fbomber

2011-08-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

I know that I am supposed to feel shocked at the violence and looting going on in London. That I am supposed to think this is all a terrible tragedy, this breakdown in civil society and discourse. That when someone resorts to the use of force, then something valuable has been lost. And I guess it's true that a part of me feels that way. And would feel that way even more strongly if it were my home, my neighborhood, my business or workplace being vandalized and robbed.

But it's not. And there is a part of me. The immature, nihilistic, primitive part of me that loves the idea of a big, fat, violent, destructive riot. I think there's a part of that in everyone, especially every male.

Not just because I want more stuff without paying for it. And, like everyone else, I do. How can we not want more stuff? That wanting is wired into our very brain structure, and continually stoked with subtle and brute-force marketing messages every single day of our lives.

I mostly love the idea of a riot, and participating in one, because, at a very basic level, it's fun to break things.

There is no denying that.

You ever break a window? I used to, back when I was a falling down drunkard. Walking home from bars, I would kick off car mirrors and smash through car windows between the last place I drank and my home. I'm not saying that it was good, or even defensible, but it certainly was satisfying.

It was simple, for one thing. No calculations of risk and reward, no messy considerations of causes and effects of my discontents, no complex web of relationships to navigate. No paralyzing need to imagine another person's reactions. Foot, meet window. Smash. Loud noise. No more window.

Was it nothing more than a petulant and juvenile lashing out because of a feeling of resentment and impotence? Sure.

But I was, and am, resentful. Impotent, too. For me, at least, that seems to be the condition of modern life. On one hand, an incredible level of safety and security and health and food and material comforts that other generations could never have dreamed of. On the other, a constant dependence on other people and a curbing of the individual will for the good of the whole.

I guess looting gives a moment when you have the best of both worlds. The chance to run completely, savagely amuck in the well-stocked and orderly modern world.

I'm actually more surprised that they don't happen more often.

Spoiler Alert: Obama Wins in 2012

2011-08-02T00:21:00.000-07:00

The best part about predicting the future is that nobody ever remembers when you are wrong, or holds you accountable. The second best part is that predicting the future gives you a chance to dredge up and recycle old grudges and resentments from the past --- ones that people are already tired of hearing you whine about --- and repackage them as predictions.

With those two big premises out front, I’m going to put on my Nostradamus cap and look into November of 2012. And what I see --- more clear than any reception AT&T has ever given me on my iphone --- is Barrack Hussein Obama sailing into the White House for his second term.

He won’t get re-elected because the economy recovers and shows the wisdom of his policy. He won’t get re-elected because he re-ignites the passion among Democrats that his 2008 campaign set ablaze. He won’t get re-elected because he will be judged to have done a competent job of governance. Sure, those will be the reasons that are offered, but the real reason he won’t get elected is much more simple: The real Republican leadership doesn’t want him out yet. He’s too useful where he is.

The brains behind the Republican machine know that in 2012 there will still too much sewage strewn about the nation leftover from the financial collapse. With Obama still in the White House, it’s his job to shovel it around some more and let it stain him and the Democratic party for a few election cycles. The U.S. is going into a double-dip recession, and --- accurate or not --- the Republican party will blame it on Democratic economic policy.

And anyway, Obama is already doing everything a Republican would do, even better than a Republican could. On his own initiative, Obama is happy to coddle the banks, expand Presidential power, start wars, and punish whistle-blowers. For those things that might unnecessarily upset his Democratic supporters --- keep Bush tax cuts alive, cut Social Security, reduce Medicare payments, sell unions down the river --- the Republicans can arrange to create a “crisis” and “negotiation” for Obama to hide behind.

Having a Democratic President present these moves actually makes them easier to execute since it neutralizes the resistance that a Democratically-controlled legislative branch might develop if a Republican tried them.

The proof that the Republicans want Obama to stay has two forms. First, the corporate and financial industry donations. Through a combination of bribery and threats, the financiers have made Obama their errand boy. Without a viable union campaign funding source, big business is the only way to get the money he needs --- and keep it out of the hands of a real competitor.

Which brings us to the second proof: The Republicans have not presented a real and legitimate challenger for the Presidency. It’s fun to scoff at the second-team and second-rate quality of the Republican primary candidates. But it’s very telling that everyone is either insane (Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann), boring (Pawlenty) or just a little bit off-brand (the Mormon Romney & Huntsman). If there is one thing that the Republican party is good at, it is selecting someone who is electable behind the scenes --- most recently named Bush --- and then jamming him into the Oval Office against all obstacles.

When they don’t do that, like in 1996 (Remember pathetic old Bob Dole?) or 2008 (the even more pathetic McCain) there’s a reason.

So Obama is getting all the corporate money and being given a nice clean run at the White House. That makes him as close to a lock as it's possible to get. So for the forseeable future, we are going to get more or less what we've been getting: Republican policies administered by a Democratic President, followed (probably) by Republican policies administered by a Republican President. Thrilling.

Democracy, Human Rights, Rape

2011-02-16T22:05:00.000-08:00

The inspiring sight of a nation peacefully demonstrating to end a 31-year dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands marching in the streets for Democracy. The triumph of non-violence protest over thuggery. The euphoria of watching a tyrant forced to retire. Then we have this.

Lara Logan, star reporter for CBS News was separated from her camera crew in Cairo's Tahrir Square during celebration of Mubarak's resignation. She was subjected to a brutal and sustained sexual assault.

That's so awful. What a nightmare she went through before soldiers and Egyptian women rescued her.

I learned about this incident yesterday and it has been rolling around in my mind ever since. I guess what really strikes me is the contrast between the restraint and high-minded ideals of the protesters --- who specifically protested Mubarak's torture of prisoners --- and the savageness of this action. It's disappointing. It has added a sour note to what was otherwise a inspiring story of idealism in action.

I suppose I should not be surprised.

Immanuel Kant famously said that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made." For all the high-flown rhetoric and lofty ideals we spout --- and even believe --- we are all savage animals. Or worse, actually. Animals don't have empathy for those they prey upon.

We have the ability to imagine ourselves in the place of those we victimize. Yet we victimize them anyway.

Solutions, Solutions, Solutions Part One: Health Care

2010-03-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

Often the fbomber is accused of being nothing more than a kvetcher, a whiner, a complainer, and criticizer. “What’s your solution?” these people kvetch, whine, complain and criticize. “It’s easy to put people down, but what’s your alternative?”

To shut these people up, the fbomber will offer his solutions for the thorny problems which beset our fair nation. Solutions which, as you all will see, are about as simple and elegant as one would expect solutions formed without any training or familiarity with the subject matter.

Issue One: Health Care.
If one listened to the whining and puffing about the whole health care issue, you might be led to believe that is a diabolically complex tangle. One which many Democrats believes requires an equally diabolically complex solution, one that might take the form of a 2,500 page book of laws specifying what insurance companies can and can’t and must do. Or --- as many Republicans might say --- one that is so diabolically complex that no government could ever possibly hope to solve it, so why even bother?

That’s why the fbomber doesn’t listen to these assholes. The fbomber simply works on two simple assumptions.

ASSUMPTION ONE
Most of the time, the free-market capitalist system works better than a government-provided alternative. If you want something produced and distributed more cheaply, more abundantly, with better quality and greater efficiency ---- put the self-interested efforts of profit-seeking autonomous economic actors on the job.

For that reason, most of our health reform efforts should go into turning our health care and insurance market into something more like a free market. Which, let’s be honest, it is nothing like now. Let companies operate across state lines, break up oligopolies, create simple, fair, lenient “rules of the road” for everyone to follow and stay the fuck out of the way.

Don’t micromanage what insurance companies and hospitals and doctors can and can’t do. Don’t create administrative layers and bureaucratic impediments and operational uncertainty. Let the insurance companies and hospitals and doctors and patients work it out amongst themselves. As long as there isn’t any fraud, or deception, or trying to game or manipulate the system, the government can let the free market work.

Solution, Part One: Open the health care & insurance market to true competition.

ASSUMPTION TWO
Some of the time, the free-market capitalist system does not work better than a government-provided alternative. I would not want to hand over construction of this nation’s infrastructure, judicial system, law enforcement, defense, or education over to the purely self-interested, profit-seeking economic actors. That’s because, for all its ability to create abundantly, the free market does a piss-poor job of distributing equitably.

It appears that health care is one of those things that we need spread around a little bit more evenly than the profit motive encourages. Not only for reasons of fairness and social justice, but for economic and public safety reasons.

So there needs to be another option, for those who the newly thriving, private free-market system does not serve. A public option. Operating alongside the private options --- like public and private schools, like the post office and FedEx, like security guards and cops. Competing with one another, and spurring one another to perform better.

Like the public schools, post office and cops, this public option would offer basic, competent, simple services. For those who could afford to pay their way, appropriate fees would be charged for these services. For those who truly couldn’t, society would pick up the tab for them. Why? Because that is what countries that aren’t shitholes do, that’s why.

Solution, Part Two: Create a quality, affordable public option for those unserved by the free market.

Health Care solved. What was so hard about that?

The fbomber's Kill List

2010-02-26T20:59:00.000-08:00

Well, 2010 started off with a bang. Several of them, in fact. With a brace of workplace shootings in St. Louis, Georgia, and Alabama, killing about ten people.

This greatly concerns the fbomer. In his opinion, there are a couple of problems with these workplace shooting rampages. First, obviously, they kill people. That is, in itself, very bad.

Secondly, they kill the wrong people, which is even worse.

For a look at the epidemic of workplace and schoolyard shootings that America has witnessed since the 1980’s that goes beyond the usual “another lunatic snapped” shrugs that most media serves, check out the book “Going Postal” by Mark Ames.

As this book shows, once you look into the lives of these rampage killers you see that they are usually miserable human beings, living in considerable pain. What’s more, this pain that is often inflicted upon them by other people, usually specific people. Bullies terrorize and torture them at school. Supervisors cut their hours and harass them at work. Women they love reject them. After years of jumping through hoops and sacrificing for a company, that company fires them to squeak out a tiny bit more profit.

But these murderers rarely go out and target the specific people who caused their pain. That would be reprehensible, but at least understandable.

Instead, these killers walk into crowded classrooms, gyms, restaurants, workplaces and spray their bullets at whoever is there. Which is usually a crowd of poor fuckers nearly as powerless, miserable and ground-down as themselves.

Killing someone who has created your painful situation is fucked up enough. But killing people who are completely unconnected to that situation --- that takes the fucked-up-ness to an even higher level.

Hence, this kill list. Now, I want this to be perfectly clear. THE F-BOMBER DOES NOT IN ANY WAY CONDONE, ENCOURAGE OR WISH FOR THE VIOLENT DEATH OF ANYONE, INCLUDING THESE LISTED INDIVIDUALS.

The fbomber believes that murder is wrong. If you are considering killing anyone, stop. Get help. Talk to someone. Do whatever it takes to solve your problems some other way. If your job is driving you to consider murder, quit. If the place you live makes you want to kill someone, move. If you fantasize about cutting off your wife’s head, divorce her. If the financial stress of your bills and debts makes you feel like you are going to shoot someone, declare bankruptcy. If living in a declining, corrupt, oligopolistic corporatocratic third-world nation masquerading as a modern democracy makes you homicidal, move.

Unfortunately, not everyone will take this advice. Some people are determined to kill.

To those people, the fbomber says this: If you are going to be a murderer, don’t be a dick about it.

Don’t kill people just as poor and powerless as you. They had no hand in creating your misery. If anything, they share it with you. Get someone who helped create and uphold the system that has oppressed you because they benefit from it.

Kill the people who are fucking with you. Kill the rich and powerful.

Will killing the rich and powerful assholes change anything? Maybe. People considering a life of callously exploiting those beneath them might conceivably change their risk/reward calculations if enough exploiters were violently and publicly murdered. Probably not, though. There are a lot of not-so-rich and slightly-less-powerful assholes waiting for an opening above them to fill. And they’ll make sure they have better security.

But still. At the very least, your killing spree won’t heap more terror, pain and misery on people who have had too much of that their whole lives.

KILL LIST
Dick Cheney. This is a no-brainer. But considering how his own heart can’t kill him off, I suggest starting with silver bullets, then move on to holy water and stakes through the heart until the job is done.
Karl Rove. For putting the hand on the lever that flushed America down the toilet.
George W. Bush. The flusher.
Any current or former executives for AIG, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, Chase, Countrywide, and, fuck it, on Wall Street in general. Do we really need to give a reason here?
Any executive working for an industry with a “big” in front of it: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Defense, Big Agriculture. Considering how many people these industries put to death for higher profit margins, it’s simple self-defense.
Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts. Hey, you got your job “for life.” Nobody said how long that was going to be.
Glenn Beck. This is more of a mercy killing, and culling the herd of an obviously damaged specimen.
Sarah Palin. Otherwise, she could breed again.
Anyone ever described as a “neocon.”
Anyone else who encouraged our rush into the Iraq War.
Every Senator besides Bernie Sanders. These fall into the Wall Street/Big Corporation employee category, anyway.
Every Congressman besides Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and Marcy Kaptur. Again, this was covered in the Wall Street/Big Corporation employees category.
Rupert Murdoch. And take out as many of those other Fox News cocksuckers as you can with him.
Rahm Emmanuel. Give that asshole something to curse about.
Ann Coulter. Self-explanatory.
Bill O’Reilly. Ditto.
Spike Lee. For a millionaire film director, he sure does whine a lot. Obviously, life does not agree with him. Help him out.

RAPE, THEN KILL LIST
Joe Lieberman. If he’s going to walk around with a mouth that looks like a wrinkled old pussy, someone needs to stick a dick in it.

Did I forget anyone?

"Fuck You, Ted Kennedy. And the Country You Faithfully Served." --- Massachusetts Voters

2010-02-09T23:33:00.000-08:00

In an election result that was called a political earthquake, the residents of Massachusetts collectively marched over to Ted Kennedy’s grave and dropped a huge steaming turd on his headstone by electing a dully handsome Republican douchebag named Scott Brown for Teddy’s old, whiskey-soaked, Senate seat.

Like so many earthquakes, this political plate-buckling was followed by a tsunami. In this instance the tsunami consisted of a gigantic, liquid wall of bloviation from political “thinkers” of every description.

For these thinkers, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was not about the voters of Massachusetts preferring a moderately attractive person who really, really, really wanted the job over a dried-up boring old prig who couldn’t bother to remove the stick from her ass and campaign for it.

No, to these pundits, the election was a Message.

That Message, funnily enough, seemed to echo whatever the political thinker had been thinking, and saying, all along. To Fox News, the Message was that Massachusetts voters were rallying against Obama’a Liberal Marxist Totalitarian Crusade to reform health care. To the centrists in the Democratic party, as personified by Rahm Emmanuel, the Message was that Obama needed to hew ever more closely to the center. To the Liberals of the blogosphere, the Message was that Obama had not been liberal or activist enough, and had depressed the progressive and independent support that had put him into office in the first place.

To the fbomber, the Message was simpler: We are fucked.

By we, the fbomber refers not only to his own demographic of late-30-something, perennially-underemployed, quasi-homeless, pseudo-intellectuals who aspire to careers in show business despite a lack of talent or effort. The fbomber refers to the entire United States of Fucking America.

We are all fucked, because we’re all in the same boat, that boat is sinking, the sharks are circling, and the passengers are putting the same crew of dimwits that ran us into the shit-berg right back into the wheelhouse.

Remember, fbombers, you read it here first. Unless the Republicans do something extraordinarily --- no, make that Palin-ically stupid ---- like run a retarded one-half-term governor for President, or the Democrats do something extraordinarily brave* --- like actually enact real health care, financial, trade, tax, military and entitlement reform --- we will be back to one-party, Republican rule by 2012 at the latest.

The fbomber doesn’t base this prediction on any polls or surveys or findings whatsoever. He bases it on the simple observation that the Mean people are back in the game. And the Mean people tend to win, except under extraordinary circumstances.

In an earlier post, the fbomber posited a theory of politics that divides people into quadrants based on where they fall on the two axes of Intelligence and Empathy. For a refresher, visit this posting.

As of early 2010, Obama and the Democrats have simultaneously managed to inflame to Mean people, especially the Stupid ones, into action and to depress the Nice people into a disappointed torpor.

The 2008 election was extraordinary because the Mean people, both Smart and Stupid, sat on their hands. The chronic and flagrant bungling of the Republicans from 2000-2008 in every area from controlling spending, to starting and waging wars was so obvious that even the most vicious and idiotic of America’s great Moronic Masses could not sign up for another four years of the same.

However, as the 1985 Emilio Estevez teen-punk-greaser film states: That Was Then… This Is Now. Now, the Mean --- Smart and Stupid --- are back.

And why not?

After all, it has been a full year since the Republicans skipped town after bankrupting the country, dismantling the government, shredding the constitution, breaking the military, flaunting international law, embarrassing our nation and committing us to ongoing, multi-year and multi-trillion dollar debacles on Wall Street, Iraq and Afghanistan.

A year is a long, long time to expect someone to remember something that they never wanted to know in the first place. So the mouth-breathers of America have completely forgotten who has inflicted all this pain on us. Now, according to conventional wisdom --- aka what people who don’t think about things think about things --- Obama owns all those problems himself.

And the mouth-breathers are pissed off at him for them. Hence the Tea Party movement, a group which appears to be --- more than anything else ---- motivated by a simple hatred of paying taxes. And, by extension, everything those taxes pay for, except for the things that explode and kill poor brown people. **

At the same time time, Obama, his inner circle of advisors and Democrats in general have managed to depress and disgust the Smart and Nice and Stupid and Nice people. These people wanted something different from the eight years of incompetence, deficits, wars and governance transparently dictated by rich corporations. And Team Obama simply did not deliver.

On the most pressing issues --- the crashing economy, health care reform and reining in the out-of-control financial industry --- Obama delegated both vision and substance to an obviously lobbyist-owned Congress. On the one issue that Obama did take responsibility for --- the war in Afghanistan --- he chose a George W. Bush-esque escalation, complete with a speech about Evil and the world and the need to defeat it with unarmed predator drone strikes.

The worst that you can say about his is that he never intended to bring change or fulfill hope in the first place. That he is a fake liar bullshit artist who tricked Progressives into electing him, in order to sell them out to the corporate and militarist power elite. That’s the worst.

The best isn’t much better. At best, he is either a) incompetent. b) competent but constrained by the realities of a dismantled apparatus of governance, an unforgivingly tight budget, a compromised Democratic party and vindictively obstructionist Republican minority.

Neither one of those things is the kind of slogan that will get Democrats’ hearts racing again. “Come on, support our guy! He’s just either clueless or trapped!” doesn’t even rhyme.

So exactly why will the voters reject the Democratic Party’s style of slow-motion, reluctant slide into disaster and choose the the Republican’s reckless gleeful drunken plunge into the shit?

Quadrant by Quadrant:

Smart & Nice. This is the heart of the Democratic party. Without this group passionately excited, activated and engaged, nothing happens for the Democrats. This group needs to be shown that Obama can and will deliver the things he promised on the campaign trail. Like at least ONE from the following list:

1) Real Health Care Reform, not some Senate-Clusterfuck-Corporate-Compromise bullshit. This means some sort of Public Option, period.
2) Tough, fair, strict, strategic financial regulatory reform. Smart & Nice people are motivated by a desire for fairness above all. Having one already rich and powerful industry get more riches, breaks, bailouts and exemptions from the rules of both Law and Economics isn’t acceptable. The financial industry needs to be made to serve the economy as a whole, not the industry itself.
3) Investments in Jobs Now That Create Smart Growth Later. America needs jobs now and a Green Economy Infrastructure for later. A national electrical grid. A network of plug-in hybrid charging stations.
4) Fairer Trade. American workers are among the most productive and efficient in the world. Yet we compete on price with nations who do not offer protections to their workers or environment. And who manipulate their nations’ currency to create a pricing advantage. Surely we could quantify the artificial, unfair advantages that these nations offer and create a tariff that removes that unfair edge. To reduce that tariff to zero, the nations would simply need to stop their unfair practices.
5) Energy Independence.

Unfortunately, the chances of Obama and the Democrats accomplishing any of these things considering A) A unified Republican opposition in a Senate which can be paralyzed by 41 nay-sayers B) Democrat’s own stomach-turning spinelessness, cowardice, greed, corruption, and treachery C) The raging torrent of corporate money directed at maintaining the status quo --- is just about zilch.

Nice & Dumb.
If the Smart & Nice crowd could be sufficiently energized, the Nice & Dumb crowd would follow. So forget that.

Mean & Smart.
Democrats cannot ever convert the Mean people. All they can hope is to neutralize. In 2008, Obama did this by allowing his campaign to be financed by the financial industry, and surrounding himself with people who would ensure that the financial industry would be taken care of.

IF the economic pie were still growing --- no matter how fake and toxic its filling --- Obama could continue to let the plutocracy gorge their ever larger slices, while the lower 98% of America enjoyed the crumbs and napkin-stains.

But now Obama has a dilemma. He needs to reform the financial industry to prevent another economic collapse, not to mention establish some sort of credibility as a President who actually does his job.

So he is going to lose the plutocrat’s bought-off neutrality. In fact, he already is.

Mean & Dumb.
These are the foot soldiers for the regression of the American experiment into some sort of corn-pone fascist banana republic. These hateful morons sat out the election in 2008, but --- as evidenced in Massachusetts, are agitated and gaining the political equivalent of retard strength by simply offering hurting, pissed off stupid people a chance to lash out at everyone but the people who caused their pain.

Their anger, combined with the Smart & Mean money seals the deal for the Republicans in 2010 and 2012, unless one specific thing happens: They manage to do something so stupid that they fuck it all up for themselves to do that for you. Luckily, they do that pretty consistently. Like vote for Ross Perot in 1992. Like take over the Republican primary put someone far too unelectable up for office, like they did in upstate New York with that ridiculous carpetbagger Hoffman guy.

Which is where Sarah Palin comes in. As someone who isn’t interested in reliving 2000-2008, but with even less money and international prestige, I can only hope that the Palin juggernaut continues to gain steam, that her supporters overwhelm the Republican primary and that she runs for President in 2012. Whatever Obama’s failings, the very thought of the babblings of that half-wit harridan coming from the Oval Office would instantly convert every quadrant but Mean and Stupid into banner-waving Democrats in about half-a-second.

* If the current crop Democrats ever did anything extraordinarily brave then all our problems would be solved anyway. Because if that happened enough winged pigs would fly out of enough asses that we could harness their collective flapping power to replace fossil fuels forever.

** The fbomber does not like paying taxes himself. And does not expect anyone to. But he has traveled abroad, and notes that the countries that spend money on themselves tend to be nicer than the countries that don’t. And the fbomber wants to live in a nice country.

The Coif of Genius: A Tribute to Trump

2009-04-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

So casino-bankrupting Donald Trump narrowly avoided getting his hair forcibly cut off in the most recent Wrestlemania.

No surprise there. There is no way that the Donald would --- or should --- ever let anyone alter even a single follicle of that magnificent do. Though others might want to pour scorn on DT's rusty locks, in the fbomber's humble opinion, that hairstyle is the stroke of genius that has allowed Trump to have the absurd amount of fame, wealth and hot-ass-model-pussy that he has wallowed in for the last two decades.

That complicated comb-over, or to be more accurate, comb-forward-and-over-and-back has served its owner in two vital ways.

First, as a trademark. How many other real estate developers can you name and picture in your head? Unless you work in that field, or have an extraordinarily bizarre sexual fetish, that number is zero. Trump came from a boring, staid business and wound up as a genuine American celebrity, and his unique and memorable appearance played a big part in that

Secondly --- and this is where the genius comes in --- his hair serves him by making him look buffoonish and ridiculous. that's right, I said serves him.

Here's why. People cannot feel envious of and superior to someone at the same time.

As a rich man who clearly loves flaunting his wealth, Trump is bound to attract a considerable amount of envy. Sure, this is supposed to be a nation that worships success and money and those who achieve it, but there's also a lot of resentment too.

Furthermore, Trump's personal qualities, individually and as a whole, make him a profoundly unlikable individual.

He's loud. He's a braggart. He's pushy. He's a blowhard.

Under normal circumstances, someone like this would be violently expelled from the public eye. Sure, he would be rich, ad successful, and landing his private helicopters on his estate's lawn. But he would be doing it privately, like every other developer in the world. If he ever did, for some reason, make it into the public eye, the average person would see him as some undeservingly rich, boring dick. Who, if anything, arouses feelings of hostility.

But with the haircut, a different dynamic emerges. The haircut makes Donald Trump look ridiculous. Like some clueless, arrogant, pathetic douchebag without a sense of how out of touch he is.

The average person sees that and immediately feels superior to the Donald. "Sure" Average Person says, "I may not have millions, or models, or TV contracts but at least I don't look stupid like that."

This feeling of superiority effectively short circuits the negative feelings someone might have towards a standard-issue rich arrogant prick. To the Average Person, Trump is a clown, a buffoon, a laughing stock. There is no need to feel hostility for someone like that. On the contrary, the average person can condescendingly tolerate Trump, snickering to themselves at him the whole time.

And while they are snickering, Trump is sucking up the TV time, the attention and all the dollars it brings his brand. Millions and millions of them every year.

Furthermore, the coif signals a certain amount of naivete and lack of self awareness. Though this signaling is false, it effectively creates a sense of trustworthiness towards Trump. "Surely," Average Person thinks, "someone who is so clueless as to walk around looking like that all day long, must also be too clueless to try to be duplicitous or ruthless."

It's a formula that has worked for him for 20 years.

Why else would he look like that? Trust me, he's had plenty of people bring up the hairstyle with him. Stylists, PR professionals, interviewers, writers... the guy has been married to a string of superficial, appearance obsessed MODELS for Christ's sake. He is aware of the hair issue.

He knows what he's doing. Strategically choosing to look like an asshole on his own, superficial, terms to avoid being called an asshole for real, substantive, reasons. Let's just call it being a genius.

AIG Outrage Fatigue + the Fbomber Predicts Tits, Ass, Cock, Balls.

2009-03-17T22:06:00.000-07:00

Goldman Sachs VP Morganna Deluxxx prepares to unload her toxic assets.

