Thursday, September 28, 2006
I do believe that's the worst thing I've ever heard. How marvelous
Or so says Christopher Guest after torturing Cary Elwes in "The Princess Bride."
Maybe my perspective has become a little skewed, but has the United States now become (tragi)comically evil? I mean, the vote to ban torture officially while giving this president the power to define it really is the narrative climax of sane Americans' national embarrassment and disgust. Short of nuking Pyongyang on Election Day Eve, there's nothing worse that the government can do. The party of small government, the organization whose reason for being is to rein in the power of the State, has now authorized the State with the power to inflict physical and psychological pain as it sees fit.
So the NIE report, the comprehensive conclusions of every government agency devoted at least in part to terrorism, means nothing. Why even have a Department of Homeland Security at all, if we're so hellbent on undermining our own existence with wars and torture, and only a tiny segment of Congress even gives a shit? With an almost Piscean will to self-undoing, Christians can only comprehend responding to a punch with a punch, even if it breaks your fist (in fact, the boondogular missile defense system that once upon a time seemed like the worst way to undermine the international system relies on 'hitting a bullet with a bullet').
Iraq is a cause celebre. Afghanistan in the 80s was, too, and where's the Soviet Union now? Realists expected it to last well into this century, it collapsed because the jihadists there bled it dry and set internal events in motion, and Ronald Reagan and the US somehow got all the credit. The people in power now rewrite every narrative of world events to culminate in the greater glory of the United States. I'd like to see the Christians who are so cocksure of the US's centrality in an eschatological master-plot answer for the eventual annihilation of an American city.
The next terrorist attack is inevitable, and when it comes, the right will clamor and shriek for us to 'bravely' accept sharply curtailed freedoms in the name of freedom. Surveillance and torture: expect their gradual expansion and abuse. Expect them to be used, conveniently, against despised populations (minors who want abortions, the HIV+, the mentally ill, anyone browner than a Sicilian) just as law enforcement has begun requesting warrants permitted in antiterrorist cases to be used against drug dealers and organized crime.
Which legal scholars were consulted in the drafting of this torture bill? Was it just GOP party hacks? Because I think it might be. I think we'd be hard pressed to find someone within mainstream jurisprudence, post-Japanese WWII internments, post-McCarthyite black lists, post-Palmer Raids, post-Sacco and Vanzetti, post-COINTELPRO. 'You're a fascist!' is such an easy bomb to lob. But seriously, you stupid fuckers, torture is the worst idea conceivable. Unfortunately, it's part of what we've always done.
Maybe my perspective has become a little skewed, but has the United States now become (tragi)comically evil? I mean, the vote to ban torture officially while giving this president the power to define it really is the narrative climax of sane Americans' national embarrassment and disgust. Short of nuking Pyongyang on Election Day Eve, there's nothing worse that the government can do. The party of small government, the organization whose reason for being is to rein in the power of the State, has now authorized the State with the power to inflict physical and psychological pain as it sees fit.
So the NIE report, the comprehensive conclusions of every government agency devoted at least in part to terrorism, means nothing. Why even have a Department of Homeland Security at all, if we're so hellbent on undermining our own existence with wars and torture, and only a tiny segment of Congress even gives a shit? With an almost Piscean will to self-undoing, Christians can only comprehend responding to a punch with a punch, even if it breaks your fist (in fact, the boondogular missile defense system that once upon a time seemed like the worst way to undermine the international system relies on 'hitting a bullet with a bullet').
Iraq is a cause celebre. Afghanistan in the 80s was, too, and where's the Soviet Union now? Realists expected it to last well into this century, it collapsed because the jihadists there bled it dry and set internal events in motion, and Ronald Reagan and the US somehow got all the credit. The people in power now rewrite every narrative of world events to culminate in the greater glory of the United States. I'd like to see the Christians who are so cocksure of the US's centrality in an eschatological master-plot answer for the eventual annihilation of an American city.
The next terrorist attack is inevitable, and when it comes, the right will clamor and shriek for us to 'bravely' accept sharply curtailed freedoms in the name of freedom. Surveillance and torture: expect their gradual expansion and abuse. Expect them to be used, conveniently, against despised populations (minors who want abortions, the HIV+, the mentally ill, anyone browner than a Sicilian) just as law enforcement has begun requesting warrants permitted in antiterrorist cases to be used against drug dealers and organized crime.
Which legal scholars were consulted in the drafting of this torture bill? Was it just GOP party hacks? Because I think it might be. I think we'd be hard pressed to find someone within mainstream jurisprudence, post-Japanese WWII internments, post-McCarthyite black lists, post-Palmer Raids, post-Sacco and Vanzetti, post-COINTELPRO. 'You're a fascist!' is such an easy bomb to lob. But seriously, you stupid fuckers, torture is the worst idea conceivable. Unfortunately, it's part of what we've always done.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Extraordinary
Because Bill Clinton was at best a mediocre president (cowardly, illiberal, indecisive, dishonest, scandal-prone, always needlessly playing defense against the Republicans, heading up a scattered foreign policy, etc.), the nostalgia felt for his tenure generally distills into admiration for him as a 'master politician.' I've always wondered what the hell that meant, since how savvy are you really if both houses of Congress flip to the enemy on your watch and then you lie about blowjobs and get caught lying?
Now I remember. This interview (part one, part two) is truly fantastic. Its quality is iffy, it's in two pieces, and it's pretty long (15 min altogether) but everyone, everyone, everyone should watch it. I haven't read anything link-worthy that gets to the root of exactly why I think it's not only good TV but an important episode in the history of journalism, which is that an ex-president--a figure generally revered, even quasi-deified in the case of B-actor Ronald Reagan--is smacked around by yellow journalism as if he were Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore or Tariq Aziz or whatever flake/upstart/enemy of the state. Moreover, Clinton not only reduced the smirky and insufferable Chris Wallace to an intellectual fetal position, he called into question the very mission statement of Fox News. I just don't think Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush would get that kind of treatment from anyone, anywhere, over anything, and if either did, they probably would not excoriate the interviewer or periodical in question as practitioners of shitty journalism, propaganda and misinfotainment. It. Was. Amazing.
Not only that, but Clinton only began to set the record straight. This is an excellently-researched backup of what Clinton said, quoting one conservative senator after another to reveal their convenient amnesia and rank hypocrisy.
Fuck yeah.
Now I remember. This interview (part one, part two) is truly fantastic. Its quality is iffy, it's in two pieces, and it's pretty long (15 min altogether) but everyone, everyone, everyone should watch it. I haven't read anything link-worthy that gets to the root of exactly why I think it's not only good TV but an important episode in the history of journalism, which is that an ex-president--a figure generally revered, even quasi-deified in the case of B-actor Ronald Reagan--is smacked around by yellow journalism as if he were Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore or Tariq Aziz or whatever flake/upstart/enemy of the state. Moreover, Clinton not only reduced the smirky and insufferable Chris Wallace to an intellectual fetal position, he called into question the very mission statement of Fox News. I just don't think Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush would get that kind of treatment from anyone, anywhere, over anything, and if either did, they probably would not excoriate the interviewer or periodical in question as practitioners of shitty journalism, propaganda and misinfotainment. It. Was. Amazing.
