Top Ten New Year's Resolutions

10. Lindsay Lohan (and Mischa Barton, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, ad nauseam) -- Call a taxi.

9. Rudy Giuliani -- Size zero sequined number by Memorial Day, come hell or high fugly.

8. Mitt Romney -- Remember to change lithium-ion batteries in face-plate along with the smoke detectors, during switch-back to Daylight Savings Time.

7. Hillary Clinton -- Ask around for ideas, pick resolution that focus-groups best with sensible centrists and Village idiots.

6. Barack Obama -- Bring people of all nations, creeds, colors, and lifestyles together under magnetic charisma and happy-talk, then get each one of them to kick down fifty bucks for a nice juicer. Buy tropical island.

5. Sherri Shepherd -- Explain frantically to bozos in audience how Jeebus was around before gravity and thermodynamics, which made getting around in those days interesting to say the least. Offer to take bozos on field trip to Creation Museum.

4. Fred Thompson -- Give wife's tits a good squeeze, scratch and fart a bit, then laze into 800th iteration about how it's better to elect a president by voting for someone who acts like he has better things to do.

3. Corporate media -- Stay housebroken.

2. Richard Bruce Cheney -- Try to find a little "me" time, explore rejuvenative properties of bathing in puppy blood. Have Constitution reprinted in two-ply for executive bathroom.

1. George Walker Bush -- Get NotJenna to show him where Pakistan is on a map.


Special Hammer of the Blogs bonus resolutions:

• Larry Craig -- More cock, this time at county fair glory hole.



• Billy Kristol -- Other side of glory hole.



• Britney Spears -- Think seriously about getting tubes tied. Share taxi with moron coke-whore friends. Start fashion trend by painting smiley-faces on cankles.



• Mike Huckabee -- Appoint son as head of security team. Continue insisting that grampa warn't no monkey, even though one look at progeny proves otherwise. Re-stock on snake oil for general campaign.



• Tom Brady -- Upgrade from Bobcat to Caterpillar D8 to retrieve ginormous piles of money and/or pussy. Share some of each with teammates, coaches, and helpful refs. Prepare for inevitable downfall caused by unrealistic expectations and excessive repetitions of that damned Dropkick Murphys song from The Departed.

Spiked Punch

In his Political Punch column, Jake Tapper helps Fred Thompson explain himself a little more thoroughly.

The larger point Thompson seems to have been trying to make is that he's not interested in the process of running for president, but he wants to be president and thinks he'd be a good one.

He also said -- and this isn't new -- that those who have had fire-in-the-belly for the job aren't necessarily the people who should be entrusted with the job.

Yeah, case in point there would be ol' Oedipus Tex, who enjoys the leadin' 'n' decidin' 'n' dressin' up 'n' all, but not so much on the part about knowin' stuff. That would have taken time and effort, cut into his two hours a day of mountain biking and the afternoon nap.

I think Thompson is a shrewd enough character to know how his phrasing will be perceived by his crowd, that they all know who is consumed by personal ambition. It's as much about the she-goblin of their fever dreams having too much fahr in the belly, than Ol' Fred not having enough.

But you could say the same thing about Romney, who is apparently hellbent on spending Tagg's inheritance on making sure the Cornfield County Caucus tilts his way ever so slightly over the Huckabee juggernut [sic]. Romney seems to enjoy trying to be everything to everyone; someone (I'm sick and I don't feel like looking it up) very astutely pointed out the other day that if Romney felt that being a pirate would get him the nomination, he would have run as a pirate. That about covers it.

His efforts to clarify his colleagues' work and Thompson's thoughts nearly complete, Tapper offers some final nuggets o' wisdom.

That's Fred. Fred is Fred. He has disdain for the process. And I think probably most of us can understand why.

Ah, Fred is Fred. But of course. It all seems so simple now.

So where was Fred's "disdain for the process" when he was making money off it, being a Warshington lobbyist for twenty years, or parlaying the perception of his gravitas (and ooooh, his height) into a comfortable supporting niche of authority characters? Why would Thompson have disdain for the process, when the initial stages of it for him consisted of mash notes and swoony bullshit from everyone from Margaret Carlson to Tweety Matthews. I mean, if we're going for fuckability quotient, then why not get Heidi Klum or Katherine Heigl in the race while we're at it?

