Cartoon Character

Perhaps the only thing more off-putting than constantly being lectured on issues of character and morals by people who clearly have none themselves, is watching them vote and legislate on their projected inferiority complexes. Can't they just cheat on their wives, beat their mistresses, and harass minorities on their own time? It's adding insult to injury to make us pay them to do it.

But when C-Plus Augustus' last trick is to go pimp for the slugs who poll even lower than himself, you know the jig might finally be up. All that's left is the usual cheap scaremongering, and that just doesn't have the desired effect anymore. Either they've finally run out of wolf cards, or their vaunted base of moralizing nitwits has finally started to get slightly wise to the scam.

Or not, because there's clearly still great emotional investment on their part in hypocritical lectures on "principles" and "values", as well as the usual whining about how persecuted religious people are in American public life.

O'REILLY: You stand — yes, you sink or swim on your principle.

O'REILLY: That's it.

O'REILLY: But there's also something else in play, Mr. President. The secular progressives — I just wrote a book called "Culture Warrior." And we sent you a free copy, by the way.

BUSH: Good.

O'REILLY: The secular progressives...

BUSH: Might entice me to actually read it.

O'REILLY: The secular progressives don't like you because you're a man of faith.

BUSH: Yes.

O'REILLY: You know that.

BUSH: Yes. That causes me to be sad for people who don't like somebody because he happens to believe in the Almighty.

O'REILLY: But you know that's in play.

BUSH: Absolutely. They think you are some kind of evangelical. God tells you what to do and you go out and do it. And they hate that.

BUSH: I guess that I have pity for people who believe that. They don't understand the relationship between man and the Almighty, then. And.

O'REILLY: Don't believe it?

BUSH: Well, that's their choice. The great thing about America is we're equally American. In other words, those of us who believe in an Almighty, and those who don't are equal. And that's the way we got to keep it, because it distinguishes us from Usama bin Laden or the Taliban.

Well, let me finish my point.

O'REILLY: Sure.

BUSH: And so I welcome the diversity of views when it comes to religion. And I think that anybody who dislikes somebody because he happens to be a religious person is someone to be pitied.

Where to start? Perhaps with the setting itself, an obsequious suckupathon stretched over three nights from a sanctimonious douchebag who had to settle a six- or seven-figure sexual harassment suit and still has the balls to try to paint himself as a "culture warrior". That Falafel Factor still stubbornly insists on portraying himself as some sort of crusading hero, instead of the blustering tool that he is, is a pretty huge clue as to the scale of the collective delusion going on here, between interviewer, interviewee, and target demographic. It's all an elaborate kabuki for the braying self-styled Archie Bunker contrarian chumps, people who never seem to tire of telling everyone just how "out of the box" their adventurous thinking is.

Well, it's not remotely out of the box. Hell, they built the box, dug a moat around it, and started a homeowner's association for the damned box. These are people whose thinking is in fact unusually tethered to whatever entity happens to excite their authoritarian impulses. They seriously think that because they arrived at the exact same conclusions via mild differences in toxic rhetoric, they are "free thinkers".

Again, Falafel's known conduct should normally confer at least enough decency and grace to just shut the hell up about criticizing the supposed moral values of others. And it should confer enough common sense on his viewers to at least understand how badly they've been had. But no, the guy writes books about the shit, and these fools buy the books, watch the show, and mindlessly regurgitate their received wisdom.

As for the subject of this turgid kneepadfest, Bush's passive-aggressive strawman sanctimony might have a little more heft if this were a country where a professed atheist had even an outside chance at being elected to anything higher than dog catcher. Bush claims he feels sorry for secular progressives who feel "that way" about the religious. Talk about reckless oversimplification.

But then, Bush knows better anyway. It's all just the usual dog-whistle boilerplate to try to re-energize a base that's slowly realizing that maybe they've been played for suckers to a certain extent, at least in comparison to their expectations. And, you know, it'll probably work for a lot of them. Let's face it, when you're the sort of chump that seriously believes that fags a-gittin' hitched is going to affect your marriage in any way, you'll believe pretty much anything you're told to believe, so long as it conforms to your projected daddy issues.

All this is just another bumpy cobblestone in the road to the election. I believe this election is bigger than it's been portrayed, but for perhaps subtler, somewhat less tangible reasons. In all practicality, ceding both houses of Congress to the Democrats simply provides some slim hope for a modicum of oversight, but for every John Conyers who wants to climb up the sphincter of this mendacious lot with a microscope, there's a Joe Lieberman who has staked his "serious" cred on having the dipshits from the Heritage Foundation listen to his enabling nonsense. In other words, it's a nice thought, but it's not the be-all end-all of good governance.

What it really is is a referendum on the people of this nation, and its continued viability. I'm very serious about this. We can argue about the Republican noise machine, the money train, the ground game, the smear ads and the cheap shots, the strawman rhetoric, the intuitive feel for the visceral pulse of so-called red-staters. But what it really comes down to is what all of us know about how these people have chosen to run this country. All of us, Republican and Democrat alike, have the ability and the choice to avail ourselves of a sea of information pointing to the lies, the incompetence, the the perversion and criminality of the various characters who populate this festering tumor of an administration.

And after all is said and done, if after knowing what they know to be at least as reliably true as any other current events news they know, they still vote to keep the destructive, mindless, hypocritical status quo, then it's over. The Democratic Party might as well fold up its tent if they can't secure big wins in this climate. It doesn't even have to be their "fault" specifically, but if you have a preponderance of people who continue to delude themselves and drive the entire country further downward out of nothing more than sheer ignorance and spite, then what's the goddamned point?

And in the end, that's what "character" and "values" are all about, on an individual level -- either you care enough about your country and your family to pull your head out of your ass and pay attention and maybe even admit to yourself that you were wrong, or you don't. And if enough people truly don't, then we're done, not now perhaps, but eventually. Call it idiocracy, call it anything you like; the results are the same -- we collapse under our own stupid weight.

Poppy's Remorse

One trope of contemporary political discussion among "serious" observers (who can always be spotted by their patched tweed jackets, corncob pipes, and argyle kneepads) is the affectation of evoking George H.W. Bush as some sort of eminence grise of American statesmanship. Instead of perhaps correctly noting that more than anything, Poppy Bush simply had a knack for knowing whose to knob to work to grease his way incrementally higher up the food chain, it is apparently simpler to accept as an article of faith his stature as an elder statesman.

Conveniently, more unsavory episodes are simply avoided altogether as topics of discussion, as if the Bush family's habit of periodically renting themselves to the Moonies had nothing to do with anything else. This is more of a testament to the prostrate condition of the supine corporate media, than any real sort of reconsideration of 41's legacy. If he has a true lasting legacy, it is simply that of the career henchman -- he knows where all the bodies are buried, because he helped plant them.

So when I hear tell of yet another ponderous article [link via Talking Points Memo] of how secretly disappointed Poppy is in Junior, I have a hard time mustering the energy to give a fuck.

At this month's christening of the nuclear aircraft carrier bearing his name, former President George H.W. Bush delivered a rousing endorsement of his son.

"I am very proud of our President," the elder Bush said in rain-swept ceremonies in Newport News, Va. "I support him in every single way with every fiber in my body."

Is there any serious person on the face of the planet who doesn't believe that only familial loyalty allows Bush Sr. to utter such things with a straight face? Furthermore, does anybody seriously believe that family loyalty should trump loyalty to country? More directly, if your own administration proactively established a firm policy which is now being recklessly and aggressively countermanded, with predictably disastrous results for the country and the world, and no end in sight, isn't it despicably irresponsible to continuously pretend that your belligerent halfwit of a son actually knows what he's doing?

Indeed, one of the worst-kept secrets in Bush World is the dismay, in some cases disdain, harbored by many senior aides of the former President toward the administration of his son - 41 and 43, as many call them, political shorthand that refers to their numerical places in American presidential history.

For five years, the 41s have bit their collective tongues as, they complain, the 43s ignored their counsel. But as the war in Iraq has worsened and public support for the current administration has tanked, loyalists of the elder Bush have found it impossible to suppress their disillusionment - particularly their belief that many of 43's policies are a stick in the eye of his father.

"Forty-three has now repudiated everything 41 stands for, and still he won't say a word," a key member of the elder Bush alumni said. "Personally, I think he's dying inside."

Good. I hope it eats him up inside. I hope it haunts him to his very last day. Seriously. Even Junior's staunchest supporters acknowledge that without his famous family, their boy would never have been inflicted on this country; you could scarcely make a case for him being anything more than an incompetent middle manager at a chain store. So his family's enablement of and indifference to Junior's demonstrable lack of any marketable skill or ability is something which has affected the course of world history, indisputably for the worse.

And yet, not only is Poppy not really "dying inside", as it's being portrayed, but he's mobilized his old posse to help his bumbling oaf of a son out of yet another jam.

The ultimate sticking point for the old guard is Iraq. They cite the appointment of 41's close friend and former secretary of state, James Baker, to chart a new Iraq policy as belated vindication.

The 41s remain incensed, however, that Brent Scowcroft, 41's national security adviser and once a top outside adviser to this administration, has been demonized since he wrote a 2002 article opposing an Iraq invasion.

"What Brent said is now the accepted wisdom," a senior 41 hand said, "and everyone believes 41 agrees with him, though he'll never say it."