Not only that, but Clinton only began to set the record straight. This is an excellently-researched backup of what Clinton said, quoting one conservative senator after another to reveal their convenient amnesia and rank hypocrisy.
Fuck yeah.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
War in Iran? Pretty tacky, darling
People have begun referring to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran, as a dictator. Which is funny, because he was elected, the same way his more moderate predecessor was. Adding to that the list of non-elected leaders whom this country supports (Pervez Musharraf, for one) as vital allies in the "war" on "terrorism" (in the course of which we have of course contributed absolutely no terrorizing acts ourselves), the term 'dictator' is elastic to the point of meaninglessness.
But it still possesses a charge, and the Neocon Imagineers are gradually positioning Iran as the 'real thing,' or maybe the 'country we should have attacked in the first place but the Nazi-Russia like evilness of Saddam was just so glaring we were distracted. Saddam, Saddam, Saddam. But, really this time, Iran!'
I don't believe Karl Rove will use airstrikes as some kind of October surprise. It's too theatrical and obvious; he gets more covert and relies on auxiliaries the closer an election gets. But the timeline of the political calendar and that of the neoconservative failure caucus that's wondering What Is To Be Done? parallel one another very eerily. They're like sorority sisters who've begun ovulating in synch.
And in a political system where in spite of our leaders fucking almost everything up, torture and how best to employ it are still somehow up for debate among serious minds--even as our catastrophe in Iraq has conclusively begun generating more future terrorists than if we had not pre-emptively invaded--a third war just can't be ruled out. Even if al-Qaeda's strategy all along was to see us bankrupt ourselves in frivolous wars as our innate paranoia, weakness and decadence impels us to, we're not going to refuse that tantalizing possibility of fighting and losing in three adjacent countries.
How could we possibly fight and win in Iran, unless we just withdraw from Iraq and/or Afghanistan? (I think we should withdraw from Iraq, but that's largely because we shouldn't be fighting non-essential wars at all, especially with an exhausted military that conservatives don't care to finance properly). Bush's WWII analogy is dangerously dis/ingenuous, because as the British showed last month in foiling another airline attack, fighting terrorism ought to involve police and surveillance--although not spying without warrants, and not by yoking intelligence-gathering to pre-decided future wars. It shouldn't take a chattering hippie to realize that war is not the answer.
Especially now, when hopefully people will recognize that there really has been a fundamental shift in war. Wars between countries are increasingly rare; civil wars and insurgencies--i.e. the harder kind, the ones which drag on forever because tanks and missiles don't crush political resistance--are common, and with belligerents like us at the helm, will possibly grow to be more so. Given the dynamics of Islamist terrorism and the ambiguously Christian West, future wars will simply breed the need for more wars. That's fine if you're Raytheon or Kellogg, Brown and Root, or a Republican congressional representative from a conservative district, but bad for the rest of us.
Especially because in the case of Iran, what exactly is Iran doing that's so terrible? Developing nuclear weapons is not an act of aggression. We have them (and we used them!) and so do eight other nations, including the one actually ruled by a dictator and constantly teetering on the precipice of Saudi-Arabification, Pakistan. Not only that, but the US is fighting a war just to the east and the west of Iran. If al-Qaeda or the USSR or Imperial Japan were pummeling Canada and Mexico, do you think the US would just abide it?
Oh, but they burn flags and hate Israel! Hating Israel is an ingenious political trick promulgated by semi-legitimate Arab governments which are rich in oil and corruption and poor in jobs, literacy and civil rights. They can foist the blame for the problems they create on a tiny apartheid-state (which, in all fairness, hands Arab propagandists no small amount of fodder, with its ghastly war crimes, unconscionable treatment of Palestinians, and supremely ignoble and immoral destruction of Lebanon). Israel is the eternally convenient distraction used by its incompetent, impoverished neighbors whose rulers are largely secular and cloak themselves in legitimacy by allowing fiery clerics to rant on and on about the Zionist Satan. You never hear about how there-is-no-God-but-death-to-Israel in Indonesia, India, Bosnia, Morocco or other nations with large Muslim populations. It only happens where it's politically useful. And face it: Israel isn't going anywhere.
Iran will not launch nuclear weapons on Israel because they would kill a shitload of Palestinians and also annihilate a number of holy sites and shrines, possibly including the Dome of the Rock. Not only that, but Iran is a democratic state attempting to soften the inevitable change from its 1979 revolutionary fervor to a wealthy, influential power. It has pretensions and aspirations to be a regional hegemon, not a global pariah. If anything will further empower Iran, it's not 'appeasement,' but 'staying the course,' which has allowed Shiite militias to run harum-scarum, willy-nilly and pell-mell through Sadr City and much of Baghdad. Heck of a job, United States.
But it still possesses a charge, and the Neocon Imagineers are gradually positioning Iran as the 'real thing,' or maybe the 'country we should have attacked in the first place but the Nazi-Russia like evilness of Saddam was just so glaring we were distracted. Saddam, Saddam, Saddam. But, really this time, Iran!'
I don't believe Karl Rove will use airstrikes as some kind of October surprise. It's too theatrical and obvious; he gets more covert and relies on auxiliaries the closer an election gets. But the timeline of the political calendar and that of the neoconservative failure caucus that's wondering What Is To Be Done? parallel one another very eerily. They're like sorority sisters who've begun ovulating in synch.
And in a political system where in spite of our leaders fucking almost everything up, torture and how best to employ it are still somehow up for debate among serious minds--even as our catastrophe in Iraq has conclusively begun generating more future terrorists than if we had not pre-emptively invaded--a third war just can't be ruled out. Even if al-Qaeda's strategy all along was to see us bankrupt ourselves in frivolous wars as our innate paranoia, weakness and decadence impels us to, we're not going to refuse that tantalizing possibility of fighting and losing in three adjacent countries.
How could we possibly fight and win in Iran, unless we just withdraw from Iraq and/or Afghanistan? (I think we should withdraw from Iraq, but that's largely because we shouldn't be fighting non-essential wars at all, especially with an exhausted military that conservatives don't care to finance properly). Bush's WWII analogy is dangerously dis/ingenuous, because as the British showed last month in foiling another airline attack, fighting terrorism ought to involve police and surveillance--although not spying without warrants, and not by yoking intelligence-gathering to pre-decided future wars. It shouldn't take a chattering hippie to realize that war is not the answer.