And I'm not sure whom exactly Tapper means by "most of us" understanding Fred's imaginary disdain. Is Tapper talking as a voter here, or as part of the electoral-industrial complex, a group of vertically-integrated conglomerate media entities who make tons of money spinning their wheels over a two-year campaign? I do not quite get the observations of people such as Thompson and Tapper, who are literally part of the problem they so plaintively decry.

The Passion of the Brady

You know, if the NFL needs Team Tuck Rule to win it that fucking badly, why not just save us all another month of shitty officiating and give the Patriots their trophy now? Jesus Christ, Brandon Meriweather hits the Giants' punt returner late and out of bounds at the Giants' 40, so the refs call a personal foul on Amani Toomer, who replays showed doing nothing at all to Meriweather (or anyone, for that matter).

This is the same sort of shit refereeing that handed the game back in Baltimore, and really goes back to the infamous retardation of the snow bowl playoff game against the Raiders six years ago. Whatever Bob Kraft or Bill Belichick is paying the refs, they're certainly getting their money's worth. I hope their playoff opponents understand that they will have to absolutely kick the Pats' asses to squeak out a win. The calls are always going to go their way until the game's out of reach.

And frankly, considering New England's off-putting running up of the score all season long, I would urge future regular-season opponents to hold a grudge. Eventually someone will have a sore mangina, or Moss and Brady will not get along, or whatever. The team's star will fall at some point. Hopefully the rest of the league chips in and cleans their fucking clocks for as long as possible.

The Tedium Is the Message

I'm always down for a slap fight twixt opinionators (although, to be sure, with the conservatards being more robust in their epithets, Pat Buchanan would have found or created an opportunity to call, say, Jonah Goldberg a douchey inbred fuckwit or some such), but the root of the problem is hopelessly obscured. Consumerism and jonesmanship long ago supplanted the concept of an informed citizenry that votes and lives its principles. Now it is enough simply to be seen mouthing them. Hey, I watched the global warming LiveAid dealio, whaddaya want from me?

Let's put it in even more stark terms -- Reich and Judt, whatever their principled differences, probably cling to the hope that "if only people knew....", they would buy local, drive smarter, be less wasteful, blah blah blah. If only they knew how the sausage was made.

Well, guess what, podna? They may not know the arcana of capital mobility and bundled derivatives, liquidity puts and FDI and such, but they know cheap sausage when they see it, and they know they want it. You can give them all the guided tours of the slaughterhouse you want, but no one believes that they're the sausage until the bolt gun's cocked against their temple.

You might be better off just telling them to max out their credit cards on iPhones and magic beans, so at least they're enjoying themselves while their jobs are outsourced and their houses are foreclosed.

Accountability

Presumably because Mobutu Sese Seko's availability is compromised by his being dead and all, Izvestia has opted to further squander its scraps of credibility by giving legacy floater Billy Kristol a weekly column. Funny how journamalism (especially the opinion-mongering stripe), like politics, is one of those unique vocations where being wrong every fucking time has no effect on your ability to find work.

Truthy Versus Facty

So let's see -- Huckabee does not know where Pakistan is, nor has he any clue as to what proportion of our illegal immigrant population Pakistanis constitute. Nor, it appears, does he have even a little bit of insight as to any realistic solutions in that part of the world. (Or hell, this part of the world.)

Which means he'll be a perfect nominee for his party; after all, the current occupant got in not knowing the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia (or Sweden and Switzerland, for that matter), and in fact did not even know Pervez Musharraf's name back in '99/early 2000.

The total, contemptuous disinterest this country's citizens and politicians hold the rest of the world in is creepily complemented by their tiresome insistence that only we can solve their problems for them. It is almost a perfect symbiosis of cognitive dissonance. We don't know shit about the problem, but we're the only ones who can be trusted to fix it, whatever it is.

America has a tiger by the tail in Pakistan. It would help if at least some of our decision-makers and would-bes knew a fucking thing about it, instead of me-tooing each other on how tough they all think they are.

Professionamalism

Never before has a boutique blog been launched with such care and detail. Can't wait for the next illuminating post. It's been eleven days since the initial burst, so perhaps the poor boy's constipated. Still what's there ranks among the most profound he's ever written. I, for one, applaud his moxie and/or gumption.

Ride the Tiger

Couple more things on the developing investigation of the tiger attack at the SF Zoo the other day. The hysteria over this event, recklessly inflated by the media, serves to show just how many people really are nothing more than bleating retards. Look, this is the first time ever that a visitor to an American zoo has been killed by an animal. But with the breathless coverage, including a particularly moronic Today show piece that overtly implied that you're taking your life into your hands, you'd think you're in imminent danger, and many of these goobers seem to genuinely believe that.

