentally unsuitable for the job. No shit -- he was unsuitable to be even a nominee of an ostensibly serious political party. And yet, there he was, in full stammering glory, as dumb as the day is long.

But can you extrapolate from that that he would subsequently: enable a catastrophic energy crisis forced on the nation's largest state by a bunch of Texas bunco artists; ignore detailed warnings of imminent terrorist attacks; leave incomplete a necessary military action to initiate an unnecessary invasion and occupation; squander hundreds of thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and the heretofore sacrosanct civil rights of American citizens and the principles of the Geneva Convention; and so many other, endlessly enumerated atrocities? No, I honestly don't think you can.

Speaking for myself, I rather naïvely assumed that enough people would have enough goddamned sense to see a fool when he was staring them in the face, and not vote for him. Stupid me; I had briefly forgotten my Mencken and presumed that at least enough of my fella 'merkins had their wits about them. I have certainly not made that mistake since. I did not, however, instantly ascribe some sort of transcendent level of malice or indifference to the guy because he was a demonstrably stupid legacy thug. The world is full of such people; 99% of them do not do the things George W. Bush does and did. Usually they just snicker when they take up that second parking space or cut you off in traffic. So it's a fallacious assumption.

Nader may be indirectly responsible for something besides the Iraq war. Just a question: If the CIA director came to a President Al Gore in August of 2001 saying that bin Laden planned to attack targets in the United States, do you think Al would have ignored him? Do you think he would have had a worthless National Security Adviser who would have let him ignore it? Of course, even if Gore got on the case, he might not have been able to prevent the 911 attacks. But we'll never know. Anyway, great airbags, Ralph. Thanks for your magnificent contribution to history. And please run again in 2008, so you can get even fewer votes than you got in 2004.

I find this particularly galling. Nader -- and in turn, the people who voted for him -- may be indirectly responsible for 9/11 and the Iraq War, not to mention the recent untimely passing of America's Rose, Anna Nicole Smith. I do agree with LaSalle's assertion, a rather common one over the past several years, that a Gore presidency and NSA would have taken the "Bin Laden Plans To Strike With Hijacked Planes In The U.S." reports quite seriously, vacation or no.

But I went through all this in the chat fora back in 2000. I heard time and fucking again how I owed my vote to Gore. I never heard them say any of this to their fellow Democrats who had defected in much larger numbers to vote for Bush, mind you. That was apparently just fucking jake. After all, Bush, simpleton or no, was the standard-bearer for one of the accepted Parties; therefore, he had been vetted by the hallowed process. The people had spoken, God damn them.

But after all is said and done, Nader's original point for running was and is still essentially correct -- corporate underwriting of the legislative process has taken governance further away from the interests of an already-dwindling middle class. And corporate underwriting of both the campaign finance process and the endless media campaign-industrial complex has perverted and corrupted the very essence of the system itself, to where even basic points of dialogue and debate are incontrovertibly altered.

In 2000, that translated into the effervescent media Heathers cooing and grunting at utterly meaningless things -- Gore's chick advisor told him to wear earth tones; Gore sighed at the debate; Gore moved awkwardly at another debate; Gore thinks he's soooo fucking smart -- smarter than you, Joe Lunchpail, who let yourself be bamboozled by "family values" nonsense not once, but twice, to vote directly against your own self-interest.

I ask again -- how is this all Nader's fault? The only reason someone like George W. Bush gets anywhere near the White House in the first place is because of the systematic dumbassification of Americans. A country with a lick of common sense would know better than to give him any more responsibility than a junior-varsity towel-boy.

We can go round and round on the 583-votes-in-Florida issue all damned day; bottom line is that thousands of Floridians who had voted for Clinton went for Bush, and thousands more were "accidentally" disenfranchised by Jeb!s political ChoicePoint allies. And when the Republican rent-a-mobs harassed the recounts (which probably would have ended in Gore's favor, had they been allowed to complete), and when Jim Baker slithered over there to "help", did Gore's team step up and counter any of these overly provocative actions? Fuck no. They took the high road straight home.

And fuck Florida anyway. Gore didn't need Florida. All he had to do was carry his own goddamned home state. Jesus H. Christ, he couldn't even pull that off. Once again, why is this Nader's fault? Why is this my fucking problem? Why are a candidate's manifest shortcomings projected onto a "spoiler" who refused to recognize his diminished place in a supposedly free political system, and thence to that spoiler candidate's principled, if disaffected constituency?

It is always a political candidate's job to convince the voter why he or she is a good choice. I listened to Gore's sales pitch. I came very close to voting for him. And he has absolutely acquitted himself extremely well since then. But I was also pissed at the needlessly squandered brilliance of Clinton, countless possibilities splashed across that intern's tonsils. And Gore seemed woefully unprepared for dealing with the slime machine he was up against. These people are sore winners; they couldn't even resist making up the "Clenis' team stole all the w's" story. What kind of losers do you think they'd have been, especially with an intact Republican congress?

Having said all that, I will also say this about Nader, that both as a person and as a politician, he is too dogmatically rigid to ever be truly effective in an arena that requires daily compromise. He would be a terrible president, and his appearance in 2004 was little more than a cruel joke. His time in the political spotlight is done, and his recent Daily Show appearance did nothing to sway me on that opinion. At this point, he seems to take pride in being a jerk; he has to know that he could be far more effective and meaningful finding subsets of Democratic groups he could help empower and enfranchise in the debate, instead of increasingly coming off like a lone crank.

But 2000 was a different time; we had eight years of relative peace and prosperity; economic indicators were high; foreign policy looked strong and just; and the opportunity to refocus one small part of the debate on something other than a smooth corporate agenda seemed apt. We forget that in our presumptions about Nader and the people who voted for him; it barely merits saying that had we known then what we know now, that not only was Bush a retard, but an irretrievably dangerous one, we would have played it safe, stuck our idealism back up our asses and voted for Gore.

My question to the people who can't seem to give up the Nader hate is this -- have they ever gotten (or even tried to get) any similar concession out of the people who voted for Bush/Cheney, not once, but twice and were proud of that shit? No? Well then, climb out of our asses already, because you have about 10-12 times as many people who "owed" their sacred vote to Gore and gave it to Bush. And until you resolve that little conundrum, this other shit's a waste of time.

Can't wait till next year, when the Democrats carefully try to calibrate their outflanking measures, as always dependent on what the opposition's tack is, and we have to listen once again to the godawful notion that their pathetic overtures to people that would just as soon gut them as vote for them is something for us to fucking rally behind.

Touched By An Anal

It's the all-American fags-to-bitches story: boy works his way through college as a gay porn star and prostitute; boy becomes a Marine reservist; boy goes back to college to finish his degree and become some sort of weird provocateur against anti-military bias on college campuses; boy gets his picture taken at noted closet-case event CPAC, schmoozing with horse-faced blow-up doll of the Cheeto Brigade. Boy's natural reaction to all this is to pule and whinge about how meeean those libruls are.

Several bloggers were posting pictures of me and Coulter together and noting, gleefully, that the guy with his arm around the waist of the woman who called Edwards a faggot had, once upon a time, acted in adult films.

