Ever since the beginning of the Iraq War, I’ve suspected that the Grim Reaper was a Bush Pioneer, since the whole enterprise makes no sense except as a sort of war-profiteering boondoggle for Death, Brown & Root.

But if any further proof was needed that the Grim Reaper is a Republican, Molly Ivins has folded up the chess board and gone on to greener pastures.  Meanwhile, Dick Cheney, last I looked, was still not lying in a plot of his native soil, pushing up crabgrass, or deadly nightshade, or poison ivy, or whatever it is that would actually be able to grow on top of his grave.

Selfishly, I was hoping Molly would linger with us long enough to see Bush leave office, in whatever way he eventually does — upright, feet-first, in handcuffs, under cover of night, in a tumbril, or hand-dipped in creosote and lightly dusted with marabou feathers.  But I’m glad she lived long enough to see the Democrats take control of Congress and Dubya’s Presidency auger in like an incompetent cropduster.  And, not incidentally, the bulk of her own words sweetly vindicated.

Farewell Molly and Godspeed.  You’re the only thing from Texas I can truly say I’ll miss.

One Of The Good Dead Ones | 18 Comments »

 

My friend Laura, with whom I’ve worked on a few bad movies, has developed the bizarre habit of sitting through every film nominated for an Academy Award, regardless of category.  Needless to say, this is a very self-destructive pastime, sort of like signing up for a week at the Bataan Death March Dude Ranch.  But as she stoically sucks up Andorra’s official entry in the Best Foreign  Film category, the lavish Basque language musical, Goats A’Poppin!, she distracts herself by predicting the inevitable porn versions of each year’s most honored motion pictures.  This season’s crop includes such distinguished films from the San Fernando Valley as:

Acockalypto

Creamgirls

Little Miss Slutshine

The Pursuit of Happypenis

Booble

Pam’s Labia Rinse

Notes on A Sanchez

An Inconvenient Poot

The Queef

Butt Pirates of the Caribbean:  Dead Man’s Muffiny Chest

Half Nelson…All Man

Vulvar

The Breastige

The Curse of the Golden Shower

Plus films that fit the porn paradigm without any change in title required:

Little Children

Happy Feet

Any other suggestions…?

Movies | 17 Comments »

Big Surprise:  Lileks has a .

Not So Big Surprise:  He has zero Friends.

Uncategorized | 23 Comments »

Like a fishmonger trying to pull a fast one, Dinesh D’Souza attempts to pass off yesterday’s scrod as fresh by wrapping it in today’s newspaper.  In the Sunday Washington Post, he essentially spews the same piece he published last week in the LA Times, and which we gingerly poked with a stick here.  But he covers up the rancid flavor by heavily salting the corpse with tears of self-pity:

In the pages of Esquire, Mark Warren charges that I “hate America” and have “taken to heart” Osama bin Laden’s view of the United States. (Warren also challenged me to a fight and threatened to put me in the hospital.) In his New York Times review of my book last week, Alan Wolfe calls my work “a national disgrace . . . either self-delusional or dishonest.” I am “a childish thinker” with “no sense of shame,” he argues. “D’Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to Bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists.”

“…and then, and then he made fun of the leopard skin rug in my office, and then he shoved me head first into a trash can behind the cafeteria, and then him and some other guys pulled my pants off, and they threw ‘em onto the roof of the natatorium, and I had to get the custodian, and then when he was pulling my pants down with one of those poles they use to open the windows in the gym, my pants turned inside out, and my puffer fell out of my pocket and somebody stepped on it!”

And in my recent appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” I had to fend off the insistent host. “But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don’t you?” Stephen Colbert asked again and again.

My, that does sound like a low blow.  Or it did, until I rewatched the segment on Crooks and Liars (the exchange starts at about :05:00):

COLBERT:  And you have the courage to say that, right?  That you agree with some of the things that these radical extremists are against in America.

D’SOUZA:  I’m more concerned –

COLBERT:  Are you — Do you agree with that statement?

D’SOUZA:  Well, no, I’m…I’m…

COLBERT:  Do you agree with that statement?

D’SOUZA:  I agree with it.

