I've got to steal an intro once employed by the always-sassy Some Watery Tart for this one: Bush Gall Soars to New Heights of Impertinence, Spelunks New Caverns of What-the-Fuckism.
At yesterday's—gasp!—unscripted Q&A session after an appearance in Cleveland (during which Holly of The Moderate Voice, who was listening to it live, emailed me to comment, "I am listening online to GWB's speech in Cleveland. He is NOT getting softball questions and is goofing up."), Bush made a faux pas that was a doozy even for him. Annoyed with the length of the Q&A session—and dare I suggest irritated at having to suffer face time with incontrovertible evidence that he isn't as popular as he likes to think—he blurted out, "Anybody work here in this town?"
Oof.
Think Progress (who's got the video) notes that Cleveland's unemployment rate, as well as its poverty rate, have worsened considerably under Bush's presidency, prompting the quip: "So the answer, Mr. President, is that a lot of people in Cleveland don’t work because they can’t find jobs."
Double oof.
(The hat tip goes to Griffin at 300 Dollar Wonder. Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
"Anybody work here in this town?"
Shakers... Please... All the Support You Can Give to Shakespeare's Sister is Needed...
...because I'm about to break her heart.
Smiths Reject $5 Million Reunion Offer
AUSTIN, Texas (Billboard) -- Pioneering U.K. modern rock band the Smiths turned down a $5 million offer to reunite at the upcoming Coachella Valley Arts & Music Festival in southern California, former frontman Morrissey said Thursday.I love that "triggered gasps from the audience" line. Very dramatic.
His revelation, during a public interview at the South By Southwest Music & Media Conference in Austin, triggered gasps from the audience. When journalist David Fricke asked if he had considered it, Morrissey replied, "No, because money doesn't come into it," a response that drew applause from the crowd.
Of the critically adored act, which broke up in the late 1980s, Morrissey said, "It was a fantastic journey. And then it ended. I didn't feel we should have ended. I wanted to continue. (Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr) wanted to end it. And that was that."
Morrissey will first support the album with a European tour that includes a six-week run of sold-out shows in the United Kingdom. A North American leg is also expected.
Coachella, which takes place April 29-30 about 120 miles east of Los Angeles, will feature such acts as Depeche Mode, Tool and Madonna.
At least you can see Morrissey, right Shakes?
(Don't hit me... I thought you should know...)
Question of the Day
What's your favorite magazine and why?
Mine's got to be NME, for what I'll assume are obvious reasons, although I haven't picked up an issue in a long while.
WWJS*
From the "News of the Weird" Department. Proselytizing is hitting some new lows (ba-dum-ching!) in "Wrestling For Jesus". Body slammin' for Christ, baby! Read on:
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Can professional-style wrestling really be the next frontier for Christian outreach?
Small bands of masked evangelists, clad in tights and armed with biblical names, argue it is. The violence and intensity of wrestling, they claim, can be the perfect way to attract the alternative, younger crowd.
At the beginning of some "Wrestling for Jesus" shows, wrestler Chase "Darkness" Cliett is strapped to a massive wooden cross on stage as piercing music is played. A group of evil wrestlers beats and bloodies him before the good guys dramatically come to his rescue. Later, after a horned fellow in a red suit is knocked out, the preaching begins.
It's not all fun, at one 'Wrestling For Jesus' show, a real brawl broke out that left one poor dude face-down and weeping. This isn't a new thing either, there is Christian Wrestling Federation in Texas and Ultimate Christian Wrestling based in Athens, Georgia.
Very....interesting. Indeed.
*=Who Would Jesus Slam?
(hat tip to Pam)
Strategery
In response to my post on Feingold’s censure resolution, wherein I reveal that I have one good nerve left and everyone who keeps implying that I just don’t understand The Big Picture is gettin' on it, Neil the Ethical Werewolf (who, it should be noted, is not someone at whom I’m directing my ire regarding tendencies toward condescension; Neil and I manage to disagree, on the rare occasions we do, quite agreeably) replies:
As you know, I have mildly positive feelings towards this censure thing. But let me make it clear what Reid, Pelosi, and the rest of the big folks are thinking.Having an actual advantage on the issues does not automatically translate into having the perceived advantage, which is a lesson the chronically marketing-impaired Democrats never seem to learn. But I digress. Back to Neil:
Look at the issues currently on the table. Polls show us winning 60-30 on Iraq. Lots of states have minimum wage initiatives that have 80% support. We're perfectly set up to whack the administration on port security. Nobody likes corruption, and that looks to be the big story of this election cycle. Then there's all the cuts in college money and veterans' benefits, which are similarly hated by the entire American public.