Some of the sites were comparing me to Rich Merritt, a Marine Corps captain who appeared in gay films. Others were comparing me to Jeff Gannon and claiming that I too had advertised my services as a male escort. I won't deny it, or that I acted in several adult movies 15 years ago under names like Pierre LaBranche and Rod Majors.

Subtle. I guess "Lance Cockheavy" might have been a little over the top. But hey, awful large of him "not to deny" that he, like cock-headed plagiarist James Guckert, had advertised his "services". I suppose that an "escort" can command a better price, and hence presumably a better class of riff-raff for clientele than your ten-bucks-a-throw streetwalker, but let's not pretend that they're exactly the same thing -- we're just haggling over the price.

We all have a tendency to want to hate the enemy. I suppose that's why Coulter gets applause when she uses terms like "faggot" or "ragheads" (was that the last Coulter scandal, or was it her comments about 9/11 widows?). I also suppose that's why I got so much abuse in my in box when gay and liberal bloggers posted ancient pictures of me.

Yes, one reasonably assumes that when nobodies take pictures with people who are famous precisely for being polarizing and contentious, that said nobody tacitly endorses some of the bizarrely spiteful things that person says for a living. Don't pull this babe-in-the-woods "was that the last Coulter scandal? I forget" snide bullshit, asshole. You know exactly who she is, you know exactly what she says on a regular basis, you know that she has openly and repeatedly advocated for violent retribution and oppression to "enemies" without and within. She essentially wants everyone who disagrees with the Cheney administration either dead, imprisoned, or disenfranchised, and she's said as much. Save us the feigned surprise, "Pierre".

And while we're back on Coulter (however briefly, thankfully) I notice that over the past week, some half-dozen papers have dropped her syndicated column. I am of two minds on this, frankly. I think it's pathetic that, after years of spewing the most ridiculous nonsense -- not simply "hateful", but just dumb, and utterly useless in any serious discussion -- it took a half-assed "faggot" joke, a truly lame jape at perceived librul correctness that tethered John Edwards to its conjoined trope of Democrat emasculation, to get the powers that be to sit up and actually do something.

They didn't get rid of her because she "joked" about poisoning John Paul Stevens, or shooting Bill Clinton. Nor did they do shit about her fantasizing about Timothy McVeigh blowing up the New York Times building. Or hell, even actually read her contemptible scribblings enough to realize that she's a thoroughly dishonest thinker and a hack writer. Used to be that political writers were expected to know something useful, and do more than clumsily stitch a famous name to a popular teevee show.

The most charitable speculation I can offer is that perhaps this latest CPAC episode highlighted very concisely how irrelevant both Coulter and the movementarians she represents have finally, blessedly become, and by their own doing at that. But still, this should have happened a long time ago, not because she's "offensive", but because she adds no value to anything. She has never expressed even an interest in providing insight or perspective; indeed, she has deliberately avoided such things.

Anyway, back to the long intemellectual awakening of Peter Hunter, or whatever the fuck his name is.

I sometimes think of myself, ironically, as a progressive: I started off as a liberal but I progressed to conservatism. Part of that transformation is due to my time in the industry. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? I didn't like porn's liberalism. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.

Being in the adult entertainment industry was sort of like being in a cult, and like all followers of a cult, I have a difficult time figuring out when I stopped believing in the party line. I can tell you, though, that by the time I finished my brief tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers interested only in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high.

So he basically left one cult for another, and even seems to think he was deprogrammed, rather than simply reprogrammed. It's the same sort of self-serving evangelizing you get from ex-smokers, who are invariably the most rabid anti-smoking activists. Youstabee libruls are generally the same type of mindset, using their personal and emotional issues to inform their dogmatic leanings, and then confusing those with empirical principles.

(For the record, I have never smoked, and I despise the purveyors of the product, but I think that individuals still have the right to their addictions, to a reasonable extent. Thus I find most of the efforts, especially here in California, to fund this or that pet cause with a sin tax to be bullshit. If it's a worthy cause, we can all chip in for it. Save your sermons for church.)

Now, this part just made me crack up [emphasis mine]:

Sure, I had my picture taken with Ann Coulter. I don't agree with what she said, but anyone in the military would defend her right to say it. I'm not apologizing for it. I'm also not going to claim I'm sorry for leaving a long-ago summer job off my curriculum vitae.

When I was in high school and the one year of college I attended at the time, I had summer jobs. One summer, I worked for a landscaping company. Another year, I worked swimming pool construction. Another summer I was a convenience store clerk. Those are what most people would recognize as "summer jobs".

Renting yourself out as a choad dumpster for a video stable of tweaker boiz, not so much.

I learned a lot at CPAC. I saw Jeff Gannon. He seemed to be doing fine, despite the minor media scandal he endured. (When was that scandal anyway? It's hard to keep track, because so many come and go so rapidly.)

And you know, at the end of the day, this is what fucking gets me about preening little smartasses like this guy. I really don't care whether or not he's gay, or that he did gay porn and prostitution for some time (how long, despite Sanchez' dismissal of it as a "long-ago summer job", seems to be in some dispute). But even as he gripes about how mean liberals have been to him since the disclosure of his past, he gladly associates -- seeks out, even -- groups of people who are quite closely associated with the sort of folks that would literally like to see Sanchez and everyone like him either dead or "cured". That's hate, chump; we're just giving you a hard time about your foolish hypocrisies and past indiscretions.

But when he's not talking about himself in this piece, his few truly "political" observations (or at least observations about people who are political in nature) are so superficial as to be roughly 90% air. When Sanchez refers to Jeff Gannon™'s "minor scandal" so carelessly, he seems enamored with the notion that he himself will, like Gannon™ be both largely forgotten by most of the public and promptly subsumed into the wingnut welfare system. He has completely, cheerfully forgotten the nature of that most assuredly not-minor scandal, which illustrated a very clear M.O. on this administration's attempts to subvert an already complaisant press.

Guckert had been receiving daily press passes to the White House for over two years, by the time he had been discovered. He had visited the White House many times, besides press briefings, and no one seems to be able to figure out why. His journamalism credentials took a weekend to earn, the "media" source employing him was bankrolled by the chair of the Texas GOP. And the whole reason he was uncovered in the first place was, shortly after he had been noticed lobbing increasingly ridiculous softballs at press conferences, he was found to be a flat-out plagiarist, which in actual journalist circles is a huge fucking scandal.

It would be very easy to write off Sanchez as just another closet-case Republican geting hoist on his own sweaty petard. But his actions and words bespeak a deeply compartmentalized person, one who is able to rationalize seemingly diametrically-opposed principles into the appearance of cohesion. I don't buy it. At the very least, if he were actually interested in boosting the military and such, instead of vainly trying to show "the left" what a maverick he thinks he is, he might be put to better use recruiting all those tough-guy keg-stand frat-boys to the cause. I mean, they're war supporters (at least for other people), pal; if you can't convince them to join up, what the hell makes you think anyone else is going to listen to you?

A Milestone?