Personally, I’d be a little more outraged at Colbert’s impertinent suggestion that D’Souza concurs with Islamic radicals if D’Souza hadn’t, you know, said he agreed with them.  (I know the right wing depends on Good Ol’ American Historical Amnesia about things like Vietnam and Watergate, but I think Dinesh is pushing the load capacity of the Memory Hole when he expects us to forget things that happened 10 days ago.  Which were captured on tape.  And posted on the interwebs.)  And perhaps other wingnuts should take a lesson from Dinesh’s experience:  If you go on a comedy program where the host plays a blowhard conservative who pretends to agree with your ridiculous premise while taking it to its logical conclusion, then maybe you shouldn’t be so shocked when he doesn’t sit back like the Sunday talking head hosts and let you fill the room with your stale outrage like carbon monoxide in Thelma Todd’s garage.  Better yet, maybe you shouldn’t go on comedy programs at all, if you’re only going to get tweaked when you realize a week later that they were making fun of you.

Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month,

…and available on remainder tables everywhere…

I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks.

Dinesh goes on to regurgitate his charges from last week about how during the Carter and Clinton years (and he’s right about how memory can play tricks on you — I’d forgotten their terms were consecutive, having some fuzzy hallucination of another couple of guys shoehorned in the middle there), America dressed all slutty, and danced suggestively at the roadhouse, and so we kinda had it coming when a group of men who firmly believe in traditional values decided to teach us a lesson on top of the pinball machine.

The reaction I’m eliciting is not entirely new to me. As a college student in the early 1980s, I edited the politically incorrect Dartmouth Review and was frequently accosted by left-wing students and faculty. They called me names back then, too.

Names like, “Distort D’news.”  Via Media Matters:

As an undergraduate in the early 1980s at Dartmouth College, D’Souza gained national notoriety as co-founder and editor of the conservative newspaper The Dartmouth Review. During D’Souza’s tenure as editor of the Review, according to a September 22, 1995, article in The Washington Post, “[T]he off-campus newspaper [The Dartmouth Review] published an interview with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, using a mock photograph of a black man hanging from a campus tree, and ‘outed’ at least two gay students.”

Oh Dinesh, you puckish iconoclast.  Way to stick it to the man!

But the personal attacks have reached new heights with “The Enemy at Home.” So much so, in fact, that I feel compelled to explain why I wrote this book, what it does and doesn’t say and why I think it prompts people to threaten me with hospitalization.

Ah, he’s going to do his own Shorter Dinesh D’Souza.  Excellent.

First, and I feel silly having to say it: I don’t hate America.

…I just hate 60 percent of the people who live in it.

Immediately following 9/11, there was a wondrous moment of national unity in which the American tribe came together. “Why do they hate us?” some wondered, but no one wanted to comprehend the enemy — only to annihilate him. And I shared this view.

…Still do, in fact.  Well, at least about the Enemy at Home.  Which just happens to be the title of my new book, now 50% off, and available from a table in the back of Borders, next to the pile of discounted 2007 cat calendars.

But five years later, that unity has dissolved amid a furious national debate over the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Some people have realized that these are two separate things, thanks to that meddling national debate, and despite our efforts to conflate them.  Even worse, they’ve realized that the failure of the former has hamstrung the latter, and my wondrous national unity is melting, melting…what a world, what a world…

I thought it was time to go back and reconsider 9/11; in so doing, I concluded that the prevailing conservative and liberal theories explaining Muslim rage were wrong.

…because if I can pin 9/11 on the liberals, then that will mean they’ve inflicted a more serious wound on the body politic than George W. Bush has with his septic war in Iraq.  And all those sneering attacks from the right wing on people who tried, shortly after 9/11, to grasp the terrorists’ motives, who tried to understand “why they hate us” never happened, understand?  They are no longer operative.  Because now that we know that the terrorists don’t hate us, they just hate the Blue States, it’s okay to muse about their motives and even to publically approve of them.  Amazing the distance we’ve traveled in just a little over 6 years, isn’t it?  As another immigrant and noted foreign policy thinker, Yakov Smirnoff, famously observed, “What a country!”

Contrary to the common liberal view, I don’t believe that the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden isn’t upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.)

Well, you got me there, Dinesh.  Still, I can’t help wishing that I had a passing knowledge of recent history, because something about that statement sounds kinda hair-spllitting and evasive…

Marking the end of an era, the United States will soon withdraw about 7,000 U.S. military personnel from Saudi Arabia and terminate a significant military presence there that lasted more than a decade, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced Tuesday.

Many Saudis resent the presence of U.S. forces in the nation that is home to Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, and some–including Osama bin Laden–had used this as a justification for terrorism.