I can't keep track anymore about what I am supposed to be enraged about anymore.

The AIG bonus-grab certainly didn't come as a shock to me.

This is a company whose business model was creating asset insurance they could never pay off, then selling it to people who didn't even own the insured assets.

Taking money they shouldn't is part of their corporate culture. They'll have to do better than that to surprise me.

Maybe spending the money on little boy butt-sex would do the trick, but I doubt it.

Which brings me to a more serious point, and a prediction.

So far, these financial scandals have been coming in short, frequent pulses --- Some bank took a luxury spa vacation with bailout funds, Bernie Madoff ripped off a Holocaust survivor's charity with his ponzi scheme, AIG gave the very division that took them down $165 million in "retention" bonuses.

These mini-scandals given blowhards of all stripes in Congress and in front of cameras plenty to get worked up about. But then the fury has kind of... well.... dissipated. Then temporarily moved on to the next outrage or scandal of the moment.

That's because these scandals have been --- for all their sleaziness --- a bit dry. And --- here's the big thing --- sexless.

A trip to a spa, a ponzi scheme defrauding liberal old Jews, a gamed compensation system... That's kind of abstract, and makes you think about numbers and laws and ethics and shit.

Is it any wonder that the average news viewer will soon be clicking over to see who's left on "Idol?"

But the fbomber knows what puts the lead in the American rage-and-envy pencil. The same thing that puts the lead in its regular old lust-and-envy pencil: Tits & Ass. Also, Cock & Balls. Preferably all in contact with eachother.

Sometime --- maybe this week, maybe this month --- some news organization is going to dig up something sexual in this financial debacle.

Maybe an exec will get caught paying for a hooker with money that may have come from the bailout funds. Maybe some sexy MILFy VP will get caught with her french-manicured hands dipping into some TARP cookie jar. Maybe investment bankers got together in the bubble years and gangbanged eachother rotten while celebrating some ill-gotten gain at innocent homeowner's expense and made the big mistake of taking pictures and/or videos.

That story, whatever it is, will be the lightning rod --- the erect, throbbing lightning rod --- for all the jealousy and resentment and frustration and rage circulating throughout the atmosphere at this moment. That story, the one with the pussy and the dick involved, will define this whole financial disaster. Forever. Trust me.

After all, Americans might be a bit confused by now with all the arcane, sophisticated investment instruments --- the CDOs, the MBOs, the CDSs. But we know --- and are avidly fascinated by --- BBBJs, DPs and GFEs. Americans are fascinated, and --- more to the point --- livid with rage when we see that someone, anyone out there is having hotter sex than we are, while we sit in front of our computer screens, titillated to the bursting point by terabytes of free porn, yet rendered more or celibate by our obesity, puritanism, and social retardation. And when we discover that the hot-sex-havers are rich and powerful, why America's fury has no bounds.

That's the one advantage America's have-nots like believe they have on the haves. That the have-nots at least live a life of relative social freedom, cut loose from the onerous societal norms and hoity-toity prudishness that is forced on the rich, at least the version of the rich that shows up on TV shows. Our poor deluded masses like to think that they could at least go out and live a life of thoughtless, sleazy, Jerry-Springer-guest-style fucking if they so chose. While the rich are locked into chaste and sexless existences in drawing rooms and country clubs full of old, judgemental biddies.

Every so often, something comes along and pops this little fantasy bubble for poor, sex-starved Americans --- Clinton's blow job, Paris Hilton's sex tape, Donald Trump's succession of model wives --- and the result is a frenzied shit-storm of jealous, self-righteous, hypocritical wrath falling on the participants. "What?!?" the furiously-masturbating, socially-stunted, grotesquely fat America roars, momentarily taking its bloodshot eyes off the tranny porn on tube8.com "You get all the money AND the fucking too??!!?!? I hate you!!!!!!!!"

And then proceeds to go apeshit.

Which is what the as-yet-undetermined scandalees have to look forward to. These participants, in all their sexy, fuckable, hatable, investment banking glory will be on our TVs just about about as much as that sexy, fuckable, hatable Sarah Palin was during her 1st 15 minutes of fame in the Summer/Fall of '08.

Who wants to wager that this doesn't happen by, Summer 09 at the latest? I'm taking bets.

Well, Now We Know How to Spark A Rally

2009-03-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

The election of a President who doesn't have his head lodged in his own ass. Result: Stock prices fall.
Passing a massive economic stimulus plan within a month. Result: The stock market continues to fall.
Pouring and promising trillions of taxpayer dollars without questions or conditions into struggling financial firms. Result: Yet more stock price falling.

A failing bank's CEO writes a memo saying, in essence, that except for all the worthless assets on their books and reliance on government subsidies for survival*, the bank was doing, well, okay. Result: Jubilation in the Street and stock prices climb for four days straight.

Maybe we've been going about this economic turnaround wrong all along. Forget about anti-cyclical Keynesian spending, subsidizing financial firms and instituting regulatory reform. What we've needed all along are simply better memos.

*You've got a bullet in your chest, and a machine is doing your breathing for you, but, hey, your cholesterol level looks great!

13 Year Old Conservative Wunderkind

2009-03-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

Right Wingers are agog over this CPAC speech by 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, in which Krohn defines conservatism.

It really is quite impressive. This kid has managed to become a Republican jerkoff before he is actually physically able to jerk off.

Bye-bye Dubai

2009-02-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been getting forwarded little snippet about the travails and collapse of Dubai.

That's because an earlier, booze-soaked version of the fbomber once resided in Dubai, for nearly two years before fleeing the country in debt, shame and panic.

Here is an essay I wrote and performed back in 2006 about that experience. It's long. Take your time.

Sallie Mae and Me

I was in my home office last summer, avoiding work by whipping myself into a righteous frenzy on my favorite political blogs, when, somewhere between dailykos and talkingpointsmemo.com, my cellphone rang.

Private Number.

I don’t trust people who block their numbers. But my job requires me to call strangers and have them call me back.
So I answered.

“Hello. Is this Mr. Steven Schneider?”

I have never, ever, in my life had something good happen to me after that question. Still, I said yes.

“Ray Taylor from Sallie Mae here. I’d like to talk to you about your student loans.”

Busted.

Some people --- normal, sane, responsible people --- took out student loans, graduated, worked, and paid off those loans until they evaporated into nothing.

I am not one of these people.

Over the past ten years I’ve defaulted and gone into collections three times. I’ve restructured and refinanced twice. Once I told a collection agent that Steve Schneider had died, and I was merely a friend who had inherited his cellphone.

In my defense, I’ll say that I graduated with every intention of paying , but my first reporter job wasn’t producing that extra thousand bucks a year.

So I figured those loans would have wait until some later day, a day when I had so much money I could pay without pain or deprivation. Now, I didn’t have any sort of grandiose fantasies like winning the lottery. I had more practical plans, like meeting and marrying an heiress to the DeBeers diamond fortune, or possibly selling a screenplay to a major motion picture studio.

I was, you see, pursuing a career as a writer. Not in the sense of putting my words down on paper, mind you, but more in the sense of calling myself a writer, taking crappy newspaper jobs, and poisoning all my reading with envy and guilt.

People, usually non-writers, told me these crappy jobs were how I would “pay my dues.”

One muggy day, driving to a press conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sweating and shirtless because the AC in my $900 former cop car blew out air hotter than the combustion chamber of the engine, I began to think maybe these dues were a little steep.

I decided I would pay them, but not at the same time as my loans.

Shortly afterwards, I moved to London for “experiences” as Phase Two of my project to become a great writer without writing. While there, a publishing house offered me a job writing an Internet technology magazine in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The salary was three times what I’d earned back home, verging on what a starting shift manager at Chili’s might pull in.

I told them I needed to think it over, then went home to look at a map. The United Arab Emirates turned out to be a small, crescent shaped country on the Persian Gulf bordered by Oman and Saudi Arabia, a part of the world where money, quite literally, bubbles out of the ground. I was sold.

Surely in a country that owed its very existence to wealth without effort, there would be a place for me.
I imagined my life in Dubai as a sort of melange of Beau Gest, a harem and Somerset Maughan’s morally bankrupt colonialists at play.

Once there, I’d get one of those great old Land Rover Defenders, the boxy kind like John Wayne drove in Hatari. Every morning I would cross the dunes to work while my houseboy tidied up my seaside villa and helped the sultry consort I had left behind gather her belongings and catch up to her salt caravan.

I figured within a year I could pay off my college loans, accumulate some savings and return to the United States in style.
Some of what I imagined was true. In an oil-wealthy nation, inside the Internet field during its boom, I was working at the nexus of two gushing fountains of easy money. And at the top of the corporate org chart, the cash did just rain down.

The founder, a silver-bearded Scotsman, had a reputation for throwing glasses of expensive Cabernet at restaurant walls for sheer, wasteful sport. The advertising sales manager drove an obnoxious yellow Ferrari he filled with young female sales reps, then drove to his private beach club.

But down at the bottom of the chart it was a different story. In appearance and architecture, Dubai is Las Vegas without the taste or restraint. In terms of cost of living, it’s more like Manhattan.

My lifestyle wasn’t extravagant. Instead of a seaside villa, I lived in a crumbling corporate apartment with two coworkers. Instead of the sexy Landrover, I drove a rented Tercel. In place of a harem, I discovered a city with a male to female ratio similar to that of an Army base.

Even so, after paying my bills, my checkings and savings accounts remained at zero and my credit card balance grew every month.

My job was a disappointment. For as long as I had been half-heartedly participating in the workforce, I’d believed a dream job, would magically give me a work ethic. Other people fostered this wishful thinking, saying things like “Of course you aren’t really trying at work, Steven. You haven’t found your thing yet.”

It turned out that’s like saying that when I developed a passion for water polo, I would grow a blowhole.

There I was, living my dream of writing for a living, in a wildly exotic locale. A flashbulb-bright sun baked silvery glass towers rising from the dunes like a mirage. Imperious local men glided the streets in gleaming white Range Rovers and matching robes. Mysterious, veiled women scurried out of Victoria’s Secret, covered head to toe in pitch black abayas. Yet even in this extraordinary setting, I put in the same lackluster work performance that had blocked my promotion to fry station at the Muskogee Burger King.

One problem was I could not get excited about my stories. I wanted to be out riding with the Hell’s Angels, not rewriting press releases about how many processors Compaq had put in their new server.

I was also in over my head. Despite my interview lies, just about everything I knew about computer networking could be exhausted by typing those two words at the top of a page. What’s worse, I felt paranoid about interviewing people to learn more. Then they would know how ignorant I was about the subject my magazine was named after. Instead, I spent hours staring, paralyzed with fear, at the phone and business cards of Microsoft Middle East Marketing Reps.

I wound up using the same tricks that got me through college --- stretched deadlines, all nighters and plagiarism. To write stories I typically stole three or four articles from the internet, mashed them up, and created a fictitious expert to quote this information.

As for my own writing, it turns out I’ve only got so many words per day inside me. After cranking out news and feature stories at work, I simply could not go home and type more.

In fact, the only part of my life that aroused any passion was lunch. My South African coworker, Colin, and I spent approximately half our workday suggesting, eating at and critiquing lunch spots. But after six months, even these multi-hour gluttony excursions stopped cheering me up.

In my misery, I decided that if I was sinking into an ocean of debt, I might as well head to the Promenade Deck, tell Isaac to mix up some Mai Tais, and enjoy the ride down. I financed a new Jeep, got a gold card from the local bank and moved into my own place. I went to Ikea, pointed to one of the pages of their catalog and took it all home with me.

Every night I careened between Irish pubs, American bars and discos full of sad-eyed Ukranian prostitutes dancing with fat Arab businessmen. I spent sex weekends at five star hotels with my new British girlfriend, ordering $300 bottles of whiskey from room service.

Within months I spent my entire next year’s salary. I maxed out all my credit cards and had post-dated rent and car payment checks sitting in offices throughout the city like timed explosive charges waiting to blow.

What’s more, this new social calendar ignited the afterburners on my downward work spiral. Each day I came in later, often still drunk from the night before and occasionally wearing the same clothes.

Nasty rumors about my behavior circulated the office. One afternoon the founder took me for coffee. Over butter cookies, he told me he’d heard that I had been so aggressively amorous at a party that a girl had locked herself into a bathroom to escape me.

My defense was that the story could not be true, because I would have simply kicked that door down, just like I’d kicked my apartment door down the weekend before when I lost my keys.

Not long after this conversation, I was fired.

I had to leave the country. The question was how. And when.

I couldn’t leave right away. My old company had vouched for my debts and would alert the Dubai authorities. If caught leaving, I would be thrown in jail until someone paid.

To buy time, I took a job writing copy for an ad agency and secretly prepared my escape.

I couldn’t openly vacate my house. The security- slash - maintenance man lived downstairs, and popped from his door like a smiling, curry-scented cuckoo each time he heard a noise in the lobby. But I didn’t want to abandon my stuff. Those were, after all, the Swedish-designed treasures I had braved jail time to own.

I moved out one back-pack load at a time and traded my furniture and dishes for dinners out.

My car was another problem. Not only would selling it notify the bank of my immanent departure, but it refused to let me to shift gears while in motion. So I left it in 3rd for a month.

My last day in Dubai, I abandoned the Jeep in my bank’s parking lot with the keys on the seat and called a cab for the airport.

At the terminal, I poured fearful sweat. I believed that every cellphone was reporting me, that every policeman and soldier was there to put me in cuffs for stealing $30,000 from their country.

I didn’t relax until I was well into international airspace.

Once there, I reflected on the whole Dubai debacle, and swore I would never attempt to pay my student loans again.

After all, that loan had resulted from a decision I made when I was seventeen years old, namely to go to an expensive private university. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for a seventeen year old jackass’s mistake even --- no, especially --- if that jackass was me. After all, I might give the benefit of the doubt to a 17-year-old stranger, but I know exactly how dumb I was.

I realized I should have spent my tuition on a car. Back in 1990, $100K would have bought a monster sportscar, a Lamborghini cool enough to get me laid, even if I lacked the social skills to be in Wagoner High’s Dungeons and Dragons Club.

I would have wrecked this car, or defaulted on the payments. But either way, the bank would have gotten a good portion of their loan back from insurance or auction.

Instead, I had put myself thousands of dollars in hock for a ‘university experience’. Unlike my hypothetical Lamborghini, there was no way to abandon or return this experience. I couldn’t just take the degree off my resume and call it even.

I also thought the fact that leaving the country didn’t erase the debt was a little hypocritical. After all, our entire country is descended from people who shirked debts by moving here. I should have been lauded for exporting American values abroad.

Back in the States I pursued a second dream career as an advertising copywriter. After two dues-paying years in that field, living in a converted closet in New York City, I decided to make some life changes.

For starters, I realized that my drinking problem was getting in the way of the things that were really important to me… like my sex addiction. So I gave up alcohol.

I also gave up the idea of a dream job in a creative field.

I already dreamed of writing great books and stories. To pursue that dream and also a dream of being a highly-paid copywriter or intrepid journalist took energy and focus I simply didn’t have. It was also kind of greedy. Some people really do dream about those jobs, and the sooner I got out of their way the better.

I started taking jobs that, though not creative and exciting, paid me enough to meet my expenses and put some aside every month for writing classes, trips, and a richer life to write about.

Hence, my current recruiting job, which is like being a telemarketer who got your work number, but pays me $50/hour to work from home.

So when Ray Taylor called, I was ready. By taking some money out of savings, putting some debt on a credit card, and scrimping a little, I stayed out of court and paid off everything in three months.

My triumph is mixed with sadness, though. When I think about it, Sallie Mae was the one relationship I made in college that lasted. The girls I dated back in 1995 are long married in Connecticut suburbs. My rugby pals are so busy with their careers on Wall Street that our correspondence has shriveled from long emails about our lives to the latest nightvision mpegs of teen heiresses blowing their boyfriends.

By contrast, for the last decade, Sallie Mae was there for me, calling, writing, emailing, wanting to know how my job situation was going. And above all, wanting me to stay in touch.

I’m going to miss Sallie Mae.

But I’d like to think that we’re not so much through as taking a break.

Right now, I’m applying to graduate school.

As If Today Wasn't Sweet Enough

2009-01-21T00:22:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know we're supposed to be post-partisan now, but I hope it hurt like a mother.

Michael Lewis Tearing It Up

2009-01-07T00:58:00.000-08:00

I have always enjoyed reading Michael Lewis, author of "Liar's Poker" but have always considered him to be something of a lightweight. His positive, good-natured spin on his subjects, his cheery tone, his breezy and humorous writing style was fun, but a trifle superficial.

The collapse of the business and culture of investment banking, and the pain that collapse has wrought onto the rest of the economy, seems to have lit some sort of fire in Mikey. Though never veering into anything like righteous indignation, he does come across as more serious --- not to mention peeved --- than I've ever read him.

The first shot of this more serious, concerned Lewis was fired in the pages of Portfolio, a Conde Nast publication that was launched to be a kind of New Gilded Age wank-mag but looks to be turning into its autopsy report. It's a great, comprehensible overview of the chicanery, shenanigans, subterfuges, and magic thinking that created our current financial system collapse. As well as a thumbnail sketch of the culture that created a welcoming environment for it all.

The second shot, popped off in the NYT Opinion pages adds a look at the governmental and institutional (especially the financial ratings institutions) capture by the investment banking culture.

Both are rewarding and enlightening reads.

Yet More Japanese Corporate Ingenuity

2008-12-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

This time, they solve the retirement pension problem.

Home of the Pregnant Burrito

2008-12-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

Also on the menu:

The Lactating Flan
The Menstruating Chimichanga
The Prematurely Ejaculating Churro

Letter to Another Aspiring Screenwriter

2008-12-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

A college friend living out of Los Angeles recently asked me to help him sell a pair of screenplays he has written. Here was my response:

I'm pleased that you believe me to be capable of selling screenplays through my efforts. I kind of feel like the Michael Rappaport character in True Romance. Yeah, sure, I live out here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I can move a briefcase of cocaine, or a pair of screenplays.

Though if you have a briefcase of cocaine, feel free to send it. I don't know if I could sell it, and don't use it, but I could certainly move it up the noses of a lot of sexy chicks in exchange for gratifying my strong --- if dully conventional --- physical needs.

All I can offer is the same, hackneyed advice that everyone ever gives about the biz. Because it is true. And that is to make a list of agents and agencies and actors and producers and send them a copy and hope some of them get some flunky to read it. Really that's all that someone without writing credits can hope for.

All that connections and face-time really gets you is the ability to skip the flunky and get the script directly to the agent or star or producer or studio exec directly. In other words, to jump over a possible dead end. Then the script has to stand or fall on its merits.

There is another hackneyed bit of verbiage that gets thrown around the screenwriting world a lot here, and it is also true. If a great script were to be thrown out the window of a moving car on the 405, it would still get made and opened wide in two years.

There is a ravenous, insatiable, burning hunger in this town for great scripts. Great scripts are like the seed crystal that drops into a supersaturated solution, and immediately cause the other elements of a film to bond to them. Stars want to be in a great scripted film. Directors want to direct big stars. Producers want to make a movie with top directors and stars. Studios want to distribute a movie made by top producers, directors and stars. The audience duly lines up to go see The Prestige.

This is all true.

Those of us who are churning out words on paper, formatted with actions, characters and dialogue don't want to believe that this is true.

One, because we see films coming out to the theaters that fall far short of the "great script" standard.

And Two, because writing a great script is so fucking hard and we know we aren't doing it, and don't even really know if we want to do everything it takes to write one. Or if we can.

I mentioned True Romance up top. That was a great script. So was Pulp Fiction. For all his eventual excesses and indulgences, Tarantino has put down some strikingly fresh, original, smart, interesting stories down on paper. Stories that are informed and grounded in the time-tested principles of drama, yet break free of them in an exciting way. True Romance would have been made if it had been found under a bush in a lawn. So would Pulp Fiction.

I know that I'm not writing Pulp Fiction right now. I am, more or less admittedly, writing Stir of Echoes. But so what? It's only my second go at the form. By script six or seven I might be a bit closer to the mark I'm shooting for.

So, a neophyte screenwriter might wonder, how do all these sub-great scripts get made? And how, he might continue to wonder, could he get his bad Stir of Echoes clone turned into a film? This is where connections and favors and obligations and misjudgments and chance enter the picture. After all, the movie industry has to make movies. If there aren't enough great scripts to go around --- and there aren't --- other factors enter the selection process.

People that went to USC or NYU film school with decisionmakers prevail upon them to buy a script. TV writers have their agent push their feature film onto producers and execs for them. One decisionmaker buys a script he isn't in love with because he's making a marketing decision to capture a demographic he thinks will love it. Another decisionmaker has more money and power than taste. A third has a personal, political or social agenda he/she wants to push.

Sadly, you and I cannot count on those factors.

We simply haven't done the things in our life that would bend and tweak and push the system in our favor. We didn't know we were supposed to, for one thing. And we were busy doing other things for another.

So we just have to write a great script, send it into the world more or less through the usual channels, and see what happens. I've watched some people have what this industry calls success through this route. Typically, they've had one script get some buzz and interest, but nothing happen. Then a couple scripts get bought, but languish and expire afterwards. Then they pitch a ton of other scripts, get some rewrite jobs, and bang out a few more spec scripts. Then something gets made that disappears. Then, maybe, something gets made that people see and like. To be honest, the process looks an awful lot like work to me.

Alternatively, we could turn ourselves into a producer, and director, and craft services provider and make our films ourselves.

Believe me, I wish I had more to offer you than cliches and exhortations to work even harder for an uncertain reward, but I simply don't.

P.S. If you have not read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, I cannot recommend it more highly. Dude breaks it all down. Why we want to be creative, why we aren't, how we can be, and why we should.

O-Borg-Ma?

2008-12-10T01:58:00.000-08:00

True. I can’t help myself from mutilating Obama’s name to make my silly writing points.

But seriously. Has anyone noticed that Obama has the uncanny habit of absorbing his former opponents into his organization?

Joe Biden, VP. Hilary, Secretary of State. Bill Richardson, Commerce Secretary. Republican-Picked, Surge-Supporting Robert Gates to stay on as Defence Secretary.

Indeed, say some progressives, Obama seems to prefer appointing people from the center and even center-right --- where the real challenges to his nomination came from, incidentally --- over the progressive and left elements who formed his earliest, loudest and most eager supporters.

Resistance, apparently, is not futile. It is rewarded.

Eliot Spitzer: Columnist

2008-12-04T18:46:00.000-08:00

Disgraced former NY District Attorney and Governor Eliot Spitzer has published his first column for Slate, in which he astutely criticizes the form that the taxpayer-funded bailout has taken. Whatever you may think of Spitzer, it's clear that the man recognizes a good fucking when he sees one.

Burger Assault

2008-12-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

A South Florida man was arrested and charged with domestic violence for repeatedly smashing a McDonald's cheeseburger into his girlfriend's face.

The original charges of attempted murder were dropped when police determined that he was not trying to make her actually eat it.

The Jolie Bible

2008-12-04T18:04:00.000-08:00

A new, illustrated version of the Bible has been released, which includes glossy photos of Angelina Jolie, cruelly placed right next to the chapters that tell you not to masturbate.

Sarah Palin's Book Contract

2008-12-03T23:53:00.000-08:00

The publishing industry is abuzz with speculation about Sarah Palin's memoir sales.

Insiders say that if Gov. Palin writes a book, she would get paid $7 million dollars. Furthermore, if she reads one, she'll get $8 million.

College Too Expensive for Most American Families Now

2008-12-03T23:48:00.000-08:00

A report has come out that trends making higher education more expensive and household income lower makes puts college out of reach for most American high school graduates.

That's the bad news. The good news is that they've just released "Girls Gone Wild: The Burger King Breakroom Edition."

America's Moment of Clarity: 21 Days Clean

2008-11-26T01:12:00.000-08:00

It feels strange to me that election day was only three weeks ago. Usually, for me, three weeks is hardly any time at all. I have dishes sitting in my sink that have been there longer than three weeks. I have unopened mail sitting on my table older than three weeks.

But in the case of Obama’s election, November 4th seems like a long time ago. Like months past. Maybe even like something that happened last year.

I don’t know how to explain this warping in my sense of time’s passing.

Maybe it’s because I’m able to breathe again. To relax, knowing that George W. Bush and his gang of crooks, thugs, idiots and con artists are finally getting the boot. And that a smart, competent, sane, decent person has been put in charge again.

It goes even deeper than that, too. I feel like the country I live in remembers what is right and important again. The last eight years have been surreal for me, like I have been put in some sort of Bizarro World version of America, where all our values and priorities had been turned upside down.

Since 2000, I’ve wanted my country back. And now I feel like I have it.

What’s more, it’s even better than when I lost it. Maybe not financially, right now. Or militarily. But psychologically. Emotionally. Dare I even say it? Spiritually.

If America were a person --- a filthy, street-living, meth-addicted person --- I would say that we have hit bottom, had a moment of clarity and are poised to make an even stronger comeback. Because this time we’ve realized that our meth --- all the immediately-gratifying, short-term-thinking, status-quo-preserving shit we’ve been sucking on for decades --- really isn’t good for us. That it might have served us in the past, helping us pull all-nighters on our way up, but has ultimately brought us down to our current bedraggled state.

America Looks Forward to Its Bright Future

Though it took a bad beating to get us here, we might finally be at a point where we seriously consider how we are going to live without getting back on that shit again.

Here’s some of what we’re purging:

1) Racism. Things are different in America now. I saw it in the coalition that Obama put together to work for him. I saw it in the way that America voted. I saw it in the way that the people who didn’t vote for him more or less shrugged and shut up when he won.

I feel that something has truly changed in this country between how it was just 22 days ago. Heavy tectonic plates that have been grinding against one another for decades finally slipped three Tuesdays ago and we’re in a new landscape now.

A specific, personal example: I do standup comedy. I had written and told some jokes that used racial issues. Not in a derogatory, stereotype-perpetrating way, but in a way that exploited racial tensions for their humorous energy. For instance, here’s one that got big laughs up to November 1st.