This here is the 1000th post of Hammer of the Blogs, which I will now waste by announcing that it is, in fact, the 1000th post. As a rough guesstimate, that means about 7,500 instances of gratuitous and or graphic vulgarity, including but not limited to the oft-censored words: Cheney; DeLay; Fredo; Rove; dildo fuckface Barbra Streisand.

Thanks for reading my graffiti splatterings so far. Here's to the next thousand.

Motorhead - Stay Clean

This is a great clip of one of the best songs by one of the best bands on the planet, period. I wanted to go old school and find the No Sleep Till Hammersmith version, but this one is actually a lot better. These guys are not fuckin' around. This will cure what ails you.

I saw them at a fairly small (300-seater or so) club in 2001, about three weeks after 9/11. Everyone was pretty much in a fuck-or-fight mood that night, and Lemmy, after shooting pool and drinking beers with the locals (including myself) in the downstairs bar for a couple hours before the show, comes out and announces the start of the show with "We are Motörhead -- and we're gonna change yer fuckin' outlook." And goddamned if they didn't do exactly that. Seriously, an utterly fucking amazing band.

Hammer Of The Power Ballads

Been enjoying The Editors' prog videos and Rush festivals. I think this hair metal memory tops it because I am actually in a couple of the rapid camera pans dead front of center stage. Recognize, fools!

Soon as Viacom gets over itself and tightens its iron grip on dead intellectual property rentals, I'll hunt down my Win Ben $tein's Money loss appearance, and give all y'all a healthy (if unintentional) laugh.

Ignore No More

Another thing about the Coulter brouhaha (or is it a kerfuffle?) I've been noticing is the number of people, a small but substantial minority, who opine that giving the beast the attention it craves is just shoveling out more troll chow. If the issue were just Coulter there might be something to that, but as it stands, this is really an opportunity to expose the nasty little CPAC claque for what it really is, and maybe even to hold the media chumps who keep Coulter's mug on the TV screen somewhat accountable for their participation in all this.

See, it doesn't matter if we little people ignore her or not -- we don't affect anything, not with any significance. And we on the left especially can't get it together enough to make a dent in what clogs the airwaves, while they have no compunction about gang-faxing NBC for a couple weeks and getting a show yanked practically overnight because it's too iconoclastic. But, you know, for the most part we do ignore the majority of Coulter's weird spasms, and it's made no difference.

John Kerry thought he'd seize the moral high ground by ignoring the pathetically obvious calumniations of the swift boat assholes. How'd that work out?

Already the "joking" assertions are gaining at least minimal traction, as the cretinous tit-monster known as Atlas Juggs subtly demonstrates. Does she really want to go there? Hasn't it already been made abundantly clear on which side of the aisle the overwhelming majority of self-loathing closet cases reside? If it turns out that, say, during one of her idol John "Colonel Sanders" Bolton's forays into Plato's Retreat, another guy's johnson came somewhere near his, um, radar, will AJ then retract every deep-throat homily she's thrown down for him?

Ignoring these people is a perfectly rational response, as if one were ignoring a bratty kid in a supermarket whose parent just refuses to discipline the kid even a little. But as I've always said, it's a complete waste of time to respond rationally to irrational people, and the problem is that these are bratty kids with money and political power.

Look, what undid Kerry with the swift boat bullshit was not that his hesitation allowed the lies to gain credence; the people who needed to believe that about him weren't going to be swayed anyway. But it showed the people who were still on the fence about him that he would take shit from these cocksuckers, and that was what was unacceptable. Fuck that "I'm not going to dignify that with a response" bullshit. This is politics, boyo, and it's a bloodsport, and motherfuckers who lob cheap lies into crowds and cameras need to be cockpunched forthwith. You may not like to do it, you may feel that it's beneath your dignity, but the sooner those people find that there's no longer any upside to their fabricated bullshit and their lame "jokes", the better off the whole process becomes.

A couple months ago a cast member from the show Grey's Anatomy came under fire for outing a fellow cast member, and repeatedly calling him a "faggot". At the very least, if you have a problem with gay people, then maybe working in showbiz in Hollywood is not the best idea. I dunno, maybe "faggot" is becoming the new n-word, and in the great scheme of things, that's probably for the best.

But here's my point: within days, the offending cast member literally saw his career just about go out the window, and he'll probably be making conciliatory gestures to the gay community for some time to come. He quickly realized that if he ever wanted to work again, he was going to have to grovel and genuflect, and prove that he wasn't an irrational hater of teh gay. Again, his career was at stake; whether or not it should have been is not the issue here. The point is that Coulter's career is heavily dependent on publishing, and on broadcast and public appearances. These things are all facilitated by people and companies who make money enabling this nonsense.

Like I say, there are several options here, all of which are viable. The real goal is not Coulter, but the corporate machinery and the knuckle-dragging base that keeps creatures like it in play. You get rid of Coulter, they'll just find another troll to take its place; you monkey-wrench the machinery that makes a fat buck peddling inchoate bullshit to impressionable rubes, then maybe you start turning the tide back just a hair, and strike a blow for serious (if not solemn) discourse.

[Update: Apparently the excuse being put forth now by the fan base is that, since Bill Maher got away with tacitly endorsing the assassination of Dick Cheney, this lone transgression from Coulter pales in comparison.

First off, Maher's comment was remarkably ill-conceived and unnecessary, and counterfactual for that matter -- does anyone seriously suppose that if the suicide bomber at Bagram had gotten to Cheney, that we wouldn't instantly find some units somewhere to rotate in there and rain hot death on the nearest available scapegoat? Please. I understood the point Maher was attempting to make, but it fell way too close to the "if you could go back in time and push Hitler in front of a train in 1921, would you?" argument, which has always struck me as something of a jerkoff question that doesn't adequately consider externalities. If anything, a Bagram incident in which Cheney had been killed or even injured would more likely have rendered the suicide bomber this century's Gavrilo Princip. So yeah, Maher fucked up, but the fact is that he's generally been intellectually honest enough to admit when he's fucked up, unlike Coulter.

Secondly, Coulter has a long and well-catalogued history of exactly this sort of thing, including vicariously wishing sudden death upon Bill Clinton and John Paul Stevens, as well as anyone -- American or Middle Eastern -- seen to be thwarting the braintrust's master plans. If death wishes were horses, this broad would have a fucking breeding sanctuary. So spare us the drama, ladies.

Then again, judging by the high-quality erudition of the linked example (even some of the taglines are multiply misspelled; one brain surgeon attributes his clunky, too-funny-by-half slogan to an unnamed "Genious"), it's no surprise that rubber-gluing Bill Maher was their intellectual redoubt of first choice. It enables them to instantly project their assumptions, and announce loudly and proudly that every sentiment expressed by Bill Maher automatically vocalizes what everyone not in awe of the Bush-Cheney brilliance must also feel.

Which was the whole point of the link, and indeed of the CPAC, in the first place. They are not for anything per se, they are merely reconstituted antidisestablishmentarians, bred with soccer hooligans. Hofstadter would be both proud and mortified to see how remarkably consistent his observations have remained, and even flourished in some pockets.]