But it’s not like when Reagan Clinton withdrew from Lebanon after the Marine Barracks bombing in 1983, or when Clinton pulled out of Mogadishu in 1993 (damn he gets around).  George Bush only yanked our forces out of Saudia Arabia because he’d been ordered to by a bunch of inbred, muumuu-wearing religious fanatics he occasionally likes to hold hands with.  So it’s not like there was anything pussified about it.

He isn’t upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East?

Who could possibly be upset by our hopping into bed with despotic regimes?  That’s as crazy as your wife getting mad when she finds you in bed with a hooker; it’s not your fault she was out of town for the weekend.  Love the one you’re with, man.

Contrary to President Bush’s view, they don’t hate us for our freedom, either. Rather, they hate us for how we use our freedom.

Because freedom is like the “Sword Thrusting Will Turner” action figure from Pirates of the Caribbean.  Once you take it out of the plastic, it completely loses its collectibility.

When Planned Parenthood International opens clinics in non-Western countries and dispenses contraceptives to unmarried girls, many see it as an assault on prevailing religious and traditional values.

And when Western NGOs object to female circumcision, they might just as well be flushing a Koran down the toilet.  It’s a simple equation, liberals: you’re either with us, or you’re with the foreign clitorises.

When human rights groups use their interpretation of international law to pressure non-Western countries to overturn laws against abortion or to liberalize laws regarding homosexuality, the traditional sensibilities of many of the world’s people are violated.

“Violated” is too mild a word.  Can you imagine how traumatized it makes people with traditional values feel when you cook up some loony “penumbra” or “emanation” from international law that prevents them from stoning a raped woman for adultery, or burying homosexuals alive?  That’s the kind hurt that just doesn’t go away, you heartless bastards.

One radical sheik even told a European television station a few years ago that although Europe is more decadent than America, the United States is the more vital target because it is U.S. culture — not Swedish culture or French culture — that is spreading throughout the world.

To sum up:  If Sweden made better action movies, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

What would motivate Muslims in faraway countries to volunteer for martyrdom? The fact that Palestinians don’t have a state? I don’t think so.

Neither do I.  As long as you don’t count all those Palestinians suicide bombers over the years.

Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values.

Sure, we’ve lost over 3,000 American troops in Iraq, and roughly 600,000 people have died there as a result of George Bush’s invasion, but you people made Dukes of Hazzard!

And anyone who would undermine the patriarchy probably has the effrontery to walk around with an intact clitoris.

All my arguments can be disputed, but they are neither extreme nor absurd. So why has “The Enemy at Home” been so intemperately excoriated? I can imagine only two reasons. The first is given by James Wolcott himself. I am not, as he says, an unqualified right-wing hack. Rather, I am a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, so Wolcott fears that I will be taken seriously.

Of all the fears that may awaken James Wolcott in the wee dark hours of the morning, I have a feeling this particular one ranks just below, “going birdwatching and getting pecked to death by Marshmallow Peeps.”

The second reason can be gleaned from the common theme in the reviews: that mine is a dangerous book. But if a book says things that are obviously untrue and can be disproved, then it is not dangerous — it is merely fiction and should be ignored. A book is dangerous only if it exposes something in the culture that some people are eager to keep hidden.

A third possibility is that a man who thinks that having his name on the voice mail menu at the Hoover Institution makes him a “scholar,” also thinks that critics who call a book bullshit do so because it’s dangerous, and not because it’s, you know, bullshit.

Revenge of the Nerds | 32 Comments »

Wow, the Scooter trial has gone all “Law & Order” on us even faster than I thought it would!  As the NY Times headline writer put it, “At the Libby Trial, Hints of Intrigue and Betrayal.” For it seems that Scooter’s lawyers are claiming that “White House aides had sacrificed him to protect Karl Rove” and that said aides “deliberately set  … Mr. Libby up to be a scapegoat.” 

Of course, the defense hasn’t yet explained how these nefarious officials forced Scooter to lie to FBI and DOJ investigators, but I’m sure that will come out in day two or so.

As you may recall, in our L&O scenario, we had the character based on Scooter being shot in the court house before he could testify against Dick Cheney — but with real life giving us such a cracker jack opening scene, our plot seems too tame now.  And, given L&O’s recent penchant for ripping from at least two different headlines for each episode, our story probably isn’t complicated (or lurid) enough to get aired. 

So, your challenge is to come up with your own plot for “Law and Order” — you need to start out with the Plame case and trial of Scooter Libby. but then you need to mix in some other recent news item for that special L&O twist.  Here are a couple of examples.