“A lot of whites think it’s hypocritical that white people can’t use the n-word, while blacks use it with each other all the time. But I don’t mind. Because white people have our own “n-word.” A word that we don’t mind using with one another, but that we get kind of uptight when we hear blacks and Mexicans call us. That word is “neighbor.””

Today, that joke --- and others like it --- is dead. Not because it’s offensive, but because the reality that supported it --- that of whites being reflexively nervous and afraid of darker skinned people --- simply doesn’t exist anymore in a country where the President is black. That battery is drained.

As much as I hate losing good jokes, this tectonic shift is a very big and awesome thing. Maybe the most big and awesome thing that has ever happened in this country.

2) Metastastized Financialization.

Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, tells this story better than I can in this article about our current financial debacle, and the two decades of insanity that preceded it.

Since I’ve been aware of America’s economy, I’ve been struck and worried by the outsized prominence that financial services has taken. And had a sneaking suspicion that that sector’s activities were not necessarily providing proportionate value to investors, economies or societies. After all, if there is any subject that I am an expert in, it is failing to provide adequate service to those counting on me.

I’ve also noted with alarm that a great deal of our economic “growth” takes the form of successive bubbles. In my adult life, I’ve watched a broad stock bubble grow and pop, a more narrowly focused Dotcom bubble grow and pop, and a real estate bubble grow and pop. And can’t help but notice that efforts to stimulate the economy after one pop --- i.e. low interest rates --- generally give rise to the next bubble.

I’ve felt like at some point we’ve got to make reforms more substantive than simply inflating the next financial instrument-led bubble to rise out of a recession. At long last it looks like serious thinkers and policymakers are considering what those reforms might be.

3) Dependence on Foreign Oil.

This summer’s stratospheric gas-prices that turned already-suffering American consumers upside down and shook all the money out of our pockets --- while loathsome Oil Execs and Traders enjoyed record profits and bonuses --- finally made believers out of us all. I think Americans realize that we can’t be so dependent on foreign oil suppliers going forward. And that developing a domestic source of energy is at least as vital to American interests --- and worthy of sustained effort and funding --- as picking up some moon rocks, or toppling a petty Middle East dictator.

4) Crazy Christian Bullshit
Yeah, this is a tough drug for America to put down. And it looked like we were going to relapse, when we got a look at that big pretty hunk of Alaskan Ice. But we did resist, and on January 21st we will officially be 100% Creationism-Free at the top levels of government. I’m so proud.

We Are All Even More Fucked

2008-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

I have deliberately stayed away from commenting on this economic and financial catastrophe because I do not possess a great deal --- fuck, let’s just say any --- expertise in the world of global finance. Mortgage Backed Securities, Credit Default Swaps, monolines… for many years, these words were just chatter that my friends who worked in finance made to eachother while I tried to think of good fart jokes to tell and change the subject.*

But as I have watched Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson “handle” the crisis, I have decided that the financial catastrophe scenario is not really so much about the intricacies of the financial markets as it is about a couple of subjects that I can indeed claim a great deal of expertise in:

a) being over one’s head.
b) fucking up
c) trying desperately to hide a and b.

On Tuesday, Paulson announced that he wouldn’t be using the $700 billion taxpayers gave him to buy up dodgy mortgage backed securities after all.

Never mind that’s what he assured us, implored us, begged us to let him do that a scant two months ago. Now he is going to use that money to buy up bank stock to provide a capital injection, kind of like England did --- and critics of the whole toxic asset-purchase plan suggested in the first place. He has also let it slip that he’s considering other options as well.

In other words, dude is floundering.

This doesn’t look good for us.

In the long run, the US economy is made up of too many greedy, ravenous consumers and efficient, remorseless producers to really fail. I am confident that we will be prosperous, vulgar and insufferably arrogant again.

The only question is how long it will take us to get back there. Unfortunately, there is only one way to get there as soon as possible: do the right thing, at the right time, and with the right amount of firmness.

By that logic, there are many more ways to fuck up and delay our return to economic health.

We could do the wrong things. We could do the right things too late. We could even do the right things at the right time, but do them in a half-assed and unconvincing way. Economic actors hate uncertainty and risk, so if they don’t know how committed the government is to a course of action, then they aren’t going to move until that doubt is removed.

Right now, it looks like the lamest-possible-duck Bush team is failing in each of the three categories. By their own admission, they are doing the wrong things. They are wasting so much time doing these wrong things, that they are delaying doing the right things. And by reversing course and making changes, they are decreasing consumer and investor confidence.

Estimations of how long the credit/financial crisis and the economic slowdown would last are pretty much guesses in the first place. But every time the Government's "solution" has to shift like this, it’s safe to say that we can lengthen it out a bit more.

In other words, this Christmas, only the good little boys and girls will get coal in their stockings. Because that means they can have a few moments of warmth burning those coals in a converted coffee-can fireplace in front of the cardboard box they live in.

Next Christmas, they get nothing. Because they will have boiled and eaten their stockings to survive.

* Who am I kidding? All fart jokes are good.

Kudos to McCain

2008-11-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

One has to admire the class that John McCain has shown in his concession speech and afterwards.

Though he seemed to lose his way in the campaign, once he no longer had any alternatives, options or possible actions he really seemed to shine as a person of grace and dignity.

I guess John McCain is just one of those people who is at his best when he has been put in a box.

Bag! Douche

2008-11-03T16:44:00.000-08:00

Voting Day. And a Strange Compulsion

2008-11-01T01:52:00.000-07:00

Since I will be out of town on Tuesday, I went to the County Registrar's Office in Norwalk to vote early.

After a one hour drive and a three hour wait, I finally got into a voting booth with a numbered ballot in front of me.

For just an instant, I had a powerful temptation to vote for John McCain. A temptation so strong that I actually envisioned myself filling in the numbered oval that corresponded to the McCain/Palin ticket.

This sudden compulsion unnerved me. I would never have imagined that a perverse thought could consume me so, even briefly. This strong and unexpected vision made me understand why people are tempted to have other people piss on them or fuck barnyard animals. A person can get a very real and illicit thrill from doing something that violates a deep, ingrained moral conviction. There is no arguing the fact that breaking a taboo is exciting.

Still, I didn't do it.

Vote for John McCain, that is.

I did let someone piss on me, though. And fucked a barnyard animal tonight. In fact, I sexually ravaged an entire petting zoo. Including a mohair goat, a Vietnamese potbelly pig, and an extremely well-hung Shetland pony. Then I had my exertion-spawned sweat hosed off by the urine of a homeless man who has been eating nothing but asparagus and B vitamins the last three days.

A man has to get his kicks where he can.

But vote Republican? Hey, I'm not some kind of sicko.

Obama's Slow Reveal

2008-10-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

Though I fully intend to vote for Barrack Obama, I’m nothing at all like a True Believer.

For me, a vote for Barrack is a vote against John McCain and the Republican party. That is enough.

For some reason I don’t get a warm and tingly feeling in my tummy when I listen to Barrack speak. Never have. Even though so many of the people who I agree with and love and respect do get that feeling.

Truth be told, listening to him speak actually makes me like him less. He seems too good, too earnest, too squeaky-clean and upright and honorable to be true. I got a bit excited when I learned, early in the primary, that he smoked cigarettes. “Yes” I thought, “a flaw. Something dirty and stupid and self-destructive and weak. How he's more like me. Now I can relate.” Then he quit smoking.

Maybe I’m cynical, or simply too morally compromised myself to recognize a genuine idealist when I see one. But when I am listening to one of his speeches --- or attempting to read one of his books --- it just sounds too much like myself when I’m trying to impress an old lady.

And I think even the most fervent supporter should be able to admit --- even if only privately, in the secrecy of their own Prius with all the windows rolled up --- that if someone doesn’t get that tingle from Obama's words, then Obama doesn’t offer a whole lot else.

His resume, though impressive in its accomplishments, is thin. Let's just be honest and admit that.

If the Republicans have gotten traction out of any message, it is that we don’t know who this guy is. Because we don’t. He hasn’t been around for decades to become a known and familiar quality.

He spoke at the Democratic Convention in 2004, won the Senate Race in 2006 and didn't really get scrutinized until Spring of 2008.

What’s more, even as we have seen him, we still don’t know him. His policies are vague, amorphous promises to do everything good and nothing bad. His political philosophy is middle-of-the-road, let's-bridge-differences, can't-we-all-get-along blandness.

During his tightly-scripted campaign appearances, he hasn’t revealed much of psyche to us. Ever. Nothing seems to to jangle his nerves or dislodge that smile. Not once has emotion --- joy, frustration or anger --- get the better of his self-control in some sort of physical way. No tears. No pulsing veins in the temple. No spontaneous fist-pumps. Not when his old pastor stabbed him in the back. Not when he went to visit his “gravely ill” grandmother. Not when he accepted the freaking Democratic nomination for the President of the United States.

Compared to the incredible mass of tics and grimaces and eyerolls that McCain has become, this calm is reassuring. But still, Obama’s calm affability keeps his character hidden from us, as does his campaign's SuperGlue adherence the official campaign message.

That’s why, for me, the campaign is doubly important. Not only does it hopefully move a Democrat into the White House, but it gives us a real --- so far the only real --- insight into how Barrack Obama operates.

And I like what I see so far.

Like how he has tricked McCain and turned him into a whining crying little bitch-baby.

From Politico.com

Obama’s move to blanket multiple channels less than a week before the election was made possible by his decision to forgo participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns.

The campaign spent between $4 million and $5 million to air the ad on NBC, CBS, Fox News and several other cable channels.   McCain stayed within the public financing system, and has been limited to a budget of $85 million. In contrast, Obama raised $150 million in September alone.

  Appearing Wednesday on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” McCain said the infomercial was “paid for with broken promises.”   Obama “didn’t tell the American people the truth” when he claimed during the primary that he would negotiate in good faith on a course to public financing, he said.

I fucking love it. To somehow get the Republican party candidate to voluntarily give up the one advantage it perennially has --- the ability to raise lots of cash. That’s awesome.

And to see McCain reduced to whining about it to Larry King. Delicious. I thought Republicans were supposed to be the tough guys.

“Didn’t tell the American people the truth” McCain snivelled. Uh, John. He told us that he was going to do what he had to do to get elected. It’s possible that he didn’t tell you the truth about taking public financing. More fool you, sucker. So now you’re counting your pennies, while Obama is free to swamp your message. I love it.

It should be said that I don’t know for sure if Obama double-crossed McCain or not. And I don’t really care. Actually, I do care. I hope that he did double cross McCain. I hope he burned McCain like a match.

There’s a sports saying that goes “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” After watching Gore and Kerry take the high road to electoral defeat, I’m glad we have another Democrat that is trying to win, and willing to do everything that means. Including cheat. Especially cheat. After the dirty tricks that Republicans pull every four years with voter registration lists and robo-calls and character assassinations, a little Democratic cheating only means we're playing the same game.

Also, I want to see some dirt inside Obama, just so I’ll know he’s for real. A genuine goody-two-shoes is beyond my capacity to comprehend. But a fake goody-two-shoes exterior that hides a shrewd, calculating, ruthless interior? That I understand. And approve. In fact, it's starting to give me a warm tingly feeling in my stomach.

More Bad Economic News

2008-10-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

I just saw a white guy standing in front of Home Depot.

more standup from the fbomber

2008-10-24T01:59:00.000-07:00

Joe the Plumber has become a conservative icon. Because, apparently, there are many Republicans out there who find Sarah Palin to be a little too intelligent and sophisticated to really get behind.

Movie Review: Religulous

2008-10-22T14:20:00.000-07:00

To my mind, Bill Maher is a national treasure. He’s one of the best comedians working today, and he is willing to use his considerable talents to fearlessly and loudly speak his mind. The fact that I agree with about 90% of his views --- he loses me at vegetarianism --- probably helps a lot. Not surprisingly, I loved Religulous.

For starters, the film is legitimately funny.

Maher starts at the physical site of Armeggedon and delves into organized religion’s heart of … well, not exactly darkness… more like silliness. A truck-stop church in a trailer. The Bible Land theme park. An anti-Zionist rabbi. A chubby Puerto Rican who claims to be Jesus Christ. An Israeli institute for creating Sabbath-law-circumventing gizmos. A fit, trim, very-well-groomed ex-gay. A creationism museum. An extraordinarily-full-of-shit Islamic rapper.

Though Maher goes into the project with a definite agenda, he is respectful enough to let the people he’s mocking do most of the work of making themselves look silly themselves. The resulting humor is more subtle than one might expect, mostly earned by the reactions and glances and tone of the interviews.

He also spends considerable time in thoughtful conversation with his family and others about the subject of faith, and belief. And whether people would or would not be better off without it.

It’s a lot of fun and definitely gives the viewer plenty to think about.

In the final two or three minutes, though, Mahar drops the levity. And the hammer.

The silly movie clips stop. The fun music ends. Shit gets serious. Maher matter-of-factly delivers the central message of the film in stark and electrifying terms. The three main monotheistic religions ---Christianity, Judaism, Islam --- all explicitly and rapturously predict and End of World cataclysm of destruction and death. For humanity to embrace these religions while simultaneously possessing the means to bring them about --- nukes and pollution --- endangers all our lives.

It’s a powerful ending to an entertaining and insightful… documentary? No. Comedy? Not really. Filmic essay? Yeah, that.

That said, I do have a problem with it. Two, actually.

First, I don’t think he goes far enough with his condemnation of organized religion. And, though I wouldn’t expect all religious foolishness to get equal time, the victims of his expose don’t get equal whacks from Maher’s mockery-stick. Second, I think Maher gives human nature too much credit, believing that chucking organized religion would fundamentally improve humanity’s chances of survival.

To make a gross and highly distorting generalization, Maher’s encounters and conversations with representatives of the three monotheistic religions can be summed up thusly.

1. Christianity has a Saying Stupid Shit problem.
2. Judaism has a Following Silly Rules problem.
3. Islam has a Killing People problem.

In reality, fundamentalist Christians and Jews do things much worse than spout off nonsense and create religious-law-loophole-defying devices. Though they don’t go for the kind of mass, frenzied blood-rallies that Muslims do over cartoons and books --- if you happen to cross them over something really important to them, they will gladly murder you for it in God’s loving name.

Just look at the abortion doctors gaffled in the U.S. or assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for examples of the Christian and Jewish faith taken to the deadly extreme. Though I understand his desire to keep things light, I wish that he’d taken the gloves off a little bit more with these lunatics.

Secondly, Maher’s solution --- or rather plea --- is for humanity to simply get over religion. He implies that with that silly, superstitious, violence-encouraging deadweight off our collective neck, we could use our rationality and logic to create a better, more livable, more sustainable world.

I wish.

Personally, I happen to think that the problem isn’t religion. It’s people.

Again, specifically, the problem is the three-quarters of humanity occupying the less-than-prime territory on the fbomber’s Heart-Brain Quadrant.

The Smart & Mean quartile is always going to try to run things, the Dumb & Mean quartile is going to obey them, the Sweet & Dumb crowd will look confused and the Nice & Smart set will gnash their teeth while watching impotently.

For some time now, the Smart & Mean group has used religion as mind-control to ensure a docile and obedient population. But religion is by no means the only possible method. Other belief-systems have worked just as well.

The godless Communists of the Soviet Union and China each wasted a substantial of their own population without having to pray over it. The Nazis combined nationalism, a weird racial superstition and a dash of Darwin to justify treating millions of people like animals to slaughter. Pol Pot’s massacres were inspired in part by the Greek Philosopher Plato’s belief that anyone over ten years old was already too tainted to help build an ideal society. In the fbomber’s adopted home of Los Angeles people regularly get killed for going into the wrong neighborhood --- without religion’s help.

Which I think proves that it’s the mean people and stupid people who have to go, not their imaginary friend, God.

What’s my solution to that problem?

It’s radical, but simple. Make a single, strategic purchase at a hardware store. Then wait.

The most irretrievably Mean & Stupid people among us historically do a pretty good job of taking themselves out of the population without any help --- through wars, suicide bombings and driving Ford F-150s drunk on Wild Turkey.

Lately, however, they’ve greatly accelerated their removal process even more. Not through violence, though. Through architecture.

Above all other thing, Mean & Dumb people love to all get together in big groups to be stupid assholes in front of one another. And indulge in frenzied, showy rituals of empty self-congratulation.

Go to any backwards, unlivable shithole in the world --- right now, I am specifically thinking of Houston, Texas --- and the biggest, most impressive buildings in town aren’t going to be the hospitals, libraries, universities and City Halls. You know, those drab, neglected places where actual service to the community and improvement of the mind happen.

No, the shiniest, most capacious structures in town are going to be places for the Mean and Stupid to get together in mass numbers for high-volume, emotionally-charged, intellectually-vacant exercises in tribal reinforcement. In the Western world, that means churches, and their new incarnation, Mega-Churches --- or their secular equivalent, sports stadiums.

In the Muslim world, the biggest enclosed gathering places are mosques capable of holding thousands of kneeling, ass-raising worshippers at a time.

In Israel, the religious fanatics have taken a different path. Instead of individual buildings, they’ve built a single wall for themselves around the entire city of Jerusalem and much of their country so they can hide from the other religious fanatics.

The Mean & Stupid pack into these structures on a regular basis to hoot and holler and parade their unthinking loyalty to tribe. The Smart & Mean show up --- in a more comfortable and expensive section, naturally --- to exercise leadership and cement “regular guy” credentials. Lastly, the Sweet & Dumb crowd tags along too, just to see what all the excitement is about.

Historically, the Nice & Smart crowd has distrusted these large rally-type settings and stayed away. And for good reason. They know that if you get enough amped-up retards in one place, someone --- probably someone wearing glasses and carrying a book --- is going to wind up getting hurt badly. Consequently the Smart & Nice crowd has sniffed disdainfully, and tried to disparage this kind of indoor herd migration. Maher’s movie is an example of this disparagement.

But I think this is the wrong idea.

Instead of being discouraged, all the dummies and assholes of the world should be encouraged --- nay, exhorted --- to fill these churches, stadiums, mosques, synagogues and gymnasiums as often as possible. And in as large numbers as the buildings can physically hold. And to yell and stamp and chant moronic slogans as much as their ignorant, hateful hearts desire.

Because buildings have walls. And walls have doors.

And the Smart & Nice people --- if they have followed my advice and gone to the hardware store --- have padlocks to put on those doors.

From the outside.

More fbomber stand-up

2008-10-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

The Republicans believed that the Presidential debates would be "game-changers."

They were right, but unfortunately for McCain-Palin, the game changed to Street Basketball.

fbomber standup

2008-10-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

This Presidential election has taken an ugly racial turn lately. John McCain has changed his campaign slogan to "America: Do You Really Want to 'Never Go Back?'"

Plumber? More like Joe the Stupid Lying Law-Breaking Asshole

2008-10-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

First off, I’ll confess that I did not watch or listen to the entire third Presidential debate. I tried, but was too saddened and put off by McCain’s feverish and pathetic aggressiveness to finish.

Jesus. I haven’t seen a white guy go after a black guy so hard since the Kimbo Slice fight.* From what I did see, McCain never managed to land a punch like that pink-haired MMA dude did, though. As mad as McCain was, Obama shrugged off the old man’s palsied jabs with the confidence of a fighter who knows that he’s so far ahead on points that he only needs to avoid getting knocked out to win the fight.

Still. The entire spectacle of McCain grimacing and clenching his increasingly deformed jaw while compressing his wattle-y old turkey-neck --- viewed in High Def --- was so stomach-turning that I watched some Tivo’d segments of “CSI: Miami” with a friend instead. Meaning --- astoundingly --- that compared to John McCain, David Caruso was the lesser douchebag of the night.

I should have kept watching the debate though. Because it looks I missed the emergence of the next shining political star for the Republicans. The clear favorite to be the bottom half of the Sarah Palin for President ticket in 2012.

Apparently, the final Presidential debate was really a debut party for the arrogant loser full-of-shit cocksucker called “Joe the Plumber.” For those who also missed the unveiling of America’s future VP --- one even more intellectually unqualified and personally repugnant than Governor Moose-fucker herself --- here’s the story.

While out on the hustings in Toledo, Obama happened upon this unmarried 34-year old toilet-unplugger, who was in his yard playing football with his 13-year-old son.

Joe took this chance to go up to the next President of the United States and pour some of the steaming pile of ca-ca in his bald head out through his mouth --- starting with this accusation, phrased as a question:

"I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?"

The ever-gracious, ever-patient, almost painfully-earnest Obama proceeded to give Joe a very long, detailed, respectful answer to this question. An answer that visibly bounced off the dipshit Joe’s doughy, moronic, slit-eyed face as his weak brain grasped and fumbled for the next Fox-News-fed talking point he would poop out of his slack mouth-anus.

You could almost see him visibly relax when he finally got a firm mental hold of the next buzzword he was going to blindly excrete at the high-pressure jet of intelligence directed at him.

Twice that happened, with Joe’s contribution to the exchange being a look of stubborn, unsubdued, unashamed ignorance and the meager shit-pellets of a mumbled “American Dream” and “flat tax.” Shit-pellets that were so quickly swept away by the force of Obama’s considered, thoughtful, detailed hydrant-blast of information that they hardly left their stench of stupidity in the air.

Here, you can watch the hose-down for yourself:

Still, even those tiny, stinking little shit-pellets were enough to make Joe a hero to the Right. First over at Fox News, who raised this nobody to icon status as an entrepreneur emperiled by the socialistic schemes of Barack Obama. Then John McCain himself, who bandied Joe the Plumber’s name about in the debate, causing it to be mentioned two dozen times in total. Joe then went on some Fox News show himself. Katie Couric interviewed him. Fortune Magazine wrote an article entitled “McCain's best hope: Joe the plumber.”

The next logical step is for this guy to join the next Republican ticket. After all --- as a further investigation of Joe the Plumber proves --- he meets all the current requirements for a brilliant GOP career.

+++

1. He is a complete liar. For starters, his first name isn’t even Joe. It’s Sam. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. Wurzelbacher I can understand dropping. It’s a fucking bitch to pronounce. But Sam? What’s wrong with Sam? Why is this guy so determined to go by an alias? Clearly, he loves to lie so much, that he can't even say his OWN NAME with any honesty.

2. He is delusional. According to his boss, who Joe/Sam was supposedly going to buy this business from, the only time they discussed this potential transaction --- the one that Joe/Sam thought important enough to personally critique a United States Senator’s proposed tax plan over --- was SIX FUCKING YEARS AGO. DURING THEIR INITIAL JOB INTERVIEW. Since then, there have been no negotiations, no assessments, no discussion of transfer terms. In other word, when Joe/Sam said that he was “getting ready to buy” a business what he meant was that he was thinking about it. To himself.

Well, fuck-a-duck, Sammy. I’m thinking about importing a freight-container full of 18-year-old sex-slaves from Eastern Europe. Sometimes I think about it half a Kleenex box worth a day. That doesn’t mean that the next time Obama comes canvassing my block I’m going to harangue him to legalize prostitution and human trafficking statutes to better suit my fantasies.

3. He can’t fucking add up numbers. The business Sammy was thinking about buying --- a two-person outfit named Newell Plumbing and Heating Co. of Toledo --- only makes a net profit of somewhere between $100 - $200k per year.

Given what we’ve seen of Sam/Joe so far, even if he ever does buy the business --- a gargantuan “if” --- I think it’s safe to say that he’s not the kind of businessman who’s going to raise their revenue by 25-150% anytime soon. So the whole higher-taxes-over-$250k wouldn’t even apply to him.

4. He thinks that he does not need to abide by the law. Even though the county where he lives requires plumbers to be licensed, neither he or his employer possess this needed credential. The local plumbers union says that he applied for an apprenticeship in 2003, but “never completed the work.” So, apparently, Joe/Sam thinks that it is okay to flaunt local professional requirements, and to perform plumbing work that may or may not abide by the relevant building codes… because, well, he’s Joe/Sam, that’s why.

What’s more, he doesn’t seem to want to pay his hospital bills or tax bills. He’s had two liens taken out against him for $1100 apiece for nonpayment of those pesky little expenses he incurred and subsequently ignored.

5. He is --- let’s just say --- a bit insensitive to some obvious racial issues. Obama, instead of ignoring Joe/Sam like the ignorant little shit-stirrer that he is, paid him the respect of addressing his truculently phrased question as if it were an honest request for information. A request that he fulfilled with a deluge of facts, figures and philosophical justifications regarding his proposed tax plan.

Joe/Sam not only visibly hardened himself against hearing --- much less understanding and processing that answer --- but later characterized it as “a tap dance.” One that, he said, was “almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”

Sammy Davis Jr.? Tap dancing? Um, Sam/Joe, you do realize that you are talking about a black man here? Sammy Davis Jr. and tap dancing might not be the appropriate metaphor to use. Tap dancing in particular carries some subtle and historical negative racial connotations of minstrel and blackface shows.

Why not just go straight for a set of breakdance, rap and fried chicken references and be done with it, Joe/Sam? With a watermelon and malt liquor chaser while you're at it? Why hold back?

+++

So there we have it. Mean. Stupid. Dishonest. Criminal. Living in an ideologically-pure fantasy world. And despite all these shortcomings, breath-takingly arrogant. Even in the face of all his intellectual, legal and social deficits, this colossal jackass has the clanking, swinging balls to believe that he can legitimately engage in intellectual debate with someone who is so obviously and publicly his superior in every possible way.

Sound like anyone we know? Actually that’s a trick question. It sounds like every successful Republican Presidential candidate ever. Fuck VP. Fuck waiting until 2012. I'm shocked that the Republicans don’t ditch McCain and run Joe on the top slot right now.

----

* The fbomber hates to bandy ethnic generalizations around, but has to point out that this Presidential race has turned traditional racial stereotypes on their head.

In his quest to be President, Obama has conducted himself with stereotypical characteristics of older white males: He has been methodical, rational, organized and disciplined nearly to the point of dullness.

By contrast, John McCain has shown the characteristics that racists commonly apply to younger black men: Untrustworthiness. Poor impulse control. Aggressiveness. And a lifelong obsession with fucking blond women.