Operation Yellow Elephant

Mike Stark notices the elephant conspicuously absent from the hallowed CPAC hall of lame:

Something else these folks have done well is turn out the new generation of wingnuts. The average age of the attendee here has got to be below 30 - there are literally thousands of College Republicans moving about in Brownian style from exhibit to exhibit, conference to conference, speaker to speaker, ballroom to ballroom.

Exhibit hall is stuffed to the gills. Freedom Alliance. Blogger's row. Heritage Foundation. American Spectator. Clare Booth Luce Foundation... the Koch group... Regent University. Several candidates have booths. Oddly enough, even the ACLU has a booth (even if they are placed in the back corner furthest from Exhibit Hall's entrance).

Oh... but there's one notable - striking, even - absence.

There are no military recruiters here. No United States Marine Corps. No Army, no Navy, no Air Force or National Guard - hell, not even the Coast Guard is here. Thousands and thousands of College Republicans, but not a single recruiter in sight...

For people who never tire of lecturing the betters on the utility -- hell, the necessity -- of war without end to combat the spread of islamojihadifascismexpialidocious (provided, of course, that it doesn't affect our ability to consume), they sure don't seem too eager to stop the keg stand and follow their own loopy exhortations.

Ann Coulter's Def Comedy Jam

America's favorite plagiarizing fabulist she-male is back in top form:

March 3, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- The Ann Coulter presidential primary ended on Friday, before an oversold crowd of Republican college kids and conservative activists in a basement hotel conference room. She had just finished doing her incendiary stand-up act, joking that Al Gore was fat ("Did Al Gore actually swallow Michael Moore?"), that Bill Clinton was the first black president ("half white, half trash") and that John Edwards was a "faggot."

I've been hearing a lot of "Al Gore is fat" jokes lately. The only one that was genuinely funny was Jon Stewart's ("Here's an inconvenient truth -- cake is not a food group."), which is far more self-deprecating and critical than you will ever hear these conservatives authoritarians get on their own people. Dennis Hastert looks like he could swallow Gore and Moore simultaneously, and still have room left over for a plate of buttermilk biscuits smothered in gravy made from the bones of Mark Foley's pages. But Al Gore is fat. Right.

The Clinton "joke" actually makes no sense, unless Coulter is logically imputing that "black" = "white trash", or that even bringing up "white trash" would be considered acceptable in a crowd made up mostly of that exact renewable substance. And John Edwards is a "faggot" now. Probably because he was one of those much-maligned trial lawyers; though Coulter also has a law degree, she's chosen to apply it thusly, much to the relief of law firms who would otherwise have to put up with her incompetent bluster. The difference is that Edwards performed actual work, which is a different thing entirely than assuming that the demented scribblings one makes on cocktail napkins during a pub crawl can be turned into "books" and "jokes".

What I have never gotten about Coulter and her many defenders is this -- they always default to the trope that she's "joking", that when she is invited to a "news" program, or a "serious" political conference, these things she says are just "humorous polemics". Well, no. They are neither humorous, nor polemic. Saying that 9/11 widows are gold-digging hussies -- not funny, no actual point. Ditto the wishful poisoning of John Paul Stevens. The list goes on and on. This is not Swiftian satire; these are third-rate japes beneath most hack comics.

Like I said, I can find humor in comments directed at my own side, if they're funny. But shit, Coulter's brand of "humor" really doesn't even make sense. John Edwards is a "faggot". I honestly can't find the funny. Are we in fourth grade or something? I just hope Phyllis Schlafly, whose son actually is a "faggot", was present, not that she would care.

Oh, wait. It is the carny convention, after all. Guess I answered my own question. But perhaps our serious librul media could start keeping these little Tourette's episodes (which happen with alarming regularity) in mind, before asking Miss Thang to contribute "serious" commentary on their stupid fucking infotainment shows. Relegating her to the Fox Network, the broadcast equivalent of a sandwich board on a sidewalk denizen, should be the first recourse for sensible people. This toxic cunt has poisoned the debate pool for long enough; send her back to clown college already.

[Update: Edwards has responded, in half-assed fashion, and Coulter counter-responded predictably enough:

Mr. Edwards’s aides responded with an e-mail message that attacked Ms. Coulter and urged supporters to donate to Mr. Edwards’s campaign. “John was singled out for a personal attack because the Republican establishment knows he poses the greatest threat to their power,” said his campaign manager, David E. Bonior. “Since they have nothing real to use against him, Coulter’s resorting to the classic right-wing strategy of riling up hate to smear a progressive champion.”

Ms. Coulter, asked for a reaction to the Republican criticism, said in an e-mail message: “C’mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean.”

Oh ho. Teh fun-nay. Did not see that one coming up the road. Look, Edwards' mistake here is in making this about himself and thinking it's an opportunity to drum up some coin. Big picture, boys. Coulter is a cheap rabble-rouser, and nothing is beneath her, and her track record speaks loudly and clearly. This could be a real opportunity to put one of the most vile demagogues out there back on the lunatic fringe, where she belongs.

And you don't do that by saying "poor wittle me", you do that by drawing attention to her entire body of work, and entreatying the bloodsucking media vampires that keep her afloat with constant appearances to marginalize this sort of bullshit, period. In effect, you further marginalize the asshole morons who crowded in to watch her stand-up act, and go out and buy her "books". Recognize the enemy when they're in your face, boys; marginalize them and claim some of their accessible turf as they retreat. Read some fucking Sun Tzu already.

Even better, make a joke out of it in return. Get in front of a camera and start riffing. "Faggot? I don't get it. Is this what conservatives consider humorous? Perhaps someone could explain it to me, as soon as they're done studiously ignoring Dick Cheney's donut-bumping daughter." Maybe not in so many words, obviously, but you get the idea. Seriously, a deft, concise press conference could put not just Coulter but the entire conference on their heels, scuttling for the safety of their rocks as the sunlight fries their exoskeletons. It's all in the phrasing. Start by asking plainly and sincerely why exactly anyone there would have found that funny, and watch some magic happen.

Perhaps even more frustrating is that Romney, Giuliani, and McCain (who wasn't even at the sideshow) all made short work of repudiating Coulter's comments, which would have made possible a more forceful response from Edwards, further delegitimizing the CPAC itself. Money is important, but so is reclaiming the sphere of ideas, a necessary part of which is marginalizing people like Coulter. This is a chance to capitalize on that principle. Take another stab at it, ladies.]

[Update #2: Here's an e-mail list of advertisers who sponsor Coulter's website, poached from a commenter at John Edwards' campaign blog.

jonathan.atack@ing.com, boris.dunne@ing.com, ronald.h.lataille@verizon, contact.community@wachovia.com, investor.relations@bankofamerica.com, info@overstock.com, investor.relations@yahoo.com, investor.relations@universalstudios.com, jheinz@gannett.com, (gannett is usatoday) info@yellowpages.com, info@monster.com, info@ulta.com

And some media e-mails:

netaudr@abc.com, nightline@abcnews.com, 2020@abc.com, evening@cbsnews.com, earlyshow@cbs.com, oreilly@foxnews.com, hannity@foxnews.com, colmes@foxnews.com, today@nbc.com, hardball@msnbc.com, msnbcreports@msnbc.com, ombudsman@npr.org, nytnews@nytimes.com, ombudsman@washpost.com, info@ap.org, tips@upi.com

I'm as First Amendment as they come, and I think that's obvious, but I am not going to get hung up on some esoteric ACLU/Skokie bullshit here. Coulter has never added anything to any serious debate, not even in the guise of "humor", and she makes way too much money and gets far too much publicity doing it. She and her scumbag ilk are never going to be intellectually honest about anything. They are where they are because that's where the money is. Maybe it's time to change that; maybe she's gotten away with her revolting schtick for long enough.]