Especially now, when hopefully people will recognize that there really has been a fundamental shift in war. Wars between countries are increasingly rare; civil wars and insurgencies--i.e. the harder kind, the ones which drag on forever because tanks and missiles don't crush political resistance--are common, and with belligerents like us at the helm, will possibly grow to be more so. Given the dynamics of Islamist terrorism and the ambiguously Christian West, future wars will simply breed the need for more wars. That's fine if you're Raytheon or Kellogg, Brown and Root, or a Republican congressional representative from a conservative district, but bad for the rest of us.
Especially because in the case of Iran, what exactly is Iran doing that's so terrible? Developing nuclear weapons is not an act of aggression. We have them (and we used them!) and so do eight other nations, including the one actually ruled by a dictator and constantly teetering on the precipice of Saudi-Arabification, Pakistan. Not only that, but the US is fighting a war just to the east and the west of Iran. If al-Qaeda or the USSR or Imperial Japan were pummeling Canada and Mexico, do you think the US would just abide it?
Oh, but they burn flags and hate Israel! Hating Israel is an ingenious political trick promulgated by semi-legitimate Arab governments which are rich in oil and corruption and poor in jobs, literacy and civil rights. They can foist the blame for the problems they create on a tiny apartheid-state (which, in all fairness, hands Arab propagandists no small amount of fodder, with its ghastly war crimes, unconscionable treatment of Palestinians, and supremely ignoble and immoral destruction of Lebanon). Israel is the eternally convenient distraction used by its incompetent, impoverished neighbors whose rulers are largely secular and cloak themselves in legitimacy by allowing fiery clerics to rant on and on about the Zionist Satan. You never hear about how there-is-no-God-but-death-to-Israel in Indonesia, India, Bosnia, Morocco or other nations with large Muslim populations. It only happens where it's politically useful. And face it: Israel isn't going anywhere.
Iran will not launch nuclear weapons on Israel because they would kill a shitload of Palestinians and also annihilate a number of holy sites and shrines, possibly including the Dome of the Rock. Not only that, but Iran is a democratic state attempting to soften the inevitable change from its 1979 revolutionary fervor to a wealthy, influential power. It has pretensions and aspirations to be a regional hegemon, not a global pariah. If anything will further empower Iran, it's not 'appeasement,' but 'staying the course,' which has allowed Shiite militias to run harum-scarum, willy-nilly and pell-mell through Sadr City and much of Baghdad. Heck of a job, United States.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Oh, those wacky Africans, so unlike us
From yesterday's NYT:
On the final day of campaigning [in the Gambia], President Yahya Jammeh vowed to rule for the next 40 years. Mr. Jammeh, who seized power in 1994 as a 29-year-old army lieutenant and went on to win elections in 1996 and 2001, told supporters that he ruled through God and that “no coup d’état or elections can remove me.’’ He faces two challengers but warned at the rally in Serekunda, east of the capital, Banju, “I will develop the areas that vote for me, but if you don’t vote for me, don’t expect anything.”
"I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president." -- George W. Bush, to evangelical preacher James Robison.
"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this." -- Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, 2003.
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its votes to [Bush in 2004]." -- J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio secretary of State, head of Bush re-election campaign in Ohio, and current candidate for governor.
I'm assuming that places likely to sustain a major terrorist attack are New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles. Given that, here are some interesting numbers revealing the similarity between our government and that of a risible African dictator who rules 1.5 million people.
New York City's allotment of federal anti-terrorism funds in 2006: $124 milion, down from $207 million in 2005.
Washington, D.C.'s allotment: $4.3 million, down from $9.2 million in 2005.
The capital region (incl. Maryland and Virginia suburbs): $46.5 million, down from $77 million.
New York City voted 73.82-22.76, Kerry over Bush
Washington DC voted 89.18 -9.34, Kerry over Bush
Prince George's County, MD voted 81.8 -17.2, Kerry over Bush
Fairfax County, VA voted 53.3 - 45.9, Kerry over Bush
Wyoming receives $27.80 in antiterrorism funds per person. It voted for Bush, 69-29.
Alaska receives $24.83. It voted for Bush, 61-36.
North Dakota receives $23.82. It voted for Bush, 63-35.
New York receives $15.54. It voted for Kerry, 58-40.
Illinois receives $8.13. It voted for Kerry, 55-45.
California receives $8.05. It voted for Kerry, 54-44.
On the final day of campaigning [in the Gambia], President Yahya Jammeh vowed to rule for the next 40 years. Mr. Jammeh, who seized power in 1994 as a 29-year-old army lieutenant and went on to win elections in 1996 and 2001, told supporters that he ruled through God and that “no coup d’état or elections can remove me.’’ He faces two challengers but warned at the rally in Serekunda, east of the capital, Banju, “I will develop the areas that vote for me, but if you don’t vote for me, don’t expect anything.”
"I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president." -- George W. Bush, to evangelical preacher James Robison.
"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this." -- Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, 2003.
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its votes to [Bush in 2004]." -- J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio secretary of State, head of Bush re-election campaign in Ohio, and current candidate for governor.
I'm assuming that places likely to sustain a major terrorist attack are New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles. Given that, here are some interesting numbers revealing the similarity between our government and that of a risible African dictator who rules 1.5 million people.
New York City's allotment of federal anti-terrorism funds in 2006: $124 milion, down from $207 million in 2005.
Washington, D.C.'s allotment: $4.3 million, down from $9.2 million in 2005.
The capital region (incl. Maryland and Virginia suburbs): $46.5 million, down from $77 million.
New York City voted 73.82-22.76, Kerry over Bush
Washington DC voted 89.18 -9.34, Kerry over Bush
Prince George's County, MD voted 81.8 -17.2, Kerry over Bush
Fairfax County, VA voted 53.3 - 45.9, Kerry over Bush
Wyoming receives $27.80 in antiterrorism funds per person. It voted for Bush, 69-29.
Alaska receives $24.83. It voted for Bush, 61-36.
North Dakota receives $23.82. It voted for Bush, 63-35.
New York receives $15.54. It voted for Kerry, 58-40.
Illinois receives $8.13. It voted for Kerry, 55-45.
California receives $8.05. It voted for Kerry, 54-44.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
I like Dick Cheney
I like that he's an unvarnished psycho asshole who doesn't pretend to hide behind Jesus. Weirdly, this has made him something of a "true believer," in that he genuinely appears to believe the strange things he says, about Iraqi WMDs or connections to al-Qaeda, things which have been debunked so many times in so many places that even linking to them seems superfluous. He's so sinister, diabolical and un-reassuring, yet he beat the shit out of John Edwards in the vice presidential debate. He's anti-avuncular, wrong all the time, and has a track record littered with disaster, but apparently people feel safer knowing guys like him are running things.
But even if he's the one foaming at the mouth for a giant war with Iran, he seems like enough of a libertarian to be at least a little uncomfortable with domestic spying and authoritarianism-at-home as a response to threats abroad. (After all, he did say he was in favor of gay marriage because "freedom means freedom for everyone"; yes, I think gay marriage is a frivolous waste of resources better spent addressing real inequalities, but it's nice that an uber-conservative gets it).