1.  Scooter/Brittany Spears dropping her baby and later showing off her lack of undies.  Plotline: Somebody leaks the name of an undercover terrorism expert to the press, thus killing Jack Bauer and forcing everyone to sit through 24 hours of Jack’s funeral.  A senior White House Official lies to the intestigators about it, and is prosecuted.  But that case is crowded off the front page when a pop starlet feeds some hungry crocodiles while holding her baby, and accidentally drops it into a croc’s mouth.  And she isn’t wearing any panties. 

In a surprise legal move, Jack McCoy tries the two cases together.  When she takes the stand, the starlet reveals that her baby was fathered by Karl Rove’s, which is why Scooter was sacrificed — he was ordered to leak stuff about Plame and then lie about it to deflect attention from her pregnancy.  She takes a plea deal in exchange for her testimonty that she dropped the child on purpose, at Rove’s command, to get rid of the incriminating child.  The undies were stolen by Russian spies who wanted to bring the affair out into the open, but after one of them was poisoned by a plutonium pellet that the RNC slipped into his tea, the other one agrees to testify in exchange for Judith Regan’s old job at Harper-Collins.

2.  Scooter/ the case of those kidnapped boys found in Missouri, one who had been missing for four years. 

Plotline: During one of his radio segments, an obnoxious news personality based on Bill O’Reilly blows the cover of a CIA employee working in North Korea.  The agent is captured and killed only minutes before she was to bring out Kim’s secret nuclear strategy, so Bill is tried for treason, and executed.  Everybody at the D.A’s office is happy.  Even the defense seems glad.

But wait, there’s more!

It seems that the leak came from the White House, which offers up a senior advisor as a scapegoat.  He stays mum until, in an emotional scene in the last act, he testifies that Karl Rove kidnapped him 30 years ago, and he was not only psychologically unable to escape, he also had to do Karl’s dirty work, because he was so afraid of Karl, who used secret “Manchurian Candidate” brainwashing techniques on him.  The advisor claims that Karl is a North Korean mole.  Then Karl takes the stand, and says that he was only following the orders of his secret master, Reverend Moon.  He blurts out that his next assignment was to have been the murder of Tom Cruise for claiming to the new Jesus Christ.  It all ends with the revelation that George W. Bush, like LonelyGirl15, is just an actor following a script.  So, everybody wants their money back, and Jack McCoy files a class action suit on their behalf.

And so on. 

Now, make up your own scenarios.  Here are some recent headlines for you to work with. 

Duke prosecutor accused of hiding DNA evidence
Houston Chronicle - 51 minutes ago
By JOSEPH NEFF and BENJAMIN NIOLET. RALEIGH, NC – When embattled Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong took his seat at the defense table at the NC State Bar on Wednesday, the role-reversal became complete: The hunter is now the hunted.

Military Develops Non-Lethal Ray Gun
CBS News - 8 hours ago
(AP) The military’s new weapon is a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire. The technology is supposed to be harmless – a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.

After decades, arrest made in slayings
Houston Chronicle - 34 minutes ago
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and ALLEN G. BREED. AP. JACKSON, Miss. – For four decades, Thomas Moore dreamed of exacting revenge on the reputed Ku Klux Klansman he believed had kidnapped his younger brother and another teen, beaten them and drowned them in …

Obama Rips Fox News Over Madrassa Story
Boston Channel.com - 7 hours ago
WASHINGTON — With a staffer declaring, “We will not be swift-boated,” Sen. Barack Obama fought back Wednesday against an allegation that he was educated at a radical Islamic school as a child in Indonesia.

Panama’s Noriega to be Released from US Prison in September
Voice of America - 9 hours ago
By Lisa Ferdinando. The defense attorney for Manuel Noriega says the former Panamanian dictator is to be released from a Miami prison in September.

 I bet you can come up with some great plots based on those stories (plus l’affaire Scooter).  Or, you can find your own headlines to rip from.  Just be creative!  Bonus points for killing off Districk Attorney Arthur Branch.

Uncategorized | 15 Comments »

I understand that the President gave a speech this evening — something about the State of the Mission Accomplished.  But there’s no time for that now, because the big news is that Tom Cruise ‘is Christ’ of Scientology. (Hey, we don’t really read The Sun, we just got the link from WorldNetDaily.)