Digital Footprints

I hadn't planned on doing another Glenn Beck post so soon -- or, for that matter, ever -- but there's an interesting discussion regarding his unseemly behavior with gossip reporter Dina Sansing.

The transcript fleshes out the context a little bit:

BECK: Well, Dina, has it ever struck you as a good idea to take naked photos?

SANSING: It depends from what perspective you`re coming from. You know, it`s probably not the best idea.

BECK: Probably not the best idea? You know, I just read a story in "USA Today" this morning about how there`s a digital footprint, that people don`t -- you know, everybody`s fine about the carbon footprint. It`s the digital footprint.

People now have cell phones with pictures everywhere, and your photo is going to be everywhere. You can`t take stupid photos and expect those to be you know, locked away forever.

SANSING: Certainly not if you want to become a big celebrity. You have to understand that the minute you go on "American Idol" or want a career as a singer, people are going to look into your past and find these kind of photos and post them everywhere, which is what happened.

BECK: Dina, let me tell you something. I don`t think you have to be famous. I think you just work in the average environment in America now, somebody would get a picture of you, and then it would be posted all around, and it will happen in your office.

SANSING: Possibly.

BECK: You don`t think so?

SANSING: Well, it depends. You know, it depends...

BECK: Dina, I`ve got some time and a camera. Why don`t you stop by? No? OK.

The transcript, sadly, does not capture the awkward, uncomfortable pause after that, as Sansing smiles blankly and Beck, obviously a bit embarrassed at letting his riffing get out of control, looks askance. Since Beck makes a living being a smug, supercilious tool in the first place, this is obviously not all that surprising.

Still, his point was pretty clear, if inadvertently creepy and inept in making it. Does he really want to take pictures of Dina Sansing nude? Probably. If she lets him, I expect him to post them on the internets. For research purposes, of course.

I have no idea who Sansing is, or if she plans on discussing the frivolous minutiæ of American Idol contestants with goony talk-show ravers for a career. But, you know, how surprised could she possibly be, in such a context, that she was jokingly, incompetently "propositioned" by a time-killing putz. Nature of the beast, sweetheart. Any time you're sick of shoveling shit in the monkey-house, there's plenty of actual journamalistic work to be done. The added bonus of that is that, by definition, you'd never have to talk to Glenn Beck again.

In the rest of the segment, though, what I really found interesting was the presumptive moralizing going on between the two of them [emphases mine].

[BECK:] Do you think that, with "American Idol," this is really pretty much a win-win for them? I mean, they`ve got to be saying to themselves, "Oh, the hot one in naked pictures? This is great."

SANSING: Well, yes, it`s certainly a great thing for the show. All publicity for this show has been a great thing. Their numbers just keep going up and up. This is certainly, again, another scandal, and they`re profiting from it.

I don`t know that it`s a great thing for her. I think, ultimately, when America is deciding about "American Idol," they`re going to say, "I`m not sure we are ready to name this woman the American idol. We have seen her in these pictures. It`s kind of shocking, and that`s not really what we`re looking for, for the next great singer."

BECK: No way. Come on, you -- I got 100 bucks right now. You want to bet? Come on.

SANSING: You think she`s going to do it?

(CROSSTALK)

SANSING: Are you going to be voting for her?

BECK: No. I`ve got a life, thank goodness. No, here`s the thing. Vanessa Williams, Vanessa Williams was shot in provocative, lesbian, you know, action shots, if you will. She`s very well-respected now. I mean, that was, what, 1980 something or other?

SANSING: It took a while, but that was certainly after she had won Miss America. You know, I think it`s tough, especially this show is very - - you know, this is a sort of family show. People watch it with their kids. Their kids are voting. You know, they just aren`t ready to have someone who`s exposed themselves.

BECK: OK, so let me look -- with that being said, let me look at -- do we have the screen shot of all of the felons there -- all the trouble that people have had? Do we have that shot?

Here are all these people that have, you know, posed nude. They were, you know, involved in battery and everything else. I mean, this has happened on "American Idol." Is it that this shows attracts these kind of people or this just even worse, this is just a reflection of American society?

SANSING: Well, let`s hope it`s not a reflection of American society. You know, I think it`s a lot of things. I think anytime you have a show with so much success, people are looking in every corner to see if there`s another scandal, because, quite frankly, that`s what "American Idol" has been known for. They love the scandals. You know, and these are real people with imperfect pasts.

I'm sorry, but that just strikes me as all kinds of weird, assuming Sansing is correct (and I'm willing to bet that she is). While Antonella Barba may not have exercised the greatest judgement in not only having nude photos taken of herself, but apparently allowing someone else access to them, the fact of the matter is, unless this was an elaborate self-initiated publicity stunt on her part, she did not intend those photos for public consumption.

And even if she did, so what? What the hell is wrong with people who need to feel that their entertainment personalities lead personal lives which conform to their expectations of moral purity? They're titties, people, grow the fuck up. Your precious children will, believe it or not, survive the trauma of seeing a stray nipple here or there. It's the ones who are kept completely in a protective, paranoid bubble that end up storing cold cuts of hitchhikers and neighbors in the chest freezer.

And the blowjob photos, the veracity of which is in dispute? Okay, that might be a bit more embarrassing for Barba and her family, but again, that's their business. Guess what -- everyone you have ever or will ever see on your idiot box is having the sex. So are you, if you have any brains. That this kid -- who, judging by the few comments I've read about her, can't sing for shit anyway -- is supposed to genuflect to a bunch of hypocritical, self-righteous soccer moms and their fecund mallrat progeny is an awful notion.

Don't give 'em the satisfaction, honey. Tell 'em all to get bent.

Cult Of No Personality

Okay, this is probably about as surprising as hearing that water is wet, but apparently the CPAC morlocks are mighty irritated at their current pickins for abject, unquestioning worship next year.

"I feel very angry and betrayed" by the GOP, some of whose elected officials have backed a "guest worker" immigration plan, abortion rights and tax increases, said Richard Viguerie, chairman of Conservative-HQ.com. "We should withhold support from all major Republican [presidential] candidates today. Not one of them deserves our support today," he told a ballroom full of activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference annual meeting Thursday.

Further, he said, conservatives should withhold "all support" from GOP national committees, which Viguerie said have not produced federal candidates who adhere to conservative principles.

Ken Blackwell, a failed GOP candidate for Ohio governor last year, agreed that conservatives should at least wait to endorse a presidential candidate. "The Republican party -- our natural home in a two-party system -- is in disarray," Blackwell lamented.