Another type of goofball is the bien pensant animal rightist, imploring the rest of us with this "cantcha see" plaint about the intrinsically confining nature of zoos. It does not seem to occur to these people that, especially with endangered species such as tigers, zoos actually serve as a redoubt of preservation of these species. I thought everyone knew this; it's not that complicated.

How long would Tatiana have lasted in the wilds of Siberia, game for poachers and assorted scumbags who ascribe arcane medicinal properties to the animal's organs? You know what's killing off tigers? Self-indulgent fuckheads and superstitious weirdos, who themselves oughta be shot, skinned, and parted out for folk remedies. Failing that, zoos are about the last best realistic hope for preserving what's left of these animals. There are more tigers in Texas than there are in the rest of the world; hell, there are probably more people named Carlos just in San Jose than there are tigers on this planet.

There are, of course, private foundations and sanctuaries, who do wonderful work. But they also have to rely on volunteer work, donations, and the local example I linked has to constantly deal with unwarranted harassment from paranoid neighbors. (Personally, I would be more than happy to live next door to them; Durham is a beautiful town, and I know first-hand that the facility is extremely safe.) Zoos, backed by municipalities and states, do not have to worry about such things (though many do receive substantial funding from private trusts and foundations).

Anyway, what's pissing me off about this stupid story is how idjits have allowed themselves to whipped into a paranoid frenzy over a freak accident which, the more information trickles out, looks less and less like a straight-up accident.

When Carlos Sousa Jr. didn't show up for Christmas dinner, his father called several of his son's friends - including the two brothers injured in the tiger attack that killed the teen.

Either Amritpal "Paul" Dhaliwal, 19, or his 23-year-old brother Kulbir Dhaliwal answered the phone and told Sousa Sr. that his son wasn't with them. In reality, the three young men were either on their way to or had already arrived at the San Francisco Zoo, where they would later be mauled by a 350-pound Siberian tiger.

"I said, 'Have you seen my son?' and he said, 'No,' then he wished me a merry Christmas," the father said.

....

A man accompanying family members outside the house later told a reporter that the family would have nothing to say until after consulting with a lawyer.

The Dhaliwal brothers have been hostile to police in the current death investigation and were "extremely belligerent" in an earlier encounter with police this year, authorities say.

After the zoo attack, authorities said, the brothers had refused to give their own names, identify the victim or initially give authorities an account of what occurred.

Other reports indicate that pine cones and sticks from elsewhere were found in the tiger's grotto. A shoe-print was found on one of the railings. No doubt there'll be more once the Dhaliwar brothers decide to talk, since apparently they have something to hide.

I fucking despise these puling, paranoid histrionics people indulge in every time there's a unique, if tragic, incident. These same people will climb into their grocery schooners and drive like assholes while talking or texting on their cell phones. They are more than 217 times more likely to blow their own brains out (lifetime odds 225:1) than to be killed by any mammal (other than dogs) (48,957:1). They are even more likely (200:1) to be killed by some sort of fall. People won't you see? Stairs and ladders, the silent killers! Oh, won't someone please think of the children?

It does appear that the SF Zoo may have misrepresented the dimensions on the wall height of the tiger grotto, and someone's going to get their asses sued for it. But the facility had also been inspected and accredited just a couple years ago. And perhaps the tiger would have just continued to go about its business if it hadn't been taunted. I don't know what sort of fucktard goes to a zoo to tease and provoke the animals, but one of the few sensible reader comments at the Chronicle site indicated that such things are commonplace.

We don't know that that's what happened here yet -- indeed, thanks to the recalcitrance and outright lying of the Dhaliwar borthers, we don't know much of anything. I suppose we'll find out more if this goes either to criminal or civil court, but in the meantime, the media would do well to exercise some responsibility, take a big chug from the STFU cup, and quit inciting these hooting dipshits.

Dare To Be Stupid

It's like spitting on a fish; it's like barking up a tree.
It's like saying you gotta buy one if you wanna get one free. -- "Weird Al" Yankovic

Shorter conservative thinkamator:

Instead of pestering us to explain the specific dangers of the crack, or pointing out that nothing is in fact wrong with your mother's back, just do what you're told. Those "smart" people are just trying to trick you into stepping on the crack.