Well, that's chickenshit. He sure had no trouble publicly criticizing Bill Clinton for his sexual exploits, but when it comes to something important, he doesn't say shit, and he gets Jim Baker in to fix Junior's mess. Some legacy.

Because no matter what Poppy says -- or doesn't say -- now, we all know what he said then, no matter how much he'd like us to forget.

We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.

....

Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

Yeah, that. So when I hear these dumb little stories about the old man's inner heartbreak at the fecklessness of his offspring, I am not "touched" by his loyalty to stupidity, I am pissed at his blindered callousness to the notions of genuine truth and reason and accountability.

Less Artsy, More Fartsy

I've only been through New York, never to it, sadly, and I was never much of a fan of the late '70s post-punk scene spawned by CBGB's. Still, I can recognize it as the end of an era because it was where bands showed up to play and strut their stuff, and that's generally a good thing in the aggregate.

Roy Edroso has wonderful take on it all, from the perspective of someone who paid his dues and spent enough time there to see the good, bad, and ugly, and take 'em all in stride. And I can particularly sympathize with his distaste for schlepping the artifacts out to Vegas, as if they were rebuilding the London Bridge in the Arizona desert or some shit. As Roy says, it's not an "outrage" per se, but still rather creepy and unseemly. More than that, it's unnecessary.

This is the real problem with the commodification of rock (or any, but rock in particular) music -- it turns participants into mere customers, digging through curios and fetishizing the various sordid knick-knacks accumulated by hangers-on, associates who eventually fall on hard times and cash in by displaying their found goodies in a glass case and gouging the suckers.

So you have corporate museums like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the like, dickless curators draining the beauty and impact out of it by lamely attempting to freeze-dry the immediacy of the music, which is after all the point of it. I can't imagine venturing near such places; they'd make me not want to listen to that genre of music ever again.

It's something of a relief that as I approach the halfway mark through my fortieth year, I find myself gravitating toward ever harder, more aggressive, and sometimes more garage-y music, instead of falling into the horrid "adult-contemporary" niche, where radio stations sport cutesy first names, and every third song is from Sting. I'd like to keep it that way. I do not want musical wallpaper to complement my hamster-wheel lifestyle and mortgaged priorities, I want to feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Either there is vitality and passion, or somebody is just trying to sell me a fucking cheeseburger.

It's the energy of rock, in the end, and the commercialized failed attempts to bottle, transport, and sell the lightning to the rubes serve only to separate the fans from the tourists. I'll never find the time to partake of the listless taxidermy the museum dickheads traffic in; were I to venture into such a place and see a stuffed and mounted Lemmy, trapped forever in some lame pose for some schmuck to ogle, I'd have to cause some destruction. I figure I owe him at least that much.

Joe Mama

It seems that, whether he or they win or lose, it's high time the pooh-bahs in the Democratic Party help Uncle Joe find his pants and kick him the fuck out already.

Joe Lieberman is declining to say whether he thinks it would be a good thing if Dems win control of the House of Representatives. Lieberman -- who needs GOP votes as an independent -- was asked in an interview published today in the Hartford Courant whether America would be better off if his lifelong party took back the House. The Courant reports that Lieberman responded: "Uh, I haven't thought about that enough to give an answer."

Has he made himself clear enough yet? Enough is enough. Kick his ratfuck ass to the curb. Let the Goopers have him, let him go on the Zell Miller nutjob circuit. Take a stand, and do it now, before the election. Put his fucking rutabaga head on a goddamned pike and be done with it.

While the political winds are obviously with the Democrats right now, the fact is that the reason they keep choking every couple years is their innate ability to appear timorous and indecisive. Well, here's an opportunity to make what should be a pretty easy decision by now.

Lieberman literally chose to make it a Party of Joe. Quit dicking around and grant him his wish. It's time he was someone else's liability.

That's Senator Shit-For-Brains, Pal

Debra J. Saunders continues the downward slide of intellectual probity and editorial responsibility in returning to perhaps her pet idée fixe, and in so doing, not only aligns herself with such upstanding publications as the Moonie Times, but praises perhaps literally the stupidest member of the United States Senate, heretofore a deliberative body of at least some repute.

Inhofe gleefully represents some of the most regressive, moronic notions to fester in politics. No doubt people like Saunders would like to wish the rest of Inhofe's nonsense away and pretend that, out of everything else he's said and done over the years, at least he knows what he's talking about on this subject. Good luck with that.

Inhofe is even currently under investigation by the FAA for flying a plane that he knew had a damaged rudder. In Inhofe's defense, however, it should be pointed out that Inhofe only knew that the rudder was damaged, he didn't know exactly why. That would just be....well, stupid.

But apparently his mindless contrarianism on the subject of global warming has earned him admiration from Serious Thinkers such as Saunders.

GLOBAL WARMING is a religion, not science. That's why acolytes in the media attack global-warming critics, not with scientific arguments, but for their apostasy. Then they laud global-warming believers, not for reducing greenhouse gases, but simply for believing global warming is a coming catastrophe caused by man. The important thing is to have faith in those who warn: The End Is Near.

Talk about hitting the ground stumbling. Saunders, herself a tiresome self-styled contrarian, is no doubt under the impression that she's puncturing the supposed smug superiority of secular liberals who conveniently find faith in their pet causes. But when the subject she chooses to laud is literally on record as declaring that the United States should base its Israel policy on the Bible (and even suggested that 9/11 was divine retribution for failing to protect Israel sufficiently), well, you may want to find a different well to pump.

What does Inhofe make of the NAS finding? Inhofe recognizes that the Earth is warming, but sees this as part of the natural cycle. Inhofe mentioned the Medieval Warm Period -- 1000 to 1270 A.D. when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland. So he doesn't buy this 12,000-year high. His office referred me to a piece University of Oklahoma geology professor David Deming penned for the Normal Transcript that noted, "The fact that the thermometer wasn't invented until the year 1714 ought to give us pause when evaluating this remarkable claim."

Note that Deming is also the cephalopod who wrote the Moonie Times op-ed I linked to above, but wow. What a remarkably ridiculous analogy. What does the date of the invention of the thermometer have to do with the legitimacy of core sampling and compiled weather data. Hell, weather records weren't consistently kept for statistical tracking purposes almost anywhere until maybe 100 years ago? Is Deming implying that any research compiling data before that period of time is automatically invalidated? What exactly are the University of Oklahoma's standards for their geology professors -- a pulse and a grant from Exxon?

This is the sort of thing that counts for scientific observation in these circles, and as Saunders' husband works for the "Discovery" "Institute", it's no real surprise to find that she shares the same disdain for honest scientific rigor. No wonder people in Tornado Alley think Jesus rode to work on a dinosaur.

I remain agnostic on global warming, as I've seen good arguments on both sides. I know, however, that I never will be convinced that global warming is a scientific threat as long as believers put most of their energy into establishing orthodoxy and denying that reputable global-warming skeptics exist.

See, that's Saunders' real beef, and that's fine, insofar as it appeals to the notion of truly rigorous scientific skepticism and validation of method. But Inhofe is not only not remotely a scientist, he is quite consistently a scarily unserious thinker. He is absolutely not the horse you want to hitch your "global warming agnostic" wagon to.

I too have expressed some skepticism in the past about global warming, mainly over the degree and rapidity which some scientists speculate changes will occur. But I temper that skepticism with reading as many different opinions by as many different impartial and scientific voices as I can discern. (And frankly, it's impossible to not take the sheer scale of scientific evidence seriously at this late point in the game.) James Inhofe is neither, and again, he has proven himself to be nothing more than a foolish, disingenuous, intellectually dishonest person. Allowing him to head the Environmental Committee is a slap in the face on the scale of putting Libya or Sudan on the UN's Human Rights Commission.

There's no other intellectually honest way to put it -- Inhofe is not just a tendentious hack and an idiot, he is someone who is actively, diametrically opposed to honest scientific inquiry. He's made himself abundantly clear on that count. This is not a case of the New York Times and a claque of lefty scientists picking on poor ol' Mister Smith as he does the peepul's work in mean ol' Warshington; this is a group of educated, serious, sensible people trying desperately to counter the destructive nonsense of a man who is inexplicably allowed to wield actual power over his fellow citizens.

The people of Oklahoma could hardly be any more irresponsible in their civic duty if they slapped a "Jesus Saves" sandwich board on a stray dog, and voted it into office. That's how fucking dumb Jim Inhofe really is. He's the one guy in government who makes Tom Coburn momentarily appear to have a measurable IQ.

Now, here's what serious scientists -- as opposed to hacky newspaper columnists looking for cheap money quotes to bolster their threadbare premises -- have to say in response to Inhofe's bullshit:

Inhofe relies upon novelist Michael Crichton (see here and here) to support his contention that

"We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a 400 year cold spell known as the Little Ice Age."