Ah yes, Ken Blackwell, recently deposed vote-fixer for the Ohio GOP. That would be this guy:

Wilberforce took what was then an unpopular position - ending slavery in the British Empire - and devoted his life to it. During his 18-year crusade, he endured ridicule, vilification and scorn but remained undaunted. He was inspired by God's amazing grace. And he ultimately succeeded.

Today, God's grace visits us again.

In Miami, Amillia Sonja Taylor captured the hearts of millions and the attention of doctors with her courage, strength and zest for life. Born at 21 weeks and six days, she weighed only 10 ounces and was 9.5 inches long - about the size of a ballpoint pen.

Last week, she was brought home by her doting family weighing four and a half pounds. The world's youngest baby ever to survive, little Amillia has moved the threshold of viability in the ongoing fight to protect the unborn.

See how neatly Blackwell ropes together three rather disparate ideas: slavery is wrong and was rectified by moral crusaders such as Wilberforce; it's a miracle that a baby delivered at 21 weeks has managed to survive; and of course, his real point:

Wilberforce implicitly understood that non-cooperation with evil is just as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.

Today, we face another evil and we need another Wilberforce. Abortions in American have taken the lives of more than 48 million babies since the Supreme Court's 1973 decision.

Those of us in the pro-life moment must strive to be today's Wilberforce for the unborn. We must continue to not cooperate with this legalized evil. And we must continue to wage our battle in the courts, in Congress and legislative bodies across the nation, through direct action and in the hearts of men and women.

Now, by rightard standards of basic epistemology, ontology, and semiotics, this cheap piece of sophistry rings true. It is an idiomatic English-to-Dog Whistle guidebook, if one were to wish for such a thing. Simple phrases such as, "Hello, how are you today?" are reconfigured lego-like into interchangeable tropes such as, "You need to be on the right side of the existential struggle between Good and Evil. We, of course, are the right side."

Central to Blackwell's feeble presumptions is equating a pro-choice sentiment with a desire for, or at least studied indifference to abortion. I think that may offend as much as the basic principle underpinning its continued legalization in the first place. Because that one presumption has informed their ridiculous stereotypes for decades; it permits them a very wide rhetorical area in which they can purport to ventriloquize The Other's understanding of the sanctity of life.

I think Ken Blackwell's challenge should be taken up by all comers. I think that respect for life -- all life -- is essential to having a true moral compass. People like Blackwell simplistically (and insultingly) attribute religious people with superior moral precepts simply because they attend church and can recite the talking points chapter and verse. If they spent half that energy and discipline trying to help living people, to empower their fellow citizens on true quality-of-life issues, there would be a dent in the abortion rate overnight. I guarantee it.

As nice of a story as it is that American medical technology has excelled to the point where the viability of a baby can be adjusted to 21 weeks, there is another side to that as well. As the health care system continues to crumble and deny significant access, as it becomes more and more pwned by infinitely greedy insurance and pharmaceutical companies and HMOs, these tales of extraordinary measures taken will begin to stack unfavorably against the increasing numbers of uninsured Americans, people who cannot afford access, people whose chronic illnesses and inability to effectively treat them translates in to billions of dollars of lost productivity every year.

Suddenly being able to separate conjoined twins, or prolong a centenarian's life for nine months, while certainly wonderful things, are at the expense of something else in a finite resource pool. Many times hospitals will magnanimously underwrite some of the costs of these extreme cases. Which means they can afford to scale back costs across the board. Again, it is wonderful that we have the technology and skills to be able to undertake extraordinary medical procedures with high success rates. It would also be nice if people didn't have to risk losing their house when their kid breaks his arm, or pay $120 for a fucking asthma inhaler.

Anyway, that's a prime example of what these authoritarian cultists (they are "conservative" like I'm a watcher of Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?) have in terms of intellectuality and principle.

Conservatives said they are frustrated and angry, blaming the GOP's massive losses in the 2006 elections on Republicans who deviated from a hard-line conservative agenda. The mood also puts added pressure on a slew of GOP presidential candidates set to speak to the CPAC meeting Friday.

Social conservatives are leery of Giuliani, who supports abortion rights, and of McCain, who authored a campaign finance law that limits interest groups' financial influence in political campaigns. Romney's evolution to a socially conservative agenda pleases some religious conservatives, but some are still unhappy with his earlier, softer positions on gay rights and abortion rights.

There really is no pleasing these goofballs, and I mean that quite literally. If Roe v. Wade were repealed, and every homosexual either killed or driven underground, they'd then move to force everyone to go to their church. There's always another issue for them to rally around, because that's really all they're about, is imposing their discontent on the rest of us.

Put it this way: these people want to make Tony Fucking Snow a viable candidate for John Warner's Senate seat next year. Judging from their own web page, they seem unclear on what the word "agenda" means -- unless, you know, their real agenda is just to sell intellectually empty and coercive shit to the iconodules in the grand ballroom.

Nah. That couldn't be it.

Urine Good Hands

This is how we support our wounded veterans:

The Army fired the head of Walter Reed today, and the new guy who's taking over until they can hire a permanent replacement is Kevin Kiley, the same guy who reportedly let a soldier sleep in his own urine, and refused to lift a finger when he was notified by the wife of a GOP congressman who had witnessed the horrifying scene.

This is a guy who only one week ago implied that the problems at Walter Reed were nothing more than a pack of lies. So he's the guy now in charge of fixing the non-existent problems.

Words literally fail me; I cannot express how utterly contemptible I find this. It's probably because I have a sinus blockage that feels like it's about to blow out the left side of my face, but still. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

In non-celebrity ass-sniffing (that is, actual) news:

BAGHDAD – Iraqi police found the bodies of 14 policemen today, all shot in the head, and an Al Qaeda-linked group said it had killed them to avenge the alleged rape of a woman last month.

Police said the bodies were discovered close to Baquba, the provincial capital of Diyala province, not far from where the men disappeared on Thursday.

A group called the Islamic State in Iraq said in an Internet statement it had kidnapped 18 men working for the Shi'ite-dominated Interior Ministry following "the rape of our sister ... Sabreen Janabi".

The group later said it had killed them all after the government ignored demands it made for their release.

Janabi has said she was raped by officers from the Shi'ite-dominated police force. The government says medical records show she was not raped.

They appear to be "standing up" quite well. This has all worked out just superbly.

Mediaocrity

So early this morning I'm perusing the paper, with one eye on the ever-present crawl, which "informed" me that Anna Nicole Smith, at long last, would finally be planted in the Bahamas. Newly edified with this empowering bit of information, I mention to the wife, "Now, wouldn't that be a pisser if they pre-empted regular programming to show the funeral procession, as if she were Gerald Ford or something?".

Sure enough, flipping through channels a few minutes ago, I stop on reputed news network MSNBC to find -- live coverage of Smith's funeral procession. Yeah, I have no idea why more and more people are beating on these media fucks for clogging the airwaves -- the people's airwaves, mind you -- with this nonsense.

I can't help chicken-egging this atrocious phenomenon one more time. Either the media have been collectively and irretrievably leveraged by corporate humps with the express mission of turning us into drooling morons, or we are already there, and they're just giving us what the market majority wants.