In short, we have huge advantages on everything else that's on the table.
So why expend effort introducing an issue where we have a slight advantage (if any), rather than twisting knives we've already sunk into the Bush Administration? And realize that this is a "rather than" issue. A minority party has limited resources to control the debate.I’m not convinced it needs to be an either-or issue, particularly when Feingold’s introduction of a censure resolution was, for all intents and purposes, free, and it generated a lot of press coverage, which seems to bring the Dems out ahead, resources-wise. If the unfortunate spinelessness of the rest of his party hadn’t necessitated their disavowing his proposal or damning it with faint praise, the Dems wouldn’t have halted their own possible momentum yet again. That’s not Feingold’s fault for circumventing the party; that’s the party’s fault for shying away from bold maneuvers and leaving a void that someone needs to fill. Ultimately, what this argument comes down to is whether Feingold was right or wrong to fill that void in the way he did, when he did. And one’s answer to that question is likely predicated on one’s impression of what else the Democrats are doing. Neil continues:
In short, we're not arguing for inaction. We're arguing for action everywhere else. Take a look at the ads that Rahm Emmanuel wants to buy. Let's make the elections about those things, because there are easy wins there.As I said, I’m open to persuasion, so I went ahead and took a look, as requested, and I found:
Just as Harry Truman ran against the "Do-Nothing Congress," Democrats will run against the "Rubber-Stamp Congress," which pimped for K Street, took a dive on its critical oversight duties (particularly on Iraq) and helped the president bankrupt the country by shoveling money toward the rich.Clunk. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Emanuel won't say yet which votes supporting Bush he plans to wrap around the necks of incumbents. But look for gut-punch ads that highlight the incumbents' 90-plus percent backing for Bush on issues like cuts in college loans and veterans benefits, privatizing Social Security, selling out to Big Pharma on prescription drugs and halting stem-cell research. Republicans are now scurrying away from Bush, but it may be too late. They can't take those roll-call votes back.
The only way I could be less enthusiastic about that is if I were dead, which, ironically, may be Democrats’ new ploy to squelch a lack of enthusiasm among progressives, because that plan nearly killed me with boredom. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
One of the Democrats’ most unattractive features is their bull-headed insistence that being right on the issues is all that matters, and someday Americans will wake up and start making the distinctions about specific policy that the Democrats want them to make. I expect any day to be issued a mind-numbingly tedious rulebook outlining exacting how I’m supposed to respond to the Democrats’ campaigns, because they seem immutably resistant to the idea that candidates are meant to campaign in a way that appeals to voters.
That’s not to say I disagree with the above-described campaign plan, but it can’t be the only—or even the main—plan. We aren’t living in a world of highly engaged, nuance-interested voters, nor in a world where knowing a candidate voted “wrong” on an issue or two about which one cares automatically means that candidate will become unappealing enough to vote against. If we were, Kerry would have won. It’s just that simple.
As repellent as the notion may be that voters are looking for some pizzazz—call it balls, call it a show of strength, call it a grand gesture; it doesn’t matter—turning up one’s nose at the reality that it’s going to take more than plodding rightness to win elections doesn’t make it not so. The longer the Dems fail to provide something to vote for, rather than relying upon our votes against a more odious alternative, the greater our diffidence.
Given what the American people already know, it's going to be a lot easier to whack the GOP as the party that screwed up Iraq and is massively corrupt, than as the party that lets the president break the law. So let's take the obvious route to victory.I get where this sentiment is coming from; I do. Yet, more than anything, it calls to mind the dull and dreary high school comp classes where I learned to write a term paper. Thesis, body, conclusion. No rhetorical questions. Never start a sentence with and or but. This is what they expect in college. If you’re going to succeed, you’ve got to do it right. I got As in those classes, because I did it they way they expected, but when I got to university, I sat before wild-haired professors who smoked in class, and took the class outdoors on sunny days, and wrote on the cinderblock walls when the chalkboard got full. They, I thought, didn’t want a paper that was right; they wanted a paper that was interesting.