Scientific studies come to the opposite result. All published scientific investigations of the causes of 20th century warming have consistently found that natural factors alone cannot explain the warming. Model simulations of large-scale temperature changes in past centuries , for one, can only reproduce the post-"Little Ice Age" warming through the inclusion of non-natural, anthropogenic forcing. The IPCC concluded in its 2nd asessment report that "that there is a discernible human influence on global climate", based in fact on a variety of different techniques, including so-called "Detection and Attribution" studies. These studies involve detailed analyses of the spatial patterns of the observed 20th century changes, which differ for different causes of warming (e.g. anthropogenic factors such as increased greenhouse gases or industrial aerosols, or changes in land use, and natural factors such as changes in solar output or explosive volcanism), each of which have their own unique spatial pattern or "fingerprint". Another simple reason that natural causes cannot explain recent warming is that none of the natural factors which could potentially cause warming (e.g., the combined solar+volcanic forcing or even the somewhat more dubious hypothesized forcing by cosmic ray flux changes) show a trend since the mid 20th century.

Sorry, but it's a tad more involved and convoluted than "The Bible said it, I read it, and that's that", which really does appear to circumscribe all of Inhofe's legislation, as well as his approach to logic and reason. I'm sure that comes off as more smug secular snark, but Inhofe's record speaks for itself.

Finally it is worth providing a bit of context for this latest speech. Inhofe has a history of making inflammatory and incorrect claims about the science of climate change. He previously gave a speech on the senate floor in July 2003 on "The Science of Climate Change" (partial transcript here) in which he stated that "catastrophic global warming is a hoax" and made a rather substantial number of false claims about the science. In fact, Senator John McCain (R) of Arizona subsequently provided two climate scientists mentioned specifically by Inhofe, Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University (whom Inhofe referred to as "the father and promoter of the catastrophic global warming fearmongers") and Dr. Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the opportunity to respond to several of these false assertions in the Senate record--see the account provided in the article "Earth Last" by science journalist Chris Mooney. In this speech, Inhofe repeated many of the standard contrarian arguments challenging the mainstream, consensus view of the climate research community that the activity of human beings now has had a discernable impact on global climate and that this warming is likely to continue as anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase. Most of these arguments are debunked on the pages of RealClimate. Inhofe, for example, once again promoted each of the "myths" we have documented about the "Hockey Stick" reconstruction of past temperature changes, citing contrarian criticisms that have since been thoroughly discredited.

These excerpts are very thoroughly referenced and annotated, so definitely check out the original. Look, again, I remain skeptical of the more frantic Day After Tomorrow theses, but just in the past few years -- chunks of the Antarctic Ice Shelf the size of Rhode Island breaking off; last year's epic hurricane season; an alarming trend of polar bears drowning. They can't all be statistical anomalies, nor can there be absolutely no human causation in any of them. Serious people can debate over the details and facts and find some common ground, but there is literally zero probity or intellectual honesty to Inhofe's stance.

Considering his governmental position, that's simply unacceptable, to borrow Junior's favorite new word, and it's irresponsible for people who characterize themselves as inquisitive agnostics to give Inhofe's cheap nonsense the time of day, especially in the guise of "apostasy". Inhofe's laissez-faire approach to environmental stewardship is as orthodox dispensationalist as it gets. These are people who quite literally believe that it doesn't really matter how we abuse the planet, because the end is nigh and the rapture is coming.

I wish that were mere sarcasm, but it isn't.

All Your Moron Are Belong To Us

Via Froomkin we see this little gem from Brad DeLong:

[Bush:] This morning my administration released the budget numbers for fiscal 2006. These budget numbers are not just estimates; these are the actual results for the fiscal year that ended February the 30th.* [sic] These numbers show that the budget deficit has been reduced to $248 billion and is down to just 1.9 percent of the economy...

[DeLong:] Should we say that the 2004 budget deficit was $412.7 billion, and that half of that would be $206.3 billion--not $248 billion? Should we say that the fiscal year ends in September, not February? Should we say that February never has 30 days? Should we say that February never had--not even before Julius Caesar--30 days?

I think that Bush and his like-minded flock have shown us earthbound reality-based, calendar-based chumps the folly of our ways by this point. It just doesn't matter how stupid this guy demonstrably is -- someone will vote for him just because he affirms their feelings about themselves. Hell, they can't remember which month it is (nor how many days it has) half the time either, so what's the problem?

Let's all just take a hypocritical tip from the Crazy Jesus Lady, and resolve to be more civil to those who spout virulent hatred and rhetorical violence, to achieve grace in opposition to the manifestly graceless, etc., etc.

These people are rapidly outpacing the ability of the language to accurately observe their consistently monumental level of absurdity and outright bovine stupidity. Seriously. If there actually is a God, He's playing one hell of a practical joke.

Mama He's Lazy

I have no idea who Sara Evans is, nor have I ever watched Dancing With the Stars (nor, it should be said, can I quite believe that there is actually such a show on the air, but then again, there are people who actually buy Sean Combs' excuse for music), but this is pretty funny [link via TBogg]

Country singer Sara Evans alleges in divorce papers that her husband committed adultery, was verbally and emotionally abusive, drank excessively and frequently watched pornography in their home.

....

Schelske, 43 and currently unemployed, ran for Congress as a Republican from Oregon's 5th District in 2002. He is a native of Salem, Ore.

He could not be reached for comment because there was no answer at a phone number for him Oregon.

In the filing in state court in suburban Franklin, where the couple has a home, Evans alleges that Schelske watched pornography on the couples' computers and has at least 100 nude photographs of himself in a state of arousal.

She also alleges that several photographs show Schelske having sex with other women.

According to the court documents, the oldest of the couple's children [a 7-year-old -- ed.] confronted Schelske when he was watching pornographic material on the television in their home.

Sounds pretty wankerific. This must be the "family values" I keep hearing about, or as TBogg points out, fertile subject matter for Evans' next magnum opus.

And funnily enough, it seems that Craiggers still has his campaign website going, replete with phantastic photos, with which you can play our favorite drinking game, Spot the Doofus.

For this photo, you have to chug:

The guy in the middle sorta brings down the intemellectual property value, though we probably weren't on Park Avenue in the first place.

Then there's this:

I just think this is an excellent, well-taken photograph, and I have no fucking clue who Tom Sundquist is. Larry Snarfquist. Bill Smithers. Whoever that guy on the right is. Those are nice.

Damn.

Anyway, more seriously (but seriously, that's some nice sweater fruit there, mes amis), just perusing the photo pages might lead one to believe that this is a guy who traded rather heavily on his wife's apparent popularity, for a campaign from four years ago.

I dunno, pal, maybe after you're done jerking off to pictures of yourself fucking other broads, you might want to either update or take down your campaign website, maybe saving that sweater-fruit picture. In the meantime, noting how the current crop of candidates has taken pains to dissociate themselves from even old photos with the Chimpster, it's nice to see that at least one chump is just too preoccupied to worry about such niceties. And sorry, Sara, but maybe this sort of thing is what happens when you roll with shitbirds like Tom DeLay.

Diddy Get Bent?

I think I'd rather go on a rafting trip with Scoutmaster Kolbe than even think about our old friend T.C. Diddy, but to be confronted with this asinine nonsense on the very same day that Freddy Fender, a class act to the very end, passes, is just too damned much.

(Note: People who don't regularly read the Comical should realize that Aidin Vaziri is basically their Andy Dick, a snarky, self-conscious little shit who also happens to be a solid pop aesthete, if he could ever get out of his own way. His Sunday Pop Quizzes and CD reviews are frequently must-reads, dripping with alternately contemptuous and celebratory pomo meta-irony. Which is okay in small doses. Here he's just a passive, mildly amused stenographer, which is unfortunate, because he can turn up the heat when he wants to.)

"We will only be talking about the new album," his New York press agent sternly told the gathered throng, even though no one had yet heard the disc, as she handed out fact sheets detailing talking points that included, "Diddy is named by Burger King as the KING of music and fashion."

My, that's quite a selling point. Is a prefab burger chain suddenly an arbiter of music and fashion, or are they implictly saying that T.C. is to music and fashion what Burger King is to quality cuisine and/or dining? I mean, I loves me a Croissanwich™ every now and again, but I have no illusions about the nutritional content. One might have thought that people would have learned from Michael Jackson's poor example of proclaiming oneself the "king" of anything larger than, say, Liechtenstein (yes, I know it's a dependent duchy, smartass), but then one doesn't normally find a way to fuck up a perfectly good song like Kashmir.

Combs arrived more than two hours late. There was some brief talk of staging a walkout among the hungry and frustrated journalists, but it seemed too cruel to deprive the artist of his lifeblood: free publicity.

This is really the problem with the oxymoronic "profession" of entertainment journalism -- they're all weasels, almost by definition. What Vaziri doesn't say is that, even had these noble wielders of the truth decided en masse that this troublesome little shit wasn't worth their time, and repaired to some bar for several rounds of drinks, one of them would have kept one eye to the road for T.C.'s favored mode of regal transportation, a solid gold litter carried by Numidian midgets.

Seriously, the guy's a fucking asshole, and he's only enabled by all the free publicity these goofballs keep handing him. When do we hit the tear-down stage already?

Between takes, Combs furiously fired off text messages and yelled some more into the earpiece, while checking himself out in the bar mirror. A man with a necklace that featured a working miniature clipper covered in diamonds groomed his light layer of hair.

Another half hour went by like this until Combs finally entered the conference room for the roundtable interview. Each of the five journalists got to ask one question.

Mostly he bragged. "Being a leader in culture, I never stop providing entertainment," he said, citing recent commercial triumphs by proteges like Danity Kane and Cassie. "I'm just timeless."