Taking the Bush Administration at face value, rather than estimating the extent to which Cheney is the puppeteer dangling the rapidly-aging Bush, I think it's useful to distinguish Cheney's evil tendencies from the overall horrors of our government. He's a fearmonger, but not a fascist. Yes, he obtained five draft deferments and has crusaded shamelessly for war after war, but his defense of the US isn't hysterical or knee-jerk. Yes, it doesn't take a genius to realize his secret energy-policy meetings devised ways to enrich Big Coal and Big Oil (and could have been poached from the plot of Naked Gun 2 1/2), but I don't think he's played in any Rovian reindeer games to destroy the credibility of the electoral process.
However, he's smart and consistent. When he was secretary of defense under the previous Bush, he knew that nuclear nonproliferation was going to be a big problem after the USSR disintegrated, and fortunately people responded and we don't have 15 more nuclear powers than we already do. To look at him in the most charitable light, he's much more of a realist than a neocon--motivated far more by a fear of international institutions ravaged by rogue actors than by a complacent trumpeting of America's inherent virtue and grandeur as a way of doing away with that pesky UN.
It's also interesting that he doesn't want to be president. I can't think of a time in US history when a sitting vice president, under a two-term president, opted not to run. The 2008 election will be unique in that no incumbents will be seeking a nomination, let alone cruising through a primary season as an anointed front-runner. If the GOP gets trounced this November, losing one or both chambers of Congress, is it possible that Cheney will retire? Will his four heart attacks finally wear him down (officially speaking)? If Bush is reduced to an unpopular lame duck--far from a given--would he appoint one of the '08 contenders to prime them for a presidential run? I don't think Karl Rove has the guts to install Condi (not because she's a black woman, but because she's single) but it would be a stroke of genius if he did, and it would piss Hillary Clinton off like nothing else.
If we have to go to war with Iran, but it doesn't happen till after Cheney's resignation and return to war profiteeering in the private sector, and they're fishing around for someone to steward the CNN-friendly pyrotechnics of battle to inflate Bush's poll numbers, Bush might want to consider pardoning Daniel Biechele, the manager of Great White, who isn't up for parole till September 2007. In terms of competence alone, he is clearly in the Cheney mold.
But even if he's the one foaming at the mouth for a giant war with Iran, he seems like enough of a libertarian to be at least a little uncomfortable with domestic spying and authoritarianism-at-home as a response to threats abroad. (After all, he did say he was in favor of gay marriage because "freedom means freedom for everyone"; yes, I think gay marriage is a frivolous waste of resources better spent addressing real inequalities, but it's nice that an uber-conservative gets it).
Taking the Bush Administration at face value, rather than estimating the extent to which Cheney is the puppeteer dangling the rapidly-aging Bush, I think it's useful to distinguish Cheney's evil tendencies from the overall horrors of our government. He's a fearmonger, but not a fascist. Yes, he obtained five draft deferments and has crusaded shamelessly for war after war, but his defense of the US isn't hysterical or knee-jerk. Yes, it doesn't take a genius to realize his secret energy-policy meetings devised ways to enrich Big Coal and Big Oil (and could have been poached from the plot of Naked Gun 2 1/2), but I don't think he's played in any Rovian reindeer games to destroy the credibility of the electoral process.
However, he's smart and consistent. When he was secretary of defense under the previous Bush, he knew that nuclear nonproliferation was going to be a big problem after the USSR disintegrated, and fortunately people responded and we don't have 15 more nuclear powers than we already do. To look at him in the most charitable light, he's much more of a realist than a neocon--motivated far more by a fear of international institutions ravaged by rogue actors than by a complacent trumpeting of America's inherent virtue and grandeur as a way of doing away with that pesky UN.
It's also interesting that he doesn't want to be president. I can't think of a time in US history when a sitting vice president, under a two-term president, opted not to run. The 2008 election will be unique in that no incumbents will be seeking a nomination, let alone cruising through a primary season as an anointed front-runner. If the GOP gets trounced this November, losing one or both chambers of Congress, is it possible that Cheney will retire? Will his four heart attacks finally wear him down (officially speaking)? If Bush is reduced to an unpopular lame duck--far from a given--would he appoint one of the '08 contenders to prime them for a presidential run? I don't think Karl Rove has the guts to install Condi (not because she's a black woman, but because she's single) but it would be a stroke of genius if he did, and it would piss Hillary Clinton off like nothing else.
If we have to go to war with Iran, but it doesn't happen till after Cheney's resignation and return to war profiteeering in the private sector, and they're fishing around for someone to steward the CNN-friendly pyrotechnics of battle to inflate Bush's poll numbers, Bush might want to consider pardoning Daniel Biechele, the manager of Great White, who isn't up for parole till September 2007. In terms of competence alone, he is clearly in the Cheney mold.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Let Me Shit on a Lot of People's Good Intentions For a Second
I've seen this on three t-shirts in Manhattan this week, so it must be cool now.
Actually, it's a grade-A grossout. It's the kind of bullshit ecumenism that means nothing other than to highlight the supposedly enlightened viewpoint of the wearer, who transcends the petty, myopic conflicts among religions while understanding that nothing about those religions needs to be changed, other than what causes conflict--which is, apparently, extraneous ideas that fundamentalists adopt as a perversion of spirituality and which have nothing to do with the actual tenets of the three monotheistic faiths at all.
Unfortunately, this is absolutely required in American political discourse, where the faith of a given individual must be respected at all costs. Hey, my adherence to things-that-were-good-enough-for-my-parents/my-heritage-of-which-I-am-immensely-proud-even-though-it-represents-no-actual-accomplishment-on-my-part/ideas-the-neighbors-will-gossip-about-if-I-don't-profess-them/crudely-anachronistic-and-anti-empirical-nonsense-derived-from-a-poorly-written-though-often-re-edited-book demands nothing less. I've taken a real gamble here by proclaiming my faith in a God who will make me burn forever if I don't!
This is where "spiritual, but not religious" comes into play as the ultimate metaphysical dodge. "Coexist" could be the new mantra for people who dislike war because it's dangerous to "children and other living things."
A possible way to assassinate Pat Robertson would be to wear this shirt and listen to the song "Imagine," because in several of his books he goes on and on about what a coded anthem of quasi-Marxist one-worlder utopianism it is. (Only Robertson equates that with devil-worship, the Anglophile liberal intelligentsia of the '50s, the ability to use a credit card in war-torn nations, and the conspiracy by a crypto-Jewish cabal of financiers who will orchestrate another Great Depression in 1996).