A source close to the actor, who has risen to one of the church’s top levels, said: “Tom has been told he is Scientology’s Christ-like figure.

“Like Christ, he’s been criticised for his views. But future generations will realise he was right.”

But only after his crucifixion, alas.  (My guess is that the source close to Tom is Tom.  After all, he has to do something to keep Katie from leaving him now that the sex is over in their marriage.)

But forget all that, because the real REAL news is that we didn’t make the Forbes Magazine’s Web Celeb 25 list. 

LonelyGirl15 is #1.  Kos is #3.  And, presumably just to prove that celebrity, even web celebrity, is a tawdry, dirty, ultimately meaningless business, John HIndrocket and That LittleGreenFootballs guy also made the cut, both of them for their involvement in Proportional Font Gate, thus demonstrating that Forbes is so two years ago.  (The fact that InstaGlenn is #7 only proves it.)

But even so, Hugh Hewitt, the guy who invented blogging, didn’t get included, probably because he’s just not photogenic enough.  So, to make things up to him, let’s take a brief look at his latest Town Hall column, “So Let Us Find Our Resolve, And Turn Events Toward Victory.”  It’s about the SofU speech, and how it was just like the Gettysburgh address, in that George Bush is also one of our greatest presidents (and since Honest Abe got picked on by bloggers too, only he can truly understand the loneliness of the Dubya).

Lincoln of course was surrounded throughout the Civil War by critics whose venom was the equal of the far reaches of the nutterspehere. To his enemies in the Confederacy he was evil personified, and to his political opponents at home, especially the Copperheads, he was a fool and a dangerous incompetent. But even the horrors of the war which he saw often and at first hand did not blur his vision of what had to be done, a vision far more focused and far sighted than that of his enemies combined.

So Lincoln called for resolve and he insisted on victory.

And thanks to him, we were victorius in our war against the Commie Nazi Huns, and we lived in a golden age of peace, prosperity, and no oral sex until Bill Clinton came along and ruined things for everybody. 

However, in another eerie parallel with our current situation, Lincoln never found Robert E. Lee’s stash of nuclear weapons, and so he was ultimately impeached.

But, per Hugh, it’s sad to realize that despite all of George’s heroic resolve and steely-eyed focus and stuff, the Democrats will never acknowledge that President Bush, not Tom Cruise, is the real new Jesus (which is why they are all going to hell).

First principles plus the resolve to defend them are the mark of great presidents, and it has always been so in the history of the country. President Bush extended a variety of invitations last night to the new majorities in the Senate and the House, and only the most optimistic of sorts can imagine much coming from them as the Democrats have evidenced no interest in ending their effort to reverse the judgment on Bush which history will inevitably bestow.

Okay, can anybody translate that last sentence from the original wingnut into English?  (I think what Hugh was trying to say is that Democrats probably won’t take up the President on his offer to jointly destroy our country because the Dems are too busy trying to build a time machine so they can go back to 1945 and prevent Barbara Bush from getting lucky, but I could be wrong.)

But back to Hugh:

President Bush is resolved to deliver the country to his successor much safer than the one that was delivered to him,

His successor being Cornelius the Ape, of course, and the safer time only coming after the radioactivity dies down quite a bit.

 … a safety which flows from clear-eyed realism about threats and the courage to act upon them.

And trillions of dollars, and the lives of hundreds of other people’s children.

It will be interesting to see if the combination of General Petraeus’ clear and emphatic testimony at his confirmation hearing and the president’s steady insistence on victory will reverse the flow towards neoappeasement in the Senate. That may be too much to expect of politics in these divided times, but the good news is that the president is not for turning.

Personally, I thought that Christopher Fry’s The President’s Not for Turning lacked the wit and charm of his previous play.  However, I did like the part where the town gives in to the hero’s demands, and hangs him.  But then, I’m always a sucker for a happy ending.

Uncategorized | 19 Comments »

Media Matters had this on the 18th, but I only just caught up with it today:  Rush Limbaugh heard that Barack Obama also likes to suck on hot sizzling cylinders, and apparently couldn’t help himself from fantasizing aloud about the freshman Senator’s Pants O’ Fire!

If Obama is seen smoking in public, and it is said because no one wants to criticize him because, he’s above criticism, because he’s a godlike figure to the godless. Now, you don’t criticize gods or godlike figures. What if the whole anti-smoking bunch has to come out, ’cause they’re a bunch of libs too, has to find a way to justify Obama’s coolness? Because he’s got fire. If he’s got fire in his hands, what has he got in his pants?