W the Movie

2008-10-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s a link to the trailer of the new Oliver Stone joint, “W.” which apparently gives George W. Bush the biopic treatment he deserves --- contemptuous and mocking.

www.wthefilm.com

I heard Oliver Stone talking on Bill Maher's show about this movie. Crazed, loony liberal that he is, Stone said that he did not make shit up for this movie. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but that he didn't need to. The information and quotes on the public record about Bush were more dramatic and theatrical than he could have fabricated himself.

I believe that.

Stone also alluded to the fact that GWB is a mystery. I really believe that, too. Here we are, 8 years later and as much as we --- or at least, I --- like to belittle the man, I don't know anyone who has a real sense of what he's made out of or what makes him tick. I certainly don't.

It's easy to dismiss him with pejoratives that capture an element of his persona --- chimp, frat-boy, asshole, bully, etc... --- but he's more than just that one (or even all) of those things.

I just can't figure the guy out at all.

For instance... I don't even know if he's smart or dumb. Honestly.

I know it's easy to call him a moron for all the obvious, visible reasons he gives us. But, hold on, this is a guy who got to do pretty much every thing he ever wanted to do in his life by his 60th birthday. Without even starting to try until after he was 40. And who has manipulated supposedly brilliant guys like Tony Blair and Colin Powell and then flushed them away like used toilet paper afterwards. There's something sharp and pointed in there someplace, but I don't know what it is exactly.

In a similar manner, I can't really fathom what pleasure he has gotten out of the Presidency. Clinton clearly reveled in the pomp and attention and chance to be the biggest mover in the world's most powerful country. I don't sense that in W, though. It's like he's kind of going through the motions so much of the time... cramped and sulky and reluctant. And other times --- usually inappropriate --- he's loosey-goosey and near manic with high-spirited nicknames and jigs and personal teasing pokes at reporters and foreign dignitaries.

Also, is he a dickhead or not? Yeah, he mocked a woman about to get lethally injected. But he seems to be a genuinely loving and decent dad to his daughters.

Some other things I don't know for certain:

Is he really all that religious? Is he really not drinking? What happened with that “pretzel” passing out incident? Is he really so intellectually incurious as he appears? Does he really not follow events at all? What really motivated him to shoot for the highest office in the land? Of all the things he did the last 8 years, which did he really want and which were thrust on us by the scum-circle around him?

In short, just who is this guy that's been running the show since January of 2000?

I've read the books, I've watched the news, I've combed the blogs. And he's still a mystery to me even, as he's getting ready to pack his bags.

I think that's bizarre. This last eight years has been tumultuous and wrenching and exhilarating beyond any eight years I've ever lived through in my life. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, the Bush Boom, the Financial Meltdown. The Bailout.

In other words, W and I have been been through some shit together.

Whether I agree or disagree with the decisions he's made. I should have a sense of some kind of understanding --- at least knowing at an emotional level --- why he's made the decisions he's made. Like some die-hard 1930's Republican might hate the New Deal, but at least understand why FDR was pushing it out there.

Or --- here’s a better analogy --- how some hippy might not like Nixon, but at least understand why a paranoid, fascist, rotten-hearted creep like him would do the things he did.

I honestly don’t have that with Bush.

Bush's intellectual and emotional core has been hidden behind multiple, light-proof, airtight seals and chambers --- the Republican Party aristocracy, the emotionally deformed Bush Family, the ultra-secretive White House lockdown, and his own impermeable smirking facade --- for so long, I've given up on ever glimpsing his psyche. What's more, I haven't read any credible accounts from people who have. For all his folksy informality, he's one of those sphinxes --- like the iconic Reagan --- who leave even their closest associates (never friends, these people never have real friends) scratching their heads about what's really behind the affable shell.

Maybe this film will help illuminate this psyche.

I kind of doubt it. This biographical information has been out there long enough and hasn't really shed any usable light yet. For whatever mysterious reasons, George W. Bush has been a complete, unalloyed, toxic, flaming, radioactive, crashing disaster of a Chief Executive. He's combined awful ideas with even worse executions. He's weakened or destroyed everyone who supported him and strengthened everyone who opposed him. Everything that he has touched has turned into liquid, poisonous shit. Everything that he has ignored has festered into oozing, gangrenous sores.

Clearly, as a President, he is the Very Worst Ever.

Frankly --- at this point --- I've kind of lost interest in finding out exactly why.

I guess there is a sort of taxonomic value to understanding the nature of the GWB beast. If we can identify what kind of creature it is, then we can better build defenses against future incarnations of it. Or better yet, learn to crush potential Georgies in their immature stage --- while they are running redneck states, crappy baseball teams and failing companies.

Other than that, what's the use of putting that proven loser under a microscope?

Focusing on his personal failings is beside the point.

As tempting as it is to pin everything that happens on his incompetent and deserving back, we are all to blame really.

George W Bush was a mistake that all of America made.

Some of us made it bigger and more passionately than others, but we all made it.

We all thought that America was inherently awesome enough that we could put someone who was clearly substandard in charge of it --- and then let him freely and obviously fuck things up --- without any serious consequences. That nation-wide mistake is the only explanation for why Bush didn't receive the kind of real resistance that would have made it impossible to continue doing his visible and blatant fucking up of this country, without pause or slowdown, to this very day.

I'm not just talking to the dumbasses who have ever applied a "W" bumper sticker to the back of their bloated and shoddily-constructed SUV. Though those people make a satisfying herd of scapegoats, they are so emotionally and mentally subnormal that we really couldn't expect anything more than jingoistic, moronic hate-echoes from them anyway.

I'm talking to the rest of us. “Oh well,” we shrugged, watching an election stolen, a stupid war started, the budget balanced wrecked, a city drowned, the Constitution shredded, and the economy metastasize into a giant Ponzi scheme ready to collape, “there’s always 2004-slash-2008.”

With that kind of stupidity, apathy, arrogance, entitlement and laziness so ingrained and widespread through this nation --- and yes, this writer --- clearly we were headed for some sort of disaster no matter who had been in charge all this time.

Bush just sped it up and made it more painful than it otherwise would have been. So while this movie all-so-deservedly kicks Bush while he is down, I hope it has the honesty to aim a few boots at the rest of us as well.

We've earned them.

Lazy, Half-Assed Blog Posting

2008-10-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

I received an email from a Republican friend (yes, I have some) who said, in essence:

1. He thought McCain won the first Presidential Debate.
2. Sarah Palin is a joke.
3. Obama, who he respects as a person, reminds him of Carter, who he also respects as a person. But that Carter was crushed by world events, and he fears Obama would be too.
4. McCain reminds him of Reagan, and we need a Reagan more than a Carter in this dangerous world.
5. The fbomber is hilarious, and bound for great success as a standup comedian.

My response:

I thought McCain came out on top of the debate with Obama as well. He didn't look obviously overmatched by Obama's famed rhetorical brilliance.% McCain kept it simple, he hit the same emotional buttons over and over, he was aggressive and gave the impression of victory. Since I don't know the rules of debate, and these things are purely theater anyway, that seemed like enough to make up a victory for McCain. I was actually quite discouraged by the debate.

Later, though, analysis seemed to point out that the debates helped Obama in the places he needed it... independents and undecideds. Turns out, his campaign brains didn't want the debate to make raving Dems like me feel good at watching McCain's nose rubbed in shit. They wanted the fence-sitters to see that Obama could appear Presidential. Mission accomplished there.*

This made me realize that Obama and his strategists are really two or three steps ahead of me on this thing, effectively planning and cleanly executing the very delicate and complicated set of dance steps they've determined can win this election for him. That, more than anything else, has turned me slowly from a Obama tolerator to a reluctant yet ever-warming Obama supporter. If^ he could bring the same level of analysis, intelligence, preparation and execution into the office as he brought into the campaign, I would be happy with how he handled the job.

That's the place I'm at now. Intelligence, competence and seriousness are enough for me.+

By contrast, John McCain's behavior and decisions of this campaign radiate the qualities diametrically opposed to intelligence, competence and seriousness. He's not stupid, but clearly he doesn't put a lot of weight on analysis and investigation before he makes a decision. He certainly doesn't seem to have a solid, workable campaign plan that he's determined to follow. And his surprise pick of a controversial, unqualified nobody like Sarah Palin as a running mate shows that he doesn't really respect the consequences of this race beyond getting into the office.

So you think McCain is another "go with the gut" guy, like Bush II and your icon Reagan.** And Obama is another "in his head" guy like Carter, Bush I, Woodrow Wilson, et al.

Even if you are mistaken, and Obama turns out to be a combo head and gut guy --- like JFK and my icon, Clinton## --- I'm okay with a head guy.

I think that smart, principled, strategic thinking what we need right now --- even more than the ability to make great snap decisions.

We can't predict or prepare for theoretical, unforeseen events that might need an instantaneous response.

But we can analyze our present, real and pressing crisis. And choose someone with the skills and temperament to address it.

Our biggest current problem is that we are buried in a concentric circle of ruins --- economic, military, diplomatic ---- and first need to dig ourselves out.

Then we need to intelligently, strategically and competently reorder our house so that it doesn't collapse so completely again. In this scenario, I want to be headed up by someone who likes to take measurements and draw up blueprints, as opposed to someone who eyeballs where to throw up some walls. Or, worse yet, is determined to continue the same demolition activities that collapsed our home in the first place.

Thing is, whatever events transpire, whoever gets elected next is going to have to focus most of his attention on rebuilding anyway.

After all, being able to effectively respond to the kind of world events that get thrown our way depends on getting our ruins cleared away as cleanly and quickly as possible.

So even if one accepts your premise that President McCain would react more coolly and decisively (Reaganesquely?) in a crisis that occurs after January 20th^^ his reaction would be constrained by the economic, military and diplomatic wreckage George W. Bush created --- i.e. we're broke, our military is overstretched, everyone hates us.

Since McCain doesn't even pretend to have a plan to clear that rubble, that's where we would stay, no matter how putatively brilliant his response from the gut.

That's not acceptable to me.

---

% Funny how everyone, from pundits to the public, grades Republicans on the curve in debates. Like we automatically assume the Democrat is smarter and better at having, expressing and defending his or her ideas. All the Republican has to do is not be humiliated to be able to claim a victory.

It’s like Democrats are competing to beat real Olympics times, but Republicans only have to beat Special Olympics standards to get the medal. Which should effectively topple the fantasy that Republicans are the party that believes in rewarding individual merit and achievement. They have no problem with affirmative action, or the soft bigotry of low expectations --- as long as they give stupider, whiter, richer, more religiously fanatic people a leg up.

*Obama's measured, respectful, friendly performance was also smart for other, uglier reasons. As much as I would have loved to see a Democrat forcefully inflicting grievous injuries on a Republican, there is an optics issue to consider. I suspect that for many people in this nation, the sight of a younger, blacker man exhibiting anger towards an older, whiter man would create a sense of discomfort.

^ This is an enormous “if.” But since this Obama has succeeded at every other thing he’s had to do so far, it's no stretch to believe that he can pull this off, too. Obama seems to be the luckiest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. So lucky that it can’t be just luck. Nobody can be this lucky. He’s got to be good, too.

+The evil variety, as exemplified by Dick Cheney, does not count.

** The love for Reagan is one of those blind spots I have in relation to other guys my age, kind of like Fantasy Football, which I think is just taking watching sports and giving yourself homework.

I just don't fucking get what was so great about that guy. To me, everything he said sounded great. But he wore black shoe polish in his hair and more rouge than my Aunt Ezma. And everything he did was either stupid (Star Wars defense system) or destructive (cut taxes + raise spending) or mean (firing Air Traffic Controllers) or uselessly theatrical (invade Grenada) or some combination of those things.

Is simply saying the right things good enough to achieve Legend status? I guess so. He is known as "The Great Communicator" not "The Great Chief Executive." So also falls the fiction of Republicans being about substance rather than appearance.

As for his goading of the Soviet Union through insulting rhetoric and deficit spending to fatally blow their budget on weapons slightly before we blew ours... I will concede that the stupid, inflexible, vain, incurious, simple-minded, lazy, callous, naive, remote, self-absorbed Ronald Reagan was a broken clock that turned out to be right exactly one time. But that is as far as I will go.

## Peace. Prosperity. Sloppy, fat-girl blowjobs. Really, what's not to like?

^^ A supposition not borne out by his campaign behavior, by the way. Campaign off. Campaign on. Debate off. Debate on. Fly into DC. Fly out of DC. All over a fucking bill in Congress he didn't even contribute to. How many more pallets of Depends would he have gone through over something that actually needed his input?

Congress Finally Talks Back

2008-09-30T22:44:00.000-07:00

The fbomber is glad to see that Congress has decided to grow a spine, and defy President Bush's wishes. He is, however, scratching his head about the timing.

Authorize the Iraq War without evidence of WMDs or aggressive action against the U.S.? You got it, George.

Pass the Patriot Act without even reading it? Okey-dokey, no problem.

Prevent another Great Depression? Fuck you, asshole.

McCain: Losing It?

2008-09-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

As this campaign progresses, the fbomber continues to be more and more impressed by Barrack Obama's composure. Nothing seems to phase the man and ruffle his good natured cool.

Apparently, this is not only a reflection of his natural temperament but a deliberate campaign choice designed to highlight his capacity to function effectively under pressure. The fbomber has heard that his unofficial campaign mantra is "No Drama Obama."

This is in dramatic contrast to McCain, who has adopted the unofficial slogan of "Insane in the Membrane."

The fbomber is actually becoming worried about McCain. He's only seen one other person melt down so dramatically in the public eye.

Much like this other person, McCain has:

1) Abandoned his previous beliefs and morals.
2) Become BFFs with a snotty bitch.
3) Proven erratic and completely undependable about scheduled responsibilities.

Basically, the fbomber fears that McCain is a single head-shaving and beaver-shot away from pulling "a full Britney."

Fbomber's Social Laws:Part 1

2008-09-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Reading the print and online commentary about the Federal Wall Street Junk Buy-Up/Bailout has made the fbomber realize two hard facts about human beings.

1. The Fbomber's Competency/Certitude Inverse Correlative: The less able an individual is to successfully manage even the smallest aspects of his/her own life, the more sure he/she is of how to manage the biggest issues of the world.

AKA Blogger's Law, Politician's Postulate, Economist's Axiom, and Op-Ed Writer's Fundamental.

2. The Fbomber's Professional Wardrobe/Utility Paradox: The less valuable a service a profession provides, the better that profession dresses.

Brain surgeons save your life wearing pyjamas made out of green bedsheets. Investment bankers push around crap investments wearing $6,000 Brioni suits.

As proof of this law's accuracy, consider that this law predicts that hookers provide the maximum possibility utility to customers, as they perform their job completely naked. QED, homies.

Deepest Condolences?

2008-09-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

The fbomber just learned that his weekend a missive went out from Georgetown University (the fbomber's alma mater) to "Greater New York–Area Alumni" impacted by last week's events in the financial sector, i.e. the Wall Street I-bankers who have been giving the school money. James M. Langley, the university's vice-president for "advancement" wrote:

In light of the extraordinary events that have rocked global financial markets this week, I write to express my deepest sympathy and concern for all members of the Georgetown University community impacted by the upheaval.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you as the crisis continues and details of remedial efforts are announced. I intend to spend the coming months learning how our friends have been impacted and provide whatever support the University can.

On behalf of President DeGioia and our entire Georgetown community, I extend my hopes for a swift recovery and a brighter future.

I'm ashamed. For all the old grey stone buildings on campus, this just shows how middle-class, gauche, arriviste and bourgeouis (sp?) Georgetown really is.

The true pimp elite aristocracy schools (do I even need to say the "I-word L-word?") know better than to even talk about money, in good times and --- especially --- in bad. These little economic hiccups are the sort of thing that are taken on the chin with a stiff upper lip and all that... anyway, it's something for the accountant people to worry about.

Not Georgetown, though. We have to say this kind of shit. In public.

Come on, guys. Pull it together. At least act like G-town is more than a glorified trade school to put out efficient white-collar servants for America's hereditary elite. Pretend.

After all, no matter how many earnest knowledge workers we can pump into the worlds of law, finance, medicine and politics we're never going to get the admission to the white-shoe world we crave with every ounce of our being if we keep betraying our Mick & Wop Papist working-class origins with this sort of rookie faux paus. Jesus.

If Not Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse When?

2008-09-20T01:30:00.000-07:00

As of end of day Friday, the fbomber has heard 24 hours of a panicked chorus of dire, if vague, warnings about what kind of catastrophe awaits our global economic system if the American taxpayer does not pick up the tab for the bad home loan-based debt that appears to be the financial equivalent of the Ebola virus.

Against this frantic, unified squealing, the fbomber would like to send up a countervailing, solitary and equally frantic squeal of his own: "Don't do it!"

Don't allocate money for a bailout. Don't save these financial institutions. Don't prop up the rotten timbers of the global finance structure.

Let it all collapse.

The fbomber does not say this out of a disbelief of the worst case scenarios which have been trotted out for the last news cycle. He says it in a fervent hope and belief that the worst case scenarios are actually conservative, rosy-tinted, dream-wishes compared to the full extent of the inevitable disaster.

In short, the fbomber wishes for a complete descent into violent, senseless anarchy. Pronto.

He can't help it. As a product of the 80's, he was raised on a steady stream of post-apocalyptic narratives in his formative years. As it turned out, movies like Mad Max, Red Dawn, and The Terminator shaped his psychology in a profound way.

He's actually disappointed that it's 2008 and he has not yet once had to wear animal furs to survive, eat human flesh or drive a spike-studded dune buggy across the desert while being chased by a psychotic midget.

That is the violent, chaotic, brutal reality that his upbringing prepared him for --- not this boring business of going to work every day to do the same stupid job. Where's the glamor to that? The adrenaline rush? The opportunity to callously commit satisfyingly vicious acts of violence without fear of retribution? Unless you're working for the LAPD, nowhere.

The fbomber actually looks forward to a life of scrabbling for life's essentials amid the ruins of a once-functioning society.

After all, such a life looks to combine the most enjoyable aspects of camping, hunting, road-racing, mixed martial arts, scavenger hunts and trading food-scraps for sexual favors.

He has exciting plans to create his own society, a tribe which rewards indolence and cynicism with the same respect that our existing society heaps upon industry and competence.

Most of all, he eagerly anticipates being able to travel the 405 during daylight hours at a speed exceeding 5 miles per hour.

So, yeah. Fuck this "New Great Depression" talk. Let's think big here, folks, along the lines of "Next Dark Age" or better yet, "Pre-History 2.0." If he's not wearing a feral-cat loincloth and club-fighting another dude for chieftan status by next week, at the latest, he's going to be pissed.

CORRECTION: Republicans Even Worse than Previously Stated

2008-09-18T04:17:00.000-07:00

CORRECTION
In an earlier, error-riddled post the fbomber predicted that Mitt Romney would be elected President of the United States, which obviously will not come to pass this year.

Even more egregiously, he claimed that Republicans possess three core competencies: Making money. Trolling for anonymous gay sex in public bathrooms. And making Democrats look repulsive.

As it turns out, the fbomber overestimated Republican capabilities. For starters, it appears that Republican men are awful at keeping their feverish lust for public bathroom cock out of the papers.

And saying that the Republicans are good at making money is a statement so vague as to become inaccurate. Because as recent events have shown, it does not contain a descriptor of exactly who the Republicans make money for.

As the last eight years have shown, that list of lucky parties is a very short one, noticeably NOT including the following groups:

The Poor - The Census Bureau reports Americans whose household income was in the lowest 20 percent saw their incomes drop 6 percent since 2000.

The Middle Class - According to an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, the period 2000-2007 shows the lowest increase in median income (it’s actually a negative $324.00) of any of the four cycles of economic growth over the last four decades.

Stockholders, generally - The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,587.60 on the day Bush took office. Today it's at 10,609.66. So it's more or less identical, not even taking inflation into account. So, considering brokerage fees and investment costs --- investors would have been better off burying their money in coffee cans in the back yard than investing in stocks.

Taxpayers, generally - Under George W Bush, we've added $4 trillion to our national debt, thanks to a combination of tax cuts and wars. This debt will generate interest which the taxpayers will have to pay.

Anyone earning, spending or saving U.S. dollars, generally - Between 2000 and 2008, the dollar weakened against the euro by 37 percent.

But not everyone has been a loser the last eight years.

Oil Companies, Defense Contractors and The Top 1 Percent of the wealthiest Americans seem to have made out okay. That last group, for instance, has seen its income increase by 50 percent since 2001.

Some might say that this failure in both absolute wealth creation and equitable wealth distribution proves the error of the "trickle down" theory of economics first propounded by Ronald Reagan's economic handlers nearly 30 years ago. Then again, the Republicans never specifically said what they intended to trickle down on the poor people, in the same way that R. Kelly never specifically mentioned what liquid he would be serving his 15-year-old girlfriends when he invited them up for "a drink."

OsamaWatch:2555 Days and Counting

2008-09-11T05:11:00.000-07:00

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, one that killed almost 3,000 Americans.

Though the fbomber knows how many distractions this nation has right now --- Look! A Presidential candidate with really curly hair! Wow! A chick Vice-Presidential candidate with sexy rimless glasses! --- he wonders if anyone, anywhere, in any official U.S. Government capacity is actively trying to catch the motherfucker who reportedly planned and directed that attack.

Here’s a refresher: His name is Osama Bin Laden. It’s understandable if you’ve forgotten the name, since the only time you hear the word “Osama” anymore is when Republicans deliberately mispronounce Barrack Obama’s name to make some childish, retarded, bullshit point that only childish, retarded, bullshit people can even understand.

Osama --- the real Osama --- is a Saudi national. He’s about 6 foot 5 inches, with a long stringy beard, livery-looking lips and big, soulful, puppy-dog eyes --- kind of like Paul McCartney’s if Paul McCartney were a fanatical killer motivated by a perverted interpretation of an already violent religion.

U.S. forces last spotted him in the hills of Tora Bora back in December of 2001 --- way back when we were actually winning the war in Afghanistan --- but he somehow slipped away. Various reports have him in the mountainous, wild, lawless Waziristan region of Pakistan* or maybe even dead.

I think it’s outrageous that it’s 2008 and we don’t even know for sure if he’s still breathing or not. And what’s more, nobody seems to care. Networks haven't broken into our regularly scheduled programming to tell us about the latest Osama sighting since I don't know when. The CIA unit tasked with finding him was disbanded in 2005.

Oddly, America --- a nation which remains fascinated beyond all reason with sluts and drug addicts who peaked a half-century ago ---seems to have lost interest completely in this mass murderer after only seven years.

Why are we letting this killer off the hook? Were his victims not blond or pretty enough to merit continued interest?

Shouldn’t the War on Terror include at least a couple of shots at those who actually commit acts of terror against us? If nothing else, those legitimate uses of force could at least act as a sort of fig leaf to cover whatever other bloody, expensive, misguided, illegal side-projects this nation chooses to lump into that category as well.

Don’t we want revenge? This is --- after all --- the nation which gave the world “Death Wish,” “Kill Bill” and, er, “Kill Bill II.” Don’t we want some payback? What's holding us back?

We certainly have no compunction about indulging in all our other baser instincts of lust, greed, jealousy, rage and violence --- usually in a single hour of FOX prime time programming --- so why are we drawing the line at a desire for retribution?

Personally, I don’t care if it’s seven years, seventeen or seventy. I want Osama caught. If he’s alive, I want him in an orange jumpsuit in Rikers Island, being sodomized in the showers. If he’s dead, I want him dug up and brought here for a ritual corpse defilement, also consisting of sodomization in a shower.

Finally, weren’t we --- as an angry and grieving nation --- promised that this asshole would be brought to justice? Shortly after the attacks, I seem to remember our President solemnly intoning on national television that Osama would be captured, “dead or alive.”**

Though Bush failed to keep most of his other promises --- especially his vow to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” --- I always kind of hoped that he would meet this one. After all, it didn’t really require any thought or work on his part. Just an order for one person to kill another person, his specialty.***

It looks like it’s not going to happen though. Bush has already been quoted as saying that “he doesn’t think about” Bin Laden.**** That’s too bad. Because after seven years of Bush not thinking about Bin Laden, the trail has grown colder than the underground crypt Dick Cheney goes into to hide from sunlight.

What a shame. I just wish that the Republicans had showed as much energy chasing Osama as they did the blue dress Bill Clinton jizzed on.

---

* The fbomber finds it comical --- in a choking, sickening way --- that this country’s multi-billion dollar surveillance satellites, predator drones, communications-interceptions networks, information-processing hardware and intelligence agencies are apparently rendered useless by caves. Caves. How much more low-tech can you get than that? That’s like having your F-16 shot down by a flint-tipped spear.

** Perhaps when Bush said that, he had already decided on “dead” and chosen the world’s top assassin --- old age --- to carry out the hit.

*** Texas: 154 Executed while Governor
Iraq: 4155 U.S. Dead, 150,000 to 1 million Iraqi dead.
Afghanistan: 586 U.S. Dead, up to 14,000 Afghanis dead.

**** Luckily, he stopped there. If he had given a complete list of all the things that he does not think about, he would probably still be talking now, and I am --- frankly --- sick of his voice.

The fbomber Told You So, Part I

2008-09-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

In this article, "5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply Informed Voters", Washington Post writer Rick Shenkman confirms many of the fbomber's theories about American voters*, but without resorting to overbroad generalizations, scatological analogies, scurrilous accusations, gratuitous insults, misogynistic rantings, a gross distortion of facts or a graph drawn on the back of an index card.

Yeah, I know. Bor-ing!

To summarize (and chime in):

1. American voters are Dumb, Dumb, Dumb. (Where's Iraq? Who's Karl Marx? What war was the Battle of Bunker Hill fought in? Don't ask Americans. Ask wikipedians**)
2. Conservative voters are not necessarily more dumb than liberal voters. (The study did not measure Meanness levels.)
3. Even if you give American voters the facts, they will still draw the wrong conclusions. (This should come as no surprise, in a country where half the population still believes in Creationism, despite being forcibly exposed to Evolution countless times during their journey through the educational system)
4. Voters are as Dumb as ever, and maybe even Dumber, despite rising educational levels. (A cursory viewing of the "Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break" documentary series should explain why a college degree need not automatically result in higher intellectual achievements.)
5. Young people don't follow the news, really, at all. (Facebook Status Updates, apparently, do not count.)

