Bush on the Plame affair:
“And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of. … I don’t know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate action.”
And yet, gosh, it turns out: Bush Authorized Plamegate Leak
Bush on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto:
“The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy. Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice.”
And we have learned by now that the only possible way to discern truth from the mouth of Bush is to take what he says and state it in the exact opposite.
(So the above quote could be translated as: “I strongly applaud this brave act by life-loving centrists who are trying to sustain Pakistan’s brutal dictatorship. Those who committed this great deed must be made exempt from the rule of law.”)
Only possible conclusion: Bush ordered the assassination of Bhutto.
(Well, at least he got the “murderous extremists” part right — that’s the most succinct description of his administration I’ve read yet.)
Republicans have been getting a lot of stick lately for their so-called crimes. I mean, sure, they steal elections, gut the constitution they were sworn to uphold, start costly, unnecessary wars that throw nations into tumult, squander our nation’s reputation and kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to enrich themselves, loot the treasury, place bonehead incompetents in high positions of power and influence, shoot men in the face then demand they apologize, cackle at the destruction of American cities, flout the Geneva Convention, politicize religion, children and anything else they think will benefit them, hypocritically pass anti-gay legislation while acting as closet gays, disregard the Bill of Rights in order to erode whatever civil liberties they think will gain them more power, but at least no one can say that a Republican would torture a stray dog, hang it by its neck over a tree limb, slit its throat and then stone it to death.
What’s that you say?
Hit her, baby, one more time
In response to yesterday’s post, Anonymous writes —
“Why would Britney”… is already the wrong approach and question. Why do you see an individual reasoning? This is no play. “Britney”, as one can see from Moore’s film, is an idiot, in the real sense of the word. Really, nothing personal, she is. How many interviews and subsequent white-trashtastic failures does it take to show over the YEARS, the chances to prove after her mother-managed first years that she understood anything, are gone. We talk about a “poor” girl who is rumoured to make 700thou a MONTH without doing anything. Such is the sublime banality of the U.S. media culture.
This comment interests me. Anonymous’s anger here is palpable, and reflects some of the strong feelings I’ve been hearing about Ms. Spears’s attempted comeback (including another long piece in the New York Times today). Any artist who makes people this angry must be worthy of some kind of attention.
So let’s examine this comment a little more closely.
Spears’s individuality, in Anonymous’s opinion, hinges on the fact of her supposed idiocy. If I’m reading this correctly, what Anonymous seems to be saying is that Britney is too stupid to have a successful career on her own, that she has been managed and packaged and handled and promoted and, if left to her own devices, would be unable to string two words together or feed herself properly.
Well, let me just say that I have no problem with that. I don’t demand that artists be scholars, or even particularly bright. I don’t care if they are drooling morons, as long as they have something to contribute to our culture. Elvis Presley had trouble with food, drugs and sex, Frank Sinatra was an alcoholic, woman-beating psychopath, Chuck Berry was a pathetic degenerate and Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin. None of these guys would ever make it at the Algonquin round table, but each one of them is a sublime, significant American artist.
So what is eating Anonymous? Spears’s “idiocy” is related, in the poster’s mind, to her “white-trashtastic failures.” So it’s a class thing then perhaps, Anonymous is upset not because a pop-star is a failure, but because she is betraying her “class.” I personally don’t know Spears’s background so I don’t know if she’s reverting to her white-trash roots or not. But let’s bring up Elvis again, since Spears decided to the other night it seems fair game. Elvis Presley was renowned for what Anonymous would call “white-trashtastic failures.” In Elvis’s mind, he was always and forever a white-trash truck-driver who got lucky, and his subsequent actions reflect that. He had terrible taste in clothes, food and manners, and behaved in the most garish, uncouth and barbaric ways, so much so that, by the end of his life, his personal tastes had completely overshadowed his substantial musical legacy. So I, for one, am still unconvinced by Anonymous’s argument — I don’t need my artists to be refined sophisticates any more than I need them to be scholars.
Next, Anonymous is outraged by Spears’s alleged income. This I can reject out of hand — you sing a super-hit song, you get millions of dollars. That’s the way it goes. I may like the song, I may not (and in the case of Spears, I couldn’t even hum it for you), but if people bought her music, she deserves the money. Lots of popular artists make art I don’t cotton to that other people do — I see nothing wrong here.