Jesus. Where's Mark David Chapman when you could really use him? If this douche-nozzle's a "leader in culture", then we need to have an election. If he's "timeless", someone buy him a fuckin' clock, mach schnell.

"Every hip-hop artist has a dream to become an R&B singer or a professional athlete," he said. "I think I've accomplished both of those dreams. I ran a marathon and I did a duet with Keyshia Cole."

I have no idea who or what a "Keyshia Cole" might be, and it may interest this nauseating little fag to know that thousands of people also ran the New York Marathon for free, just as they do every year. By definition, this does not make them "professional athletes", any more than shagging balls at Padres training camp makes Garth Brooks a major-league baseball player.

Seriously, what's wrong with this fuckin' guy?

The press agent then said time was up, but Combs -- who on the official Diddy Web site labels himself "The CEO, The Entertainer, The Humanitarian, The Designer" -- granted a bonus question.

"Music is my first love, success is something I acquired," the man who is estimated to be worth $346 million said. "I would make music for free."

I sincerely hope he gets that opportunity, the sooner the better.

God's Grift

Perhpas the most welcome news of the past week was the well-timed revelation that Chimpco might, just might, have been playing the extra-chromosome vote for the suckers that they are. I mean, rank cynicism we can all understand; actually thinking that esoteric religious and social issues are even our hundredth biggest problem right now, not so much.

A former senior presidential aide has accused the Bush administration of using evangelical Christians to win votes but then privately ridiculing them once in office. The allegations by David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House office of faith-based initiatives, come at a devastating time, when the administration is counting on born-again Christians to vote in sufficient numbers to save the Republicans' hold on Congress in the November elections.

In a book entitled Tempting Faith: an Inside Story of Political Seduction, to be published on Monday, Mr Kuo portrays the Bush White House's commitment to evangelical causes as little more than a cynical facade designed to win votes.

"National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ridiculous, out of control, and just plain goofy," Mr Kuo wrote, according to MSNBC television, which obtained an early copy of the book. In particular, he quotes Karl Rove, the president's long-serving political adviser and mentor, as describing evangelical Christians as "nuts".

Good. At least the elves of this administration have actually assessed something correctly. As always, it's necessary to preface that assertion with the caveat that it's not all people of faith, nor is it the having of faith itself, that is the problem. It's simply the overt politicization of faith, and that's all these hucksters really are when you get down to it -- they're politicians.

I doubt if the political blowback will be much to write home about -- at worst, the evangelicals might decide to stay home instead of voting. And again, if they are going to persist in their ridiculous misprioritization of serious national issues, good. Stay home continue the endless plaint of moral decadence and perfidy of everyone else. Shoot your television set. Whatever floats your boat. Just stop inflicting your willful ignorance on the rest of us.

I understand Barack Obama wants to reach out to these people, or at least be seen and heard talking about how much we need to reach out to them. The notion of crazed Jesus Campers laying hands on and praying over a life-size Barack Obama cardboard cutout does not make me feel any better about the process. I think we get farther by doing and saying things that will enlighten and inform people, and encourage the self-disenfranchised to want to become more involved in the political process. There, too, is the instilling of faith.

And it's alternately hilarious and telling that on their visits to the White House, the evangelicals were frequently bought off with trinkets and things like official stationery and photographs. Something to take back home to show the rubes. And you thought we got Manhattan Island cheap.

That, along with Pope Dobson's indifferently cynical response to the indisputably moral issue of Mark Foley preying on teenage pages, also demonstrates a profound gulf even between the flock and their self-appointed leaders. Dobson reflexively recognized the political gambit at play and characterized Foley's pathetic e-mail exchanges as "pranks" and "jokes" played by the pages themselves. A more organized opposition (not just to the Republican Party, but to the wild yet disciplined antics of the snake-handlers as well) would use that episode to drive a real wedge between Dobson and his millions of suckers. Then again, it may be a definitional issue with suckers -- short of a video of Dobson consummating with a nervous ungulate, they'll happily lap up everything he says, and pay him for the privilege. Pretty sweet racket, when you think about it.

And if it does affect the flock enough that they wish to start a third party, even better. I would even drop a buck in the tin cup for such a windmill tilt. It's like throwing Finding Nemo in the DVD player so you can go to the back of the house and spend a little quality time with your significant other.

The Wages Of Spin

There is much hand-wringing and statistics-mongering over the recent estimate of the running death toll in Iraq, as a direct result of our unwarranted invasion, which is about the most polite way one can put things at this late point. Expert statisticians such as noted future MacArthur Genius Grant winner Michelle Malkin loudly proclaim their misgivings at the notoriously high estimate of over 655,000 dead. At that rarefied level of death, one gets into tautological arguments over methodology and then, as some sort of rhetorical buffer, the inevitable "Saddam was worse" charge is lobbed somewhat injudiciously.

Well, then. Once again, it appears that we are dancing around the wrong bonfire. The false comparisons of Saddam's murderous behavior are almost too easily put to rest -- even giving the benefit of the doubt that the flat Stalin statistic of one million is accurate to ascribe to the Hussein mafia, it took him over two decades to tally that figure, versus some 42 months for ours. Now, it's true that it is also a false equivalence to attempt to conflate Saddam's furious malice with our noble if incompetent scheme of "liberation", but it's also not as unfair as the liberators might pretend to think to point out that had we left awful enough alone, hundreds of thousands of innocent people would not have met an awful, undeserved fate. Whether the actual toll is one hundred thousand or the six or seven posited by statistical regression analysis elides the larger point, which the liberators are understandably trying to avoid.

It's a gruesome moral calculus, but one that is necessitated by the mere act of attempting a verifiable accounting. Because once you've taken it upon yourself even to dismiss the estimate as too high, if you are at least intellectually honest with yourself (if not the rest of the world), you have to ask yourself what is "it" worth -- and what "it" is in the first place. All these terms that get chucked around like rocks skipped across the pond, indifferently, mindlessly, must be defined at some point. What are we actually trying to achieve, and how realistic are our professed goals? What is "success"? Is it merely having a standing Iraqi security force? What about the likely prospect of such an army devolving into sectarian death squads, engaging in revanchist ethnic cleansing (as has been happening)?

More to the point, how many people have to meet their fate at the business end of a power drill to make George Bush and his noisy little claque of basement keyboarders feel better in their projected certitude? Even though some five thousand people have wound up in the morgue and in the street just in the past couple months, they are unwavering in their blindered equivalences, and their abject refusal to accept statistical probability. It's all worth it for them, because they were never asked to sacrifice anything in the first place. They have no real skin in the game, just the onset of carpal-tunnel and a lot of empty 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew to clean up.

As for Oedipus Tex, the estimate of thirty thousand -- which was generally considered rather low even back when it came out -- is apparently still his personal benchmark, when he can be bothered to revisit it in the first place. Particularly troublesome are his blasé assumptions about what Iraqis are "willing" to put up with.

I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- that there's a level of violence that they tolerate.

They're not "tolerating" it -- everyone with the means to leave is doing just that. The people who remain are stuck. Bush's condescension is upstaged only by his utter cluelessness about the whole operation. His inability to describe even basic terms of what needs to occur before not only we can get out, but that Iraq doesn't then become an Iranian proxy overnight, only cement the impression that he's just running out the clock before he can fob this off onto the next administration.

And now that the British are going to be leaving, that means that the southern section surrounding Basra -- already a nascent Iranian enclave -- will soon become our problem as well. Do we just scoop up as many juvenile delinquents and skinhead nutjobs as we can, to avoid a draft, and set them loose in the pressure cooker of Basra? Is this more of that "forward thinking" Bush is so famous for?

Just the "press conference" alone is so completely without any real value, you could spend the next week fisking pretty much every assertion, if not literally every single sentence. A cursory reading of the whole thing will illustrate that, as well as the fact that as with most things Bush, it's just not worth the time.

The main thing to take from the estimate is not its accuracy, but its implications. The "real" figure may be "only" 100,000 or even less, though I can't imagine a remotely realistic estimate at this point of less than 75,000. And that doesn't even take into account the maimed and wounded, the soldiers and civilians who are saved by the wonders and advances of medical technology, but have had their lives and bodies forever altered.

And for what? So Bush can feel tough and show us all how principled and godly he is? So the warporn enthusiasts have more wanking material, telling us how "serious" they are? If there were a realistic, attainable strategic objective to all this, I could see it. But the fact of the matter is, we're on the verge of turning a bloody dictatorship that, for all its faults, was the technological and commercial leader of the region, into a bloody fundamentalist theocracy backwater, where everyone with any skills and practical ability has gotten the hell out.

If they're lucky, and if we all step in and help, Iraq might get back on its feet in a generation. And who knows, perhaps like the Vietnamese, they'll move past what the Stratego players of this administration wrought on their country and forgive us. It's certainly more than we would do for them, if the roles were reversed. The toxic bloodlust of the past five years has demonstrated at least that much.

Northern Exposure

So let me see if I understand this correctly: the Clinton administration engaged in a flawed agreement with perhaps limited success with the North Korean government, but the results of that endeavor were a general suspension of uranium enrichment, and no nuclear program or bombs.