Really, unless he's trying to be facetious or ironic here, for a guy who actually wrote a book on people who avoid reason and logic for fanatical, uncritical thrall to "traditional imperatives", he's just being obtuse.

The Illusion of Control

There are days when momentous events happen with such sudden force, that people can only step back for a second and pause, and try comprehend the bigger picture. Such events snowball and reverberate, generating unforeseeable yet associated events, and nations can only tremble in dread of what more may come.

I'm talking of course about the Mischa Barton DUI bust. Can any of these dingbats afford a goddamned driver? Then they can do lines off each others' tits and chug Ketel One till they black out, and no one's the wiser. It's one thing for some blue-collar guy to take the back roads home after work with a coldie between his legs (it's still not right, but it happens), but quite another for these overprivileged morons to weave up La Cienega at three in the morning, not only shitfaced but not even having a license. One Lindsay Lohan's more than enough, sweet cheeks. You're going to have to develop a sex addiction now just to get your career back.

Okay, okay, so seriously the Bhutto assassination is obviously huge. I would think the immediate assumption is that it's the same Islamic lunatics who've tried to assassinate Musharraf twice, this time trying to bait him into over-reacting in the tribal regions (which, let's face it, they sorely deserve). That and the only alternative in the upcoming election now is Nawaz Sharif, as big a crook as Bhutto was, but more sympathetic to anti-western sentiments. That this took place in Rawalpindi, a military city, is also significant. (Added bonus: the footage of some of these asshole rioters, lamely swinging anything they could find into the shells of destroyed buses -- real fuckin' cool, guys. The bus looks pretty well done, but hey, keep up the fine work. I remember my first beer.)

I dunno. There's really not much to say about this, oddly, and very little even to speculate. It's a sad situation, and we're stuck, and our man in Islamabad is stuck as well, being pushed into a corner where moderation becomes less and less likely an option for him. I think 2008 is going to see a U.S. surge in Afghanistan, because people have Tinkerbelled themselves enough to believe that the Iraq version succeeded utterly on its own merits. But the terrain, the people, and the cultures are entirely different, and the "planners" of these operations can't get out of their one-size-fits-all approach to things.

Update: Timely article in the London Review of Books, for those inclined to more backstory. Big thanks to Marius in comments for the tip.

Pillars of Humanity

50 Most Loathsome People of 2007. Check it out.

Predators

Everybody's heard about the tiger attack at the SF Zoo by now. It's in all the papers and everything.

The rampage began about 20 minutes just after the zoo closed at 5 p.m. Tuesday, while dozens of visitors were still milling about inside. The animal apparently escaped from the grotto, attacked the first man near its enclosure, then proceeded about 300 yards to the Terrace Cafe restaurant, where it mauled the other two victims.

The word "rampage", while technically accurate, connotes a marauding, unpredictable force tearing through all in its path and causing massive amounts of damage. And yet the tiger actually got out of its enclosure (how has not yet been determined, but there's bound to be a story there as well) and did what tigers do, and made it all of 300 yards away from its enclosure before being shot. Tragic, but is it really a "rampage"?

Unfortunately the tiger was female, so there is no penis to harvest for impotent, superstitious morons, but I'm sure the other parts and organs have lots of cool magickal "properties" as well.

Maybe this qualifies as a "rampage":

OMAHA, Nebraska (AP) -- A man killed two women and left their bodies in the basement of a house, then beat and raped the daughter of one of the victims in the same home, authorities and a relative of the victims said.

Fabian Hands, 46, was booked on two counts of homicide and two counts of use of a weapon to commit a felony.

Officers were called to the house in north Omaha Monday night. When they arrived, a 20-year-old woman came out of a bedroom and said she had been sexually assaulted.

Hands followed her out of the bedroom and assaulted her in front of officers, according to a police report. Officers subdued him and took him into custody.

What do these stories have in common? I dunno, one animal killed a couple of people for no goddamned reason, and the other one's a freakin' tiger. Shame that, unlike the tiger, Hands was not shot during his rampage.

Season's Bleatings

I don't think the word "mixed" means what CNN thinks it means.

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times -- a tale of two legacies as President Bush prepares to ring in the final year of his presidency.

Sitting in the front row for Bush's final press conference of 2007 on Thursday, I was struck by how it's a mixed bag for the president on three key issues -- his relationship with the Democratic Congress, the state of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the health of the U.S. economy.