Of course, for this slogan to get anywhere, it would require that the 2/3 of the populace who require a bit more clarity and a bit less muddled do-goodery to drop dead or at least stop voting entirely. Because given the choice between evangelical narratives of the Clash of Civilizations and a Bono-esque plea for a Klatch of Civilizations, most people will choose the former. Glaring cognitive dissonance usually wins over watered-down cognitive dissonance, and people who are terrified of more than the iota of commodified free-thinking they've already committed themselves to don't usually get anywhere.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
This is bullshit. I especially love
Mr. Smith, who was married when he entered the Marine Corps in 2001, hopes to dispel a stereotype of the “promiscuous, night-going, street-dancing” gay man by telling his story and sharing the reaction that disclosure of his orientation elicited. That reaction was largely favorable.
It's great that freedom is on the march within our own armed forces. It's great to know that we have an anti-sex gay Republican gender police at the forefront of that struggle. It's great that self-hating faggots are attempting to assimilate on the backs of their more effeminate...brethren. You know, like the "night-goers." And it's really great that someday in the future the war machine might welcome cocksuckers with open arms. I really look forward to the day when Hadithas and Abu Ghraibs happen under morally callous, racist leadership that's just riddled with fags. Manly fags who never cry after massacring children. And what you really don't want is street-dancing after the bloodbath, believe me.
Mr. Smith, who was married when he entered the Marine Corps in 2001, hopes to dispel a stereotype of the “promiscuous, night-going, street-dancing” gay man by telling his story and sharing the reaction that disclosure of his orientation elicited. That reaction was largely favorable.
It's great that freedom is on the march within our own armed forces. It's great to know that we have an anti-sex gay Republican gender police at the forefront of that struggle. It's great that self-hating faggots are attempting to assimilate on the backs of their more effeminate...brethren. You know, like the "night-goers." And it's really great that someday in the future the war machine might welcome cocksuckers with open arms. I really look forward to the day when Hadithas and Abu Ghraibs happen under morally callous, racist leadership that's just riddled with fags. Manly fags who never cry after massacring children. And what you really don't want is street-dancing after the bloodbath, believe me.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Conservatives Will Kill Us All (Part I in a series extending indefinitely)
Tucker Carlson mentioned to his "leftist lesbian friend" (his Situation cohost Rachel Maddow?) that she's the kind of person who would be shot first when al-Qaeda takes over. That's not a direct quotation, since I can't find it anywhere on the Infobahn, but I want to unpack it.
First, I'm going on the assumption that even if he said that in a playful, "Oh, you!" kind of way, it echoes popular sentiment about leftists, lesbians and leftist lesbians. Which is to say, they're unattractive, pushy, hypersensitive, shrill, immoral, drunk on academic terminology, and generally opposed to everything good about the America that will save everyone from terrorists while keeping its own roster of war crimes within tolerable limits.
However, I think a person sort of has a moral responsibility to be someone al-Qaeda would hate. Otherwise, you're...kind of like an Islamist terrorist. It seems cowardly to me to hope that a Qaeda assassin would pause to draw a Venn diagram and evaluate your convictions, cross-checking for mutually-held prejudices and superstitions, freeing you so he could spray bullets at the Jews and porn fans.
I want a prominent conservative Christian to answer this question: does the fact that there exist leftist lesbians in this country make it more likely that terrorists will attack us? That would really put them in a bind. Answering yes would reveal their paranoia and fascism as well as the almost beautiful symmetries between Talibans foreign and domestic. Answering no (the right answer) means you can't really yoke together the War on Terror and the various cultural purification crusades that are always seeping into everything. Which is of course what many conservatives really want; you could substitute 'Mexicans' or 'biracial Vegan Bahai' for 'leftist lesbians' and still piss off Osama bin Laden and Pat Buchanan just as much, even though they would claim to hate each other most of all. Although we already know what Jerry Falwell thinks, someone should pose a version of that question to Rod Parsley or Pat Robertson. Does the existence of your pet enemies make it more likely that terrorists will attack the US?
Naturally I don't believe in a logical magic bullet that would make Pat Robertson's head explode or his followers go away. I'm just saying.
The other thing that's stupid about Tucker Carlson's comment is the naivete about how war works and what al-Qaeda wants. Rhetorical flourishes though they might just be, you occasionally hear things about the enemy marching through our cities or taking over the government, as if this were one of those Twilight Zones where all the neighbors become Commie-robots who vote in the zombie-aliens.
At the risk of going on and on about the obvious, terrorists aren't armies. They don't march. Or sack. They are not modeled after the Visigoths or a military state like North Korea. And the mobile, suburbanized geography of the US itself makes the notion of a besieged city quaint. We are a gigantic country, unoccupiable by an enemy uninterested in occupation. Terrorists don't have a real interest in 'being here' other than as parasites preparing attacks. They don't want to be attorneys general who rewrite the penal code to conform with Shariah. They don't have Post-Its full of helpful hints about improving our Weberian rational bureaucracy. They want to kill a lot of us and re-establish a caliphate so they can relive the glory days, but even that's not the true goal. I don't even think the true goal includes destroying Israel, since it's such a useful recruiting tool (and anyway, try erasing Israel without blowing up the Dome of the Rock. I dare you.)
Their wet dream is the decline and fall of the United States, which will allow them to fill the vacuum and reorganize world affairs to halt the traffic in forbidden things. Having destroyed the USSR, which collapsed barely 2 years after withdrawing from their 10-year disaster in Afghanistan, they've got their sights on the remaining superpower, the one that exports L'eggs and pictures of titties. Five years after the Tradge, they're doing a smashing job getting us to bleed ourselves dry losing one war and forgetting about the stalemated other one while fitfully undermining the rights and freedoms that nominally differentiate 'us' from 'them.'
Actual terrorist attacks are like nudges towards implosion. We're totally playing right into their hands, and the doctrinaire incompetence of the Republican Party means the next Septmber 11-style episode might just be critical mass, the moment when Bill O'Reilly and his hive mind viewership don't stop screaming until the Bill of Rights is treated like a peacetime nicety impeding our survival. That's what terrorists mean when they call our empire decadent. The mismanaged, unfinanced wars and iffy commitment to our founding principles reveal more about our soft underbelly than the presence of leftist lesbians, i.e. the people Christian conservatives revile as evidence of our national decadence, ever will. The God-people are going to get us all killed, which of course is the only way to truly cleanse a Christian nation of its secular taint, but that's another topic.
Islamists want to inspire enough terror that we collapse basically by ourselves. I don't think they're very interested in navel-gazing red state/blue state debates, but at the risk of saying something completely outrageous, maybe there is a greater likelihood of getting attacked under a Democratic president, if he or she is sane and not susceptible to Cheney-like bouts of panicky desperation (e.g. the "one-percent doctrine"). A Democratic president who shows the world that we aren't going to succumb to hysterics, nuke Tehran without provocation or suspend trials-by-jury might inspire terrorists to try again and see what happens, since the Republicans were such facile dupes who required little to no masterminding.