By contrast, the Bush administration has developed a uniquely inept combination of bluster, inaction, and refusal to deal with what they so loudly proclaim to be a brutal dictatorship. They have bravely refused to compromise or engage in any bilateral discussions, and have repeatedly upped the ante by lobbing handy little marketing terms, designed specifically to incite, inflame and embolden. End result: the North Koreans have accelerated their enrichment process, and may very well have tested an actual weapon. The last best hope for this administration, as regards North Korea, may be to try to pull up its pants already and send James Baker over to patch this thing up as best he can.

So for those keeping score on the Axle of Elvis, we have one member developing and testing its nuclear program, another right behind it in similar efforts, and the third devolved into a morass of blood and pain, with no end in sight, at the bargain price of $2bn/week to the US taxpayer. There are your Serious Thinkers, America. How do you like them?

It's no wonder that Fafblog walked away from it -- it's literally impossible to parody the enormous absurdity which circumscribes these blustery idiots running the show, and the brainless halfwits who continue to seriously think that Chimpco has any sort of plan to help this country in any area.

A World Of Shit

From the Random Clippings file, I came across this brief interview with R. Lee Ermey. Although Ermey is currently plugging the, um, prequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he will forever be best known as the closet-case coach in Saving Silverman.

Supposedly he also had a small role in a little thing called Full Metal Jacket.

Anyway, because of Ermey's actual background as a Vietnam vet and Marine DI, the interviewer decided to ask him his thoughts about our current brush with density destiny.

Q: As a guy who still attracts a wide military following through Mail Call and volunteer work with wounded veterans and military families, your opinions hold lots of sway. What's your advice to commanders in Iraq?

A: Just stay the course. We're doing great. If you listen to the liberal media, you'd think we were losing the war. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan several times, and I see great advancements every time I go back. War is war. People are going to get hurt. People are going to get killed. A lot of people don't agree with the war. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Really. So the "liberal media" is just making everything up. All the carnage and violence is just a well-coordinated illusion with a practical purpose of destabilizing the morale of the homefront. The "light at the end of the tunnel" couldn't possibly be nothing more than an oncoming train.

Maybe the nut of it is simply Ermey's basic contention that "if you listen to the liberal media, you'd think we were losing the war." Perhaps the corollary to that is that if you listen to nothing but Fox and Limbaugh and the rest of the Horst Wessel gang, you'd assume that we were winning, that the casualty rate is a mere comma in the chapter of greatness George W. Bush and like geniuses are authoring, and leaving to future administrations to figure out the ending.

But refereeing a bloody civil war is not a "course", nor is it a plan. There is an intellectually honest argument to be made that immediate withdrawal is no solution either, but this is not such an argument.

I respect Ermey's prior service, and appreciate his continued endeavors to participate and boost troop morale, seriously. But this particular Q&A was little more than a rhetorical turd in the punch bowl.



This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.

Fuck The Dukestir

I'll take the high road and claim principled opposition to the prison rape, but I secretly hope Dukestir's talking about his anus:

“I hurt more than anyone could imagine and without my faith your constant cruelty would destroy me,” he wrote.

Cunningham cited his religious faith again when he wrote, “The Lord's Prayer forgive me my debts as I would forgive. My first sin each night is the failure to forgive the U.T. Not just coverage but the brutal two and three pages each week that has nearly destroyed me and my family.”

He warned that the “truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [libelous] you have & will be.”

He also complained that Stern and other Copley reporters “only want to write about how I died not how I lived.” And he rattled off a long list of honors he said he earned as a congressman – “Education Man of the Year, Impact Aide Man of the Year, Library Man of the Year,” among others.

Plus he's in the running for Turned-Out Cell Block Punk of the Year, but I don't there's any medal involved.

Seriously, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Cunningham. May every corrupt grifter in the Duma/Politburo end up sharing a cell with you. His perfidy is well researched, documented, and annotated; he can now add Baldfaced Liar of the Year to his many notable accomplishments. Plus his wife -- who, don't kid yourself, could not have at least intuited what the fuck was going on -- is penniless.

Sometimes the system actually works.

Raiders Sucking Like Chasey Lain

Here's a quick comment I just dropped on the SF Comical's Raiders blog. If you're a football fan (or, God forbid, a Raiders fan) you may find it morbidly amusing. Or not.

I am so tired of trying to root for this gutless, incompetent team. The next time Lamont Jordan walks away from a lateral clanking off his ass, he should be benched for a full game.

There is no sense of urgency to this team. They can't count (how many false starts per game are we up to now?), can't catch (dropping as many balls as they're catching), and can't tackle. Shoulda known that Frank Gore would break his fumble streak on Duh Raiders.

Four years straight of this ridiculous nonsense is enough. I have no idea why I'm supposed to spend money watching this team stumble listlessly through every game. I'd like to think they could get their shit together and make a 9-7 or even 10-6 playoff run, but looking at the rest of their schedule, it really is possible for them to not win a single game this year. Maybe if the Lions or Titans were on the schedule, but maybe not even then.

I'm just disgusted with this level of performance. Maybe Ben Davidson will show up at practice and put the fear of God into some of these guys; short of that, see ya next year, fellas.

It may actually be even worse than that. This team has no chemistry, and is on the verge of either total meltdown or mutiny. I'm dead serious. One problem I see is that virtually all the blame is getting dumped on the quarterbacking, when the fact of the matter is that the offensive line has performed miserably. They miss blocks and constantly draw stupid, drive-killing penalties like false starts. Aaron Brooks had to run for his life the first two games, and Andrew Walter has had only slightly better protection the second two, primarily because the defenses of San Diego and Baltimore are far better than those of Cleveland and San Francisco. I have no idea why Art Shell thought dumping Marques Tuiasasopo into this mess would help anything. Hell, might as well bring back Jeff George again while you're at it.

Secondly, the receiver corps has been spotty at best. I've seen Randal Williams -- who was excellent on offense and special teams in the preseason -- drop more passes in the last two games than he's pulled in. Randy Moss had a terrific touchdown catch between the knees to put the Raiders ahead in the second quarter, but he also dropped a (for him) money shot in the end zone on the previous drive, and they had to settle for a field goal.

Finally, while the defense had two nice fourth-down stands when they needed them, they also allowed Frank Gore -- who had fumbled in each of the previous four games -- to dance all over, around, and through them. Arnaz Battle, a mediocre receiver at best, completely pwned the secondary. That's just fucking inexcusable.

Frankly, I see some imminent locker room and meeting room clashes, prison style. I can see Art Shell just walking up silently to the last guy to show up at the next team meeting and fucking deck him, just to send a message to the rest of them that punctuality is not an option, nor is paying attention. I can see Andrew Walter going up to Randal Williams or Randy Moss and telling them that the next time someone drops a pass that hits them square in the fucking numbers, someone will lose some teeth.

Okay, I'd like to see such scenarios, because I think that this crappy team has already sunk to such depths that only such drastic measures will shake them loose, but it won't happen. This is a poorly-prepared, poorly-organized, and (sadly) poorly-coached team. Dan Marino was right -- this team really might go 0-16.

So, you know, I hope Al Davis realizes that all of us Raider fans know exactly who the ultimate blame lies with, that he was stupid to let Jon Gruden go, that he's stupid to get in a pissing contest with Jerry Porter. Just between those two episodes and his old feud with Marcus Allen, Davis' ego and bullshit has cost his precious team countless wins and playoff appearances. And since it's all about the benjamins in the end, perhaps if nothing else, the thought that people might just stop showing up to watch the Special Olympics of the NFL, wasting their hard-earned money, maybe that'll sink in.

Handjob Veterans For Truth

Alicublog has a brilliant take on the sexual continuum of the frantic Foley fabulists and their compadres in disingenuous silliness.

The top conservative bloggers, despite their self-portrayal as men and women of The Peepul, tend to be professional word-workers with some education and prestige (law professors, speechwriters, journalists, students, etc). They have to know this Republican freakishness about sex is all bullshit. But they have gone along because it has been good for their Party and the non-sex-based causes it supports -- endless war on Muslims, low taxes on rich people, and such like.

By a willful misreading of the current scandal-twisted situation, some of them see an opportunity to speak up for sex without abandoning their Republican affiliation. This opportunity is so rare, and so delayed, that when they finally feel themselves free to speak out for sucking and fucking, it comes out explosively, in a pressurized stream of clumsily suggestive gibberish.

For all the harm their reign has done our country, let us be grateful at least that we are not so afflicted.

Right on the money. The more literate of the conservabloggers are actually educated and sensible enough (believe it or not) to at least understand the trade-off they have made, even if they'll never fully admit it. But the fact is that their political success is tethered to the abject, pathetic deference they show to narcissistic theocrat orcs like Tony Perkins and James Dobson, who have all of a sudden abandoned their mission of dumbing down the culture to accommodate slow eight-year-olds to instruct their minions to think that a U.S. Congressman leaving a floor vote to talk about handjobs with teenagers is some big fucking prank. So much for ideological (or even intellectual) consistency. How do they sleep at night? On a big fucking pile of money, that's how.

But this is just another episode that neatly circumscribes their convenient obsessions with other peoples' sexual habits. They couldn't shut the fuck up for two seconds about the Clenis, alternating their labors between shoveling shit and desperate fabrications, but when it turned out Newt Gingrich and his replacement (among others) had similar moral afflictions, they hemmed and hawed like nobody's business.