Jay-zus. You know, it's great to get a hummer for Christmas, but it should be from your wife (or whatever), not some reporter assigned to Christmas kneepad duty. I mean seriously, how the hell are the three issues Henry puts forth in his own article perceived even charitably as a "mixed bag"? There's no way, pal -- there is no relationship between Bush and congressional Democrats; the economy is foundering; the war in Afghanistan is stalling, and the one in Iraq has temporarily normalized because Iran has told the Shiite militias to stand down for a while.

I honestly cannot figure out why this article needed to be written.

Offensensitivity

Anne Applebaum rightly -- if obtusely, as if we don't all know the answer to the rhetorical question -- asks why we don't repudiate Saudi institutionalized sexism as forcefully as we should -- or indeed, much at all.

This comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently, journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms—in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all, but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.

I don't buy that for one second, not when we are utterly dependent on Saudi oil, not when they have substantial investments throughout the U.S. economy and stock market. They have us by the balls, so on the rare occasions when we do bother to criticize their institutionalized barbarism, it's in the most mealy-mouthed, sotto voce terms possible.

But this tack is an interesting contrast from Applebaum's recent column on the Sudan teddy bear kerfuffle....or was it a brouhaha? I can never tell the difference.

In a pattern that has also now become familiar, Western reaction to these events divided neatly along political and institutional lines. The British government, faced with a controversy involving a teddy bear, put on a straight face and began negotiations with Khartoum, gingerly using two Muslim peers as emissaries. The archbishop of Canterbury and British Muslim students' groups regretted the "disproportionate" punishment, thus implying that a somewhat gentler one might have been more acceptable. Asked for its opinion on the matter by Fox News, the National Organization for Women was not "taking a position" at this time. Elsewhere, some even criticized Gibbons for her insensitivity to Sudanese religion and culture.

....

In fact, the Great Sudanese Teddy Bear Controversy, like its Dutch, Danish, and papal precedents, was not actually a religious or cultural affair. It was purely political. Nobody—not the other teachers, the parents, or the children—was offended by Mohammed the teddy bear (who received his name last September) until the matter was taken up by a totalitarian government, handed over to what appears to have been a carefully orchestrated mob, and briefly turned into yet another tool of domestic terror and international defiance. The Sudanese government, which, when not persecuting British teachers, pursues genocidal policies in Darfur, is under pressure to accept peacekeeping troops from the West. At least some of the Sudanese authorities thus have an interest in building anti-Western sentiments among the population and intimidating those who disagree.

Well, yeah, that's why it got snapped up by the western press so quickly. Sudan is now a proxy in the ascending great game between West and East, or more specifically the U.S. and China, though the obliquely coinciding interests of the respective allies of each cannot be disregarded. (Russia I would consider a wild card, though as a member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, and given its distancing policy from Washington in general and Bush in particular, they might be considered a China ally if push came to shove.)

But anyway, it's passing strange that Applebaum instantly susses out the obvious political motivations for the teddy bear deal, yet does not see essentially the same sort of ramifications in why we choose not to "handle" the Saudis in like fashion. It's not going to happen unless and until we find a way to get off the petro-tit, or at least try to turn the guzzle into more of a trickle. It's all offensive to anyone not just with western sensibilities, but with a modest standard of decency, that women are treated like chattel in these places. But it's apparently not quite offensive enough to actually do something constructive about it.

Paul Maul

Something the Ron Paul goofballs still haven't gotten through their thick skulls -- the guy is his own worst enemy. He's still quibbling over the validity of the Civil War (completely incorrectly, as the post points out) and the Civil Rights Act.

I have extraordinarily little patience with "states' rights" or "originalism" advocates, because these phrases are simply code for excusing unreasonable localized measures to make the people who obsess over things like abortion and gay marriage feel like they have a voice (other than the ones in their heads). "States' rights" is always invoked to trample the rights of disfavored individuals, and "originalism", while nice in principle, does not adequately address everything that has transpired and innovated in, you know, the last couple centuries or so. This does not mean you change your founding document with popular whim, but you also cannot run things only from such a distant perspective, anymore than you can accurately view your place in the world through a collection of anonymously written Bronze Age legends.