Anyway, terrorists won't be marching anywhere anytime soon, and if they did, I don't think anyone among them would make a distinction between leftist lesbians and the upstanding, conservative Tucker Carlsons of the world who pride themselves on valuing a few things that Islamists also happen to believe and who might just get a prurient thrill thinking about lesbians from time to time. Top or bottom, we're all of us equally fucked.
First, I'm going on the assumption that even if he said that in a playful, "Oh, you!" kind of way, it echoes popular sentiment about leftists, lesbians and leftist lesbians. Which is to say, they're unattractive, pushy, hypersensitive, shrill, immoral, drunk on academic terminology, and generally opposed to everything good about the America that will save everyone from terrorists while keeping its own roster of war crimes within tolerable limits.
However, I think a person sort of has a moral responsibility to be someone al-Qaeda would hate. Otherwise, you're...kind of like an Islamist terrorist. It seems cowardly to me to hope that a Qaeda assassin would pause to draw a Venn diagram and evaluate your convictions, cross-checking for mutually-held prejudices and superstitions, freeing you so he could spray bullets at the Jews and porn fans.
I want a prominent conservative Christian to answer this question: does the fact that there exist leftist lesbians in this country make it more likely that terrorists will attack us? That would really put them in a bind. Answering yes would reveal their paranoia and fascism as well as the almost beautiful symmetries between Talibans foreign and domestic. Answering no (the right answer) means you can't really yoke together the War on Terror and the various cultural purification crusades that are always seeping into everything. Which is of course what many conservatives really want; you could substitute 'Mexicans' or 'biracial Vegan Bahai' for 'leftist lesbians' and still piss off Osama bin Laden and Pat Buchanan just as much, even though they would claim to hate each other most of all. Although we already know what Jerry Falwell thinks, someone should pose a version of that question to Rod Parsley or Pat Robertson. Does the existence of your pet enemies make it more likely that terrorists will attack the US?
Naturally I don't believe in a logical magic bullet that would make Pat Robertson's head explode or his followers go away. I'm just saying.
The other thing that's stupid about Tucker Carlson's comment is the naivete about how war works and what al-Qaeda wants. Rhetorical flourishes though they might just be, you occasionally hear things about the enemy marching through our cities or taking over the government, as if this were one of those Twilight Zones where all the neighbors become Commie-robots who vote in the zombie-aliens.
At the risk of going on and on about the obvious, terrorists aren't armies. They don't march. Or sack. They are not modeled after the Visigoths or a military state like North Korea. And the mobile, suburbanized geography of the US itself makes the notion of a besieged city quaint. We are a gigantic country, unoccupiable by an enemy uninterested in occupation. Terrorists don't have a real interest in 'being here' other than as parasites preparing attacks. They don't want to be attorneys general who rewrite the penal code to conform with Shariah. They don't have Post-Its full of helpful hints about improving our Weberian rational bureaucracy. They want to kill a lot of us and re-establish a caliphate so they can relive the glory days, but even that's not the true goal. I don't even think the true goal includes destroying Israel, since it's such a useful recruiting tool (and anyway, try erasing Israel without blowing up the Dome of the Rock. I dare you.)
Their wet dream is the decline and fall of the United States, which will allow them to fill the vacuum and reorganize world affairs to halt the traffic in forbidden things. Having destroyed the USSR, which collapsed barely 2 years after withdrawing from their 10-year disaster in Afghanistan, they've got their sights on the remaining superpower, the one that exports L'eggs and pictures of titties. Five years after the Tradge, they're doing a smashing job getting us to bleed ourselves dry losing one war and forgetting about the stalemated other one while fitfully undermining the rights and freedoms that nominally differentiate 'us' from 'them.'
Actual terrorist attacks are like nudges towards implosion. We're totally playing right into their hands, and the doctrinaire incompetence of the Republican Party means the next Septmber 11-style episode might just be critical mass, the moment when Bill O'Reilly and his hive mind viewership don't stop screaming until the Bill of Rights is treated like a peacetime nicety impeding our survival. That's what terrorists mean when they call our empire decadent. The mismanaged, unfinanced wars and iffy commitment to our founding principles reveal more about our soft underbelly than the presence of leftist lesbians, i.e. the people Christian conservatives revile as evidence of our national decadence, ever will. The God-people are going to get us all killed, which of course is the only way to truly cleanse a Christian nation of its secular taint, but that's another topic.
Islamists want to inspire enough terror that we collapse basically by ourselves. I don't think they're very interested in navel-gazing red state/blue state debates, but at the risk of saying something completely outrageous, maybe there is a greater likelihood of getting attacked under a Democratic president, if he or she is sane and not susceptible to Cheney-like bouts of panicky desperation (e.g. the "one-percent doctrine"). A Democratic president who shows the world that we aren't going to succumb to hysterics, nuke Tehran without provocation or suspend trials-by-jury might inspire terrorists to try again and see what happens, since the Republicans were such facile dupes who required little to no masterminding.
Anyway, terrorists won't be marching anywhere anytime soon, and if they did, I don't think anyone among them would make a distinction between leftist lesbians and the upstanding, conservative Tucker Carlsons of the world who pride themselves on valuing a few things that Islamists also happen to believe and who might just get a prurient thrill thinking about lesbians from time to time. Top or bottom, we're all of us equally fucked.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
That shit is totally macaca
OK, so I'm not convinced that 'macaca' had much traction as a racist epithet before the whole episode. Granted, George Allen is totes conservative, he met with a slightly whitewashed Klan-like group, he has Confederate memorabilia in his office, and Democrats need his seat to retake the Senate, but I don't buy it. Not that I'm clamoring hard on his behalf. After apologizing halfheartedly, he and his coterie of advisers came up with an "Ethnic Rally" as a way of drumming up support among browner Virginians. WTF?
However, not only are we supposed to believe that in mis-speaking, he was uttering some secret shibboleth that his Appalachian audience was to take as signifying Allen was 'one of them' or 'seeing eye to eye with real Virginians' (a totally presumptuous claim), but that it backfired spectacularly because a word I have never heard of before in my life is actually a terribly loaded put-down for people from the Indian subcontinent, where monkeys of the genus macaca masturbate in the trees. The target audience would have to be stereotypically 'backwoods' enough for a political candidate to enhance his standing through racist speech but also sophisticated enough to pick up on the reference to a despised minority (and we all know which minority group racist rural Virginia hates most; my bet is that it isn't the South Asians clustered in and around Fairfax County, so why would Allen go that route?). I don't think the word is common parlance among racists or anyone else.
But really, the final nail in the coffin is that this episode is referred to as 'the macaca incident,' or as the NY Times blog 'The Caucus' put it, the 'macaca kerfuffle.' When Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) referred to 'white niggers' on national television, that wasn't referred to as 'the white nigger hoopla' or 'that wigga bidness.' Casually repeating racial pejoratives is kind of discouraged in the mainstream media, and not without cause. But not this time: 'macaca' is just too obscure to have real invective behind it. As racial insults go, it's belongs in the curio cabinet.