Some people accused Rush of flogging that old wives’ tale about the plus-sized loinsabres wielded by African American males, but I think there is some room for reasonable doubt.  After all, Mr. Obama is a “Halfrican,” so logicially, his dusky crotch crane could only be 50% larger than a white senator’s — hardly worthy of comment.  On the other hand, when Minority Leader John Boehner was recently outed as a , Rush didn’t feel the need to speculate on the size of the Ohio Republican’s over-the-sac-bracket, even though his name is a homonym for “Boner.”

Still, there is no reason to assume that Rush sees anything remotely phallic about smoking.

In fact, I’m sure most of us heard about Senator’s Obama’s cigarette habit and immediately thought about his groin instead of his lungs.  Or perhaps this photo of the Illinois lawmaker…

…aroused uncomfortable memories for Rush.  Memories of a trip that he and a bottle of Viagra took to the Dominican Republic, (“On an idyllic beach where necklaces of white sand and coconut trees ring a half-moon bay, tourists can find prostitutes ranging from young women to even younger boys.”), where he saw acres of similarly taut, tawny, and sun-kissed manflesh splashing in the warm, pellucid waters of the Caribbean…

Still, we should be careful not to take Rush’s comments out of context, but rather evaluate his views of minorities as part of a continuum.  For instance, he recently said this about the NFL:

Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”

Rather damning, perhaps, but let’s not rush to judgement.  Contrast that with his remarks in December regarding the NBA:

I think it’s time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association. Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call ‘em gangs. You have the Laker Gang, you have the Heat Gang, you have a Timberwolf Gang [distortions of official team names], and let ‘em strap up out there, and let ‘em market their CDs. Instead of selling concessions, sell CDs out there at the concession stand.

All the players get involved in this, and if a fight breaks out, hey, it’s what happens! It’s what happens with gangs, and if a cop gets bloodied, you know, that’s a bonus for the gang member that pulls that off, and let the fans, you know, go in knowingly. They’re going in to watch the Crips and the Bloods out there wherever the neighborhood is where the arena happens to be, and be who you are.

So any honest appraisal of Rush’s comments regarding the senator must be considered in the context of his belief that when black people join any institution in sufficient numbers, that instititution — whether it be Congress, or a sports franchise — naturally becomes a criminal enterprise staffed by gangsters, violent rap artists, and hard-bodied mulatto solons with bulging, smoldering pants.

Or maybe, with the election lost and the need to woo minorities over, Rush feels freed from more than just the yoke of political water he was toting for Karl Rove.  Perhaps he feels like that alien at the end of V who had his human mask ripped away, revealing the scaly visage beneath; as embarrassing as that moment was  –talk about tabloid fodder! — it had to have been a relief to drop the pretense and finally come out of the closet and admit that you aren’t a mammal.

Or maybe the grandees of the right wing commentariat are all just having a big gran mal meltdown.  I remember when conservative talk radio was celebrated as some kind of electoral third rail that would drive the Republican party to perpetual victory, while frying any liberal who dared set foot on it.  But I’m beginning to think that it’s more like those machines in that made the alien Krells’ dreams come alive.  Far from marshalling their forces, all AM radio seems to do nowadays is allow the darkest fantasies of the Limbaughs, Weiners, Becks, et al to escape into the ether…

Rush Limbaugh Offers His Cool, Considered View of Race Relations

Can I Peek Under Your Hood? | 20 Comments »

They Might Be Giants, “Experimental Film,” by way of the endlessly entertaining Homestarrunner.

Video Village | 6 Comments »

Apparently Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is having trouble gaining the all-important wingnut vote (except for the J-Lo K-Lo vote, of course), largely because he isn’t sufficiently anti-gay. 

Renew America (you know, the web site headed by noted wingnut Alan Keyes, the guy who disowned his gay daughter) pointed us to a press release from the virulently anti-gay group “Americans for Truth” (“a Group Devoted Solely to Countering ‘Gay’ Movement”) which demands that Romney’s web site retract a factual article about super wingnut Brian Camenker, head of Article 8 Alliance. (Yes, the same Article 8 Alliance that was savagely harassed by a dust message left on a table by a gang of roving gay activists). Anyway, here’s part of the American’s for Truth and Against Butt Sex’s press release: 

Americans For Truth President Peter LaBarbera expressed dismay at former Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s public attack against Brian Camenker, the head of Mass Resistance and “an American hero in the fight against the radical homosexual agenda.”