Anyway, Ron Paul. This must be one of the all-time unforced errors in a campaign, though it's also the sort of barmy rhetoric that may serve to galvanize his more, um, ardent supporters, who are nothing if not committed, or should be. That Paul conflates fundamental rights such as voting and housing access with innocent homeowners being "forced" to welcome unwanted minorities into their humble abodes, literally -- I don't even know what to say to this. It's beyond bizarre, it's astonishing, especially forty-plus years in retrospect.

Now if Paul wants to talk about what's left of the Fourth Amendment, I'm willing to listen. But these are like crazy-coot answers to questions that should have been easy to handle, were Paul's body of work not so extensive and easy to track, even a Punkinhead could do it.

---

Update: I have finally gotten around to reading Under the Banner of Heaven (the wife has been on a Krakauer bender as of late, so I thought I'd jump in), and am struck by some unfortunate concurrences in the spheres of politics and religion. (I'm only about halfway through the book right now, so don't spoil it for me.)

Anyway, what's notable right off the bat, as Krakauer delves into some of the formative events and principles of Mormonism, is the similarities in how things are perceived and processed, let's say, rather selectively by certain people. Fundamentalism, as Krakauer notes in describing the schisms between the official LDS chruch and the literally hundreds of splinter cults, arises from individuals exercising a rigorously literal interpretation of their founding texts, which of course are sanctified to divine status to begin with. The primary FLDS cults Krakauer describes do not simply indulge in the nastier pursuits of marrying their cousins and stepdaughters, though you'd think that would be quite enough to motivate someone to do something about these loons.

No, the members -- mostly the men, since the women have to maintain some profile so as to grift the welfare system for their inbred litters -- refuse to pay property taxes and auto registration, obey speed limits, recognize the decisions passed down by "worldly" courts, etc., etc. Indeed, a scarily literal reading of the Constitution comes into play almost as much as their scarily literal readings of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrines & Covenants. That's why they call 'em fanatics, I suppose.

But this is the well-spring of political fundamentalism as well, the extremist fetishizing of sacred texts coupled with the insistence that only you are interpreting these documents correctly. Therefore, per Ron Paul, since the two million agrarian colonists did not foresee cabinet departments for education, transportation, and energy, those departments are by definition unconstitutional, and should be abolished. Okay, and then? Let the free market decide? What do you think has kept Hummers on the state-built roads all this time, the fuckin' SUV fairy?

People can agree that those departments and others -- indeed, much of big gubmint itself -- is frightfully dysfunctional, and should be reined in. But it has become big and intrusive because that's the way we wanted it, because everyone has their own private boondoggle, and the hell with the externalities. Well, this is what you wanted, this is what you got. But when you wake up and realize that things don't work as advertised, your first response should not be to just tear it all down in a petulant frenzy. The Rummy-Cheney doctrine has beat our armed forces capability onto the ground, and trashed our foreign policy for the next generation, but that doesn't mean you junk the DoD.

I don't think the system works either, but most of the blame lies with ourselves, for acting like government is some kind of holy combination of Santa Claus and a superhero Jesus. Frankly, while it's easy to write off much of the logical incoherency of intartubez surfers defending their beloved candidate (though, to be sure, it makes a lot more sense to have a hard-on for Paul than for Giuliani or Thompson), the curious consistency of their vehement message is not to be ignored.

That doesn't make Paul a great candidate, though he stands out from the miserable GOP roster; what it means is that he's tapped into and ventriloquized an undercurrent of isolationism, xenophobia, and Christianism as an overtly political entity. And in the era of globalization, like it or not, that is simply not a viable option.

Hope In Their Souls

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Mike Huckabee, seriously. That muffled-pop sound you keep hearing is heads exploding from the cynical megachurch wing, now that they are confronted with an actual believer in their midst. It's not just something he says to get the extra-chromosome bloc going, so the playas in what's left of the conservatard intelligentsia are completely baffled by it.

"Playing the Jesus card." Motherfuckers, you've been dealing from the bottom of the Jesus deck for the last generation. Payback's a bitch, innit? What makes this even sweeter is that the official Short Bus Shepherd, Marion Robertson, has already given his imprimatur to Giuliani, who is about to get swallowed up in his own creepy extra-curricular doings (not to mention his Giuliani Partners clients/activities).

That leaves Dobson, the redneck pope. Does he cast his lot with the apparently sincere but completely unelectable Huckabee, the cultist corporate mannequin Romney, or does he instruct his monions to keep their powder dry, thus ensuring a GOP smackdown and giving his own bloc more power for a Jeb! run in '12? Whichever way it rolls, it is too sweet to see users have their pet tiger bite them finally. They figured two Supreme Court justices would be enough to placate the fundies, and if the fundies were rational, that would have been sufficient.