George Allen probably harbors genuine racist thoughts. But he's also an idiot who misspoke while trying to be off-the-cuff, and now he's being pummeled for a bad reason. I have a better reason: George Allen thinks we should still be presiding over Iraq's meltdown in the name of our national security. There, Democrats. Run against that, please.
However, not only are we supposed to believe that in mis-speaking, he was uttering some secret shibboleth that his Appalachian audience was to take as signifying Allen was 'one of them' or 'seeing eye to eye with real Virginians' (a totally presumptuous claim), but that it backfired spectacularly because a word I have never heard of before in my life is actually a terribly loaded put-down for people from the Indian subcontinent, where monkeys of the genus macaca masturbate in the trees. The target audience would have to be stereotypically 'backwoods' enough for a political candidate to enhance his standing through racist speech but also sophisticated enough to pick up on the reference to a despised minority (and we all know which minority group racist rural Virginia hates most; my bet is that it isn't the South Asians clustered in and around Fairfax County, so why would Allen go that route?). I don't think the word is common parlance among racists or anyone else.
But really, the final nail in the coffin is that this episode is referred to as 'the macaca incident,' or as the NY Times blog 'The Caucus' put it, the 'macaca kerfuffle.' When Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) referred to 'white niggers' on national television, that wasn't referred to as 'the white nigger hoopla' or 'that wigga bidness.' Casually repeating racial pejoratives is kind of discouraged in the mainstream media, and not without cause. But not this time: 'macaca' is just too obscure to have real invective behind it. As racial insults go, it's belongs in the curio cabinet.
George Allen probably harbors genuine racist thoughts. But he's also an idiot who misspoke while trying to be off-the-cuff, and now he's being pummeled for a bad reason. I have a better reason: George Allen thinks we should still be presiding over Iraq's meltdown in the name of our national security. There, Democrats. Run against that, please.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Something hilarious
Did you know there's a congressman from Idaho named Butch Otter? I swear. Here's his site. Something that is entirely fictitious is that there is also a senator from Idaho named Gaylord Pederast.
The Freedom Tower
OK, so does anybody think the current plans are banal? When I look at the current proposal, the four buildings in descending order, I see Chicago-Boston-Pittsburgh-Scottsdale.
If the corniness of descending order itself--which reminds me of a family photo at a Sears in Cape Girardeau, Missouri--weren't bad enough, 1776 feet is an absolute grossout. When a Democrat comes into office in January 2073, substituting Korans for Bibles and switching us to the metric system, the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence will be replaced with the ignominious height of 541 meters, which recalls the spread of plague to Egypt and the momentous occasion when the Uighurs came under the rule of the Hephthalites.
Wow.
The Freedom Tower. The design looks 100% devoted to commerce. There is absolutely nothing monumental about it except for the height and location, which together all but guarantee a dearth of corporate tenants, dooming it to be as much of a dead mall as the predecessor abortions-of-architecture were. It's a good thing Manhattan doesn't have a second, more important business district or anything, otherwise millions of square feet of bullseye office space in an unplanned neighborhood inconveniently sited to suburban commuters might be a bit of an anachronism.
The Freedom Tower. George Pataki tried to get the cornerstone laid during the GOP National Convention. I'm sure Larry Silverstein has freedom foremost in his mind. We're Americans and we love Freedom.* Why won't the Sunnis take our freedom? Oh yeah, they live in the sensuous Orient, where the perfumed dates might be poisonous, kohl-eyed assassins do the dance of the seven veils, and nothing is what it seems.
Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign.
Let freedom reign.
Mr. President, since you manage to fuck every single thing up, terrorists blew up the Freedom Tower using plastic sporks and lip gloss.
Let Freedom rain.
First Amendment subject to repeal upon tower's construction. Freedom not valid in the following: AL, AK, AR, AZ, CO, FL, GA, ID, IN, IA, KA, KY, LA, MO, MT, NB, NV, NM, ND, OH, OK, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WV, WY, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Washington, D.C. must remain without congressional representation while Freedom is in power. Puerto Rico will be a colony in perpetuity. Brown or brown-ish peoples not to enjoy freedom while cauliflower needs harvesting.
If the corniness of descending order itself--which reminds me of a family photo at a Sears in Cape Girardeau, Missouri--weren't bad enough, 1776 feet is an absolute grossout. When a Democrat comes into office in January 2073, substituting Korans for Bibles and switching us to the metric system, the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence will be replaced with the ignominious height of 541 meters, which recalls the spread of plague to Egypt and the momentous occasion when the Uighurs came under the rule of the Hephthalites.
Wow.
The Freedom Tower. The design looks 100% devoted to commerce. There is absolutely nothing monumental about it except for the height and location, which together all but guarantee a dearth of corporate tenants, dooming it to be as much of a dead mall as the predecessor abortions-of-architecture were. It's a good thing Manhattan doesn't have a second, more important business district or anything, otherwise millions of square feet of bullseye office space in an unplanned neighborhood inconveniently sited to suburban commuters might be a bit of an anachronism.
The Freedom Tower. George Pataki tried to get the cornerstone laid during the GOP National Convention. I'm sure Larry Silverstein has freedom foremost in his mind. We're Americans and we love Freedom.* Why won't the Sunnis take our freedom? Oh yeah, they live in the sensuous Orient, where the perfumed dates might be poisonous, kohl-eyed assassins do the dance of the seven veils, and nothing is what it seems.
Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign.
Let freedom reign.
Mr. President, since you manage to fuck every single thing up, terrorists blew up the Freedom Tower using plastic sporks and lip gloss.
Let Freedom rain.
First Amendment subject to repeal upon tower's construction. Freedom not valid in the following: AL, AK, AR, AZ, CO, FL, GA, ID, IN, IA, KA, KY, LA, MO, MT, NB, NV, NM, ND, OH, OK, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WV, WY, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Washington, D.C. must remain without congressional representation while Freedom is in power. Puerto Rico will be a colony in perpetuity. Brown or brown-ish peoples not to enjoy freedom while cauliflower needs harvesting.
World War Three
World War Three has begun. At least, that’s what Newt Gingrich wants us to believe. He told Meet the Press that the Republicans can remaster all the world’s conflicts into electoral success if they make the case that Iraq’s civil war, Iran’s assertiveness, North Korea’s ominous provocations and Israel’s aggressive approach to Hezbollah and Lebanon are in reality a single eschatological narrative that only the mighty GOP can vanquish.
Presumably this call-to-arms, the honest recognition that the Third World War is here, will encourage all Americans abandon their anti-incumbent predilections and welcome a new round of civil liberties belt-tightening. “Staying the Course,” has failed so wretchedly that Bush and Rove now need to rebrand the national strategy, out of which a phoenix of Republican landslides will flutter toward the heavens. “We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,’” Gingrich told the Seattle Times. One year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been all but written out of the storyline.