In a web posting by Romney’s presidential exploratory committee, ominously entitled, “Meet the Real Brian Camenker,”

It’s ominous because it says “real” in the headline, and reality is scary!

Romney uses liberal media stories to portray Camenker as an extremist troublemaker.

Which is very wrong of Romney, because he failed to mention that Camenker is also a noted nut case.

Camenker is widely respected among pro-family advocates nationwide for his untiring efforts to expose pro-homosexual indoctrination of public school students.

Which tells you all you probably need to know about pro-family advocates nationwide.

Romney is desperately trying to discredit Camenker’s publication of the “Mitt Romney Deception,” detailing the Republican politician’s past liberal record.

Well, I imagine that the web site posting was actually written by some low-level staff person who is young and naive enough to feel that he or she needs to respond to charges made on third-tier wingnut sites, but if it makes Brian and the Americans Against Truth feel important to believe that Romney is actively plotting against them, then who am I to destroy their cherished fantasy?

But hey, let’s skip to Romney’s most dastardly defamation of Brian:

Romney’s release even uses a clip from Comedy Central’s pro-homosexual “Daily Show,” notorious for its attempts to make social conservatives look like rubes and wackos, in a crude attempt to disparage Camenker. (The Daily Show tricked Camenker in one of its “ambush interviews,” to mock him and opponents of “gay marriage.”)

Um, yeah, since “The Daily Show” is known to be pro-homosexual, and is notorious for its attempts to make social conservatives look stupid, then you can see why Brian would be eager to be interviewed by them, and would fail to realize that his interviewer was not being entirely serious when he asked Brian if gay marriage had caused a spike in the rate of homelessness or a decline in the air quality in Massachusetts.

“Brian Camenker is a bona fide American pro-family hero,” LaBarbera said. “Brian, who is Jewish, has refused to sell out his religious beliefs like so many around him in Boston. Now comes along a politician — who once boasted that he was better than Ted Kennedy on ‘gay’ issues — to trash him as an extremist gadfly. This is establishment Republican attack-politics at its very worst.

Well, it was actually the Associated Press who called Brian a “conservative gadfly” – which was a mistake on their part, because the truth of the matter is that Brian is a “far-right wacko.”

“Romney’s use of a deceptive Daily Show set-up interview to smear a pro-family warrior like Brian says much more about Romney than it does about Camenker,” LaBarbera said.

Yes, linking to an actual clip from “The Daily Show” was very deceptive on Romney’s part, and I hope it opens people’s eyes to just what a snake he is –the kind who watched hip TV shows!

He urged Romney to retract the anti-Camenker web posting and apologize to the pro-family advocate, noting that Camenker has done nothing wrong in “reminding the American public that Romney has flip-flopped from being a very committed pro-abortion and pro-homosexual-activist politician.”

While Mitt has done everything wrong by reminding the American public that Brian made a fool of himself on Comedy Central.

But, as much as it pains me to do it, I have to offer Romney some valuable political advice. I note that his web site includes this accusation against Brian:

Camenker Admits He Used To Be “A Social Liberal.” “For much of my life I thought of myself as a social liberal. I voted for John Anderson for president and Michael Dukakis for governor.” (Brian Camenker, “How A Good Jewish Boy Joined The ‘Religious Right’,” The Jewish Advocate, 12/25/96)

True enough, but what you should be saying, Mitt, is that Brian wasn’t just a “social liberal,” he was a dedicated Marxist who read Mao’ Little Red Book in the original Chinese ! And he also used to frequent gay bars!

Here’s part of what Brian told the Boston Globe in July 2000:

[Carmenker] was once so enamored of Marxism that he studied Chinese so he could read an original edition of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

[…]

But the experience that spurred Camenker’s current crusade was yet to come. While working as a computer consultant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s, Camenker says, he became friends with a group of gay men.  He said that they ”hung around constantly,” often going together to gay clubs on Cambridge Street.

So, who’s the real flip-flopper, Mr. Peter LaBarbera of Americans For No Gay Cooties?

And Mitt, call me if you want to hire me to do opposition research on your wingnut foes. I’ll work for cat food.

Uncategorized | 17 Comments »

Meet Riley and Hobbes.

Inside every cat — at least, every cat I’ve ever owned — lies a Doctor Smith from Lost in Space.

Oh, how I loathe you…

Wild Things | 13 Comments »