But now Wehner and the rest of the nozzles of douche are starting to figure out something some of us realized long ago -- these people want a 9-0 majority in the judiciary, they want more, ever more of their termites infesting the bureaucracy, they do not believe they should have to compromise on any of these things. Believing you're divinely ordained and charged with a mission will do that to you. Guys like Robertson are easy; they've always just been in it for the money, therefore they can be bought off. But how do you solve a problem like Huckabee, who actually believes in something besides getting paid?

Black Like Me

I can't see the Willard X thing sticking for more than a day or two, especially considering it was a gaffe originating from a clear attempt to pull moderate mildly retarded Democrats away from voting from a center-rightist like Hillary to a smoother, more wealthy center-rightist like the Mittster.

Other than that, I mean, really -- is there anything about the modern Republican party's militarized corporate evangelism that strikes anyone as being remotely interested or aligned with anything Martin Luther King ever said? The only dream these guys have seems to involve pre-emptively nuking mullahs and letting oil, insurance, and Big Pharma set the domestic agenda.

It's a Festivus Miracle!

Paradise is just up the ridge from Chico, so this story has jammed up the local news, especially since it went national. As the time the family remained lost progressed, certainly people here were getting more and more concerned, so it's great that they were found safe and sound.

And of course they're giving credit where credit is due:

"I'm glad I'm home. Praise God," Dominguez told reporters after exiting a chopper at the search command post. "It was awful."

Asked how he survived, he replied, "Jesus Christ."

Butte County Search and Rescue dispatcher Madde Watts said, "They had angels with them, for sure."

Oy. Sure, "angels" in uniforms and helicopters and such. Look, you want to go through life with your warm blanky, knock yerself out. But I recall one local news blurb where the mother's boyfriend said something to the effect that God briefly lightened the snowfall to enable the search team. Come on, we're getting into Marion Robertson territory here.

You know why these people were found in the nick of time? Because we have a solid taxpayer-funded infrastructure of trained people with good equipment who can mobilize quickly for these things, and a lot of good people who volunteered their time and effort to help. That and they were resourceful enough to find a culvert for shelter and help each other stay warm enough to avoid frostbite until they were found.

Just last week in Paradise, an elderly woman (who apparently had early-stage Alzheimer's, so someone should have been driving her) left church and got lost en route to a church social function. They found her body next to her car on a side road a few days later. Then there was the software executive who got lost on a side road up in Oregon last winter; after a huge search and national coverage, his body was found just a couple hundred yards from the road. He had traversed essentially in circles for days, trying to find help to save his family, before exposure and hypothermia did him in. I always think of the classic Deep Purple song Pictures of Home (whoever transcribed the lyrics there fucked it up, but you get the idea) when these stories come up.

There should be some sort of objective, empirical way of figuring out why these poor people apparently didn't believe hard enough or whatever to appeal to this capricious deity who seemingly flips a celestial coin to decide whom to save. Lost Christmas tree hunters in Northern California, and He's all over that; emaciated, brutally ravaged Christians in Darfur, not so much. Truly, the mind wobbles.

I know people can't just admit to themselves that shit happens, so they need to find a reason for things, and when they can't find one, they invent one, and ignore the objective implications. But it's still a little strange, this subtle narcissism that develops, even if they're not really thinking it through to that extent. You know, if Tom Cruise got lost in the woods and was rescued, and started going on and on about how he was miraculously rescued because he prayed to L. Ron and got clear?

This insatiable need to attribute job performance, individual resourcefulness, and a small bit of luck to divine intervention seems connected to the voguish obnoxiousness of the "war on Christmas". For what it's worth, I say "Merry Christmas", mostly just out of habit. I don't really think about it one way or the other. But incessant coverage of this fictional "war" (which really, when the country is caught up in two actual wars, trivializes the meaning of the word) has seeped into their little sponge-brains, and so now the simple phrase "Merry Christmas" has become a code, a cultural signifier.

Speaking of local media, I saw a commercial the other night where the local merchant basically used the entire segment to affirm his cultural righteousness in his preferred coded phrase, whilst he pimped his product. "Buy from me, I say 'Merry Christmas', dammit!" Well, whoopdee-fuckin'-doo, pal. This idea that everybody should share the same superstitions and anxieties is now a ploy for cultural niche marketing. Sweet.