When nature accomplishes what terrorists must never be permitted to do, it simply fans the fire of those who view the world through a prophetic lens, wherein the United States’ catastrophic policy towards nearly every global hot spot (not to mention natural disasters) simply validates the evangelical belief that the end is surely nigh. This time. Gingrich believes that Republicans suffer from “incumbentitis,” and have sacrificed their muscular resolve for unlimited pork. This sacrifice of core principles has permitted the incoherent opposition to jump ahead in the polls heading into November. That much is true.
In actuality, Gingrich’s demand to redouble the war effort under the most chilling rhetorical banner reveals just how far the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Robertson, and how Republican reliance on evangelical values-voters as useful idiots has metastasized into their domination of the party’s strategies. The grownups have lost complete control. The insistence that we are fighting World War Three grants a single-minded moral clarity to the grotesque ethical compromises (Guantanamo, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, domestic wiretapping) that have sullied the early War on Terrorism.
Few remember World War One (or the eerie parallel between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and Israel’s pretext for pounding Lebanon), but World War Two was a good fight through and through—internment camps be damned--according to the national meta-narrative. If all signs point to this as the struggle out of which the Antichrist could emerge, quibbles of waterboarding will disappear as the trifling distraction they should have been all along. The idea of the United States as a Christian nation performing God’s work airbrushes our peccadilloes in favor of a commanding sound byte that all normal people should be able to agree on. That is the central point of Gingrich’s remarks, with their evangelical inflection: we will no longer tolerate these nuisances.
Dissent, now that all conflicts have been amalgamated into one total war against America, reveals the dissenter to be a troop-hating traitor who probably prefers to muddy up our focus with talk of gay marriages and national health insurance, things which God would never condone. For those who hold the New York Times guilty of abetting Al-Qaeda for publishing photos of Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home after the Secret Service okayed them, Gingrich’s marketing ploy might appear long overdue. Seeing the left itself as the domestic counterpart to Islamist terrorism means no tactic is too desperate in preventing Democrats from retaking the House. Anything that connects our current debacle to the glorious wars of the past and the biblical tribulations of the near future literally must succeed, if conservatives are prepared to heed Gingrich’s warmongering and put the soul of the Republic on the line as never before. Gingrich, tired of writing Amazon.com reviews all day, might be angling for media attention in preparation for an ’08 comeback. Sensationalism in the guise of sage advice from yesterday’s king is a time-tested method. But before excoriating those who deny the “reality” of a Third World War, Gingrich might want to take a page from War Games--one of the many, many pop artifacts dealing with the unimaginable horror of WWIII, and note that the only winning move is not to play.
Presumably this call-to-arms, the honest recognition that the Third World War is here, will encourage all Americans abandon their anti-incumbent predilections and welcome a new round of civil liberties belt-tightening. “Staying the Course,” has failed so wretchedly that Bush and Rove now need to rebrand the national strategy, out of which a phoenix of Republican landslides will flutter toward the heavens. “We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,’” Gingrich told the Seattle Times. One year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been all but written out of the storyline.
When nature accomplishes what terrorists must never be permitted to do, it simply fans the fire of those who view the world through a prophetic lens, wherein the United States’ catastrophic policy towards nearly every global hot spot (not to mention natural disasters) simply validates the evangelical belief that the end is surely nigh. This time. Gingrich believes that Republicans suffer from “incumbentitis,” and have sacrificed their muscular resolve for unlimited pork. This sacrifice of core principles has permitted the incoherent opposition to jump ahead in the polls heading into November. That much is true.
In actuality, Gingrich’s demand to redouble the war effort under the most chilling rhetorical banner reveals just how far the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Robertson, and how Republican reliance on evangelical values-voters as useful idiots has metastasized into their domination of the party’s strategies. The grownups have lost complete control. The insistence that we are fighting World War Three grants a single-minded moral clarity to the grotesque ethical compromises (Guantanamo, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, domestic wiretapping) that have sullied the early War on Terrorism.
Few remember World War One (or the eerie parallel between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and Israel’s pretext for pounding Lebanon), but World War Two was a good fight through and through—internment camps be damned--according to the national meta-narrative. If all signs point to this as the struggle out of which the Antichrist could emerge, quibbles of waterboarding will disappear as the trifling distraction they should have been all along. The idea of the United States as a Christian nation performing God’s work airbrushes our peccadilloes in favor of a commanding sound byte that all normal people should be able to agree on. That is the central point of Gingrich’s remarks, with their evangelical inflection: we will no longer tolerate these nuisances.
Dissent, now that all conflicts have been amalgamated into one total war against America, reveals the dissenter to be a troop-hating traitor who probably prefers to muddy up our focus with talk of gay marriages and national health insurance, things which God would never condone. For those who hold the New York Times guilty of abetting Al-Qaeda for publishing photos of Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home after the Secret Service okayed them, Gingrich’s marketing ploy might appear long overdue. Seeing the left itself as the domestic counterpart to Islamist terrorism means no tactic is too desperate in preventing Democrats from retaking the House. Anything that connects our current debacle to the glorious wars of the past and the biblical tribulations of the near future literally must succeed, if conservatives are prepared to heed Gingrich’s warmongering and put the soul of the Republic on the line as never before. Gingrich, tired of writing Amazon.com reviews all day, might be angling for media attention in preparation for an ’08 comeback. Sensationalism in the guise of sage advice from yesterday’s king is a time-tested method. But before excoriating those who deny the “reality” of a Third World War, Gingrich might want to take a page from War Games--one of the many, many pop artifacts dealing with the unimaginable horror of WWIII, and note that the only winning move is not to play.
September 11
Hello! It's a bright and cloudless day, just as September 11ths ought to be, and now that we have these pesky moments of silence out of the way, it's time to launch another bullhorn in the wilderness: VauxhallVelcraux.blogspot.com. The place to be.
I stopped blogging two years ago today when it became apparent to me that John Kerry was going to lose. I would link to my old blog as a testament to my know-it-all-ness, but my politics have lurched leftward since those pessimistic days and I've become less of a jejunebug, so I don't want to draw attention to that particular infobahn exit ramp.
Anyway, feel free to check back periodically as I fritter away the hours, on company time, in interminable intellectual analysis. If iVillage becomes too much to bear, there's always VauxhallVelcraux.blogspot.com, a bland smokescreen for the den of nepotistic cronyism within.
I stopped blogging two years ago today when it became apparent to me that John Kerry was going to lose. I would link to my old blog as a testament to my know-it-all-ness, but my politics have lurched leftward since those pessimistic days and I've become less of a jejunebug, so I don't want to draw attention to that particular infobahn exit ramp.
Anyway, feel free to check back periodically as I fritter away the hours, on company time, in interminable intellectual analysis. If iVillage becomes too much to bear, there's always VauxhallVelcraux.blogspot.com, a bland smokescreen for the den of nepotistic cronyism within.