So what? So --- the fbomber repeats --- attempts to reach American voters through their heads are going to fail to engage the broader electorate. If Darwinism can't penetrate our thick skulls after 100 years, do you think that Obamanomics has a chance in 7 weeks?

Democrats have got to generate stronger emotions from American guts.

And not just the positive, happy, warm, hopeful emotions I watched being created in Denver either. Those emotions are nice, but fbomber has far too often watched them get beat up and hand their lunch money over to the uglier emotions of greed, fear and hate inside the election booth.

The McCain strategy coalesced late and is disjointed, but it is very powerful. I'll call it the High-Low-Fear approach.

At the High end, McCain's biography and history makes a convincing case to Sweet and Dumb Swing voters that he won't do ALL the stupid things Bush did. That he's a Maverick. That he's Competent. That he's a Reformer. That he's a Lifelong Public Servant, and Oh Yeah, One More Thing, A War Hero.

At the Low end, McCain's concessions to the Hard Right on war and taxes--- plus his pick of Hockey Mom*** Sarah Palin --- energize the Mean half of the voting spectrum, both Smart and Dumb.

Underneath it all, like a steady, throbbing bass beat, the Fear message --- Obama is young, he is inexperienced, we don't know him, he's kind of different from most of us, he doesn't kick ass, he's naive, he's not ready, he can't execute, he can't protect us --- will depress and demotivate support for Obama across the board.

Democrats have got to generate some fear themselves. Fear that McCain is too Old, too Crazy, to Angry, and too Unhealthy for the job. Fear that he'll continue the Worst and Stupidest of the Republican policies. Fear that Sarah Palin might wind up in the Oval Office, and make us nostalgic for the last eight years when we only had someone pretending to be a redneck in the White House.

Democrats have to generate enough fear to make the Smartest and Nicest of the Dumb & Mean people doubt their allegiance to McCain, and stay home on Election Day. And to make the Sweet & Dumb Swing Voters of America so afraid of a McCain/Palin victory that they go vote for Obama. Or, at the very least, don't go vote for McCain. Or at the very, very least NOT go to vote against Obama.

---

* The fbomber is not one of these self-hating Americans who believes that Americans are inherently stupider, greedier, meaner, lazier and more fearful than other nations. He is a self-hating American who believes that these elements are distributed more or less evenly throughout the entire human race. He does note, however, that American culture tends to glorify and actually revel in these characteristics more than any other nation he has seen. And that Americans, in fact, appear to willfully confuse these faults with virtues.

** Some might quibble that this characterization was based on measuring what someone knows, not their capability to learn and perform. So more accurately measures interests, not intelligence. A person uninterested in politics might score very low on this test, but be extremely informed and capable in other matters more relevant to daily life.

To which the fbomber responds: Nice try, dummy. Kicking ass in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City does not count as having "street smarts."

*** Living in Southern California, the fbomber is unfamiliar with this taxonomic classification and hasn't yet had it clearly defined for him yet. As best he can tell, it's just like a soccer mom, but a complete cunt.

GOPVPT&A2: The Update

2008-09-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

No matter how cynical the fbomber gets, he can’t keep up with reality.

The fbomber knew that the Palin appointment would rouse the Mean and Stupid elements of the GOP, but had no idea that this one woman would be the spark that would re-ignite the capital C, capital W, Culture War. The War that has raged --- as best as he can tell --- since the dirty hippies had the nerve to suggest that America would be a cooler place if we didn’t subjugate Negroes, oppress women, legislate an Old Testament Judeo-Christian morality on everyone, kill innocent foreigners without reason and dress up in a dark gray suit every time we left the house.

Those filthy, bra-burning Commies somehow succeeded in corrupting our nation’s morals, causing America to fall from the Edenic peace and purity that existed in this Godly, Righteous nation before oral sex, the electric guitar and incense ruined everything.*

Stoked with the kind of rage that only comes from having freedom, fairness and scientific facts forced onto a mind that has no use for those things, America’s Meanest & Dumbest have burned with an unrelenting, unthinking, resentful fury for the last four decades.

Ever on the alert for a new power source, the Smart and Mean Republicans latched onto this rage early, riding and directing the Dumb & Mean crowd like that twisted dwarf Master rode the huge retard Blaster in “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.”

An interesting thing almost happened this election. Up until Wednesday, it looked like this year’s Smart and Mean twisted dwarf, John McCain, would be fighting in the Thunderdome solo. Despite a recent conversion to craven, servile televangelist bum-nuzzling,** McCain’s antipathy for the snake-handling set has always been obvious and reciprocated. Without someone that the Guns, God, Babies, Creationism and Hate-Faggots set could get excited about, McCain’s campaign looked ready to expire with the same sad, weak whimper McCain himself makes when he is unable to reach his bedpan in time.

Enter Sarah “Barracuda” Palin.

There was only one small hitch. Before the Republicans could present their model of Family Values and Good Old Fashioned Morality to the nation, they had to dispose of an inconvenient set of embarrassing facts called Her Life, all in a single toilet flush of a press release.

And what a deliciously white-trash set of facts it was, too. A pregnant teenage daughter.*** A drunk-driving husband.**** A power-abuse scandal involving a wife-beating state trooper brother-in-law.***** Close ties to an organization agitating for secession from the United States******. *******.

The only thing missing was clarification on whether the Alaska Governor’s mansion is a single or double-wide.

Despite these little foibles --- any one of which would have caused FOX News to launch a separate, outraged, channel if Obama had done them******** --- she has been received rapturously by her target audience.

Never so rapturously as when she delivered her speech Wednesday, a speech which reminded the fbomber of some bitchy, quarterback-fucking high school cheerleader putting the earnest valedictorian in his social place by reminding everyone how totally lame it is to be smart and care about learning and people and stuff. And that really cool people kick ass and shit. Also drill for oil and cut taxes, because, like, fuck you, nerd, you suck.

For the loyal Dumb & Mean Dog-mericans salivating at her every word, the message could not have been clearer: Attack.

It’s on. That's right, motherfuckers, it's on.*********

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

* Oddly --- despite hearing repeated intimations that a prelapsarian bliss suffused America before these morals were corrupted --- the fbomber has never seen an old newspaper headline proclaiming “Everything Just Dandy!” Not even from the 1950’s.

** McCain’s reversals leave the fbomber unable to believe anything the man says. This is a far cry from his previous honesty, when McCain was “The Straight Talk Express.” As a matter of fact, the only straight talk the fbomber has heard from McCain recently is when he called his own wife a cunt.

That I do believe. She even looks scary. Like if JonBenet Ramsey caught that aging disease.

*** The fbomber loves the sense of outrage that Palin’s spokespeople generated about the Internet rumors that pegged the five-month-old Trig as her daughter’s. “How dare you,” they screamed “suggest anything so sordid as that Trig is the 17-year-old Bristol’s secret illegitimate love-child? Bristol’s secret illegitimate love child is ANOTHER BABY ALTOGETHER, one who hasn’t even been born yet, thank you very much. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

The fbomber is also gratified to see how classy Barrack Obama was, sternly telling his campaign that Palin’s family was “off-limits.”

The fbomber agrees with the move, but would have phrased it differently, something along the lines of “The fact that Governor Palin’s preachy, holier-than-though, abstinence-only-education, Traditional-Values, in-your-face, puritanical morality did not prevent her own daughter from being a raving, cock-hungry slut moaning in ecstasy as a horny hockey jock jammed his throbbing fuckstick balls-deep into her quivering, downy-haired, 16-year-old, unmarried cooter without any form of birth control is most definitely ‘off limits.’”

But hey, po-tay-toh, po-tah-to.

**** Dude is a professional snow-mobiler. Who has twice won a 2,000 mile snow-mobile race. 2,000 miles. The fbomber has to salute the pure American-ness of a soul who sees two thousand miles of pristine Arctic Wilderness, unspoiled by man, and thinks to himself that it looks like a great place for him and a hundred other rednecks to drive their snow-Harleys across at top speed.

Best of all, combined with his two other professions of commercial fisherman and oil-field worker, this means that this guy spends literally EVERY WAKING HOUR of his life despoiling the environment and basically raping Mother Nature in some way or the other. You have to respect that commitment.

***** Imagine the shock a family experiences when they learn that a rural cop turns out to be a violent bully. That would be nearly as surprising as marrying a stripper and discovering that she has cocaine and daddy issues.

****** Last I heard, ultra-nationalist elements in Russia were reconsidering the sale of Alaska to the U.S.. The Alaska Independence Party might want to look at some footage of Tblisi getting leveled by mortar fire before they strike off on their own. Or, on second thought, maybe not. Let them just go for it.

******* Adding all these things together, it’s clear that Alaska isn’t the Last Frontier anymore. It’s the New Confederacy.

******** Having grown up in a town of 400 souls, in the Deep Red state of Oklahoma, the fbomber is intimately familiar with how the deeply conflicted Fundamentalist Christian mind works. This mind --- consisting of its unstable mixture of natural, unsophisticated, vulgar impulses and indoctrinated, all-pervasive shame and guilt about those impulses --- is willing to overlook and forgive just about any perverse act, just so long as the person didn’t actually enjoy it.

In this way, both liberals and conservatives live by the motto of “If it feels good, Do It.” The conservatives simply add the extra steps of “Fight It, Hide It, Deny It, Regret It and Persecute It.”

********* Having long ago deserted the Culture Wars frontline to hide out in the safe fortress of Los Angeles, the fbomber remains ready to offer terms of a truce. We Godless, arrogant abortionists get New York, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles. You ignorant, hypocritical pigfuckers can have everything else. In other words, the status quo. Let's go ahead and make it official.

GOP VP T&A

2008-08-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

When I looked at the picture of McCain standing next to a pouty-lipped brunette last week, for a second I thought that I was looking at his campaign’s “Bring Your Granddaughter to Work Day” photo op.

For a moment, I considered adding this chestnut-haired beauty to the gallery of Presidential-candidate-family-masturbation-fodder, to serve in rotation along with the 2000-vintage Gore girls, 2004-period Bush Twins and the circa-2008 Chelsea. Scanning the caption of the photo for a name to moan to myself while imagining my nutsack resting on those angular cheekbones, I saw that this was no mere familial bimbo. Not at all. This was The Bimbo, the Bimbo Who Would Be Veep, the Bimbo a Single 72-Year-Old, Stroke-Having, Tantrum-Throwing Heartbeat Away from the Presidency.

I immediately took myself to wikipedia, where I absorbed the pertinent facts about this Sarah Palin person. New Governor of Alaska. Former Mayor of some frozen shithole village of 6,000 backward souls. Mother of five, including a Downs Syndrome baby. Former High School Basketball star, Beauty Pageant winner, and Newscaster.

McCain had picked this hardbody, er, nobody for his VP? Where’s the experience? The gravitas? The credentials to contribute to his Presidency and --- if actuarial charts have any legitimacy --- finish it?

Like many Democrats, I initially saw this as a pathetic, desperate Hail Mary move to court the female vote. Surely, I thought, they can’t believe that this transparent ploy will work, can they? Just how stupid do they think American women are? Even in my most cynical, I don’t believe that American women are so dim-witted as to view all vaginas as interchangeable when it’s time to vote. American men, yes. But even then only for sexual purposes.

For a second I almost felt sorry for the Republicans, to see their once-mighty Presidential-electing machinery in such disrepair.

Then I remembered. The Republicans do not make stupid mistakes before an election. They wait until afterwards, when they can be sure that someone else will suffer the consequences.

Though picking Titsy McHotAss for the 2nd Banana spot might be a bold move, even a risky one, you can be sure that it was a well-thought-out, scenario-crunched, focus-grouped, strategic risky move.

Upon further thought, I realized that the Smart & Nice Quadrant Democrats were ridiculing the choice because they were looking at it intellectually and logically… with their heads. A perspective in which it was a profoundly wrong, even laughable, move.

Looking at the choice of BubbleLips McBedroomEyes from the perspective of the other three Quadrants --- Nice & Dumb, Dumb & Mean and Smart & Mean --- however, it’s a genius stroke on several levels.

For most people in this country, smarts don’t mean so much in making decisions, even --- no, especially --- voting decisions. It’s about the gut, the emotions, how someone feels. Do they like or dislike someone? Fear or identify with? Want to choke or want to fuck? On these questions --- especially that last one --- GlamourPuss McCamelToe lifts --- no, Space-Shuttle-booster-rockets… McCain’s campaign to a higher level.

1. She engorges a previously limp and flaccid campaign.

Let’s dispense with the tissue-thin fiction that this was anything like a substantive, experience-driven, qualifications-motivated pick. This is a casting based on image and identity, nothing else. Though I’m sure Sarah Palin is a nice woman, she has not done anything in her life that would qualify her for consideration for the office of Vice President of the United States of America.*

She’s cheesecake. T&A. Eye Candy. The Republican’s primary problem this election is fatigue. And Nipples McMonsVenus provides instant stimulation. After all, is anyone ever too tired for porn? Because that’s what this 40-something GILF** is. A political centerfold, chosen for the same reasons 19-year olds named Brandi get put into men’s magazines wearing (briefly) nurse outfits.

She is not pornography just on the superficial, physical level either, though that is why she will soak up TV coverage like a fresh Tampax. As she will be presented to us, Palin’s whole life is a graphic, visual, multi-page photo spread of all the fantasies that put the lead in the Conservative pencil. Rugged individualism, as expressed by the wilderness of Alaska. Shooting guns. Using an internal combustion engine outdoors. Going to church. Having babies. Lot and lots of babies.***

To a tired and demoralized population of Dumb & Mean Americans, these images will be like a Viagra IV drip, raising them from their inert state to a condition of turgid, inflamed readiness.

2. By use of the “I’m rubber and you’re glue” gambit, she will be the vehicle for the continuing attack on Barrack Obama’s readiness for office.

Get ready to see and hear a concerted, unified effort to equate and conflate her level of experience with Barrack Obama’s. In rough terms, this effort will equate her experience as mayor of Mayberry, Alaska to Obama’s Illinois state legislature. And her two years as Governor with his two years in the U.S. Senate.

Though this message is so egregiously bullshit that nobody should be able to entertain it --- much less repeat it --- without breaking into snickers of disbelief, it will get repeated many, many times. For the Dumb people who it is aimed at, this continuous debate and repetition will validate this equivalency. In this way, attacks that discredit Palin will have a kind of jiu-jitsu effect on weakening Obama with America’s more bovine Sweet & Dumb voters.

3. Palin gives the Right a chance to give Hillary Clinton a final, gratuitous, vicious kick in the pantsuit-crotch while she’s down.

One woman left the race. Another woman entered. It’s natural that people will compare the two. And even if it’s not, FOX News is going to be sure to do it anyway.

And in the comparison, Palin is going to be portrayed as the infinitely less threatening and more likable. Instead of elite universities and a law career, Palin went for a state school and being a prettyface news anchor. Instead of one kid who went to Stanford, Palin has had five, including one now joining the Army. And instead of a hideous coven of lesbian, feminist, communist, Nazi, flag-burning, blood-drinking, Bible-desecrating witches, Palin has gone to a regular Christian church.

-

Judging from these criteria, LabiaLips McSugarClit is a brilliant addition to the campaign. It just makes me wonder how the Republican machine finds people like her, people who can match the required, retarded Republican ideology with whatever combination of skin tone, family history and genitalia needed for the role they will play.

After all, though Liberals often get accused of playing identity politics --- and putting people into undeserved positions based on race and gender quotas --- it’s really the Republicans who have truly mastered the art of this kind of appearance-based casting. Republicans found the one black judge in America who hates Affirmative Action worse than any white person alive, and put him on the Supreme Court. Republicans found the only black woman in the world who loves George W. Bush --- loves him to the point of calling him “my husband” by accident --- to put in charge of the National Security Agency, then State Department.****

They must have a talent scouting organization that makes Major League Baseball’s look like whoever’s been in charge of looking for Bin Ladin the last seven years.

I mean, come on. Just how many good-looking women politicians are there in the nation who just happen to love God, guns, family and the Oil Industry --- while hating taxes, the environment and abortion?

Just one. And they found her. If she doesn’t create a big bounce for McCain --- and not just the one in his pants, or as he probably calls them “dungarees” --- then I don’t know my America.

-

* It is hardly an accomplishment to be deemed slightly less corrupt, incompetent and repugnant than the other Alaskan GOP politicians. That is, after all, a group that shows the predictable rampant criminality and dimwittedness that you would expect to see when you combine isolated rednecks, the Republican model of governance and oil revenues.

** The “G” stands for “Governor.”

***While pregnant with her 5th child, a test showed that her fetus had Downs Syndrome. Because of her opposition to abortion, she had the child anyway, and named him “Trig.”

It strikes the fbomber as cruel to name a child after an academic subject he will be too stupid to ever master. The fbomber wonders if the baby had been born paralyzed, she would have named him “PhysEd.”

**** One might even suspect that these wholly undeserved appointments serve auxiliary Republican goals of making Affirmative Action --- and black people in general --- look bad. After all, even the most impartial critics of Thomas’s surly, lazy, Scalia-parroting tenure in the Supreme Court can only with great generosity call it “undistinguished.”

As for Condoleezza Rice. Jesus. Though the fbomber is perpetually unemployed and lives on a boat, at least his record of failure does not include responsibility for American security before 9/11 and American diplomacy after it.

Obama Can't Win, But McCain Just Might Lose

2008-08-24T17:32:00.000-07:00

For most of his adult life, the fbomber has been in an emotional state that could best be described as “bitter, caustic, life-sapping, despairing cynicism” in regards to matters of politics.

Generally, this stance of expecting the absolute worst foreseeable disaster --- immediately followed by an even more terrible and unforeseeable catastrophe --- has paid off.

Because of this pessimistic mindset, despite all the twists and turns this great nation has made as it determinedly burrows ever deeper into the shit, the fbomber has often been surprised --- but rarely disappointed.

After all, the fbomber believes that no matter how gross and systemic the American people’s flaws may be, they will at least be consistent. No matter what, they will always let him down.

But lately, the fbomber has felt the tiny flutterings of a long-lost and presumed-dead emotion inside the empty, dusty ribcage that once housed his live and beating heart. That emotion? Hope.

This emotion was most recently felt while listening to Barack Obama speaking on National Public Radio. Though congenitally immune from Obamamania*, the fbomber noted that at the very least Obama does not sound like an intolerable prick when he speaks. To the contrary, in fact. He actually sounds smart, thoughtful and even --- dare I say it? --- cool.** It shows how expectations have fallen when someone becomes giddily excited at the prospect of a President who is, at minimum, not a total tool. But there it is.

This fluttering grew into a veritable flapping when the fbomber considered that Obama might actually have a chance to get elected this year. Though the fbomber firmly believes that the Democrats can never win an election, he knows that from time to time the Republicans can lose one. And that this year might be one of those times.

Political Party is Not a Choice
The fbomber believes that political party affiliation is not a product of intellectual choice, or a product of environment, or indoctrination or any other exogenous factor. It is an internally generated expression of the way that people view the world. And that the way people view the world is a result of hard-wired psychological tendencies.

Think about it. Could any of you reading conceivably vote for the other party? According to my theory, about 75% of people reading this could not. That's because you just ARE Liberal/Democratic or Conservative/Republican because of the way your brain works from birth.

The fbomber did not come up with this theory on his own. He read something like it in a book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff. Then he perverted and twisted it to fit his own misanthropic mindset, aided in large part by his complete lack of training in psychology, sociology, statistics or anything else, for that matter.

To the fbomber, the division between Republicans and Democrats is a function of where they fall on one specific, particular line of attitude. This line measures how they view their relations between themselves and other people.

At one end, someone sees himself as part of a community, with a strong and complex web of responsibilities to everyone in that community. At the other end of the line, someone sees himself as essentially autonomous, in competition with every other person and with no responsibilities towards them --- unless that person explicitly chooses to take on those responsibilities.

These two mindsets have been described in various ways:
Left vs. Right
Hippy vs. Nazi
Magnanimous vs. Selfish
Community vs. Individual
We vs. Me
Pussy vs. Dick
Share vs. Hoard
Nurturing Family vs. Strict Family
Mommy vs. Daddy

For the purposes of this essay, the fbomber will call this line the Nice vs. Mean line.

Assuming a bell-curve distribution, very few people will fall at the extreme ends of this line. Most will be in the center, with half nicer than average, and half meaner. Because of its let’s-share-the-wealth, lets-help-one-another, let’s-get-along, your-hair-looks-very-nice values, the Democratic party is the natural home of the nicer half.

Conversely, due to its leave-me-alone, this-money-is-mine, fuck-the-world, do-what-I-tell-you, look-how-big-my-gun-is values, the Republican party is the natural home of the meaner half.

At the same time, there is another line measuring intelligence, also split into the smarter-than-average and dumber-than-average halves.

So we can draw up a graph to represent the total electorate.

Republicans naturally make up the Smart & Mean, and Dumb & Mean quarters. And they are locked in there tighter than Mark Foley's eyeballs onto an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

The Smart & Mean quadrant ARE the Republican party, the rich, white shareholder and CEO class. The Dumb & Mean quadrant --- the Rednecks, the Evangelicals, the NASCAR fans, the Chickenhawks supporting a war they won't fight --- are equally locked in. They are the Smart & Mean people’s loyal foot-soldiers, held in thrall to the prospect of becoming like the Smart & Mean guys some lucky day if they do enough dirty work to earn that promotion.

Democrats naturally get the Smart & Nice quadrant. The well-educated, the artists, the creatives, the wordy, egghead types. The bourgeouis bohemians. The latte liberals. The Jews. The Volvo drivers. The women. The students. Hollywood.

The Nice & Stupid quadrant? They should be Democrats. But they are not.

Those are the Swing Voters.

How else could you describe the kind of person that looks at Gore vs. Bush, Kerry vs. Bush or Obama vs. McCain and says “I don’t know… I can’t make up my mind… they both seem a lot alike to me”?

These are the people too stupid to realize the difference between a failed cokehead oil executive and a Nobel Prize winner. Or too nice to come out and admit that one of the candidates is a huge asshole and the other is --- at worst --- a medium-sized asshole.

Why Republicans Win, Unless They Lose
In a normal election, the Republicans handily win because they have their half of the electorate and can trick enough Nice & Stupid voters come in at over 50.1% And in normal circumstances, it is easy. For starters, the Smart & Mean people have the most money, plus the rabid shock troops of the Dumb & Mean (aka the Fox News audience) to do it with.

Most of all, the people they are targeting, are --- after all --- Nice & Stupid. Stupid enough to believe that giving the top .001% of the economic elite tax breaks will pump up their Wal-Mart cashier paychecks. Stupid enough to believe that John Kerry is backed by Al Queda. Nice enough to want to stop sweet innocent blastocysts and coma victims from being murdered by those evil, evil doctors.

Here’s the kicker. The Republicans don’t even have to convince the Nice & Stupid crowd to vote Republican. That’s a bonus, but all they really have to do to win is to confuse them enough to keep them from voting at all. That’s what the Swift-Boating and other dirty, last-minute personal attacks are good for. To get the Nice & Stupid crew to throw their hands up and say “Gosh almighty! They’re BOTH awful! Is ‘Idol on?’”

On the other hand, the Democrats can never win an election outright, because the Democrat’s natural, guaranteed constituency is only 25% of the electorate and they have to split their other 25% with the Republicans.

Why This Year is Different
To win, the Democrats have to get all the Nice & Smart voters, hold onto the Nice & Dumb voters and hope that something prevents the Smart & Mean and Dumb & Mean people from voting Republican in maximum numbers.

Well, that could be happening this year.

Assuming the Smart & Nice crowd maxes out support for Obama and the Democrats, three fatigue factors should keep the other three quadrants from turning out in support of McCain and the Republicans.

1. Failure Fatigue.
As pointed out elsewhere, the Republican’s policies have been such an abject failure that even the stupidest person cannot sign up for more of them. This should minimize Republican poaching of the Stupid & Nice quadrant.

2. Gluttony Fatigue
After eight years of unrestrained bingeing, the Smart & Mean quadrant should be well and truly glutted with undeserved riches at this point. Glutted, apparently, to the point of immobility this election.

The tax cuts have given the richest Americans an extra couple hundreds of billions into their already-bulging pockets over the last seven years. An orgy of spending increases and misguided policy choices by the Republican-controlled government has handed the well-connected Smart & Mean crowd --- think defense contractors and energy companies --- yet more trillions of U.S. citizens’ cash.

After all this engorgement, these folks just don’t have the hunger for power that they did back in 1999 and 2000. They are ready to take a bit of a nap to digest their meal, like a boa constrictor just back from a good grazing session at the local pre-school. Consequently, they look to be sitting out this political fight and holing up in Palm Beach, La Jolla and Jackson Hole with their trophy wives and ungrateful children for a couple of years.

And why shouldn’t they kick back? After all, they’ve already done the fun part. They ran into a clean, well-stocked store in 2001 and proceeded to ransack and loot it for the last seven years. Now the shelves are all bare and there are broken dreams all over the floor. It’s time for them to go home and let the suckers who work for minimum wage come in and sweep up, repair the damage, and restock the shelves in preparation for 2012 or 2016’s smash-and-grab raid.

Proof of the Smart & Meanie’s absence this year can be seen in the inept and bumbling McCain campaign. Where are Rove and the other evil ninjas? Where are W’s “Rangers” ponying up $250k apiece for the campaign? Not in McCain’s bus, that’s for sure. The true, stone-cold pimps have made themselves scarce this go-round, putting the B-team in charge, with obvious results.