But now, Anonymous’s argument gets interesting. “The sublime banality of the US media culture.” Ah, so, it’s a national problem — Spears is a symptom of some sort of larger national disgrace.
Anonymous has, I think, hit on something here. We here in the US have been living through six years of utter bullshit, not unlike the England of Orwell’s 1984. We have been told, day after day, for six years, things that everyone can plainly see are untrue. This has produced a kind of national nausea, we’re like a nation of abused children being ruled by bullies who want to punch anybody who wears glasses, and a media culture who will snigger along with the bullies as they beat up the nerds and laugh at all their pranks. We know the Bush administration was wrong in their response to 9/11, we know they lied to us about Iraq, we know they abused the darkest moment of our recent national history in the most cynical and heartless way possible to gut our constitution and ransack our national treasury. We took five years of that and then elected a Democratic congress, who has, so far, done precisely nothing that we asked them to do. We, as a people, feel powerless and bitterly, bitterly frustrated after six years of being ruled by cruel, brutal monsters who are aware of every moment of our agony and laugh to each other about it, slap each other on the back and say “Heckuva job.”
We feel like we can’t do anything about Bush or the media who writes down every stupid lie he utters as though it is truth and common sense. We can, however, do something about Britney Spears, who, as Anonymous says, is, like Bush, an idiot, a puppet controlled by a machine, raking in cash, promoted by our national media, made famous for her embarrassing “white-trash” pratfalls while the rest of us suffer. We can’t get Bush out of office, but we can destroy the career of Britney Spears.
I must admit, I was baffled by the Times headline today — “Spears’s Awards Fiasco Stirs Speculation About Her Future.” I thought, really? Speculation about her future? From who? Why? Who cares? Why is this in the New York Times?
And I realized, this isn’t about Spears at all, this is about Bush, or rather, it is about our national health. Spears, we have decided, no longer deserves the fame and wealth we heaped upon her — she has betrayed us. Given the perfect context and opportunity for a “comeback,” she flubbed it — took the TV time and the money, stumbled as badly through her routine as Bush stumbles through a simple declarative English sentence, and said “now give me my career back.” We’ve had six years of this bullshit and we’re not going to take it any more.
(The timing could not have been worse, putting on this non-show so close to the anniversary of 9/11, and with the Petraeus testimony looming the next day. We as a nation were at our highest level of shame, disgust and anger toward our elected officials that night. What if Spears had triumphed? She could have truly “come back” in the Elvis sense, been a truly popular artist who does what a truly popular (that is, “of the people”) artist does — she could have taken the anxieties, hopes and dreams of a nation and crystallized them into a pure pop moment of power, hope and, sure, why not, sex — man, what a show that would have been! Why, that would have been like Elvis Presley getting his act together and proving himself for his Christmas special in — what year was that again? oh yeah, 1968, the high-water year of Vietnam and the year the entire world rioted. See, that’s what was riding on Elvis in 68, that’s why he closed the show with “If I Can Dream” — his message was “Hey, World, I pulled it together, I lost the weight, I regained my focus, and I deeply care — why can’t you?”)
What was the name of Spears’s song on Sunday? Oh yes — “Gimme More” — the chant of the Bush administration. Why wasn’t the song called “Four More Years?” Britney demanded more, just as Bush has demanded more — more of the middle-class’s money, more of the poor’s children, more of our national dignity, all without giving us anything in return. We cannot rebel against a grinning moron who controls the courts, the Congress and the media, but by gum we can certainly rebel against a stumbling buffoon who demands that we watch a lame, three-minute dance routine. Not to sound too much like the hysterical young man now, doubtless, famous on Youtube for his impassioned defense, but I suspect that Britney is now dying for the sins of Bush.
Fred Thompson
Fred Thompson: good actor.
Look. I like Fred Thompson. I liked him in Marie, I liked him in Die Hard 2, I liked him in Cape Fear, I liked him on Law & Order. I know nothing about his political career, but all it takes is a sentence like this to allow me to completely write him off as any kind of serious candidate:
“Republican Fred Thompson said Friday that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is “more symbolism than anything else” as the presidential hopeful warned of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States.”