They know (and knew) what they had in Mark Foley -- a good earner with a bad habit, like Vito from The Sopranos. It's a devil's bargain all the way around -- the GOP loses without the gay-marriage freaks, the freaks lose without a legitimate party apparatus to carry their holy water for them. Both sides tacitly know that since politics is, as they say, show business for ugly people, that as in Hollywood, there are plenty of gay people working behind the scenes, from closet cases like Ken Mehlman on down.

Which makes the Anchoress' self-indulgent crap all the more ridiculous for its senseless insouciance. The point she deliberately elides about Corn's list is that her party has been in cahoots with the theocrat assholes to pick on gays when and where it suits them. When it turns into a Jim West or an Ed Schrock or a Jeff Gannon™, suddenly the vaunted moral values that they see fit to endlessly lecture the rest of us on are sublimated for political convenience.

As for this Simon fella, I dunno. I've never read the guy before, and I guess he's supposed to be a professional writer of some sort. If that guy is getting paid to write, I'm in the wrong fuckin' business. He appears to have borrowed Matt Drudge's stupid hat to peddle cheesy little bon mots of one or two paragraphs, and has jokingly "outed" himself, while protesting that we're not sweating the big stuff enough.

Well, you know what, bub? You're fuckin'-A skippy on that one, as far as I'm concerned. I'd love nothing more than to hear the media start questioning exactly how North Korea got to this point on The Decider's estimable watch. (Beats the fuck out of watching them pester the Amish and sift through the peanuts in Denny Hastert's ass-gravy.) I'm sure it's all Clenis' fault somehow in their world, but the fact is that checkbook diplomacy kept NK's nuke program at least somewhat at bay. Since then, the Chimpco stick has done nothing but encourage further development, and now there's nothing short of an actual nuclear strike that we can do to dissuade them.

(And even then, payback's a loaded Taepodong each for Seoul and Tokyo, with some 30 million people living those metropolitan areas. It is not for nothing that this society is perceived as a do-or-die cult led by a delusionally messianic dim-bulb. North Korea, I mean. Not us, no never.)

So as Roy points out, there are several levels of cognitive dissonance at play with these weirdos. They awkwardly and too loudly proclaim that they loves them some sex, yet they have politically aligned themselves with people whose sexual mores trump their own common sense, and whose deepest thoughts on foreign policy are found in the Book of Revelation. As such, their pathetic flailing, trying to inject a virus of teh funny into a sordid tale of a predatory congressman and institutionalized hypocrisy (on the part of the gay aides as well as the fag-bashers they inexplicably keep working for), rings false, yet strikes the dog-whistle note the faithful have trained themselves to hear.

Passive-aggressive treatises on how they'd like to fuck Derek Jeter, hailing from heretofore moralizing scolds, does not wash, no matter how hard one squints. It's nothing more than cheap choir-preaching, and considering the congregation, will no doubt be successful.

The Departed

I've been a Scorsese fan for many years, but as for many people, that has waned some post-Goodfellas. Casino left a bad taste in my mouth, both for the tiresome and predictable excesses of the movie, and the actual viewing of it -- I actually saw the initial release that hit the theaters, with the original full-contact baseball-bat scene in the end, and the head-in-the-vise guy's eyeball flopping out onto his cheek. Then exiting the theater, where some douchebag was alternately consoling and cajoling his weeping daughter, who couldn't have been more than six years old, and had just watched three hours of mayhem culminating in two guys getting graphically beaten to death in a cornfield.

Gangs of New York and Aviator were okay, but still larded with a bit too much in the way of announced expectations and preconceived notions, set pieces and performances seemingly designed to coax long-due recognition from the tools at the Academy. It's always a fool's errand, but perhaps necessary to get the suits on board with anything that doesn't feature a mildly retarded high-schooler fucking a pie or two oafs looking for strange at weddings.

So it was nice to be able to go check out The Departed before getting impressions elsewhere ahead of time, and find that Scorsese has essentially returned to the Goodfellas well, both for better and worse, but mostly for the better.

(*** Caution: Mild spoilers ahead.)
Scorsese's gangster films have always been superior because of his innate understanding and desire to show the small things that make his wiseguys tick, and he both draws from and elaborates on that formula for The Departed.

The premise, adapted from the Hong Kong gangster film Infernal Affairs (which I haven't seen but will probably Netflix now), involves cops infiltrated by a mobster's mole, a mob family infiltrated by a deep-cover cop, their efforts to root out one another, and the havoc it wreaks on their lives and psyches. That the movie takes place in the backdrop of Irish mob Boston only enriches the atmosphere of the movie. Scorsese correctly recognizes and plays on some of the similarities between the Irish and the Italian experiences in the New World, and his guinea/boyo riffs are executed with style and heft.

Strong performances abound in this movie, from Jack Nicholson's scenery-eviscerating turn as mob boss Frank Costello, to Matt Damon as neighborhood-kid-turned-cop Colin Sullivan, to Leo DiCaprio's mob mole Bill Costigan. At first, it seemed strange casting two actors with such similar physical features as Damon and DiCaprio, as well as the similarity of the character names. But as the movie progresses, and the mole characters start manifesting their increasing difficulty at compartmentalizing the escalating tension and violence, the Costello/Costigan/Colin similarities make more sense. The casting similarity presents itself in a late scene, as Damon and DiCaprio descend in an elevator, silently, oddly juxtaposed and, aside from a height difference of a couple inches, appearing more than anything else as doppelgangers. The elision of identity, memory, and personality have of course been a trope of the Dickian sci-fi genre, with varying levels of success. Here it is utilized in a more visceral, worldly mode.

This would all be enough to make The Departed movie superior to the majority of gangster movies, but what makes it special is the outstanding supporting cast of Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, and Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg in particular is excellent in his role as Dignam, the ball-busting Southie sergeant who revels in his contempt for DiCaprio's river-crossing "lace-curtain motherfucker" middle-class Costigan. Whatever musical chum the Wahlberg boys cranked out in the '80s for dim-bulb teenyboppers, both Mark and Donnie have proven themselves as tough, adaptable actors in numerous roles, and Mark's authentic Southie upbringing serves him well here as Dignam. You want Oscar bait, you might actually have it there.

There are a few twists and turns, while avoiding the tacked-on "gotcha" feeling that has infested many recent movies (hello, M. Night Shyamalan). The soundtrack also returns to the Goodfellas well right from the get-go, with the strains of Gimme Shelter wafting through the scenery. Later songs are better, with some ethnic Irish rock, one of which I believe was Dropkick Murphys. And Vera Farmiga, while not bad, has a relatively passive, enabling role as the double-dealing police shrink. But she holds her own with a top-notch cast that understands, like true top-notch casts, that the project is the real star.

Maybe the biggest surprise with this movie is how fucking funny it is, in that darkly humorous way that the Irish mastered long ago, and Scorsese has successfully mined here and there over the years. The humor helps with the pacing and tempo of the narrative, and in leavening the tone, and by the end, you appreciate it as an integral part of the movie; they're not throwaway jokes. The final silent, lingering shot is a gem, and maybe the funniest scene in the entire movie. It's what separates Scorsese from the hacks -- it's a shot that would never even occur to a Michael Bay or a Renny Harlin, which may not entirely be their fault, but that's the way it is.

It's Scorsese after all, so in the end we know how most things turn out. But what has always informed his greatest works is the getting there, even when you intuitively sussed the ultimate destination, and that's what Scorsese has brought back to the table with The Departed.

Liberals And Their Media

So I'm watching Bob Schieffer (who I'm sure thinks he means well at least) tackle the still-building Foleygate scandal this fine morning, by having not one but two of the more reliable tools in the mouth-breathing conservatard shed to peddle their lies and propaganda. Having Tom Davis (R-VA) and Ray Lahood (R-Tard) on to speak freely with only Schieffer himself providing rebuttal. So of course it went round and round on "when did Hastert know this" and "how did the gay Democratic mafia that really runs things (which explains the current make-up of our government, if you're incredibly drunk, I suppose) time this so propitiously to damage the sainted Republicans", blah blah blah.

I've iterated this before in re the Swift Boat cocksuckers, but the same principle applies here -- only the Republicans, with their hands squarely caught in the congressional page nookie jar, preying on teenagers, would have the fucking gall to even try turn the blame around on the opposition party. And only this crop of Dems, scared of their own shadows and thinking that their goal is to bamboozle imaginary "values voters", would let them get away with it.

I know that they think that by holding press conferences and issuing stern reprimands, they think they're doing something, but as I relate everything to football, I persist in my belief that when you have a bad team down in the second half, you don't let up, you don't even give them a glimmer of hope of getting back in the game -- you jam that fucking boot square on their neck and keep them prone until time expires. It's nice that Nancy Pelosi is jacking them on their weak attempt to put Louie Freeh and his Deputy Dawg act on the case, but she also needs to find a point person to hit CNN and call these pervert-protecting motherfuckers for what they are. This gall/spinelessness paradigm persists, no matter how Republicans fuck things up, no matter how many of them go to prison, no matter how much they get caught flat-out lying about shit.