So I've decided to make the jump over to "Season's Beatings" instead. I want no part of these people's secret handshake, nor their insistence on attributing the easily explainable to the supernatural.

Maybe a Telethon Would Help

Seriously, does Savage have end-stage Tourette's or something? It's not the intemperate boobery so much as the sheer incoherence of it all. Nice to see the people's airwaves clogged with the sandwich-board brigade.

Civil Wars

Interesting kerfuffle going on at Roy's over some hortatory boilerplate by Michael Totten which, thanks to the (oh dear!) incivility on both sides, has taken on a half-life of its own.

I can't say I buy into any literal interpretation that Totten should kill himself, for fuck's sake. That might be a bit much (the best I could muster was to refer to Totten as a "piece of crap" and compare him to a standard-issue Cops loser threatening to get all Ike Turner on his bitch, and even that might have been harshly polemic). Nor does it really move the debate forward; not only is Totten not going to kill himself, but people can simply point and plaint "WTF?" over and over again.

But to each their own; there certainly are still much stouter defenders of this damned war who must come to terms with their moral cretinism and selective memories, one way or another. As for Totten, his decision to accentuate the positive in Fallujah comes with its own baggage, much as he may wish to ignore it and stay in the now. This is a city of 350,000 people that was besieged, not once but twice in 2004, the second time propitiously scheduled right before the election. The city was doused in white phosphorus and shelled relentlessly, cleaned out, cordoned off to all but foot traffic, and each resident was issued an ID card and biometrically scanned. All of that was a direct consequence of the savage murders of four Blackwater contractors; feel free to contrast it with Totten's own averral, in discussing the inflated body counts of the Arab media, that "a mere" 52 civilians were killed when the IDF raided the Jenin refugee camp in 2002.

Three full years later, as Totten himself acknowledges and Roy acerbically points out, the citizens of Fallujah -- indeed, of most of Iraq -- still do not have access to clean drinking water, and unemployment is estimated to be at least 50%. It's great that violence has abated, seriously; however, with roughly 10% of Iraq's pre-war population killed, another 10% internally displaced, and another 5% lucky enough to escape something that -- it cannot be repeated enough times, people -- did not have to happen, the figures were bound to kick over at some point, and of course the triumphalists were itching to jump on those figures for their own purposes.

As the comments thread goes further at Roy's, Totten reappears periodically to disavow his "support" of this war, or any potential future ones. In fact, he essentially admits that the mistakes have been catastrophic. Yet it is curious, is it not, that the article of contention is in Commentary, of all things, the house organ of the hardcore neocons? Indeed, a brief perusal of their political page indicates many such folk, including one fella who seriously (and, it must be noted, tediously) argues (from the October issue, yet it is in the current t.o.c.) that neoclownservatism has not been repudiated by the failures of this war, but rather vindicated.

Is Totten directly or indirectly responsible for being in the same magazine as such piffle? Perhaps not, but it is also not unfair to surmise that Totten knows that Commentary is the virtual flagship of the "real men go to Tehran" claque, and thus his disavowals of the current clusterfuck ring pretty hollow as he's placed cheek to jowl with these intellectual hooligans. To put it mildly, they've never been known for their objectivity.

If Totten wishes not to be conflated or confused with the folks who quite seriously still would like to expand the operations, then it is up to him to dispositively make that disassociation clear. Because what happens -- what inevitably, tragically happens -- is that token efforts to "set the record straight" get utilized for other purposes, other agenda. "Violence has abated for the past few months" has already turned into "the surge is working", and heading straight for "see, we told you so", from the drunk assholes who ran the car into the fucking ditch in the first place. Great, you called a tow truck. Doesn't mean you should keep driving.

Finally, though it has been five long years, it has also been only five years; most of us who were against this during the buildup, whether or not we got rolled by Colon Powell at the last second, recall quite well the vicious epithets, the gleeful calumniations of motive, morals, and reasoning (generalizing here; I don't recall Totten specifically among that group, though the arguments of some of his commenters ring familiar).

Now they want to talk about civility, and improve the tone of honest, open debate. How sweet. We'll see just how well that holds the first time Preznit Hitlery does something that rocks their Cheeto bowls. Maybe we're just frustrated by the inability of the vaunted Dem leadership to find their spines, or maybe the '02 screamers are finally reaping their Rovian whirlwind.