I used music magazines as my sources; I went over the word limit; I buried my thesis in the middle of the second paragraph; I put in photos; I wrote with passion and threw technique to the wind. I still got my A, and my professors thanked me being a breath of fresh air.
Sometimes being right just isn’t enough without being interesting. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde—who may not have been a great political mind, but certainly knew a lot about people—there’s no such thing as good or bad; just the charming or the tedious.
monday amusement
Also known as: “Whiny little brats grow up to be whiny little bitches”.
Whiny little kids grow up to become conservatives. No, seriously, that’s what a recent study found (and it’s not the only study which has come to this conclusion). Anyway, the most recent study:
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.
Ha! More details:
In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it’s unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.
A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
Like I said, this isn’t the only long-term study that has come to this conlusion. One was released in 2003 from another team—and guess what happened? There was a Congressional investigation into their research funding. Whiny and insecure? You betcha! It was John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues that time. They reviewed forty-four years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that: "people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism".
The article author tried to make-nice with conservatives, telling them to “look on the bright side” and interpret the findings of Berkeley study differently: conservatives can be seen as “morally certain” people who have “recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place” and liberals have “poor impulse control” and liberal men are “self-indulgent and ineffectual”. Hmmmm. Nah, don’t think so. Thank you, come again!
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. Many kids I went to school with who were spiteful, intolerant, and judgemental have become conservatives.
(Shakes says cross-post and I say "yes, ma'am!" ;-))
Two Americas
There’s the one that the President likes to talk about, where the economy is booming, joblessness is down, No Child is left behind, we’re winning the war in Iraq, the Medicare bill helps people not corporations, trickle-down economics works, our oil addiction is a new concept, human-animal hybrids are of serious concern, the GOP has a big tent, America is really free and really a democracy, unicorn piss will fuel our flying SUVs of the future, and he’s popular.
Then there’s this one.
Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men…This is not a party-specific problem; the Dems haven’t done much better than the GOP at addressing these issues, particularly the endemic poverty which underlies them all, but they’ve worsened under Bush—and he’s the man in charge at the moment, so I’m looking squarely at him. The least he could do is stop wandering about in la-la land, pull his head out, and start talking about this stuff.
By 2004, [the share of jobless black male high school dropouts in their 20's] had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.
And yeah—I know that’s about as likely to happen as all of us waking up on the moon tomorrow, but I’m not going to let the soft bigotry of low expectations stop me from calling on my president to do his bloody job and start caring about the Americans who need his help. Putting his head in the sand about the very real inequalities this nation of alleged equality is experiencing is a good way to avoid confronting it, but just because he can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s gone away. The solutions are complex, but such complexity warrants greater attention, rather than the helpless sense of futility with which he seemingly continues to greet these ever-worsening problems.
We’re Not Useless! We’re Soulless Corporatists, Too!
In an interesting post about the fecklessness of newspaper editors on the subject of The War, Mannion rather cheekily refers to Generation X as “the Most Useless Generation Ever.”
Harrumph.
My mind slipped into a fuzzy malaise at the notion that my peers and I were so utterly lackluster, our angst having paralyzed us with an apathy so resolute as to proscribe mounting a genuine challenge to the Boomers, whom Mannion deemed “the Worst Generation Ever.” Surely, we could be just as bad…couldn’t we?
Everywhere I looked was evidence that Mannion was right. We voted for Bush in fewer numbers, we’re more interested in balancing family and career, we’re less bigoted, we’re more environmentally-minded; the list goes on and on. This whole generational progressivism was really boding badly for us (Generation Y is even further off the Worst mark). But then I stumbled across evidence that, given time, we will indeed be just as heartless, soulless, and—most importantly—devoid of all traces of our youthful idealism as the Boomers.
Fear not, my Gen X compatriots—we have turned one of our tragic icons into a dolly.