It's irresponsible for Schieffer to have on two Republicans -- and ideological hacks at that -- with no impassioned partisan response whatsoever for at least the pretense of equanimity. Hell, it's irresponsible at this point for him to have Republicans on at all to discuss anything about this issue, seeing as how they've absolved themselves utterly from any serious discussion on the matter. They hid it for as long as they could, and now that it appears that one of their own finally discovered a remaining dram of soul that Karl Rove hadn't bled out, their last desperate tactic is to blame the Democrats for all this. This should be laughed straight out of the room from the outset -- and frankly, as I also said before, if the Democrats really had managed to coordinate such a conveniently-timed attack, I'd first thank them for finally understanding the rules that are necessary for fighting these animals, and then suggest that maybe they should have waited a couple weeks more for even better timing.

But the bottom line is that there is not even the pretense of seriousness or intellectual honesty in what these people had to say. Lahood even trotted out the "gas prices are down" line, thus triggering the automatic corollary that if these chumps are responsible for the occasional (and again, conveniently timed) lowering of prices, why are they somehow never even remotely accountable for higher prices? Suddenly it becomes a case of blaming Ronald McDonald for a rancid Big Mac.

So these people have nothing to say, yet Schieffer was happy to let them say, with only mild stock rebuttals and nothing in the way of actual refutation of that which was easily refutable. I'll check the transcript when I have more time tongiht, but I seriously don't think I heard Davis or Lahood once say anything that was actually true, nor did Schieffer seriously call them on it. Then again, if he was serious about his job, he wouldn't have had these clowns on in the first place.

And the elephant in the room here, despite the ministrations of the "legitimate" media, is not sex, it's power and money, and the confluence of privilege. As I pointed out earlier, and as Billmon explained even more elaborately, this is a money game, first and foremost, and Foley was a player because he had an easy seat in a wealthy district, and he was good about kicking campaign surpluses upstairs to the big bosses. That's why NRCC chairman Tom Reynolds went out of the way to protect Foley, and ironically now why the NRCC is spending extra millions of dollars, scrambling to try to save dozens of suddenly vulnerable seats.

Really, if the media filter were ever taken off long enough to allow something remotely resembling the truth to get out, these people would be pitchforked to death. I assume that the media's glad-handing role as the enabler of stupidity and lies is, like the protection of serial predator Mark Foley, all about the benjamins in the end. The sooner people come to their senses and realize that red and blue really make green, the sooner these fuckers can either be shuttled off to prison or paper-hat jobs. Having Tom Davis and Ray Lahood asking me if I want fries with that would make my fucking year.

What About Bob?

Bob Woodward is a dickhead. (Did I just say that out loud?)

I think it's just super-swell that he's had his come-to-Jesus moment with the reptiles ruining this country. Better late than never, even when there's a financial motive. And it may even lead to Condi Rice's downfall -- though to be fair, she does seem slightly less blatantly incompetent at State than she was as NSA. Knowing this crew, they'll just rotate Fatboy Hastert into Rice's State chair, although in point of fact it may then actually have to be a bench or a bean bag.

I take no comfort in seeing the scales supposedly fall from Booby's astigmatic eyes, nor do I make any assumptions about What This All Means. Woodward really is the court stenographer, in the truest sense -- insofar as he limns the current narratives and facilitates dialogue among the elites, he more or less accurately takes the collective pulse of the functionaries who actually run the place and set meaningful things in motion. These people just rely on folks like Bob to set the terms of debate and keep the plates spinning.

So in that context, I take these momentous "revelations" (Bush is clueless and dogmatic! Rumsfeld is a flaming idiot on an ego trip! Who'da thunk it?!?) to mean that the power brokers -- the "donor" class -- have read the tea leaves and decided that messianic drivel is no longer an operative foreign policy. That it took them six long years to figure this out (or at least do the cost-benefit analysis on it) indicates that, just as youth is wasted on the young, so is a college education wasted on the privileged.

But for some reason, Woodward's utterances are treated with the utmost reverence amongst "legitimate" media scribes, who can only hope to snorkel the right amount and sequence of corporate cock to land that cherry book deal. As far as I can tell, he's just finally getting around to iterating what we already knew, that these people were an unholy trifecta of incompetence, mal-fee-ance, and bad faith.

So fuck that shit. Booby oughta be sharing his royalties with us. I could use some beer money, asshole.

Party Vegetables

It's all too easy to launch deadly scuds of teh snark at the notion of earmarking a commemoration for an event which has yet to take place -- or even be defined.

THE United States Congress has set aside $20 million (£10.6 million) to celebrate the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The funds for "commemoration of success" in Iraq and Afghanistan were included in last year's defence budget, but went unspent amid an upsurge in violence in both countries.

So the money, of course, was rolled over into next year's budget, just in case. But again, all sarcasm aside, what are the serious identifiable criteria for "victory" or "success"? This ridiculous Yogi Berra shit Bush has been pimping for three years explains nothing. What the fuck does "as Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" mean, precisely? Does it simply mean getting them uniforms and weapons and rudimentary training, or does it mean sticking around and ensuring they don't devolve into ethnic death squads abusing their power for revenge?

And clearly "success" will probably have different definitions and criteria altogether for Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite Saddam's criminal predations and a decade of criplling sanctions, Iraq was one of the most socially, culturally, and technologically advanced countries in the region before we knocked it over. Getting Afghanistan back to where it was in 1978 (or even 1948) would be a plus. There are different measures and applications, obviously.

Well, it's obvious to sentient beings, but not so much to this maladministration. Their inexplicable (literally, since they utterly refuse to explain any of the specifics of it) one-size-fits-all policy applies even to the ceremonial victory laps, which must be rolled over in perpetuity till an actual adult comes along to clean up Mister Man's mess.

In the meantime, laissez les bon-temps roulez!

Frist Watch

Bill Frist's tacit endorsement of involving Taliban members in an Afghan unity government couldn't have been better timed to get largely ignored. Oh, it's already inspired some fits of pique and betrayal in the usual quarters, and understandably so. This is a tough one to soft-pedal; there's no getting around that the practical ramifications of Frist's statement -- no matter how he has since chosen to "clarify" it -- is that we may have to find a way to work with some of the very same people who brought down the World Trade Center, and have exhorted other terror cells worldwide to commit similar atrocities. After all we've committed to, after all the hortatory rhetoric and manly chest-beating hither and yon (mostly yon), this is unacceptable.

And yet, with suicide bombings increasing in Afghanistan at an exponential rate, a resurgent Taliban in that country, a truce between Musharraf and the Pakistani Taliban, and an increasingly impotent (if well-meaning) Hamid Karzai, the pathetic truth is that Frist may actually be right.

[Frist] later backtracked from his comments, but Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution says striking a deal with the Taliban might work. “Our true interest is in ensuring that Afghanistan does not again become a haven for al Qaeda,” he tells CFR.org. “The Taliban, under Pakistani pressure, might ensure this if its own position was secured. This is distasteful, and might mean [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai's departure, but it does preserve our one core interest in Afghanistan.”

Ethnic Pashtuns on both sides of the border sympathize with the Taliban’s cause. Experts agree any solution to the Afghan conflict must involve Pakistan, whose government stands accused of harboring terrorists. “ The real question is not whether Pakistan is or is not supporting the Taliban, but why it is doing so,” writes Frederic Grare of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. To rescue Afghan-Pakistani relations and root out the Taliban and other terrorists from the region, he suggests that military rule in Pakistan be ended and democracy installed in Islamabad.

Scary scenarios abound here, but there are relevant facts to consider. It is now commonly accepted wisdom that the insurgency in Iraq stemmed at least initially from CPA proconsul Paul Bremer immediately disbanding both the army and the Baath Party. This was a tactical mistake, but from the standpoint of the war marketeers, a necessary one. After all, you can't spend fifteen years insisting someone is the love-child of Hitler and Stalin, and not demolish his party apparatus upon deposing him. But again, operationally, hindsight suggests that we might have restored some semblance of stability early on by leaving at least the institutional shells intact, and enabling Iraqis to rebuild them from within. The problem is that we seriously thought rebuilding everything from the ground up would be a snap. Well, 3½ years into it, it's a $2bn/week snap.

So Frist might be taking that as a lesson to apply in the case of Afghanistan, and again, while in principle it's an utter abomination, it may be our only practical option remaining. See, if the Smart Set hadn't shunted that $700 mil and all those troops off to Qatar to start staging the Cakewalk, before we were remotely done squaring up Afghanistan and Pakistan, that might not be the case. But as we keep hearing, we are where we are now, and we must deal. And unless we're prepared to establish some sort of rump garrison state somewhere in Central Asia (we aren't, and no country in the region would allow us to do so anyway), this may actually be the least awful option.

Frist is a company man through and through; I doubt if he farts without prior approval from someone in the White House. Chances are he drew the short straw on test-marketing what will probably become the new operational policy, if not publicly. There's just no way around it anymore, without Musharraf's help, and while he's pretty much done what he can with what he has, he at least knows when to fold 'em.

It is time for the Serious Thinkers to really consider what they want out of all this, and then to seriously mull over whether they really think this administration is intellectually and diplomatically equipped to carry out their (or any, really) master plan. Reflexive hysterical dismissals along the lines of "Nancy Pelosi will let bin Laden rape your teenage daughters!" simply do not count anymore; the plan must be one of affirmation, not babbling nonsense.