3. Hatred Fatigue.
Just since 2000, the Dumb & Mean quadrant has engaged in a ferocious and endless campaign of slavering, foaming, raging hatred at a dizzying variety of targets, including, but not limited to:

Bill Clinton
Blow Jobs
Hilary Clinton
International Law
Al Gore
Reality
Gays
Liberals
The French
Habeas Corpus
Islam
Immigrants
Brown-skinned people, generally
Education
Hilary Clinton
The U.N.
Charles Darwin
Federal Judges
Dan Rather
The Geneva Convention
Science
Doctors
Separation of Church and State
John Kerry
The Truth
Hilary Clinton
The U.S. Constitution
American Cities
Hilary Clinton

Though the Dumb & Mean’s capacity for hatred is endless, apparently it is not tireless.

Like a vicious, retarded, pit bull who has been throwing itself frenziedly against the bars of its cage in a prolonged tantrum of pure, senseless rage for weeks, these idiot fuckers appear to be spent at last. They now lay on the floor, panting and covered with their own stinking slobber, stupefied by exhaustion. So they’re neutralized for a while at least.

So to sum it up --- if anything could be called summing it up after 1,700 words --- yeah, despite my pessimistic, humanity-hating, leanings I believe that Obama does actually have a shot. Not a lock, like some people are saying. But a shot.

After all, the fbomber only knows two sure things about politics.

1. Democrats can only win the Presidency after the Republicans royally shit the bed.
2. Republicans always, always, always shit the bed.

---

*I have tried. Really.

** Even the most vitriolic Obama Hater-ade slinger has to acknowledge that the man is fucking unflappable under pressure. He’s calmly, cold-bloodedly, and precisely sprinted a high-wire from Illinois State Rep to Democratic Presidential candidate --- under intense fire from all sides --- without a stumble, misstep or loss of composure. Cucumber doesn’t even touch it. Other side of pillow isn’t even close. Ice is feverish by comparison. Dude is cooler than the lakes of liquid ammonia on Saturn’s moon, Titan. That’s 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, sucka.

Goodbye - Finally - To All That

2008-08-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

No matter who* is elected this November, the fbomber is gratified to see that some of the worst elements of the Bush-Cheney Era will at long last be left behind, consigned to the same dustbin of history where America’s manufacturing base, international goodwill and military capacity now decompose.

Looking at America’s current economic and military disaster, many might view the last seven years as a complete debacle. But the fbomber --- ever a toilet-half-flushed kind of person --- prefers to find the positive aspects of this period of unfettered Republican rule.

To the fbomber, the years between 2000-2008 are valuable as a sort of social experiment in what happens when conservatives are allowed to exert their influence on this country, with Washington D.C. serving as a cross between a laboratory and the adult-less island in “Lord of the Flies.”

The ensuing disaster appears to have made an impression on even the most dull-witted and complacent members of America’s clueless citizenry. Just as even the stupidest cows eventually learn to avoid touching the electric fence, it looks like America’s cow-people are learning to avoid some specific, telltale signs of the most harmful strand of conservatism.

If the two remaining candidates of Barrack Obama and John McCain are any indicator of the preferences of the majority of voting Americans, both Democrat and Republican, the following elements of Republicanism are --- at least temporarily --- out of favor.

1. Crazy Christianity.
Unlike Bush, who practically billed himself as Yahweh’s running mate, neither John McCain nor Barrack Obama falls into creationist, speaking-in-tongues, praying-out-loud-at-Cracker-Barrel camp. And for that, we can all be grateful to the deity of our choice. Because - in my experience - any time someone is “born again,” the second birthing tends to result in massive brain damage.

Hopefully, this means that God has lost interest in interfering in U.S. political races and will now concentrate on the things He is best at: earthquakes, hurricanes and killing babies with malaria.

2. Corporate Executives Writing Legislation Affecting Their Industry.
In 2001, Cheney secretly invited the heads of America’s biggest oil companies to come set America’s energy policy. A policy that unsurprisingly included lots of subsidies and tax breaks, but little conservation or environmental regulation. Over the next seven years, America consumers paid record prices for gasoline while these oil companies posted record profits and air, water and land pollution increased.

In an equally shocking development, Bush’s decision to place Lindsey Lohan in charge of America’s strategic pharmaceutical-grade cocaine stockpile didn’t turn out well either.

3. A Foreign Policy Based on the Philosophy of the Cobra Kai Karate School.

4. Teetotaling.
George W. Bush has effectively ruined Presidential aspirations for sober people, forever. At this point, I think America might finally realize that if someone is compulsively driven to drink and drug themselves to the brink of death three times a week, they probably have a design flaw too severe to fix by just laying off the sauce. Tough luck there, Robert Downey Jr.

5. Visibly Evil People in the White House.
Unless the malignant spirit inhabiting Dick Cheney’s body can pass from host to host like the demon in “Fallen,” it seems unlikely that we will ever have anyone quite as malevolently destructive in the Executive Branch ever again. Though, again, in the spirit of looking for the positive side of things, I will point out that Cheney’s insatiable thirst for fresh blood has virtually eliminated metropolitan D.C.’s population of stray cats.

6. Incompetence + Arrogance.
Obama may be arrogant, but at least he is able to do things, and even do some of them exceptionally well. McCain is clearly incompetent**, but is at least humble about it, cheerfully admitting that he knows nothing about a confusing little subject called economics as he makes his bid to head up the largest economy in the world.

7. Stubbornness In the Face of Contradictory Facts.
Both Obama and McCain have flip-flopped, backtracked, reversed course and changed their message as events, goals and circumstances warranted. Compared to President One-Track-Mind, this is a Very Good Thing.

8. Republicanism Itself.
In 2001, the Republicans had everything that they could possibly want:
Complete control over the Legislative and Executive Branches.
A healthy economy.
A balanced budget.
A legitimately scary, dark-skinned enemy to whip up fear about.
A gay male hooker in the White House Press Corps.

The ball was finally, indubitably, irrefutably in their court to do with whatever they wanted. And they did, starting wars, ignoring civil rights, mocking international law, reducing taxes, increasing spending, and every other thing on their eight-years-in-the-writing To Do List.

Seven years later, we’re mired in two losing wars, our national honor has been lost, the deficit is enormous, the jobless rate is rising, the dollar is worthless, gasoline and food prices are spiraling upward, and vast portions of our economy are rotting, smoldering carcasses.

The experiment is over. The results are in. Republicans suck. Not just in the relative privacy of airport restrooms either. Every place. In every way. Morally. Ethically. Economically. Fiscally. Administratively. Personally. Militarily. Spiritually. Even physically. Just try to imagine a nude GOP convention, if you ever want to semi-permanently quash your sex drive.

Even the Republicans finally realize how repugnant they are, like a drunkard slowly coming to consciousness and realizing that the bad smell that's been giving him nightmares is coming from his own soiled underwear. That’s why they nominated someone who has --- superficially and sporadically --- butted heads with the Republican Party during his political career.

Again, this is a Very Good Thing. Let’s enjoy this repugnance while it lasts. Which if history is any indicator, should be about three years, maybe seven.

-----

*Of course it’s going to be McCain. Quit kidding yourself. He’s white, and this is a nation that didn’t even like Muhammad Ali until he couldn’t freaking talk anymore.

** Someone much more cynical and disrespectful than the fbomber might say that McCain was by his own admission a horrible student, obviously a substandard pilot, and no great shakes as a Senator. This person might go on to make the argument that McCain’s high water mark of personal achievement was as a captive prisoner in a losing war. But the fbomber would not go that far.

O-Bob-ma?

2008-06-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

There's been something catching my eye about the ubiquitous (in certain parts of L.A. at least) posters of Obama.
Something about Obama's faraway gaze, his prominent cheekbones, the tilt of his head.

It all seemed familiar to me, like I had seen something like it before.

I've figured it out now.

I spent the mid-nineties trying to purge my brain of its college education in a runaway teen/aging hippy locus neighborhood called Ocean Beach in San Diego.

If there was one thing that stoned skaters and pathetic former flower children can agree on, it is the genius of Mr. Robert Marley, Reggae Superstar. Consequently, just about every house in the neighborhood had a poster of the musical legend on one of its filthy, smoke-cured walls.

Usually, this one right here:

Compare to the current favorite wall decoration of 2008's starry-eyed dreamers, flipped to match head tilt:

Uncanny, no? But brilliant in a way, too. After all, Bob Marley is a figure who rose to prominence during Obama's youth and has become a lasting inspiration for multiple following generations due to his talent and ideals.

I suppose that John McCain will now have to fight back with a campaign poster that echoes an iconic figure from his formative era.

May I suggest this guy?

Obama elitist? I think not.

2008-04-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

Obama recently made the mistake of treating Americans like they are adults, capable of hearing the truth, and said that decades of politicians refusing to address the economic issues affecting postindustrial communities had made the rural Pennsylvanians “bitter.”

Hillary and McCain’s campaigns immediately seized upon this statement to wax indignant about how Obama is “elitist,” “arrogant” and “condescending” to the average Americans. As if either one of those two fakers has come within body-odor-sniffing distance of an average American in the last 36 months without a full phalanx of cameramen on hand to capture the event for CNN.

Now I’m by no means an Obama supporter, but I would at least like to see the guy get criticized for the right things. And being “elitist” about rural Americans isn’t one of them.

I know that because I am myself a true and unrepentant elitist.

This might seem counterintuitive, considering that I don’t work and I live on a filthy boat. But I believe that cements my true elitism credentials.

Any condescending dick can feel superior while staring at the glittering city lights from his penthouse apartment after a hard day of hedge fund managing. But anyone that can simultaneously preserve an unbridled contempt for America’s rural working class while having to use a public shower has truly earned his stuck-up stripes.

Speaking as such an individual, I would never say that I think that rural Pennsylvanians are “bitter.”

First off, I’d say that I never actually bother to think about them at all. And that when I do, it is with a mixture of repugnance, contempt and the kind of fleeting pity that I feel watching a cockroach get flushed down a toilet.

I drove through that state once, and saw these rural areas in question --- a region that I would characterize as Arkansas, plus heavy industry, minus heavy industry.

To my mind, any ambulatory adult who would willingly choose to inhabit such a dreary, interminable, monotonous shit-plain of ticky-tacky houses, shuttered factories and Applebee’s-infested strip malls deserves whatever heaping helping of misery their life hands them. Case closed.

But in my more charitable moments, I find their adherence to a hardscrabble blue-collar ethic long after the blue-collar jobs have been shipped to Asian sweatshops pathetically touching. Kind of like the delusions of Texans who sincerely believe, to the tips of their ostrich-skin boots, that they are real live cowboys while commuting to their job at the Dr. Pepper bottling plant.

If pressed, I would say that I wish that these rural Pennsylvanians would develop the intellectual capacity to stop electing the fascistic plutocrats who chant the voters’ favorite superstition platitudes to them as a soporific to facilitate the plutocrats’ systematic pauperization of the American middle class for corporate profit.

Alternatively, I wish that these individuals would develop the courage to leave the soul-killing patch of sooty, quasi-urbanized slum-rot that their family has festered in a full generation after the economic viability of the region has vanished. Just leave and disperse throughout the nation, like a fart spreading into a room until you can’t smell it anymore.

But if they can’t do either, I simply wish that they would die.

Die as quickly as possible and in a way that highlights the cretinous values that these losers have created for themselves in the absence of intellectual, spiritual, artistic or social attainments.

I wish their sons would break their backs copying moves they watched on backyardwrestling.com. I wish their daughters would catch the AIDS that an abstinence-only sex education never taught them to prevent. I wish the fathers’ hearts would explode from the daily intake of pure hog offal, honeycombed with visible crystals of sodium nitrate, that those voracious garbage-eaters refer to as “Scrapple.”

What’s more, I wish that all these calamities would all happen on the same day.

I wish the mom would have to load her suffering brood into the gargantuan, gas-guzzling SUV that the family’s obesity, bad taste and unreturned loyalty to American auto manufacturers inspired them to buy. And on the way to the hospital --- which, by the way, only practices the strange, backward kind of medicine which a curriculum of Intelligent Design permits --- that family’s stupendous fat-weight would cause the tires, purchased cheaply at the local Wal-Mart, to burst at their Chinese-slave-labor-created seams. And their hideous car would overturn and strew the entire family’s bloated, lifeless corpses across that state’s poorly-maintained highways.

Lastly, I wish that I would happen to be driving my well-designed, reliable imported car through Pennsylvania on this very same day, perhaps shuttling between music festivals and book-reading events in the state’s two habitable urban oases of Philadelphia and Pittsburg.

As I drive past the roadside carnage, I would slow down for an instant to toss the tepid dregs of that day’s third half-caff soy latte on their fat, ugly, pathetic carcasses.

Then I would accelerate briskly, leaving their rotting corpses in my dust like so much blubbery road-kill, an NPR podcast of “Fresh Air” blasting out all four open windows.

---

There? See the difference? That’s what true elitism looks like. I didn't use the word "bitter" once. Give Obama a break.

Spitzer Stupid? No, just horny. There is a difference.

2008-03-10T22:53:00.000-07:00

Let the moral tsk-tsking begin.

Oh my god! Some guy wanted to fuck someone besides his wife! And took steps to do just that, to fuck some younger, hotter, sexier woman. How horrible! Clearly this person is not capable of having a position of power or trust. Because God knows, nobody who ever meets their responsibilities and does what they are supposed to do professionally would ever fuck a prostitute.

Only lowlife fuckups would do that.

Oh wait, these prostitutes cost $4,000-plus. That's kind of steep for the average low-life fuckup. So I'm betting that there were some pretty highly accomplished johns calling the Emperor's VIP Club. Furthermore, I'm betting that they were all married.

After all, if a single guy is willing to drop $4k to bust a load, he's going to make it a lot more fun than some sort of scurrying little tryst in the Mayflower Hotel.

My take on this? First, you know that it was a Democrat getting busted because the hooker was female.

Second. This doesn't bother me that much about Eliot. If anything, I feel sorry for him.

I know, and any man who is honest will know what it's like to fuck the same fucking person over and over and over. It's a deadening, depressing, dream-killing, miserable kind of torture. First, sheer repetition takes the thing that you used to love doing and turns it into a fucking chore that you can frankly take or leave after about round, oh, 300 or so.

I mean, honestly, as much as you might love steak, you're going to get sick of it if that's all that you're ever allowed to eat. And let's not forget, to mix bovine metaphors here, that women are like milk to a man's wine... spoiling into chunky curds (typically on the ass and thighs) over the course of time's inexorable march.

Secondly --- and here's the real ironic twist that proves again what a perversely evil genius God is --- the less you actually want to fuck that same, aging person over and over THE MORE FUCKING WORK IT TAKES TO ACTUALLY DO IT.

Yeah, do you think that you're the only one that's bored with the same bits of sweat-soaked genitalia? Think again! So is she! Bored bored bored. Bored pissless! Also, long, long past the point of being impressed by you anymore. You know how she used to think that you were funny and smart and sexy. Well, she's heard all your fucking stories by now, twenty times plus. She's seen you walk around the house looking for the keys IN YOUR GODDAMNED HAND, Mr. Genius. Also washed about a thousand pairs of your underwear with skid marks in the seat that look like they were drawn in with a brown magic marker.

And don't forget that she's squeezed a couple of human beings out of that same vagina, too, acts that not only stretched it well past its optimal penile-rubbing dimensions but also instantaneously moved you from center stage in her set of priorities to somewhere up by the concession stand.

To recap: She's tired, she's sick of you, she's a MOM now. And you're coming at her with that dick of yours? It's all she can do to avoid throwing that hot cup of chamomille tea by the bedstand on your cock to make it go away. So to get in that only marginally desirable pussy you are going to have to beg and cajole and butter her up more than you EVER did when she was young and hot and genuinely fuckable.

How's that for hilarious? Let's really amp the fun up. You, being the wine to her milk, are actually more desirable than ever. Sure, you've lost some physical allure, but have more than compensated by your gravitas, stature, demeanor and other fancy words for MONEY. Yeah, you're rich and powerful and have hot young little gold-diggers and advancement-seekers in short skirts giving you sultry glances all the ding-dong day! Who are a thousand, million times hotter than this mother of your children, the one who is trying to feign sleep to get out of giving you a simple, basic, ordinary missionary-style fuck right now.

And we act surprised, shocked, when some married guy with something on the ball runs screaming and erect into the nearest brothel?

I mean, fuck, when you've got to get that dick into something besides the old, flabby, disinterested, enormous, dry, contemptuous vagina you are married to, hookers are about the safest bet going. Personally, I'm more of a massage parlor man, but that could just be because I don't have 4 grand lying around in my "bust a nut" account.

I mean, what the fuck else is Eliot Spitzer supposed to do? Have an affair? No, he doesn't want to have another relationship. He just wants to get fucking fucked again for once in his life. Also, he doesn't want people to think he's copycatting Giuliani. Fuck an intern? No, everyone knows what that leads to. Get a Real Doll? Those things develop hygiene problems over time and use. Sheep? Get real. He lives in New York, not Wyoming. Show self restraint? Go golfing? Channel that energy into home repair projects. Fuck that. Some of us want to actually LIVE while we are alive.

No. A hooker is the only way to go. Clean. Attachment free. Safe. Or so Eliot thought. He was almost right too.

Turns out he was just a peripheral casualty in the IRS's quest to squeeze their full due out of this prostitution ring. The Feds weren't even after the johns the whole time, just the money.

Poor bastard.

I Heart Flip Floppers

2008-02-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Much has been made lately about candidates' inconstancy of opinions. Ex-candidate Romney, Hilary and McCain have all been lambasted for changing their mind about this or that, accused of not having the courage to stand behind their convictions and even called the dreaded "F" (Flip-Flop) word.

I couldn't be happier.

After 7 years with a president who hasn't changed in mind on ANYTHING, I welcome a wishy-washy, spineless, flapping in the wind, flip-flopper into office.

Convictions are overrated. Look at recent history:

Bill Clinton --- wishy-washy as a sock in a laundromat. Result --- peace, prosperity, budget sanity, love of world.
GW Bush --- resolute, determined, steadfast. Result --- deficits, war, death, hatred from all corners of globe.

I hope the next president can't choose between cheerios and fruit loops without running it past a focus group.

A Final Dem-Fucking?

2008-01-28T17:01:00.000-08:00

So Bush had his final State of the Union Address and used it to talk more fear and panic about the economy. Not enough to "expand" the stimulus package like the Democrats say they would like. Because, gosh-darnit, $150 billion pissed away, I mean "rebated" is just exactly the right amount.

But still panicky.

Why all the hubbub? Yeah, it doesn't look particularly good for us right now. But not significantly worse than a month ago, when it was all sunshine and cookies talk from the administration. And this is not a guy who has let reality ever force him to admit anything he didn't want to admit before.

And it's not like he, or anyone who advises him gives a fuck about the people suffering in the economic downturn. The top 1% is doing just fine, thanks, and in fact will use this little downturn to pick up some valuable assets on the cheap.

And he's not running for reelection.

And I think I know what it is. It's those tax cuts. He, or rather his puppetmasters, want those tax cuts to go permanent. Never mind that they've been an economic disaster for everyone but corporations. They're expiring now, and it's his job to stop that.

Screaming about a recession is the easiest way to do it. Nobody thinks it's a good idea to raise taxes during a recession. Even if doing so is necessary to get back into some sort of rational, realistic, balanced-ish budget.

It's like exercise, I guess. Something that is normally good, and necessary, but might need to be skipped when someone is down with the flu or otherwise really sick.

So get ready to hear a lot of squealing and whining about how these tax cuts are about to sunset, and how our economy will be devastated if that happens. And watch our pussy Democratic Congress fall all over themselves to pass legislation to keep them cut for a while longer, maybe even permanently, to avoid having an ad run against them someday saying that they (cue ominous music) "raised taxes during a recession." I've got no doubt that he's capable. This is, after all, not something inconsequential like running the country or delivering services to U.S. taxpayers. This is important. It's helping rich people get and stay richer. Something he, and any Republican, can do in their sleep.

Half a million Iraqi dead, 3,000 U.S. dead. Record Debt.

If Bush can only destroy our ability to ever dig ourselves out of the fiscal hole he's plowed us into, then his legacy will be complete.

More Hatred and Contempt (and economics)

2008-01-25T23:14:00.000-08:00

Dadburn those pesky Democrats! Since Preznit Shit-for-Brains caught recession panic and threw away whatever wispy pretendings of fiscal responsibility out of his mumblings (his actions and decisions long ago ceased to contain any) Senator's Reid and Dodd would like to get some tangible national benefits out of the debt-fattening orgy of tax cuts and public spending on the way. So would like to put some infrastructure projects in the mix, the sorts of things that would actually be built here in the USA, employing USA citizens and increase our GDP going forward. Not so fast, say the Republicans.

I find this interesting, and illustrative, in much the same way that falling face first into a pile cat shit interestingly illustrates exactly what what Mr. Whiskers has been eating lately.

The lesson, so far as I get it, is that the Republicans --- addicted as they are to both tax cuts and runaway spending --- have no perceptible problem running our country into greater and greater debt levels, as long as they can state with 100% confidence that no tangible benefit to American citizens is ever produced. Things that go boom, yes. Cash shipments that vanish somewhere in Mesopotamia, sure. Subsidies to companies which pillage our national resources and pollute our environment, hell yeah. Bridges and roads, not so much.

I hate them. I hate them. I hate them more and more every day.

I'm more filled with hate and contempt every day (special economics issue!)

2008-01-23T00:20:00.000-08:00

So, apparently as of just last week we are in deep economic shit.

Never mind that every governmental and financial institution nitwit that's been put in front of a camera, microphone or stenographer-slash-journalist the last three years has been assuring us that nope, no looming recession, nothing to worry about with this economy, no sirreebob, just more solid growth for us!

Never mind the facts that ---

A. our investment banks are losing billions because people took out home loans based on income numbers which they pulled from the LOTTO ticket they bought that morning.
B. that foreigners take dollar bills from us and apply them directly to their dirty assholes now, without bothering to stick them in the cash tills because frankly it's not worth the effort these days.
C. that our government spends trillion more than it collects and borrows the difference from a country we periodically lecture and demonize about human rights.
D. That we spend billions of that on weapons and illegal war which in turn result not in further economic growth for our nation but big explosions and increased hatred directed at ourselves.
E. That we as a nation buy way, way more shit from abroad, especially flammable black goo, than other people buy from us. Not least because we (or rather our corporate decisionmakers) have been systematically dismantling our manufacturing plants and shipping them abroad to countries where they won't be bothered with pesky unions, environmental regulations or people who want to earn more than $3 an hour.
F. That we, as individual dipshits, spend more money than we make so we have credit card balances as big or bigger than our savings accounts.

--- these nitwits said, and that message was dutifully passed on to the passive consumers of America.

Only now apparently, we're allowed, no, commanded to start worrying about the economy because it's apparently on a waterslide, greased with melted pigfat, leading straight to a bubbling cauldron of liquified bat guano.

And the only thing that can save us is, according George W. Bush and his dancing monkey Ben Bernanke, tax cuts for businesses, plus $600 cash in hand for everyone to go on out and spend, spend, spend.

But hey! Is giving everyone $600 going to fix A through F? No, it's not. In fact, it's going to make some of those things worse. We'll go further into governmental debt, for one thing, as we both forgo tax income and start handing out those sweet $600 checks.

But who's saying that? Who's calling bullshit on this whole charade? Who's saying "You know what, Georgie? You can keep that $600 bones. Spend it on creating an alternative energy source that would help us avoid both trade deficits and future resource wars, homey. Or enforcing financial regulations that will prevent future greed-and-lie-fuelled market meltdowns. Put it into training people to become employable in the new economy. Buy all our soldiers in Iraq an airline ticket home, business class."

Nobody. Only the fbomber. And who cares what that grumpy fucker says anyway?

President Romney 2009: This is how it happens.

2007-10-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Mit is tenderly nuzzling his nose up the Religious Right's poop-chute, a little bit of foreplay before he buries it to the hilt.

The election is his. Let me be the first to call it.

Forget Obama. Forget Hillary. Our next President is going to be another Republican. A stupid Mormon one with a 80’s-style haircut.

Here’s why.

People are stupid, selfish, mean and fearful .

I almost said “Americans” are stupid, selfish, hateful and fearful, but that’s unfair. American’s aren’t inherently dumber, greedier, meaner and more cowardly than humanity in general. I believe those attributes are pretty evenly distributed through the homo sapiens genetic code, and probably even bound up somehow with adenine, guanine, thyrine and cytosine in the actual strands of our DNA.

We Americans, however, tend to glorify those vices more than most other cultures though. We even confuse them with virtues to a much greater extent than, say, the Swiss. And stupid, selfish, mean and fearful Americans want, ultimately, to vote for John Wayne.

At no time do these despicable qualities become more pandered to than during the election of whichever corporate-owned figurehead will preside over the Executive branch of the federal government.

That’s when these four ugliest strands of humanity’s psyche get plucked like banjo strings, in order to --- just like in the movie “Deliverance” --- provide a soundtrack for a brutal ass-rape. The victims are reason, common sense and a basic understanding of what is in our best interests.

After these decision-making factors have been made to squeal like pigs by the rancid cocks of fear-mongering right-wing corportatist propaganda, Americans give up trying to think about who they really want to see in office.

Instead, out of sheer exhausted panic, they vote against whoever they have been convinced to see as the most repulsive.

And the Republicans can be said to be the master of a three skills: Making money. Trolling for anonymous gay sex in public bathrooms. Making Democrats look repulsive.

That’s not many but it is enough. Every four years they take a decent, intelligent, successful public figure and convince a whisker-thin majority of stupid, greedy, mean and fearful voters that that public figure has some petty, yet stomach-turning character flaw. A tiny weakness in their psyche, yet one so pathetic and shameful that he should be shunned as an embarrassment to the race, not elevated to lead the nation.

Gore is a serial exaggerator. Kerry is a pussified flip-flopper. Clinton is a rapist. Dukkakis fellates Willie Horton. And so on and so on and so on.

By comparison, the Republican is portrayed as John Wayne.

Not the real John Wayne, who was named Marion, wore lifts, and sat out WWII to advance his film career. The John Wayne that was shown on the movie screen. Quiet. Masculine. Tough. Confident. Contemptuous of book learning. Intinctively competent. In other words, the kind of person the stupid, selfish, mean and fearful people would like to see themselves as, if they could ever forget for one second that they are stupid, selfish, mean and fearful .