While Kurt Cobain may no longer be part of the corporeal world, his words, voice, music, and attitude can still be felt today thanks to the full albums, videos, and unheard of amount of bootlegs left behind. Sure, there are still some songs here and there that diehard Nirvana fans may have not been able to get in its finest form of clarity, and we are still waiting for an official DVD release that catalogs all their music videos, but the one thing that many fans have been asking for and have never received in ANY form, official or not, is an action figure. Many other musical icons have been brought to plastic and NECA is proud to be able to bring that same respect and admiration to Kurt Cobain's memory with our figure.Mmmmmmm. Smells like splitting stock, baby.
Based on his appearance in the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" this Kurt Cobain Action figure includes his guitar, rendered in painstaking detail, and part of the gymnasium floor as his base. Be on the lookout for Kurt to stand with his guitar again on store shelves late in June. Here is our first look at our "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Kurt Cobain.
What better way to crush the memory of a man haunted by the commodification of his art than by mass producing his very visage? It’s the ultimate in ironic avarice.
Take that, Boomers! In. Your. Face.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You…
Susan Sarandon is set to portray Cindy Sheehan in a biopic.
Coming soon to a television set near you: Bill O’Reilly’s head exploding.
Go Feingold!
Pam reports, in a post aptly titled Another Dem spine confirmed, that Russ Feingold, he of the Censure Resolution and Lone Vote Against the Patriot Act, will be speaking at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Leadership Awards.
Let's hope Russ finds the language and framing of fairness to teach some of his fellow party weasels that they don't have to hide and cower from a public discussion of civil equality. We'll be paying attention.Seconded.
Don’t be a Feminist; Be Happy!
A recent Slate article reported with some hand-wringing that “women who strongly identify as progressive—the 15 percent who agree most with feminist ideals—have a harder time being happy than their peers.” Oh, woe is we. I’m tempted to simply snark, “I think we covered this ground in The Matrix” and leave it at that, but I’ll give it a little time.
The Happy Feminist wisely points out that it’s the wrong question.
We never see articles that talk about whether democracy will make the Iraqis happy or whether equal rights for African-Americans have made them happy or whether our civil liberties make us Americans happy. I don't think those who fought the American Revolution said to themselves, "Wouldn't we be happier if we simply accepted taxation without representation rather than fighting this rather unpleasant war?"This is all true. But even though it’s certainly the wrong question, it’s a distinctly American one. We say that money can’t buy happiness, but no one can accuse us of not bloody trying! Happy Birthday—here are some presents! Happy Holidays—here are some more presents! Feeling down? Buy some happy pills! Need a vacation? Heck—the Happiest Place on Earth is right here on our shores! We’re pathologically determined to be happy, and if you’re not…well, what the hell is wrong with you?
To frame the effectiveness of feminism in terms of whether it makes women happy is just one more way of patronizing women.
There are those people who can’t imagine that to be an American can be anything but being happy. (These tend to be people for whom the term “ignorance is bliss” was coined, people who will ignore all sorts of ugliness—including and especially their own struggles—because if you chant “USA! USA!” while secretly harboring doubts about the totality of your happiness, it makes the baby Jesus cry.) I’ve had conversations with Americans who assert something quite close to an obligation to be happy. Why, it’s right there in the Declaration of Independence!
One might note that the clause to which they are referring is the guarantee to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Not happiness, but its pursuit. Therein lies the key to the whole feminism conundrum. Feminism is the pursuit of equality, the push for an egalitarianism that would, in its way, be a very pleasant kind of happiness. And that makes it quite decidedly American, perhaps more so than ignoring the necessity of struggle implicit in our framers’ words.
In truth, if Americans did a little less worrying about what makes us happy, and paid a bit more attention to those other two concepts, we’d probably all find happiness more readily within our collective reach. Sometimes being stuck in the muck is unpleasant, but there’s something to be said for the personal satisfaction derived of the social conscience that empathy fuels. The problem is that too many of us who express—and maybe even genuinely find—happiness in this country, do it at the expense of the happiness of others.
In the interest of fairness and balance, let’s all agree that homosexuality is bad.