Here are the cold hard facts:

• We are stuck refereeing a nascent civil war in Iraq.


• Our financial and military commitment to Iraq has essentially drained us, barring drastic measures (draft, tax/bond increase), of the ability to function effectively should another serious conflict arise.


• Our window of opportunity for "fixing" Afghanistan effectively started closing when we started diverting funds away for staging troops for the Iraq invasion.


• Pakistan, given the ideological makeup of its citizenry and its military, and its nuclear capacity and former prevalence in sharing their secrets with anyone with a suitcase full of money, is far and away the most volatile, dangerous nation to our interests right now.


• The fates of Pakistan and Afghanistan are inextricably entwined.


• Pervez Musharraf is the only thing holding Pakistan together right now.

Obviously, there are more, but you get the idea. What it boils down to is that our options are limited, and our time may be shorter than we think. I am not nearly as sanguine as the CEIP guy about democratic elections in Pakistan; I think this is a citizenry that would install either a populist clown or a dangerous fundamentalist lunatic at the helm of a nuclear state.

The only other thing I can think of besides screening some "Taliban types" through this initial phase of Afghanistan unity government is checkbook diplomacy, which is what we should have done in the first place. Yeah, I said it -- throw money, lots of it. The latest bill for increasing funds for Iraq brings the running total to around $400 bn and counting. And what have we gotten for it, besides bloody death and continuous brutality? Seems like $5-10 bn max would have given Afghanistan decent infrastructural systems, which has ancillary benefits, like giving citizens a sense of national unity, rather than the role of a serf trying to eke living under the radar of the local warlord. Same with the notorious "tribal" provinces of Pakistan -- help them out, bring them along at a pace that doesn't impact them too harshly.

Instead of killing thousands of people, bankrupting our treasury, and earning the contempt and fear of the entire planet, we could have spent probably 5% of that and saved countless lives and renewed the trust and love that the world once had in us.

I know it sounds all peacenik-y and hippy-dippy and shit, but better that than going broke trying to help Oedipus Tex and his henchmen resolve all their courage issues. In the meantime, the main thing to remember about Frist is that he didn't come up with that shit himself. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. We're getting ready to start backing away from the hornet's nest we stirred up -- the real trick for the Bushies is convincing the warporn enthusiasts that it was their idea. They'll come around; they always do.

Sexual Politics

Heard enough about cyberpredator/congressputz Mark Foley? Maybe not. While it's certainly fascinating to pore over the endless minutiæ of Foley's lurid IM exhortations to his pubescent protégé, and extrapolate easy numberless jokes about his creepy predilection, there's still more.

There's more than the usual frantic, projected concoctions from the usual fucktards (links via TBogg), though those are always amusing for their abject demonstrations of cheap hypocrisy and aggressive stupidity. It's to be expected that these idiots would reflexively turn to their dhimmicrats card, because that's all they've got left. Some are even trying to bring up Gerry Studds, which is not entirely unfair if you're just focusing on the sexual aspect of all this.

But I think that's the wrong area to focus on, though it's obviously the easiest. Consider how the House Republican leadership has scrambled frantically to get its story straight as to what who knew when about all this, and how long the matter sat between Dennis Hastert's gravy-soaked ham-hock asscheeks. One thing from this Moran assclown (among countless other similar assclowns of the same ilk), who is desperately trying to finger complicit Democrats in what appears to be an exclusively Republican scandal, really made me laugh, because we can always recognize these tendentious little hacks for exactly what they are:

Now I realize how eager many of you are to connect all these dots and start accusing people of all sorts of conpsiracies to keep this thing quiet. And I will happily join you in hanging by their toes the entire Republican leadership if it turns out that they knew more than what is reported here and failed to do anything.

Yeah, sure you will. So of course the first thing this moron does when that becomes more and more the exact case is he trots out paper-thin assertions about Democratic timing and complicity. Gee, how principled you are, chump. I for one am shocked at the lack of follow-through on his part there. And for the record, I hope someone did time it deliberately. I hope they go scorched-earth on these punk motherfuckers. I want them to do to these gutless authoritarians exactly what Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have been doing to all of us for the past six years.

In the meantime, Rick Moran's promise to find his principles under a rock somewhere all of a sudden are not worth the cyber-bumwipe they're printed on. And his increasingly hostile defenses just get more and more hilarious, the jabbering nonsense of increasingly ridiculous people.

So let's talk about power, and how it can be opportunistically leveraged and compromised. Let's talk about Craig Spence, about Lawrence King and the quickly-disappeared Franklin Credit Union scandal, about the easy access of potted plant Jeff Gannon™. All those things did in fact occur, because they were allowed to occur, because there is some level of practical utility in it for someone.

Some things are not easily explained here. It becomes increasingly obvious that some or all of the people in the Republican leadership of the House knew about Foley's little problem for well over a year, yet did nothing. Now, why would that be? Think about it -- how hard would it have been a year ago to just put the arm on the guy, usher him into a nice little retirement sinecure, groom a replacement for a secure seat, and should the story ever see light, the blowback (so to speak) is at least substantially mitigated. Instead, in an increasingly hostile political environment, they completely neglected to cover their asses. Either this is incredibly stupid on their part, or Foley's a bigger player than we know. He certainly seems to be a reliable rainmaker for the NRCC. Is he also one of those people who knows where all the usual bodies are buried?

Not sure yet, but as more and more bodies drop and careers are ended, the more apparent it will become that beyond the illicit sexual aspect, there's a real systemic malaise in play here. Everyone's playing their role to the hilt -- Foley's claiming a laundry list of personal problems, Hastert's desperately trying to save what's left of his job (an increasingly futile effort), and the nearest Republicans are all breaking out their best "nobody here but us chickens" excuses. Right. No one knew. Everyone knew, or at least suspected.

This is bigger than a bunch of creepy, icky e-mails. This is a prime example of a confluence of money, power, and sex culminating in endemic corruption. And once everyone's had their fun with the obvious scoutmaster-type jokes, the scandal will lose its mystique, and the lid will fall back into place, and the party will go on, albeit perhaps a bit more discreetly.

Again, the bottom line is that Foley was worth something to somebody, or they would have dumped his ass nine months ago when rumors were starting to reach the House leadership level. I think there is where you find the true measure of corruption of these people, and the system they thrive under.

Decline And Fall Of The Raider Empire

Brief football post here, just for the hell of it. In the wake of the Raiders' ridiculous collapse against the lowly Cleveland Browns, in which an 18-point lead was handed back throughout the last three turgid quarters of the game, some sort of post-mortem may be helpful. We might even draw some broader analogies if we're so inclined.

The Raiders are failing in almost every way possible, both on and off the field. Experienced receivers are not helping their new starter at quarterback, inexcuseably droppping easy-money passes, blocking poorly, and not fighting for even overthrown balls to prevent interceptions. Yesterday's game was the first in which the Raiders found their dormant running game, breaking both Lamont Jordan and Justin Fargas open for large gains. This should have been a signal to the coaching staff to stick with the running game, and use second-year QB Andrew Walter in much the same way the Pittsburgh Steelers use Ben Roethlisberger, sparingly and with high-efficiency medium gain pass plays.

Ultimately, the primary fault in letting Cleveland back in the game lies with the kickoff coverage teams, which allowed three huge returns to establish excellent field position. But the run defense also allowed a running back with a bum shoulder to gain 100 yards, when the team's average had been only 60 yards per game. Pass coverage also miserably failed to cover high-profile malcontent tight end Kellen Winslow.

So it's a failure of strategy and imagination, but also of vision. The coaching staff, made up of an admirable team of old lions, has failed to adapt both tactically and strategically. As I mentioned, instead of helping Walter get his bearings with some short-to-medium plays designed to move the chains and control the clock, the Raiders insist on riding the vaunted vertical offense right over a cliff. It's sad, because that Air Coryell shit really does look pretty damned sweet when it works. But when it's all you've got, it's pretty easy to stop with modern defensive coverage schemes. You have to make adjustments and execute them soundly, and the coaches and players are doing neither.

Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is WR Jerry Porter, who has been inactive all three games. Porter clashed immediately with new head coach Art Shell, and made sure to piss off Al Davis during training camp by parking in Davis' reserved space. Porter has agitated to be traded, but the team has already given him a $5 million signing bonus, which they will never recoup, which naturally inflates their desired trade value for Porter beyond what other teams are willing to part with. Even more stupidly, since we're talking poor talent management, the team dealt WR Doug Gabriel, a future superstar, to New England for a second-round pick and a sack of magic beans, knowing full well that with Porter's situation, the team needed every talented wide receiver it could hang on to. Gabriel is already becoming Tom Brady's favorite target, while Oakland languishes between Randy Moss dogging it every other play, and speedster Alvis Whitted (who never met a route he couldn't mis-run) in what should have been either Porter's or Gabriel's slot.

So what to do? Well, at this point the team may as well change its motto to "Wait Till Next Year". They are sucking in every facet of the game because Al Davis is a stubborn old fool who refuses to admit that the game has changed. It's no coincidence that the Raiders were the best team in the league when Jon Gruden coached them, and have been among the very worst since he and Davis clashed and Gruden went to Tampa Bay.

I suppose there's something to be learned here about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or about refusing to acknowledge error and take corrective action, but some things are just to obvious to be reiterated.