And it works. Except for when the stupid, selfish, mean and fearful party lost its crazy sub-wing to Ross Perot in ’92 and the Republicans nominated someone too old and crippled to play the John Wayne role in ’96, it fucking works. Every time.

Of the Republican field, who can take on the John Wayne role? The Republicans hoped Fred Thompson could, but he’s proving to be too old and drowsy to pull it off. Same with cranky old coot McCain. Guiliani is plenty selfish, mean and fearful, but not quite stupid enough, as evidenced by his positions on gays, guns and babies.

Romney is not actually stupid, but he is desperate and shameless enough to play that part if he thinks it will get him the votes. Consequently, as soon as the Mormon issue can be assuaged sufficiently (see article) the Republicans --- first the moneyed decision makers, and eventually the stupid, selfish, mean and fearful masses --- will coalesce around him.

Then in the general elections, it’s all over.

Hillary, Obama and John Edwards don’t stand a chance. Remember, the Republicans don’t have to convince any stupid, selfish, mean and fearful people to vote for Romney, only convince them to vote against the Democratic candidate.

A woman, named Clinton to boot. A black guy. A smart, kind, thoughtful, gentle man who believes that the rich should share wealth with the poor.

Half the Republicans’ work will already be done.

Rudy's Ground Zero Lie vs. Al's Invented Internet Myth

2007-08-21T23:51:00.000-07:00

I still angrily remember the shameful piling on that Al Gore received regarding a a claim to have "invented the Internet" that he NEVER FUCKING MADE. This completely bogus piece of shit story spun out by GOP Asshole Dick Armey's fax machine and was immediately and eagerly swallowed by print and television reporters without question. As a result, Gore, who was ever nothing if not straight-laced and boringly honest got turned into a foolish serial exaggerator.

By comparison, what consequences has Rudy Giuliani suffered for his videotaped claim in front of a Cincinnati crowd that that he was at ground zero "as often, if not more, than most of the workers"? Yeah, it did make the papers, briefly. And Rudy later backtracked and said that he "misspoke." But it doesn't seem like it's got the legs, or has been purposely woven into a part of a pattern in the way Al Gore's NON-EXISTENT claim did.

But besides being REAL, and Gore's FAKE, there are such huge differences between the two that if Gore's claim turned him into an untrustworthy laughingstock, then Giuliani's should deservedly make him a pariah, to be treated with contempt and derision.

Not only is it blatantly false (later schedule checking showed that Rudy actually spent 29 hours at the Ground Zero site, compared to hundreds by recovery and reconstruction workers. But the intent was mean spirited and contemptuous. Rudy was doing more than trying to burnish his post-911 credentials, which is bad enough. He was also attempting to downplay the legitimate health concerns of the 911 rescue workers, and minimize the shoddy treatment that they have received from both the City of New York and the U.S. Government.

If there's any justice in the world (doubtful) or sense in the Democratic Party brain trust (more doubtful yet) this statement will be wielded like a sharp stake to impale the dark heart of Rudy's Presidential aspirations. In this one statement, Rudy crystallizes all the things that make him such a horrible human and truly frightening Presidential candidate --- he's mean, he's arrogant, he's combative, he's self-delusional, and absolutely and completely full of his own self-serving shit.

Toddler kicked off plane... good.

2007-07-13T00:51:00.000-07:00

Just read this story where a woman said she and her toddler son were kicked off a plane after she refused a flight attendant's request to medicate her son to get him to quiet down and stop saying "Bye bye, plane."

I love this story. The last couple of times I have flown, I've had to listen to babies and little kids whining, howling, babbling and crying to the point where I wanted to kick the kid off myself... mid-air.

Then I started thinking... why are these living, breathing noise-makers evenly dispersed throughout the plane, ensuring that the entire passenger load is subject to this auditory assault?

I remember when there were smoking sections on planes, on the premise that people who indulge in noxious, annoying habits should only inflict those habits on one another. Why not apply this same logic to the noxious, annoying habit of allowing your precious bundle of joy to scream and cry at maximum volume for hours at a time?

Simply create a child section of the plane, for any passengers with children under the age of 8 or nine. Put a diaper changing table in the nearest bathroom, juice holders in the fold down trays, Highlight magazines in the magazine pockets, bring tiny liquor bottles full of chocolate milk over once an hour, whatever these children and parents need to get through the flight in comfort.

In the meantime, I, and those other childless travelers can specifically request to be as far away as that den of caterwauling and mewling as humanly possible.

Scooter and Paris

2007-07-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

So I've just read the news that President Bush (god, I choke even typing those words together) commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, stripping it of the 30 months of jail time which he had been given by the Federal Judge.

Just as fast as my own ire started rising, I quickly headed to my usual left-wing sites to see what they had to say... it's all pretty much the same. We are pissed. It was worth noting to me that the comment sections, usually full of all sorts of long-winded diatribes and amateur political philosophizing had been reduced to single word exclamations like "Fuck!" "Impeach!" "Cocksuckers!" and the like.

Is there some fancy German word for the sick feeling you get when someone gets away with something they shouldn't? You know the feeling, don't you? Disgust and anger all mixed up at once into a sour taste that twists your stomach and makes your lips purse up.

I felt it when O.J. was acquitted.
I felt it when Paris was (first) let out of jail.
I'm feeling it now.

I think humans have a visceral reaction when they see people who flout the social contract without penalties. For most of us, our lives are spent making compromises, going along to get along, following stupid rules made by stupid people, just so that we can get our paychecks, pay our bills and be left alone to claw whatever little bit of satisfaction we can out of this life.

We do this, for the most part, because we are taught from an early age both verbally and with the harsh electric shocks of reality, that these are the sacrifices we have to make to get along in life. We don't like it, but for the most part we have the thin satisfaction of knowing that everyone else is more or less in the same boat, too.

That's what makes equality before the law such a cherished ideal. It's bad enough that the rich live better lives than us, on a daily basis. It's bad enough that the rich and powerful are able to isolate themselves away from the rest of us behind gated communities and executive privilege, so that they can do what they want without fear of getting caught. It's bad enough that they have resources to hire expensive attorneys to protect them from the consequences of their rule breaking on the few occasions when they do get pinched.

But when we see that their privilege goes beyond even that, that even when they've been caught, tried and convicted that they are able to pull strings which pluck them from accountability, we become enraged.

This commutation was a poke in the eye to a lot of people, not just liberals. It's the sort of thing that is going to enrage anyone with the sneaking suspicion that there are two sets of rules operating in America, one for the obscenely rich along with their minions, and the other for the rest of us.

This is going to be the stupid little thing that sets off the firestorm, I think. This is the small act which crystallizes all the things that have been bugging the shit out of people about this administration all along. Even Republicans are going to be pissed about this one. I think this is the tipping point.

The scandals that fuck the political figures aren't the big, real, complicated fuckups like, say, invading Iraq. That's too amorphous, too hard to get a head around. No, the deadly mistakes are the ones that are simple and personal... lying about a break-in.... getting blown by an intern. Protecting a convicted minion from responsibility falls in that category.

It's pretty clear. THis person was convicted, but simply because the President likes him, he doesn't have to serve time. This is going to stir the shit, and at last it might very well start to boil over.

Bring it on, I say.

weak, weak, weak

2007-05-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

So it looks like the Democrats have blinked after all.

I'm disappointed, but certainly not surprised.

You know, just once I'd like to see the Democrats, as a whole, at least try to go down swinging.

Yeah, we've got some brave souls (I'm looking at you Feingold) who are at least out there standing up for what they believe, but their backbone gets lost in all the moral flab and cowardice of the rest of the wishy washy, faux-centrist, compromising gang.

This is a speech I'd like to hear from a Democrat:

"I oppose this war, and am not going to support it for one more minute. I don't care if stopping this war costs me my office. I can always find new work, but America can never recover the blood and treasure that we pour into that quagmire. If I lose my seat, but save more American lives, it will be worth it."

Please.

Jerry Falwell, RIP (P stands for Pain)

2007-05-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

So Jerry Falwell, obese ass-clown extraordinaire, kicked the bucket yesterday.

Though I usually refrain from disrespecting the dead, with Jerry it’s pretty near irresistible. After all, he did it first.

Like when he said AIDS victims had received retribution from a just God.

And when he said that the poor souls who perished in the terror and fire of the 9/11 attacks had died because gays and lesbians and abortionists had inspired that attack.

I’m racking my brain for something positive to say about the man, and coming up blank. It’s very possible that he was a good father and husband. And for all I know, an all around great fellow. But I didn’t see that.

All I ever saw was someone trying, whole-heartedly, to take the three most divisive issues going --- sex, religion and politics --- and combine them into an electoral weapon. Then use that weapon to bully the rest of America into living our lives according to his particular sect’s interpretation of morality.

To me that’s just an asshole.

Death comes to us all, so I can’t be particularly happy to hear that it came to him. I’m just disappointed that it was as swift and painless when it did.

If there were truly any justice on this earth, Jerry Falwell would have slowly and painfully wasted away from opportunistic infections. Or jumped in terror from the 100th story of a burning skyscraper.

Not being a believer of any specific set of religious fairy-tales, I can't even console myself with the idea that he's roasting in hell right now. I just hope that at some point, as his heartbeat faded, he truly did watch his life pass before his eyes.

And that what he saw disgusted him as profoundly as it does me.

Another Iraq war casualty: Our ability to help

2007-05-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

Listening to Democrats talk about how we've got to "get out of the middle of a civil war" in Iraq has caused some strange feelings for me lately.

As much as I want for the U.S. to extricate itself from that sucking shithole of wasted lives and money, I thought that the willingness to get between people trying to slaughter one another was one of the better things about us liberals.

Modern Republicans prefer to provoke civilian deaths abroad (Nicaragua) or ignore them, (Darfur), depending on their corporation-biased opinion of what best serves American interests.

Democratic presidents, however, have a history of trying to stop those deaths, even if tardily (Bosnia) and ineffectually (Somalia), with the most glaring and shameful exception being our inaction during the Rwandan civil war. All things being equal, Democrats don't like to sit around and watch chaos spread and innocent people die.

Under normal circumstances, a tribal bloodbath between Sunnis and Shiites would be the sort of thing that we'd want to tamp down and defuse. Maybe we'd use some military force, as in Bosnia, maybe we'd try to help prod some diplomatic solutions, as in Northern Ireland. Undoubtedly, we would shovel money at both sides to make it worthwhile to simmer down--- and compared to the current fiscal assfucking our military action is giving us, it would be a bargain.

But these aren't normal circumstances. As worthy an objective it might be to keep the ethnic groups from eachother's throats, we're not the ones that can do it anymore.

We're too tainted. Tainted by the lies we rode into the country on. Tainted by the tortures and murders that we've committed there.

Even if we had the military and financial capacity to do it anymore, nobody in or out of the Iraq would believe in the worthiness of our goal, or try to help. Who can blame them?

After our claims to be in Iraq to find WMDs and establish democracy, turned out to be such utter bullshit, our professions of humanitarian intevention are now likely to be perceived as more of the same.

Consequently, our forces would remain their current position: Welcomed by none, and used and hated by all.

What a mess. Now that we've created a scenario which actually might justify a U.S. presence in Iraq, our direct responsibility for that scenario makes it impossible for us to do anything about it. We're fucked. Though not nearly as fucked as the poor Iraqis who live, work and die in our experiment to see what happens when extremely limited minds receive nearly unlimited power.

Intellectually, I know that the only option for us at this point is to pull out and abandon the Iraqis to a Lebanon-style civil war, and insulate ourselves from the jihadists that conflageration would create.

But fuck, I don't like it. It makes me feel guilty, and ashamed of what America has done, two emotions I wish I had GWB and Dick Cheney's natural immunity from.

A second helping of Gonzales

2007-04-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

Looks like you've got some 'splaining to do, Alberto!

From Patrick Leahy's office:

You spent weeks preparing for the April 19th hearing. Yet during your
testimony, in response to questions from Senators on both sides of the
aisle,
you often responded that you could not recall. By some counts
you failed
to answer more than 100 questions, by other counts more than 70,
but the most
conservative count had you failing to provide answers well over
60 times.
As a result, the Committee’s efforts to learn the truth of
why and how
these dismissals took place, and the role you and other
Department and White
House officials had in them, has been hampered.
The
questions asked by Senators should not have been a surprise. You were
alerted in letters to
you well in advance of last Thursday’s hearing.
By letter sent April 4,
you were asked to include in your written
testimony a "full and complete account
of the development of the plan to
replace Untied States Attorneys, and all the
specifics of your role in
connection with that matter." That account was
not included in your
written testimony nor in your answers to questions at the
hearing. You
were also alerted in advance of the hearing, by a letter sent
on April 13,
that you would be asked about information derived from the staff
interviews
of your senior aides. You were, nevertheless, unprepared to
answer
those questions.
We believe the Committee and our
investigation would benefit from you searching and refreshing your
recollection
and your supplementing your testimony by next Friday to provide
the answers to
the questions you could not recall last Thursday.

I've got an idea for the committee. Clearly, open-ended questions are too challenging for the Attorney General. Let's give him a multiple choice exam.

Were those US Attorneys fired for:

A. NO reason at all.

These Attorneys do, after all, serve at the "pleasure of the President" as we've heard about 10,000 times by now. So if Abu and his staff have the time, inclination and chutzpah to fuck around with, fire and defame good attorneys because of the way the wind tickles their balls in the morning, there's nothing illegal about that.

It does speak to their judgement, priorities and human decency though, and the voters should know that's how they roll in the Bush administration.

B. A GOOD reason.

There's nothing illegal about that. We're just curious what it was, though. Humor us.

B. A BAD reason.

Anyone that cares to put the pieces together about competitive districts, witch-hunts for non-existent voter fraud cases, suspicious corruption case manipulations, deleted emails, and secretly inserted Patriot Act provisions for appointing US Attorneys without Congressional Approval is starting to see what these replacements were about. And, again, there's nothing inherently illegal about it.

So just come out and say it, already.

Virginia Tech Shooter:Liberal or Conservative?

2007-04-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know that I am a sick, heartless fucker for even thinking this way, but I have been trying to figure out whether the Virginia Tech shooter was a liberal or conservative.

I know it shouldn't really matter. He was mentally ill, that's the main thing. And committed a heinous act that created devastating pain for 33 sets of families, friends and communties.

But still. I want to know. That's just how my brain has become wired over the last dozen years or so. Call it political polarization, call pop psychologizing, say that I am obsessed, but I really don't feel like I can get a grip on how someone's mind functions these days, without knowing where they fall in some basic questions.

Like whether they believe in evolution or creationism. Support or oppose the Iraq war. Are indifferent to or disgusted by homosexuals. Are pro-choice or anti-abortion. Side with corporations or people. Believe in punishing or helping others. Interested in cooperation or domination.

And, yeah, I do judge people --- negatively --- when they disagree with me on these issues. Who doesn't?

Usually, it's pretty easy to pick out the wingers from the moonbats, but Cho Seung-hui is kind of a tough one to label. Here's what I know about him, and where I think it puts him on the Liberal/Conservative spectrum.

Liberal Traits:
A minority
An English Major
Writes plays
Hates Rich Kids

Conservative Traits
Korean
A gun nut
A Religious Fanatic
Hates Debauchery (aka Fun)

All in all, it seems pretty much balanced. So I guess the deciding factor would have to be his actions.

That's an easy one.

A true liberal would have dealt with his hurt and disappointment by banding together with other similarly afflicted victims to whine and petition for recognition and special treatment. Culminating, perhaps, in some sort of march or sing-in in front of the Student Union.

A sullen, uncommunicative, Jesus-obsessed loser who blames all the troubles in the world on another group of people, then remorselessly kills those people as if they were not even human?

That's a conservative.

Let's talk about irresponsibility, Mr. Cheney

2007-04-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

I just read this load of garbage that our gravel-voiced, Vice-Mumbler delivered on CBS News' Face the Nation yesterday.

I think it's important they know where we stand. And the fact of the matter is I do believe that the positions that the Democratic leaders have taken and -- to a large extent now are irresponsible. I mean, Harry Reid last fall said -- is after the November elections -- that he would not support an effort to cut off funding for the troops. Then he changed that position to one in which he would support an effort to cut off funding for the troops, place limitations on--on the funding, and now he's to the point where he's saying he's going to support legislation that cuts the whole funding for the troops. He's done a complete 180 from where he was in five months. I think that is irresponsible. I think you cannot make the basic fundamental decisions that have to be made with respect to the nation's security, given everything that's at stake in the war on terror, and what we're doing in Iraq, and with the 140,000 American troops in the field in Iraq and with the 140,000 American troops in the field in Iraq in combat every day, and call that kind of--of rapid changes in position anything other than irresponsible.

For the "R-word" to even come from your blood-stained lips is laughable under any circumstances. You've been the dirty, reeking, radioactive power-source driving an administration which has mechanically worked to divert any and all responsibility from itself for its blunders (9-11, Katrina), crimes (Valerie Plame's outing), corruption (DoJ firings, Iraq Reconstruction) and for those actions which combined all those together in a massive festering ball of corrupt, blundering criminality (Iraq).

To avoid ever taking responsibilty, your administration has let underlings take the blame (poor little Scooter), smeared formerly loyal underlings (Richard Clarke) and systematically hid the evidence (Karl Rove's missing emails) and lied, with a straight face about it all.

So let's drop the charade about who's responsible, okay?

Because in this case, you really don't want to go there.

Let me put it to you in an analogy that you will understand:DUIs.

You and your girlfriend, W, have been drunk driving for six years now, swerving all over the road, through yards and creating quite the trail of death and destruction in your wake. The rest of the country, the ones that actually own the car, have been begging you to stop, to pull over, to sober up or at the very least try to keep the car between the lines. You've refused, so we've decided to stop paying for gas.

So tell me now, Dick. Who's the irresponsible one?

Harry, Nancy, Democrats. Don't blink.

2007-03-28T19:45:00.001-07:00

Okay.

We've passed a spending bill with a deadline for troop withdrawls attached to it. Didn't that seem a little bit easy to you?

Especially you, Harry. Why do you think that it was even allowed to go to a vote, instead of getting shut down like all the other substantive bills the Senate Republicans have blocked?

I think we know. Because George W. Bush actually wants to veto it.

He could use the distraction, from the Attorneygate, GSA-gate and whatever other gate's erupt between now and whenever the bill hits his desk. He likes making grand, dramatic stands. He thinks that he can take the high, terrorist-fighting, troop-supporting road on this issue.

Furthermore, he believes that doing so will cost him nothing. He believes, with some historical validity, that Democrats will cave and compromise. That we will settle for some sort of meaningless, non-binding, bullshit little addendum to the spending bill that he can smirk at and ignore.

Let's prove him wrong.

He wants to play chicken. Great. Let's throw the steering wheel out the window while he watches.

Let's announce to the world that this is the only spending bill that he is going to see. And he can either sign it or not. Period.

More to the point, let's stick to it, no matter what.

What's the worst that could happen? Our troops have to come home in April? Great. Something tells me the National Guardsmen on their third deployment aren't going to be too pissed about that. The Republicans will accuse us of cowardice and treason? They already are doing that. The Iraqis will descend into civil war? Ditto. Democrats might suffer some political fallout for taking a firm stand for our principles? It's worth it.

This is our chance, the best one in a long, long, time to break Bush's willful defiance of the facts --- of Iraq, the Constitution, what the American people want, and the new balance of power in Washington.

He's not going to like it. He's going to bluster, and threaten, and cuss, and call us names. Fuck him.

He's been on a six year binge of other people's lives and money.

We can cut him off now.

Let's do it.

Why The US Attorneys Firing Scandal Matters

2007-03-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

There are still some people who purport to be confused as to why the reason or method or people involved in the firing of the eight US Attorneys matters. And why Congress should issue subpoenas and force a Constitutional conflict to get to the bottom of it.

These people point out that nothing illegal happened, that US Attorneys serve "at the pleasure of the President" and that he has the right and privilege to remove and replace them at any time and for any reason.

That I will grant. Yes, the President, and his appointed Attorney General do have that right, and should have that right.

But I would add that the U.S. public has the right to know about it.

The President, the District Attorney and the US Attorneys, let's not forget, are all public servants. All are charged with doing the people's business.

If the President, his staff and the appointees he puts into place believe that the proper method of executing this business is to reward political loyalty and punish impartiality and competence, I guess it's not exactly illegal.

But it certainly shouldn't be secret.

That is exactly the kind of information that voters should be made aware of, so that we can more accurately assess how we cast our votes next time we're asked to elect our next batch of public servants. And Congress has the right and duty to reveal that information to us.

After all, who else will? Not the press, who lacks the legal authority (and the spine) to wrest the needed documents and testimony from the participants. Not the judicial system. And certainly not the executive branch, through some sort of Special Investigator like Daniel Fitzgerald. They know they can't squeak through another one of those without getting really hurt.

Secondly, even if the nakedly partisan firings and hirings aren't illegal, they raise the possibility of other illegalities that may have been committed. Namely obstruction of justice and false charges by those US Attorneys who got the hint about what was expected of them if they wanted to stay employed. Pursuing this investigation to its logical end is the best way of unearthing those crimes.

Nope, nothing wrong here.

2007-03-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

"In his remarks Tuesday, Bush emphasized that he appoints federal prosecutors and it is natural to consider replacing them. While saying he disapproved of how the decisions were explained to Congress, he insisted "there is no indication that anybody did anything improper.""

That's one of the things that's so frustrating about this guy. You don't really ever really know if he's being extremely stupid, ass-headedly stubborn, or is simply lying.

With each subsequent testimony and document dump, it becomes increasingly clear that the Administration wanted to use United States Attorneys as guard dogs for Republican politicians and attack dogs against Democratic ones. And that the USAs that didn't want to go along with that got pushed out and replaced with ones that did.

I suppose, it is possible that Bush doesn't see anything 'improper' about that... he did, after all, 'win' the Presidency. And these are all supposedly 'his' guys, that serve 'at his pleasure.' Which, to him and his circle of cronies might very well mean that they are supposed to do his bidding, no matter how nakedly political and partisan that is.

The rest of us here in America find it very improper indeed. Also disgusting. And more than a little frightening.

We might accept that people come into a politically appointed office with certain leanings and tendencies. And even understand if they allow these leanings and tendencies to affect them in the fringes of their duties... like if there's a very close judgement call to be made, their judgement might be nudged toward the direction of their leanings and tendencies. People, after all, are not perfect.

But this is a case that goes far beyond that. This is the sort of stuff that conspiracy theories and banana republics are made of. This is an attempt to stymie prosecutors from following a clear trail of wrongdoing and to send them down false trails for political gains.

That's a road that no American, Republican or Democrat, should want our justice system to begin going down. Not only does it make a mockery of the hard work that our country has done to preserve our laudable level of professionalism, but it sets a nasty precedent that could be used with the change of administrations.

Of course, that's in the long term. And if there's one aspect of Bush's personality that isn't tough to read, it's that he doesn't really give a fuck about anything any further out time-wise than his next brush-clearing vacation.

Um, sorry, that's not going to do it

2007-03-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

In this article, Bush makes his grandiose offer.

"Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies — but only on the president's terms: in private, "without the need for an oath" and without a transcript."

Bushie-Boy seems to be laboring under the delusion that his ideological and financial cronies still run things in Congress.

You'll note that he doesn't give any hint of reason why his staff can't testify under conditions in which it's more difficult to get away with lies, besides ""We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. ..."

A more laughable statement can't be imagined coming from someone who only came as close to election as he did in 2000 on the strength of exactly that... a fishing expedition into Clinton's real estate dealings that uncovered the shocking fact that a man would tell fibs to avoid getting caught cheating on his wife.

Still you can hardly blame him for shielding his henchmen so vehemently.

Once Rove and his thugs are up on the stand, under oath and in front of the cameras there's no telling what kinds of skeletons, corpses and bound-and-gagged living captives might fall out of the administration's closet.

I'm Ready for the 2nd DOJ Corruption Helping, Thanks!

2007-03-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

As the DA purge investigations continue, it's clear that the Administration was playing the the same crude and blatant politicization game with the Department of Justice as with every other person, place or thing they've had occasion to interact with.

One thing that you can say about that group of thugs and cavemen is that--- with the exception of the wily Rove, who layers a thin veneer of slickery, gotcha-proof, slime on top of his thuggery --- they aren't hard to read.

Their mandate was pretty clear to the DAs: Help get Republicans elected. Try to find (non-existent) voter fraud cases. Indict Democrats. And above all, stop investigating Republicans.

By firing the 8 DA's who, in the words of their own emails, weren't being "loyal Bushies," and accelerating or decelerating investigations at GOP command, they have more or less tipped off anyone of a suspicious mindset that the other 85 DA's were. Being loyal Bushies that is. And, on a side note, as of March 19th, 2007 I can't think of a more embarrassing label than that.

I'm rubbing my hands together waiting for the parties stung in the process --- like Dems who were unfairly singled out for investigations and intimidation, and prosecutors who had clear-cut corruption investigations against Repubs terminated --- to jump on the bandwagon and start telling their stories.

I'm betting that there is plenty of that particular kind of shit for us to push Republican noses into, while telling them that they are "Bad Americans! Bad!" before sending them out of the house, so they never get a chance to shit on the American carpet again.

Republican Priorities

2007-03-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

According to this LA Times article, Carole Lam, the District Attorney for San Diego was fired because she preferred to pursue high level, white collar criminals (including Republican Congressman/Geriatric Partyboy, Randy "The Duke-stir" Cunningham) instead of immigration law violators.

How very Republican.

Thinking that it's less important to prosecute rich white people defrauding U.S. taxpayers than poor brown people trying to become them.

Hilary ’08: Getting Ugly Early

2007-02-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

Though it’s still early, nay, pre-rosy-fingers-of-dawn days for the ’08 elections, already La Hilary is looking less and less enticing as time goes by.

Her whole campaign, to my way of thinking, has always been more or less based on the “who else ya got?” factor. Though the number of people who are actually jazzed at the thought of a Hilary Clinton Presidency is miniscule… so miniscule that even I, who consort exclusively with hard-core Dems and godless Liberals have yet to engage in conversation with anyone that would fit that description.