At minimum, let’s agree that there are plenty of religious people who think it’s bad, and that their children have every right to make that point in public schools.
When people are this far apart, every act by one side is seen as a hostile move by the other. A "Day of Silence" to protest treatment of gays and lesbians is now followed by a "Day of Truth" to promote conservative religious views of homosexuality. A T-shirt proclaiming "Straight Pride" is worn to counter one professing "Gay Pride." These differences are deep and difficult to negotiate.You know, I’m automatically suspicious of any article written by someone who’s authored a book called Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in Public Schools, but I gave it a fair shot. Yet here, in the third paragraph, we’re already being asked to treat “Day of Silence,” which protests the treatment of the LGBT community—see: Matthew Shepard, who was robbed, beaten, tied to a fence with his own shoelaces, and left to die—with the same respect as “Day of Truth,” which serves no purpose (by the admission of its purveyor, the Alliance Defense Fund) other than to promulgate propaganda about a homosexual agenda.
Yes, those differences are deep. One is about tolerance and respect. One is about ignorance and hostility. One is about actual persecution. One is about a persecution complex.
For the process to work, school officials must be fair, honest brokers of a dialogue that involves all stakeholders. That means, first and foremost, that school leaders must refrain from choosing sides in the culture-war debate over homosexuality. If schools are going to find agreement on policies and practices that bring the community together, it won't be by taking a side and coercing others to accept it.The only reason that someone, in this day and age, can get away with suggesting that public schools shouldn’t “choose sides” in a “culture-war debate over homosexuality” is because we have a government that flatly refuses to enact federal protections on behalf of the LGBT community. Consider how ridiculous it would sound to argue that schools shouldn’t choose sides about racism or sexism or hostility toward people with disabilities. It’s not that there aren’t white supremacists or misogynists or people who complain bitterly about disabled parking and ADA code requirements who have kids in schools that have been indoctrinated into their views, but they aren’t arguing to allow their kids to spout off racial separatist garbage, for example, because the law protects minorities, so they know they’d lose. Public schools aren’t required to remain neutral on these other issues—even though there are people who cite religion as the source for their retrograde notions. Not so very long ago, religion was invoked with regularity as a defense of racism, even among the mainstream. It wasn’t right then, and it’s not right now, irrespective of the underlying issue. The difference is that we have chosen to protect some people by law and have left others vulnerable to attack because we don’t consider them worthy of the same legal protections.
To avoid divisive fights and lawsuits, educators and parents must agree on civic ground rules to ensure fairness for all sides. After all, public schools belong to everyone. However deeply we disagree about homosexuality, the vast majority of us want schools to uphold the rights of all students in a safe learning environment.Again, consider the absurdity if this were an argument for protecting the right of a student to argue for racial segregation. Would anyone take seriously the notion that a racist student’s right to grandstand his separatist views in a public school should be given equal consideration to a minority student’s right to attend a public school without being subjected to such harassment? My rights end where yours begin. A student has a right to express anti-gay sentiments from here to Kingdom Come, unless and until it begins to encroach upon another student’s right to be free of harassment. Within the confines of a public school, that space becomes severely limited. I can’t help but balk at the suggestion of someone who asserts an interest in seeing “schools uphold the rights of all students in a safe learning environment,” that we must necessarily (but—shrug—unavoidably) create a hostile environment for gay students in order to protect the rights of anti-gay students. It’s so easy to lay out the theory without considering the real-world effect on gay students of being subjected to didactic, anti-gay screeds from their classmates. And while it may be fun to pretend that preventing homobigot students from putting their bigotry on public display is just as psychologically damaging, I hardly think restricting the espousing of their philosophy to the other 16 hours of the day when they’re not in school will render their delicate souls irreparably shattered.
It isn't possible for us to reach ideological or religious consensus, but it is possible - and necessary - to reach civic consensus on civil dialogue.I am, as ever, irritated by the subtle implications that this debate comes down to the morality firmly rooted in religion versus immorality rooted in religion’s void. Religion is not the singular source of morality, and so it should not be given special dispensation for its insertion into public debates, as if leaving out religion leaves out morality altogether. Civil dialogue would indeed be great, but in reality, it simply cannot include allowing students to parade around in “Day of Truth” t-shirts, handing out literature about the homosexual agenda, or giving “diversity week” speeches about how the Roman Catholic church thinks homosexuality is wrong. There’s nothing “civil” about any of those things, no matter how politely the shit is shoveled.