Got that? Osama bin Laden is not a criminal, or a terrorist, or a person, or a freedom fighter, or a psychopath, or the leader of a terrorist organization, or the murderer of 3000 Americans on our own soil, or any other concrete appellation you could give him — he’s a symbol. He’s a symbol instead of a person.
Why would Fred Thompson characterize him thus? Because you can fight a symbol forever and never win, while a person you could hunt down and capture and bring to trial. Which, by the way, Bush failed to do.
(Why did Bush fail to do this? Conventional wisdom says he could have captured bin Laden but “got distracted” by Iraq at a crucial moment and let him go. Personally, I don’t think Bush ever wanted to capture bin Laden — that would be accomplishing something, and would make a lot of his Arab friends angry. Better to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and is not a theocracy — the better to create his world of endless war and profits.)
Now then, that’s just the first part of the sentence. Bin Laden is “more symbolism than anything else,” not a big deal, not worth going after, not worth thinking about, nothing to see here, move along, move along. But then, without even pausing for a breath, Thompson goes on to “warn of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States.” Yes, exactly. No, we’re not going to pursue bin Laden because frankly, who cares, he’s not important, he’s just a symbol, but for god’s sake YOU MUST ELECT A REPUBLICAN, OTHERWISE AL- QAIDA WILL KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP!!
The fact that this blatantly deceptive, manipulative crap is reported without comment, of course, is another matter altogether.
Bartholomew and the Oobleck
click for larger view
Bartholomew and the Oobleck, for the uninitiated, is about a king who gets bored with the weather and commands his creepy magicians to make something new come down from the sky. As I read the first part of this story to my kids tonight, my son Sam (6) interrupted me to ask “Is that really a good idea?”
Oobleck was published in 1949, a time when it seemed that the kings of the world did indeed seem to be bored with the weather of the world and, aided by creepy magicians like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, deemed it necessary, for reasons having to do with hubris and pride, to have something new fall from the sky.
The narrative tension of Oobleck is palpable as Bartholomew, the lowly page boy, tries first warn the king against his foolish whim, then waits with nameless dread for the coming apocalypse, then desperately races to warn the kingdom of the king’s disastrous mistake.
It’s hard to read this story without feeling a lot like Bartholomew. We all knew our current king’s folly was a bad idea, everyone tried to tell him so, but kings will be kings and so the creepy magicians (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Halliburton, the Carlyle group, PNAC, etc etc etc) created an apocalypse for the boy tyrant.
(With plenty of little army men for him to throw around the floor of his throne room while he made exploding noises, but don’t let me mix my metaphors.)
The effects of oobleck, it turns out, can be reversed with a simple act of humility on the part of the king. Our boy king, of course, we have learned is incapable of an act of humility, and even if he were, this particular oobleck is, alas, here to stay. Our boy king’s plan, his stated plan, is to keep the war in Iraq going long enough to become someone else’s problem, and, theoretically, never end at all.
(A canny commentator remarked recently that Bush is not, and never was, interested in being president. What he was interested in was winning the election. We’ve seen, indeed, over and over, that Bush’s main objective has always been to win, no matter what he has to do, what laws he has to break or who he has to kill to do so. We’ve also seen that he does, in fact, have no interest in leading, making decisions or doing anything remotely presidential, like treating other leaders, or anyone really, even his own mindless supporters, with anything like dignity or respect.)
Just to be clear —
“Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq”, translated, means “Bush Will Say Anything He Has To To Keep the War in Iraq Going On Forever.”
But don’t take my word for it. Watch Mr. Olbermann’s commentary instead.
(I don’t know how Keith Olbermann manages to keep up his outrage every day, but I’m glad somebody in the media is doing so.)
Please please please let this be so.
UPDATE: Apparently, in addition to being a closet case who likes anonymous sex in public restrooms, Larry Craig is bad at dialing the phone. Here is a voicemail he left at the wrong phone number.