Most of them, like me, have said something along the lines of “Yeah, there’s no doubt that she’d do a good job. Yeah, I guess if I had to choose between a Republican and Hilary, I would choose Hilary.”

I also add the caveat that I wouldn’t like it. And that I would be very uncomfortable, probably even physically nauseous, having to persuade someone else to vote for her too.

This, friends, is a problem for someone running for elected office. Let’s not kid ourselves that the process of picking office of President of the United States selects out the most qualified. The process is a popularity contest, along with other even less savory things.

And Hilary, despite her formidable intelligence and many gifts, simply is not popular.

There’s no shame in that. Being popular, as any junior high-schooler will tell you, just kind of happens to some people and doesn’t to others, and there’s little that any of us can do to force it. Kind of like being a great athlete. Hard work can take you far, but then when you reach the edges of your capacity, you get smoked by those who’ve worked just as hard and also have a natural edge on you.

That’s what we’re seeing now with the Obama infatuation. Obama is likable, and as such, he’s the biggest threat that Hilary faces. After all, her candidacy falls apart when people feel like they have another option.

So get ready to watch Team Hilary & Bill do everything they can to cut off Obama’s funding, disparage his readiness, and in general delegitimize his candidacy. Kind of like the shot they just sent across his bow with the David Geffen thing last weekend.

Also, keep your fingers crossed that they fail. And that the Clintons realize that the party, and the nation, would be better served if they put their awesome powers behind a candidate with the natural gifts to get elected.

Because if the Clinton Machine does manage to outmaneuver and starve and crush all the other Dem candidates, the end result will be a lot of surly and disappointed Democrats squaring off against a Republican base energized beyond belief for a fight against an unlikable, unpopular figure they’ve spent the last 16 years demonizing.

And that, my friends, will be really ugly.

the 21.5k solution

2007-01-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

I was gone from the country for two weeks, from about Christmas to mid January and was astounded by how fast Bush's surge idea has been imposed on the country.

When I left, the talk was all about the Iraq Study Group, and their recommendations and how Georgie was going to deal with them. Two weeks later, the Decider has spoken, and all of that group's suggestions have been swept aside and the surge is a done deal.

I've got a lot of problems with the idea, but am also curious as to where he came up with the number of 21,500 troops.

In the first place, that's kind of small. It almost implies that we're only 20 something thousand soldiers away from winning this thing... like it's been more or less a closely balanced see-saw up until now, and by putting just that tiny little extra weight on the scales, it's going to swing to Victory with a mighty clank.

Secondly, it's such an oddly precise number.

Did someone parse it out so clearly as to decide that 21,000 wouldn't quite be enough to do the job, yet 22,000 would be overkill?

If so, who?

Why People Suck: Part 3,479 - Geting Your Eruv On

2006-11-20T22:55:00.001-08:00

11/20/06 LA Times

"Members of the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice welcomed the California Coastal Commission's decision last week to grant their request to run fishing line between lampposts and sign poles through several miles of prime beachfront, creating an unbroken symbolic border.

The eruv boundary, which also will stretch inland through parts of Santa Monica and Los Angeles, eases certain Sabbath restrictions by allowing Orthodox Jews to consider themselves to be "at home" within its broad outlines."

Personally, and this is just my opinion here, it's more than a little pathetic to live a life ruled by a lot of Bronze Age and medieval superstitions in the first place. This is the 21st fucking century here, and Los Fucking Angeles. Surely we should at this point be able to separate out the living, divinely-derived sap of a religion's spiritual message from from the dead wood of that religion's petty, human-created, arbitrary rituals by this point. And recognize that these sorts of dead wood commandments have as much validity as other bogus superstitions against not walking under ladders or letting black cats cross our paths.

But if some humans can't manage to make that leap then they should at least be consistent. If some decides to reap the psychic benefits of closely following some ancient tradition (a sense of righteousness a sense of community, a feeling of superiority over the less spiritual and disciplined) then they should be willing to pay the burdens of that decision.

According to Wikipedia, observant Orthodox Jews are not allowed to do any work on the Sabbath, which includes carrying or pushing items outside their home. Meaning that Orthodox Jews going to church wouldn't be able to push a baby carriage or even carry their keys with them.

This eruv loophole lets them do this by transforming the streets and sidewalks within this magical fishing wire fence to be considered indoors, or more accurately, inside a single enclosed courtyard. Basically, according to this thinking, the eruv is the top of the doorway and the light and utility poles are the sides of the door. Anything inside is the same as being in a shared living quarters, so carrying things is okey-dokey.

Well.

Which I suppose is all well and good. And I almost admire the ingenuity of the loophole that has been created. But I have a couple, nagging question:

If there is indeed a God, and he really does (for his own inscrutable reasons) not want anyone carrying keys to church on Saturday, is he really going to be fooled by a fishing line strung between lightposts?

Progressives: Let's Drop the "War on Terror" Metaphor

2006-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

Just got through reading George Lakoff's "Moral Politics" book, about a year after everyone on the blogs was talking about it. For those of you who haven't gotten to it yet, I'm sure you've heard the basic idea... that people understand the world through metaphors, and process new facts within basic conceptual "frames" based on these metaphors.

Further, Lakoff states, the Republicans have intuitively understood this for some time now and have gotten a head start refining how to pitch their ideas in words that fit into and reinforce the frames, then disseminating those words through their media apparati.

Basic examples of this process being the substitution of "pro-life" for "anti-abortion" and "death tax" for "estate tax."

One of the biggest successes that the Republicans have pulled off in the last five years is to create a nearly unanimous embrace of the "War on Terror" metaphor and phraseology. Not only have they hammered it home in countless speeches and papers, but they have gone out of their way to ridicule and lambast anyone who appears to endorse the alternative metaphor of "law enforcement."

According to these conservatives, anyone who seems to think that we will prevail against terrorists by gathering intelligence about them, arresting them and jailing them is weak and foolish and dangerous to national security. They are so bad, they are just like Bill Clinton, who as everyone knows, allowed 9/11 to happen.

Instead, the efforts to prevent terrorist attacks must take the form of a War. A "Global War." A "Long War." "A War of Civilizations." Yada, Yada, Yada.

Once we, as a nation, bought into this metaphor, we handed the terrorism issue over to the Republicans, who are PERCEIVED as being better at waging wars (a perception based more on tough talk than a historical war-winning record, btw).

Furthermore, we automatically acquiesced to some rather sweeping and drastic notions. Notions that may not be supported by facts or jibe with the norms and liberties the U.S. has grown accustomed to.

Consider:

1. A War implies that the struggle is for our very survival as a nation.

2. Because the War is for our very survival, it raises the stakes and gives our government greater leeway. In war, the government can ask greater sacrifices, spend more, curtail more rights and silence criticism in ways that they can't in peace.

3. When a nation is at War, those who disagree with that nation become supporters of the enemy and, consequently traitors.

4. In a War, captured enemies (who pose a threat to our survival, remember?) do not deserve or receive the same rights and considerations that accused criminals might receive.

We've seen all of these points made, ad infinitum, from W's lectern and the wingnut blogs to support this War metaphor. To me it falls apart at point one. As many times as I have it screeched at me, I just can't believe that a couple hundred Al Queda can destroy or conquer the United States of America.

However, this War metaphor been successful at cowing many Democrats into meekly following the Republican leads on many, many bad moves. So it's been a success in that sphere.

But in the sphere of actually reducing the number of terrorists and their capability and motivation to attack globally, the War approach has been a total flop, as the recent National Intelligence Estimate pointed out.

So in other words, this War metaphor only serves to make Republicans stronger and everyone in greater danger.

So let's stop buying into it. Let's stop using it. Let's correct others when they do use it.

The next time, you are in conversation with a wingnut and they use the phrase "War on Terror" say:

"Do you really think it's a War?"

Then follow up with questions that ridicule and destroy that notion:

"Wars are between nations. Which nation are we at War with? What does their uniform look like? Where is the battlefield? Who is in the chain of command? How do we win this war? When will we know? Who will sign the articles of surrender on the deck of a battleship?"

This will throw them. They'll begin searching their database of Rush Limbaugh talking points and come back at you with something along the lines of "so I guess you think this is a law enforcement issue." They might even throw in "like Clinton."

Now you crush their thinking as simplistic and antiquated and overwhelm them with how much more advanced your thinking is on this topic. You also slap them with one of their own code words, with the meaning twisted to suit your purpose.

"Your thinking is so pre-9/11. That there are only two ways to think about terrorism. This is the 21st century.

There are some aspects of a war to this, in some limited cases. If a state or nation is officially or unofficially providing support to terrorists, then it's appropriate to take action on the state or national level, like declaring a war.

And there are some law enforcement aspects to ending terrorism attacks. In fact, I'd say that the biggest successes in the last year have been the result of good, solid intelligence work in London, not our expensive, losing, bloody war in Iraq. And that it's a lot more efficient to work with foreign governments to round up and arrest terrorists than it is to destroy a country to fight them in the streets.

But if we really want to end terrorism, we've got to be more comprehensive than just War and Law Enforcement.

For instance, it's also a marketing campaign. The imans of these radical islamist mosques and madrassas are telling their side of the story to the impressionable Islamic youth. We've got to convincingly SHOW and TELL our side as well to PREVENT more young people from being converted into someone who wants to attack us.

It's an economic issue. Though the most visible terrorists are rich pricks like Bin Laden, they get their emotional support from the miserable poor who feel like they've got no future in this world and want to reverse course to some fabled Islamic past. Freeing up widespread economic opportunity thoughout the world will drain that swamp of the resentment they feel against the West and isolate the real radicals from their potential base of support.

It's a political issue. How many times do we have to hear Arabs of all stripes --- fundamentalist, radical, moderate and liberal --- say that they're angry about the Israeli/Palestine issue before we accept that it's a problem which keeps inflaming that part of the world? The U.S. needs to get tough and fair with both sides, and broker a peace shuts down that engine of hatred."

At this point, the Conservative is beginning to suffer a cognitive panic. He likes to have a single, cohesive, structural framework for his thoughts. You've buffetted his War frame and unless he is offered something similarly over-arching, he'll disregard everything he's heard so far and retreat back to it.

So you hold out an alternative frame.

Now, don't think that he's going to take it. He probably won't.

But what it might do, hopefully, is introduce the idea that there are other, logical, comprehensive ways to think about how to end terrorism. That serves to weaken his fervor for the War metaphor. Which is enough. Just like in elections, often you know you can't convert your opponent's voters to your side so you try to depress them and keep them home. In this case, you create one less person walking around parroting the Republican line to other people.

My favorite metaphor is the disease metaphor. It's simplistic, it's reductive, it's comprehensive.

I say:

"First off, ending terrorism in a globalized world is too complex and novel a situation to reduce to a simple metaphor. It is its own thing. Not a war. Not an anti-crime initiative. It is stopping the capability and destroying the incentive of people around the world to attack us. But if I had to pick an analogy, I would think of ending terrorism as fighting a disease. Like a virus. Or a cancer.

You absolutely do all you can to isolate and destroy the diseased cells. With caution but without mercy. This means using force selectively and precisely.

But you're also smart about it. Along with destroying those cells, you also do everything you can to strengthen your body to prevent the disease from getting a toehold in the first place. This means political and economic reform.

You also strengthen an immune system that will automatically fights the disease wherever it pops up. This means working with the governments around the world to find and catch terrorists that we don't even know about yet.

And most of all you don't ever, ever allow anyone to sell you on a cure doesn't work and actually makes you sicker. Surely I don't have to explain to you what that means."

Let's talk about Sex, Foley

2006-10-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about sex, baby
Let's talk about you and me
Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things
That may be
Let's talk about sex

- Salt-n-Pepa

You know, if I didn't know better I would start to think that the Democrats had learned some lessons from the pastings that Karl Rove and the Republican Slime Machine have been giving us for the last six years. In the last two weeks, two news cycles have been consumed with attacks aimed right at the conjoined, misshapen hearts of the Republican's supposed "strengths": National Security and Moral Values.

First, Clinton laid out some devastating comparisons of his al-Queda fighting record compared to the Bush Administration's on Chris Wallace's show. Comparisons that were coincidentally backed up with the next weeks publication of Bob Woodward's new book, which stated that Condi Rice "brushed off" George Tenant's July 10th warnings of an imminent attack in the United States. Granted, to those of us who've been paying attention the last six years, this isn't new news to us. It's what Richard Clarke was saying in 2004, before he was drowned out by the Mighty Wurlizter. It is, however, a welcome piling on of testimony, dates, times and proof that Rice, Bush and Cheney were asleep at the wheel that summer (or worse).

I'm already planning on making that July 10th brush off a major talking point when I'm combatting the notion that the Republicans have kept us safer.

Then came the Foley page scandal: it's pure, unadulterated sickness of the acts themselves and the coldly calculated coverup when the House Republican leadership learned about it one (three? five? eleven?) years ago.

I know that as liberals and Democrats, we have an innate tendency to take the high road on matters of a sexual and personal nature.

We'd prefer for the American public to become outraged about the negation of Habeas Corpus, the legalization of torture, the record budget deficit, the slashed student loan funding, the dishonest way in which we were led to a losing, disastrous war, the incompetent waging of that war, and the cynical, vomitous invocation of 9/11 and terrorists to justify all of those acts.

But the broader American public is not going to become outraged about those things. They are going to be outraged by where someone puts their pee-pee. To them that's what constitutes a "scandal." It's a simple, reductive, narrow conception of what's truly disgusting. But it's theirs.

These are, after all, people that think Nascar is a sport and Mountain Dew is a tasty beverage.

So let's go with it.

I want to dig out every sordid, disgusting detail about Mark Foley and his page fetish anyone can come up with. If I had to read about Clinton and Monica's cigar games and blue dress stains, I expect the same sort of massive, invasive, retch-inducing detail about Mark Foley jerking off in his office right before a house vote. I want to know if he came in a kleenex or if he's got a page's athletic jock in his desk drawer he jizzes on, then sniffs.

He claims that he's never fucked any of the pages. Well, let's just see about that. I want this guy's personal life examined until I know WHO he's fucked, how old they were, and if they whimpered or squealed when they took it up the pooper. This is not a time for us to get squeamish about appearing homophobic or anti-gay. We're not. But the people we want to shake up are and we want to rub their noses in what their supposed "Morality" party does on their dime.

Just like the Republicans linked the words "Democrat" and "intern" and "blowjob" so tightly that Al Gore felt compelled to get closer to Joe Leiberman and further from Bill Clinton in preparation for the political fight of his life, I want for the words "Republican" "16-year-old boy" and "masturbate" to become inextricably linked together in the public's mind.

I want to force Republicans to openly defend and minimize the gay lifestyle on Mark Foley's behalf, just like I had to defend and minimize adultery on Clinton's behalf. Which irked me to no end, as I was hoping to put off defending adultery until I got married and began committing it myself.

Besides raising the gorge of the Values Crowd and forcing them defend what they hate the most, these ongoing, explicit sexual revelations are the sorts of details that will keep putting this story on the front pages over and over and over again during the coming weeks no matter what Rove tries to orchestrate to push it off.

If there's one thing I know about the American people it's this--- if forced to pay attention to a story about where the rich and powerful shoot their loads and anything short of a full scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil, we're going to follow the jism.

So, Dems, like W in Iraq, let's stay the course on this one... right into Mark Foley's humid, rancid, sticky underwear... until it brings us the victory we need to put this country back on the right track again.

Five Fucking Years Later.

2006-09-11T10:14:00.001-07:00

Driving in to work this morning, I was scowling at the non-stop 9/11 memorializing and pontificating and sentimentalizing that I was listening to on NPR. I've been scowling a lot lately, and going out of my way NOT to read or listen to, much less watch, anything about that day.

So in the car I started thinking, scowling is rather an odd reaction for me to have. And wondering just what do I think about the event. Looking within, I'm deeply conflicted about 9/11, and what it means to me. Also, very reluctant to honestly express what I really feel, since it goes against the template of emotions that I've been instructed, or rather assumed, to feel by society as verbalized by the media and the various political figures (mostly on the right, but on the left too) trying to manipulate me into supporting their agenda.

I'll start with the big, ugly, most unspeakable feeling first.

I'm over 9/11. It happened. It was terrible. Let's not forget about it. Or the good people we lost that day. Let's definitely stop it from ever happening again (more on this later). But for fuck's sake let's get on with being America again. It didn't change my life forever. It didn't change the world forever. It didn't end an era for me and radically change how I think about the world. I already knew that there were people out there that wanted to hurt America. They got lucky one day, that's all.

Lest I sound callous, let me give a little bit of background. I was living in New York City, Upper East Side, that day and have done my share of cursing and crying, thinking about the poor souls so desperate to escape the inferno within the building they jumped out of the city's tallest building. In fact, just writing that previous sentence made my eyes burn and water.

But I don't think anyone in that building that day would have wanted America to drop everything else on our plate and focus on The War On Terror, 24/7, to the exclusion of all else, since. They were busy people, capable of multi-tasking and would have expected us to do the same.

Second, I'm and angry and disgusted by what has happened since that day. And, yeah, I'm going to get political here. This administration took the justifiable anger and desire for justice 9/11 created and perverted it to justify a completely unrelated, optional war they had been wanting to wage for over a decade.

To me that's the lowest, most shameful sort of manipulation there is. As a matter of fact, I'm more angry at our own government than I am at Bin Ladin. Bin Ladin is a fundamentalist Islamic jihadist who had sworn to attack us. Being angry at him would be like being angry at a scorpion for trying to sting you. Like a scorpion, I want to stop him. I want to kill him. I want to punish him. But there's no sense of violated trust.

With Bush and Cheney, it's different. After 9/11, I set aside my misgivings about the government and supported my President in our time of need. And in return, they have lost American lives, wasted American money and soiled American honor. I feel profoundly betrayed by the Republicans and what they've done.

Third, they've failed to address the most important piece of stopping this thing from happening again.

I believe that preventing another 9/11 has two parts: the first is making less possible to COMMIT another terrorist attack on the US. The second is to make it less common to WANT to.

The administration seems to be completely focused on the first part, and doing a passible job at it, in a completely inefficient, costly, bassackward fashion. Say what you will, turning Afghanistan & Iraq into bloody war zones does keep long-term, complex terrorist plans from being developed in those countries.

But as far as that second, more important, piece, making it less common for people to WANT to attack us... they are utter, counterproductive, disasters.

Maybe I'm one of those "Blame America First"-ers the Rightwingers keep nattering on about, but as I was walking back to my apartment in the crowd of people denied our usual subway ride home that day I was thinking that an event like this should make America examine just what it is we've done in the world that would make people hate us badly enough to do this to us. Call me crazy, but I believe that if I am attacked, I should at least take a moment to examine myself and my behavior.

I believe that it's very possible that I could have done something to offend or injure the other party. Personally, as a matter of my own personal ethics, I want to try to keep my behavior as ethically sound as I am capable. To keep my side of the street clean. I fail often, and when I do there are often consequences. I step on someone's toes and they push back. For a combination of moral and purely selfish reasons --- I don't want to live in a world where I keep getting pushed back --- I want to avoid stepping on people's toes, even accidentally.

And the US, to put it mildly, has a long history of a lot of toe-stepping, without a whole lot of push-backs.

But instead of deciding to step more gingerly going forward, and get our own legal, ethical and moral house in order our Administration decided to say, in essence, "not only will we continue to step on your toes if we want, we will kick you in the ass and stomp on your neck at will and anyone that doesn't like it can expect to get more of the same himself." Then proceeded to act out this threat in Afghanistan, Iraq and now threatens to do the same in Syria and Iran.

As a result, I feel LESS safe now than I did on September 12, 2001 and MORE hated around the world. Which is one hell of a way to mark five years later. Fuck.

Laguna Beach, the Real OC

2005-09-29T23:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took a break from working at home and watched the block of channels ranging from BET on the low end and up to one of the generic music video channels up at the top, that I never can remember the name of.

This span of four or five channels is one of my favorite time wasting destinations. Bounded on both sides by the viewing equivalent of high voltage fences (Country Music Television and C-SPAN) I can bounce up and down through MTV, MTV2, VH1, BET and the other music channels and always see enough tits, ass, bling and 80s-era cheese to feel the kind of simultaneous satiation and tantalization that can keep me enthralled for hours.

After a fairly even dispersal of attention among the channels I eventually narrowed my bouncing to "VH1's 100 Hottest Hotties" and MTV's fake reality program "Laguna Beach: The Real OC."

I'd been hearing rumors about this show for some time, mainly that the characters were supposed to be real but were using fake names. Nothing I had read or heard, however, touched upon the compelling nature of this show. Despite a near-complete lack of story, writing, special effects, narrative arc, character development, dialogue or any of the other attributes that supposedly make for enjoyable entertainment consumption I could not tear my eyes from this show and found myself only turning over to the much slicker eye-candy of the 100 Hottest Hotties only during MTVs long and frequent commercial breaks.

The lack of plotline is actually kind of refreshing, compared to the hyper-dramatic soap opera mix of seductions, feuds, accidents, misunderstandings ... that usually make the editing cut. Instead these young, white, rich, goodlooking teens go from restaruant to coffee shop to snowboarding slope casually talking about each other and hooking up.

The dialogue could not be scripted, its far too inane and empty and stupid and repetitious except for inflections that carry the entire meaning of the word (like "bitch" and "slut" becoming a friendly greeting) sort of like I remember Chinese is supposed to be.

I was transfixed through two episodes with a mixture of condescension, awe and envy. These are the popular kids!!! I never got to know what they did when I was in high school and now I do! What's more, by extension, I know what they are doing now. Because I'll wager that the life that the 33 year old versions of Laguna Beach's popular set are probably every bit as parallel as the pathetic, socially retarded bookworm life that I led in high school is parallel to the pathetic, socially retarded, Internet-surfing life I currently lead.

John Roberts, Arrogant Prick

2005-09-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

I know that the press has been in heated competition to come up with laudatory adjectives to heap on John Roberts and what a gentlemanly, brilliant, humble, kind-hearted person he is.

After watching about as much of the questioning as my ADD would allow, I have come to just the opposite conclusion.

Seeing him duck and weave and evade all the substantive questions put to him, simpering all the while, made me think that he is, as the title of this post suggests, an arrogant prick.

He's like the guy who's recommended for a job by a company's CEO, but who needs to get interviewed and approved by one of that company's department managers to make it official.

A truly humble, self-deprecating, decent person would go into that interview determined to win that approval by demonstrated honesty, forthrightness and competence.

But instead our boy has sauntered in, smirk at full strength, propped his feet up on the Manager's desk and said "The Boss told me I have this job already, so I don't have to say shit to you."

After this behavior, any self respecting Manager would look up the company regulations and find the fine print where he gets to block this prick's appointment and do so.

Yes... Firing People Fixes Everything

2005-06-07T20:15:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - General Motors Corp. is cutting 25,000 jobs and closing an unspecified number of plants over the next 3-1/2 years, CEO Rick Wagoner told shareholders Tuesday, as the world's largest automaker struggles to stem huge losses.

Wagoner, who is also chairman of GM, did not offer more details other than to say the troubled automaker needs to cut capacity by the end of 2008. GM, which has lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter, is facing its worst financial crisis in more than a decade.

----

The best part about this whole debacle is that this Wagoner asshole blamed GM's inability to compete on the high cost of health care that gets folded into each and every car that they make.

That's fucking funny. Health Care. Right.

Not the fact that GM built Hummers and Escalades as fast as America's fattest assholes could jump into them and drive off to the exurbs without ever thinking about what would happen if gas prices ever rose. Because, I mean, it's only a limited natural resource that comes out of the ground in the world's most unstable trouble zones. Who would ever think that something would happen to make the supply fluctuate? To think that far ahead you'd have to get paid a lot more than the $2.2m salary and $2.46m bonus(!) poor Mr. Wagoner got lot year.

I'm old enough to remember when Clinton tried to do something about U.S. health care and the large corporations paraded a lot of CEOs just like Rick Wagoner squealing and crying that there was nothing wrong with the current system and that changing it would cost America jobs.

Are We Crazy?

2005-06-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

U.S. To Lay Off 500,000 In Iraq
By Warren Vieth
Los Angeles Times
05 June, 2003

U.S. reconstruction officials will soon hand out pink slips to nearly half a million Iraqi military and civilian personnel, exacerbating an unemployment crisis that experts say could slow the pace of postwar reconstruction.

The layoffs will mean the loss of a government paycheck for roughly 1 in 10 Iraqi workers. The Bush administration hopes to soften the blow by making cash "termination payments" to members of Saddam Hussein's armed forces, Information Ministry employees and other government workers whose services are no longer wanted. The amount of the payments had not been announced.

Officials of the U.S.-led reconstruction effort acknowledged that the dismissal of so many people will magnify the economic misfortune of a country where a majority of the population depends on food rations; an estimated 30% of the labor force works for the government; and unemployment, as best anyone can tell, already exceeds 20%. The layoffs will be the latest blow to the once-thriving trading nation, already reduced to Third World subsistence levels by nearly three decades of authoritarian rule, international sanctions and intermittent war.

---

Yes, this is exactly what Iraq needs... more economic misfortune at the hands of the United States.

That's what's going to turn the whole insurgency thing around for us. First we invade on false pretences, then we destroy their infrastructure, then we start firing the few people who still have steady jobs left.

Hey jackasses, the last thing that country needs is more people with a grudge against us. Does the phrase 'disgruntled ex-employee" mean anything to you? If you thought that they were bad news in the Postal Service just think what they could do in a country awash in AK-47s and loose bombs stolen from unguarded military installations.

We would be smarter to do just the opposite. We should HIRE another 500,000 Iraqis --- no, make that 5 million --- and put them to work rebuilding their country, shuffling papers, any fucking thing. Just so long as they get a check that says "U.S. Government" every two weeks.

Employees don't kill their employers (often) and I'd rather have those Iraqis sniggering at Dilbert comic strips where they've written "Uncle Sam" underneath that boss with the pointy hairdo than driving into checkpoints wearing a napalm jockstrap.