Perhaps what bothers me most, however, about this whole thing is the notion that has reared its ugly head in the evolution v. intelligent design fight, too—that religion has just as much place in public schools as science. Religion—and religion only—tells us that homosexuality is an immoral choice. Science tells us that homosexuality is natural and immutable. Public schools are meant to be interested in science, not religion. And as science does not accommodate this debate, neither should our public schools.
Blog down, blog down!
My weblog is down this morning, and my personal and blog-affiliated email with it. This sort of blackout has happened a couple of times under my current hosting regime (once for some hiccup with my credit card, and again due to a comment spam-induced traffic spike). Still a far cry from the bad old days and the bad old host, where blog outages were more common and customer support a mere rumor. I am assured by my current host that a "highly trained staff of technical professionals is working to restore service as quickly as possible." Can't ask for more than that, I guess.
It's my reaction to being sans weblog that's more interesting to me than the outage itself, however. Frankly, I'm feeling pretty good about not having the obligation of blogging hanging overhead - and I don't mean to whine about obligation as though burdened by the demands of a voracious readership (which I'm pretty sure is not the case). It's just that it seems suddenly quieter here without the blog, more tranquil. It's like a little bank holiday.
Previous blog-outages have found me much less sanguine, mind you. I've paced and hyperventilated my way through many a past blackout, obsessively clicking 'refresh' on the home URL and seething as the hated error message returns: "The connection was refused when attempting to contact www.waveflux.net." Grrrr.
An annoying aspect of BARS (blog access removal syndrome) is the sudden inaccessibility of ye olde handy blogroll. Honestly, the real reason for keeping a blogroll is for your own convenience rather than that of your visitors. For some reason, I prefer that to having the list bookmarked in my own browser. Of course, this makes sense only if you're the kind of person who always has a tab open to his or her weblog. But that's hardly uncommon. There are lots of us out there...uh, aren't there?
I guess the most frustrating thing about having your site go black is the feeling of being suddenly sidelined and silenced. As Robert Silvey once observed, "So much injustice, so many dangers, so little time." Or, as the sarge who wasn't Michael Conrad used to say when dismissing the patrolmen on Hill Street Blues: "They're gettin' away out there!" Who's got time for a blackout?
Of course, I'm not feeling much of that kind of tension just now. It could be because I have the luxury of guess access here at Shakes Sis. Hmm. I shall have to think about that while I've got all this extra time on my hands.
A Tale of Two Headlines
On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success
On the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by now, President Bush and senior officials argued Sunday that their strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq, even as a former Iraqi prime minister once favored by the White House declared that a civil war had already started.Change of heartland: On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, many Indianians are no longer strongly behind the war
Displaying a carefully calibrated mix of optimism about eventual victory and caution about how long American troops would be involved, the officials who marked the day — including Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld — sounded much as they had on the first anniversary of the invasion.
The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion unleashed a surge of pessimism at a local farmers' market here, where stalwart Republicans, standing amid aisles of produce and miracle cures, said President Bush has messed up a war that looks more like Vietnam every day.The president and the rest of his administration have had a total break with reality—not just the reality on the ground in Iraq as reported by everyone without a political agenda, but the reality on the ground in America. Their little trick of simply repeating something ad infinitum until it becomes “the truth” doesn’t work anymore. They’ve abused it into ineffectuality. All they’ve got left is their idiot core who would keep supporting BushCo. even if they bombed the Blue States just to shut the yaps of those nasty liberals, declared martial law, and chose a goat-fucking pavilion as the sight for the photo op to announce their coup. No one else believes a word any of them say anymore. And they don’t realize it. They seem completely unaware that they look like total and complete assholes. The rest of us, however, are painfully aware of the reality they choose to ignore. (Thanks to Oddjob for the second link.)
''It's chaos," said Roger Madaras, who voted twice for Bush. ''How many more people are going to be killed? We were going in to free the people of Iraq, but as far as I'm concerned, a lot of them are worse off today than they were under the dictatorship."