Either way, not only are we royally fucked, but we probably deserve to be.

Swiss Pissed

From the man-bites-dog file, this odd little nugget made me laugh:

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

....

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

I've been to both Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and I couldn't tell where one ended and the next began, though I enjoyed both immensely. Liechtenstein is an independent nation only in the most notional sense, primarily for tax reasons at that.

Despite its small size and limited natural resources, Liechtenstein has developed into a prosperous, highly industrialized, free-enterprise economy with a vital financial service sector and living standards on a par with its large European neighbors. The Liechtenstein economy is widely diversified with a large number of small businesses. Low business taxes - the maximum tax rate is 20% - and easy incorporation rules have induced many holding or so-called letter box companies to establish nominal offices in Liechtenstein, providing 30% of state revenues. The country participates in a customs union with Switzerland and uses the Swiss franc as its national currency. It imports more than 90% of its energy requirements.

Toy countries such as Liechtenstein and Luxembourg have always fascinated me. They essentially function as the financial arm for people who like to keep the noise ratio on their capital down, and as a holdover for old-culture sorts who still long for the Holy Roman Empire or whatever. Anyway, just a fun little story there.

U-Haul Spice

Some say the end is near, some say we'll see armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will; I sure could use a vacation from this bullshit,
three-ring circus sideshow of freaks here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time, any fucking day.
Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay. -- Tool, Ænema

If the intellectual rigors of Trading Spouses and Deal Or No Deal are wearing you down, maybe watching someone who is famous for no particular reason move her shit from one house to another house is more your speed:

When Victoria Beckham moves to town, the momentous event will be recorded for television by the creator of "American Idol."

NBC has signed a deal for six episodes of a half-hour unscripted series chronicling the former Posh Spice's relocation from Europe with her soccer-star husband, David, who has signed to play with the Galaxy team here, Daily Variety said Wednesday.

....

How a celebrity transfers her support system, including publicist, stylist and personal assistant, to a new town will be a focus of the show, which also is expected to include her shopping for items like a home and car, Variety reported.

The only way that watching a pneumatic tanorexic do-nothing is going to be in the cards is if she takes her clothes off. (Even then -- bad helmet, bro-ham.) Since they can't go in that direction, I assume there will be some sort of stunt casting with comb-forward narcissist Donald Trump. Can't hardly wait.

I realize I'm irretrievably out of the loop here, but I still cannot grok even the basic concept of people being entertained -- or even distracted -- by watching assholes move. That's a special kind of dumb.

Tales From The Crapt

The idea that James Cameron has found Jesus' ossuary, while perhaps an interesting idea, instantly triggers the whiff of hype and bullshit. Naturally, as a godless heathen atheist, I just figured, "oh well, another publicity stunt". Nothing to see there. I forget sometimes how seriously religious (as opposed to merely spiritual) people will take even the smallest challenges to their dogma; the catechists waste no time in getting up in arms.

English theologian Justin Thacker puts it simply:

This is not a story that casts doubt on the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ - there are simply too many problems with the evidence presented - but it is a story about the nature of theological truth claims.

These truths are self-involving narratives. In contrast to most archaeological or historical discoveries, whether Jesus actually rose from the dead or not is an event that one cannot take a dispassionate view on. If he did not rise bodily then, to paraphrase St Paul, the Christian faith is utterly pointless. If he did rise bodily, then this vindicates all that he said, and demands that we acknowledge his Lordship over us.

A neutral stance over the bodily resurrection of Christ is not a fair-minded, rational approach; it is a mark of intellectual and personal cowardice. It is for precisely this reason that Richard Dawkins gets so irate. Even he realises that orthodox Christianity is not something one can be anodyne about.

I couldn't agree more, and that is the main reason why I have such impatience with people and politicians who try to straddle the ontological fence; either you believe it or you don't. And while there's certainly plenty of room for people to respectfully disagree -- and even room for agnostics and atheists to have respect for certain aspects of the traditions, cultures, histories, etc. -- there's not much point in trying to reconcile the two primary positions. So if Cameron's mission is to either debunk or confirm, then he had better pack a lunch, because millions of people have archived the names and dates for thousands of years. One Discovery Channel doc isn't going to change anyone's mind.

Springtime For Cheney

The suicide bombing at Bagram this morning capped off an extremely interesting week for the normally secretive Big Time. For now, his trusty ward Fredo seems to have taken the week off, while the eminence grise trots about the Pacific Rim, irritating and frustrating young and old alike. It's been quite a show, when you put it all together, as Cheney consistently insists that Britain's drawdown in Iraq -- and concomitant buildup in Afghanistan -- is proof of success. That no one in the American media sees fit to challenge him directly on such an incredible re-interpretation of facts and common sense tells us everything we need to know about how we got to this point.

And mere hours after putting the arm on an increasingly encircled Pervez Musharraf, the Bagram bombing, for which a reason for Cheney to even be at the base in the first place has yet to be plausibly conjured. Conventional wisdom might say that it's so he can get a "first-hand" view, even though, as with Iraq photo-ops, the safe zone is never breached. So for pure reconnaissance purposes, it's obviously better to just let people do their jobs and file their observations periodically. Everything changes when the boss comes by to look over your shoulder.

But the boss also has to have excuses from time to time to justify his excesses and harebrained schemes, his ploys and pretexts. And so it is here -- he shook down Musharraf, who can't reasonably be expected to do much of anything at this point -- the border is a sieve, and both the Pakistani army and the Waziristan civilian areas have sustained too many casualties to push the issue of border incursions and counter-insurgency ops. Musharraf sits on a seething anti-American population of 150 million, his army and intelligence have been in cahoots with Taliban and al Qaeda ringleaders since before 9/11, and Karzai is powerless to ensure security on his side of the border.

But Cheney went anyway, so that he could be seen leaning on Musharraf, who cannot afford to be seen as too compliant, but can also not afford to have a frustrated American public demand drone raids in those border areas. Cheney is a lot of things, but he is certainly not so dumb as not to know that he was very publicly picking a political scab.

So now I'm wondering which sorts of conspiracy theories might arise in the wake of the bombing. Did the ISI give their counterparts across the border a last-second heads-up that a bigwig was going to pass through? Would a deliberate, concerted effort at Bagram necessarily be targeted at a particular person, or is it more valuable to their cause to simply keep ruffling feathers, while showing their own people that they can still poke, that they're not "on the run" anymore? Remember that bin Laden (remember him?) stated a primary goal as inciting us to over-react and over-commit in the Middle East, expending lives and capital and leveraging a disproportionate cost from us. How's that gone so far? And that's not even taking into account this afternoon's Dow dump, and the subsequent panic selling at every major exchange around the world.

Then you have the almost-too-incredible-to-be-believed revelation that our foreign-policy geniuses have basically found a way to triple-cross ourselves, sans lubricant.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran.

....

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney.

It is not unreasonable in principle to decide that containing Shiism, given its minority demographic across the entirety of Islam, is in the U.S. strategic interest -- if we had made such a decision three years ago. But we have expended many lives, untold billions of dollars, and just about all our wolf cards ensuring that Iraq's new parliamentary government was anchored with a Shi'a power bloc, one led by a nationalist cleric commanding a large militia. How precisely do they plan to start asking for a do-over from all that? It is simply too late.