Senator Craig resigns
Well I for one am disappointed — I was truly hoping this would drag out for a long, long time. Partly because this guy is fascinating in a way that fellow vicious, hypocritical Republican lawmakers (Gingrich, Vitter, Ney, Foley, Abramoff, etc etc etc) aren’t, partly because I was looking forward to what Craig was going to do next. What legal recourses are there available to a man who was caught red-handed (so to speak) in a crime, then pleaded guilty, on tape, and paid the fine? That would have been a fine legal proceeding to follow indeed, and would have, I’m guessing, done much to expose the Republicans for what they are — the party of Nero, drunk on absolute power and engaging not just in lewd behavior in public restrooms but, essentially, engaging in any behavior that pleases them. Honestly, at this point it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that George Bush has sex with animals and ritually sacrifices children on a stone altar in the Oval Office.
(The latter is, of course unnecessary — Bush has no need to ritually sacrifice children in the Oval Office, he ritually sacrifices other people’s children every day in Iraq. And don’t think he doesn’t fully realize that and glory in it every day. Face it — The man likes to kill people. His actions in Texas prove that. I’m honestly surprised he never actually sat in on any of the executions he ordered, licking his thin lizard lips as the condemned man/woman made their last convulsions.)
Meanwhile, once-beloved actor and game-show host Ben Stein has, apparently, lost his mind. Stein argues that the Minneapolis police were using Gestapo tactics on poor, innocent Senator Craig. And in case you’re thinking he perhaps is exaggerating or misspeaking, he repeats it — “gestapo, gestapo, gestapo.” Yes, I see now, that’s why Senator Craig resigned — because he did nothing wrong. Yes, it’s all so clear now. It’s not the blatant hypocrisy, it’s not the staggering levels of delusion and denial, it’s not the no-doubt long list of others who would come forward to say that they, too, had had illegal sex with Senator Craig in public restrooms, furthering damaging his reputation and the Republican party. It’s because of the gestapo tactics of the Minneapolis police.
Stein goes on to bravely confess that he’s been to Idaho, as though it were not a large state within the contiguous US, but some exotic, foreign locale. He characterizes Idahoans as nice, innocent people, rather like one would talk about the Tasaday. Then, his rhetorical bucket almost empty, he reaches down and scoops out another bizarre argument, “and so what if he was soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room? That’s not a crime.” Um, well, except that it is, a misdemeanor specifically, a point the arresting officer makes several times during Craig’s apprehension.
But Stein isn’t done yet. In a stunning WTF moment, he goes on to suggest that the White House is somehow responsible for setting up a sting operation to entrap senator Craig and destroy his career. Hey, listen, I fully believe the Bush White House to be completely capable of executing such an operation — anyone who can blithely order the surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans and the torture of American whistleblowers is clearly capable of anything — but I can’t for the life of me figure out why they would do it to Craig instead of, say, you know, A POLITICAL ENEMY instead of a loyal Republican who, as far as I know, served his party and constituency with honor and integrity for thirty years.
In fact, now that I’m thinking about it (it’s always dangerous to think too much about the Republican mindset), I have no idea what the hell Stein is talking about. The issue of Larry Craig is, first and last, the hypocrisy. There is nothing else to make the story interesting. I AGREE: there’s nothing wrong with men having sex with each other. HOWEVER: there is a law against soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, and senator Craig BROKE that law, and KNEW he had broken that law, and THEREFORE pleaded guilty and paid his fine. That’s all hunky-dory, and unworthy of a media circus. He didn’t tell his wife or staff or constituency or even his lawyer — well fine, it was an embarrassing predicament to be in.
The only thing that makes the case interesting is that senator Craig is a major, long-standing opponent of gay-rights legislation, and has, with one toe-tap, probably demolished the Republican’s ability to use the threat of gay marriage as a swing-voter (hey, I don’t make up these terms) issue in 2008. That’s why his party has not rallied around him, that’s why they’ve pressured him to resign, now, only days after issuing his stern denial of everything (and I mean everything). Preferably on, say, oh, a Saturday, during a four-day holiday weekend.
But Stein, like all other Republicans today, sees his party’s problems as anything other than their own actions. It’s the newspapers, it’s the cops, it’s the Democrats, it’s the media, it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the pink-gun-toting lesbian gangs.