Madaras, the owner of a plumbing company, said he believed Bush when the president declared major combat to be over in May 2003, and is ''disgusted" that Bush's rhetoric was hollow.
More on Feingold
Once upon a time, he was the wild-eyed nut who was loony enough to cast the lone vote against the Patriot Act. Just saying.
Digby:
Grover Norquist really understands Washington. When asked what he thought would create more social comity between the parties he wasn't just being cute:Is it too much to ask, at this point, not why Feingold has introduced a censure resolution without getting permission from his party, but instead why his party didn’t introduce it a long time ago? Is it too much to ask, rather than castigating Feingold for making a bold move without his party’s support, that instead we look at his party and demand to know why their support wasn’t assured?Rock-ribbed Republican Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, proffered a solution, tell[s] us that Democrats must accept the finality of their powerlessness. "Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such."He was showing a deep understanding of how today's political establishment works. The DC pundit-strategist class have "accepted the finality of Democratic powerlessness." People like Marshall Wittman and Eleanor Clift are telling the rest of us to do it too. Remember the GOP is the "daddy party" and you all know what he's like when he get's mad. Don't make trouble…
If the Democrats lose in November, I'm sure [Clift will] find plenty of reasons to blame Democrats, but it won't occur to her that the reason people didn't vote for the D's was because the party listened to people like her and campaigned like a herd of neutered animals instead of listening to their hearts, their minds, their constituents and their leaders who were prepared to take a stand for what we believe in. No, they'll blame the "extremists" who want a safety net and a sane terrorism policy --- and leaders who defend the constitution. It couldn't possibly be that their tired, stale reflexive passivity is to blame when half the base fails to turn out because they just. have. no. hope.
If saying, “I’m bloody grateful that someone is trying to do something” makes me unsophisticated, shows my simple mind for what it is, that’s fine with me. Call me crude; call me a dullard; call me a radical; call me anything you like. I don’t really give a flying shit. Because if after spending my days immersed in news and politics, my vacant, irrational mind can’t wrap itself around the intricate processes of politics that makes doing nothing the smart thing, and my woefully inadequate powers of perception can’t help me translate what appears to be slack-jawed passivity into the brilliant political strategy it actually is, then the Dems have a real problem on their hands.
Telling me repeatedly what a naïve little fool I am isn’t convincing me. It’s only pissing me off. And, boy, I’m trying to see the folly of my ways. I’m making a concerted effort to understand exactly what the elaborate and clever plan is that I just keep missing. But there’s a whole country of people out there who give it approximately one-billionth of the effort I do, and, as it happens, lots of them support censuring Bush, and none too few of them are wondering what the hell is the problem here. And what that leaves us with is a whole lot of people who apparently just can’t get their insignificant, empty, useless heads around your strategy. So on behalf of we legions of numbskulls, let me just suggest that perhaps your brilliant strategy is simply too brilliant. We’re just too dumb to get the subtle nuances that facilitate an understanding of how inaction=action.
Maybe you’ve got to bring it down a peg. Indulge our small- and literal-mindedness and try action=action.
Conversely, continue to condescend and pat us on the heads and trust that we’ll trust you. Bush has certainly showed us that blind faith in politicians who exhort patience and trust, because they know best, is a great idea.
The Direction of Feingold’s Message
Neil the Ethical Werewolf has an interesting piece up over at Ezra’s place looking at whether Feingold screwed up by circumventing the Democratic Party leadership in presenting his censure resolution.
As a piece of personal political strategy, it was pretty darned good. I just wish Russ Feingold would just use that sort of smart tactical thinking on behalf of his party, and his country, rather than himself.I certainly don't disagree with the sentiment behind this statement, although I believe it's predicated on an assumption that the Democrats are genuinely interested in getting behind smart tactical thinking of a bold nature—of which I've seen precious little evidence lately. I'm not convinced (though I'm open to persuasion) that, had Feingold gone through Harry Reid, he would have ended up with “a bunch of Democrats standing behind him.” I get the sense, instead, that he would have been roundly discouraged from pursuing this strategy altogether.