So instead, they've decided to build another story on their little house of cards. They are allowing themselves to be played by the Saudis at the very least. How else do you figure that any rational person would suppose that working with the country whence 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came, to fund radical fundamentalist militia groups from the sect responsible for the most American casualties in Iraq thus far, would somehow be a good idea? Hell, it barely qualifies as an idea, good or bad. We're essentially re-empowering the Salafis and Wahhabis who attacked us in the first place. If this does not demonstrate conclusively that we have no idea what the fuck we are doing there, I seriously don't know what will.

And, like practically every major bad idea that has sprung forth from the diseased forehead of this administration, the wellspring of these cockamamie schemes has been Cheney's office. Working in secret, so much so that even the full list of staff is unavailable to the public (which, you know, pays their fucking salaries and all), completely unaccountable, with a clear-cut strategy not only to accentuate the "unitary executive" theory, but to establish Cheney's OVP as a rump fourth branch of government, answerable only to one man, who may have been goaded just a little further down his private (inflicted on the rest of the world in policy) road to ruin this morning.

The Beck Stops Here

How is it exactly that clowns like this, or Nancy Grace -- carnies who make Tweety Matthews look like Theodore Roosevelt in comparison -- stay on the air? Are there really people so completely empty-headed that they don't know better, yet instead of just vegetating in front of Supernanny, they try to "edify" themselves with shit like this, or the Falafel Factor?

Christ. How many "little Limbaughs" do these morons need, anyway? And while we're at it, extra props to the "Headline" "News" "Network" for keeping it on the air, some sort of affirmative-action program for the mentally challenged, I guess. They're engaged in a race to the bottom with their parent network CNN, and should overtake Fox just in time to help with the ritual smearing of the Democratic nominee next year.

Sins Of The Fathers

Far be it from me to find it anything but amusing to watch Republicans eat their young, but I think the continued Mormon-baiting of Mitt Romney is getting out of hand:

While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church, the Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.

Polygamy was not just a historical footnote, but a prominent element in the family tree of the former Massachusetts governor now seeking to become the first Mormon president.

Romney, who seems to be nothing more or less than your generic moderate pro-business Republican, has to be figuring that he bought himself a real pig in a poke here. He may not have banked on most of America being somewhat unfamiliar with Mormonism, and thus apprehensive.

But hit pieces like this little polygamy number do nobody any favors. Romney, like every mainstream Mormon, has decried the practice, which continues primarily in a couple of heavily inbred enclaves, most famously along the Utah-Arizona border, but also in British Columbia.

The argument over polygamy frequently gets falsely entangled with the gay marriage argument, but they are profoundly different. Polygamy, as practiced by the current FLDS members, is a serious social problem on many levels, from corrupt church leaders monopolizing property and business ownership in the towns, to the grifting of the state welfare system. Not to mention the inbreeding, child rape, coerced marriages, and hundreds of displaced teenaged boys, thrown out of their homes and towns because they are viewed as competition for child brides by the old perverts running the towns. The two issues are in no way comparable, and any idiot who brings up polygamy as a response to the notion of legalizing gay marriage should instantly be branded an intellectual charlatan.

How far one wishes to take this depends on one's agenda. If Mitt Romney is responsible for the FLDS, then Comb-Over Tony Scalia is responsible for Opus Dei (which he is actually a member of) and other secretive Catholic organizations. And everyone is South Carolina owes Al Sharpton an apology for keeping Strom Thuromond in office for roughly 74 years. (Actually, South Carolina owes the entire country an apology for that.)

Genealogists have found that civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendent [sic] of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a newspaper reported Sunday.

....

According to the newspaper, the genealogists found documents establishing that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

I'm certainly not sticking up for Romney as a candidate -- he needs to start getting his story straight, for better or worse, on where he stands on issues. Even a lightly moistened finger to the wind should tell him that the "repeal Roe v. Wade tomorrow" crowd, while intensely committed (oy), do not represent any sort of serious real-world constituency. Just take a stand and stick with it, pal.

No, it's not Romney's political stances that prompt one to come to his defense, but I think these cheap personal smears add nothing to any serious debate. Mormonism is indeed a cult. So are Catholicism, Hinduism, and all the rest. There are manifestly silly and ridiculous things to be found in the backstories of all of them, as well as the ugly episodes of racial and sectarian bloodshed. The only difference between a "cult" and an "organized religion" is money, power, longevity, the way that the difference between a "language" and a "dialect" is an army.

The very first sentence of the AP article -- indeed, the first thirteen words -- should have been enough. That tells you what Mitt Romney's position on the practice of polygamy is. He's been married for 37 years to the same woman, and is running against two multiply-married men. That's about all we need to know about that subject.

Get The Flock Out

As expected, the dearth of reliable wingnut puppets has the evangelicals huddling strategically, despite the best kneepad-laden feints of Saints Johnny and Rudy. I guess we can take it as a given that they also don't yet trust the inevitability viability of an Ave Maria Domino's Buttery Crust Brownback preznitency. It remains unclear whether that's more of a commentary on Brownback himself, or the American public starting to get wise to their grift, which just by the law of averages has to happen eventually, you'd think.

A group of influential Christian conservatives and their allies emerged from a private meeting at a Florida resort this month dissatisfied with the Republican presidential field and uncertain where to turn.

The event was a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club whose few hundred members include James Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Liberty University and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Although little known outside the conservative movement, the council has become a pivotal stop for Republican presidential primary hopefuls, including George W. Bush in 1999, when he was governor or Texas.

I always love how these euphemistically-titled clubs of empowered assholes pronounce themselves to be operating in the national interest -- and then meet and plan secretly. There's not even the pretense of actual debate, just a mission of pushing an agenda, whether we like it or not. I figure if God had wanted me to let a dickhead like James Dobson push me around, he'd have made me one of the unquestioning plankton clogging his stadium-churches. I hear there's a lot of tail to be had if a guy can pull off a seersucker suit, so there's that.

"Right now there is still a vacuum among conservative Republicans," said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative who was a Republican primary candidate in 2000. Conservatives, he said, "want a more provable conservative who also is demonstrating that they can put together the resources necessary to prevail." He declined to comment on the Amelia Island meeting.

A spokesman for Brownback said he would not comment on the senator's presentation to the council, citing its rules about strict confidentiality. Several others who attended his speech said he received heavy applause for his emphasis on restricting abortion and amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

But others objected to his support for a temporary worker program for immigrants, and several faulted Brownback for touching only briefly on the threat of Islamic terrorists, an increasingly central focus of the council and many social conservative groups since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Norquist, a member of the Council for National Policy, said he remained open to any of the three candidates who spoke to the group or, for that matter, to Romney. He argued that with the right promises, any of the four could redeem themselves in the eyes of the conservative movement despite their past records, just as some high school students take abstinence pledges after having had sex.

"It's called secondary virginity," he said. "It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians."

I agree with Grover on the benefits of secondary virginity. It gives them all another chance to go fuck themselves.