Depending on one’s opinion of the merits of his censure motion, that might have been a good thing, but there may be more to look at here aside from its intrinsic value dependent upon the likelihood of its success. At whom was Feingold’s message really directed? The resolution itself was clearly directed at Bush, and more generally at the GOP who facilitate his dirty deeds. But if there is, as I suspect, some truth to the idea that Feingold would have been left sans party support irrespective of his decision to work through party channels or go it alone, perhaps there was a message being sent to his own party, as well.
Sure, it’s sad that they lack the minimal level of instinct that it takes to fight and win on the fly. Similarly, it’s sad that some people are missing legs. But we don’t take away their crutches.Maybe it’s not that Feingold was taking away the crutches from legless people, but trying to remind them that legless people don’t need crutches. Maybe he was trying to say, just because we’ve been cut off at the knees doesn’t mean we’ll never walk again.
What do you think?
(Crossposted at Ezra’s place.)
BYOC*
According to the Revealer: “The War on Christians conference is coming to D.C., featuring a modified-A-list of conservative heavyweights organized by Vision America, including Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, Sen. John Cornyn, Phyllis Schlafly, Sen. Sam Brownback and Rep. Tom DeLay, as well as some Jews...”The War on Christians? You’ve got to be kidding me. Forget believing their own press; these dingbats believe their own framing. Apparently, they’ve spent so much time warbling on about how the pro-choice crowd is “pro-abortion” and the gay rights crowd has a “radical gay agenda” that they’ve begun to believe that there really is a war against them, that we’re fixing to knock down their doors so we can forcibly abort their fetuses and compel them to engage in sexual acts with members of the same sex. Well, here’s a quick reality check: All we want is the right to do what we want to do. You don’t have to do it. Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t marry a gay person. How the fuck hard is it, folks?
With enlightening, pre-enlightenment panels like The Judiciary: Overruling God, and The Gay Agenda: America Won't Be Happy, these Crusaders come to DC to stand up for the rights of the downtrodden 77%.
And Jews joining the idiocracy? Well, take a gander at the list and you'll find a handful of less-than-mainstream Jews lending their names to the cause. Start with Rabbi Aryeh Spero who campaigned for anti-Semite Pat Buchanan and who breaks bread with another Jew-hater, Bill Donohue. The folks here lend about as much ecumenism to this conference as Zell Miller lends to a bipartisan panel.
These people are absolute lunatics; they have had a complete break with reality. And any elected official who supports this categorical balderdash about the judiciary “overruling” god is committing treason, plain and simple. They are quite literally betraying a fundamental principle upon which this nation was founded as laid out in the Constitution, which they swore to uphold. I’m tired of pussyfooting around this bullshit. They’re angling for a theocracy, and that’s patently unacceptable. Cornyn, Brownback, DeLay, and any of their godshill compatriots who support this bullshit need to be immediately censured and removed from Congress if they cannot commit to upholding the separation of church and state as they are required to do.
Of course that will never happen in this fine country of ours, because nowadays left is right, and up is down, and good is evil, and black is white, and The War on Christians is really The Dominionists’ War on the Rest of Us.
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trapped in the closet
Some showbiz gossip for Friday....
Talking about favorite Hollywood nutball, Tom Cruise. And, no, not The Closet™ (speculation aside)--I'm talking about South Park and its episode that poked at Scientology. If you recall, Isaac Hayes recently quit the show over the episode. Screwy Cruise jumped on Paramount's couch in a temper tantrum over the show and got them to pull it. From Page Six:
March 17, 2006 -- HOLLYWOOD bully Tom Cruise got Comedy Central to cancel Wednesday night's cablecast of a controversial "South Park" episode about Scientology by warning that he'd refuse to promote "Mission Impossible 3," insiders say.
Since Paramount is banking on "MI3" to rake in blockbuster profits this summer, and Paramount is owned by Viacom, which also owns Comedy Central, the tactic worked.
The "South Park" episode, "Trapped in the Closet," pokes fun at Scientology and shows Cruise, John Travolta and R. Kelly (who is not a Scientologist, but has a song called "Trapped in the Closet") literally in a closet.
ABC is also covering this weird little story.
