What, No Michael Bay This Year?

The Razzie nominations are out. Michael Bay didn't get it in the neck for The Island, but I guess when Uwe Boll and Rob Schneider make movies, everybody else just needs to leave the room. (Boll is his generation's John "Bud" Cardos, while Schneider is, well, just kind of a butt boil.) You can read the full list here.

Onion Bit of the Week

West Wing Canceled

NBC canceled its critically acclaimed show The West Wing after seven seasons. What do you think?

Janelle Peterson,
Social Worker
"The Democrats are even out of fake power?"

Eager Slaves

A passage from a wonderfully mordant Gore Vidal essay:

When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush.

Wake Me When The Great Awakening Is Over

While farting around this morning, I came across Michael Kazin's essay, which argued for Democrats to return to the politics of William Jennings Bryan. It depressed me deeply, because while I don't see much hope for progressive politics in the U.S. generally, I find even less in the progressive politics he propounds. My reason is that the schism between religious and secular liberals, largely buried between Bryan's first run for the Presidency and the Scopes trial, has already emerged. We don't really trust each other. Religious liberals blame secular liberals for losing the red states (because we keep bringing up gay marriage and supporting abortion rights, I suppose); and secular liberals suspect that we have no place in the revival that religious liberals like Kazin propose:

More than 80 percent of Americans hold strong religious beliefs, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Even Christians who don’t regularly attend church regard the Scriptures and the example of Christ as moral touchstones that dovetail with the ideals of Americanism itself. Secular liberals ought to make their peace with this reality, while making sure that no religious faction -- such as creationists -- can install its doctrine into law.

Okay, so we do occupy a position. We exist to stop creationists (like we could with less than 20% of the population). But as charming as that future sounds, Kazin ought to remember that one of the creationists secular liberals had to fight was Kazin's favorite religious liberal, William Jennings Bryan. Darrow's relationship with Bryan and his followersduring the early years of the 20th century broke down over evolution and race, two things that seem like worthy reasons for dissolving political ties. Why should the secular left think another collaboration should turn out any better? What happens if a faction of the religious left tries to install its doctrines into law? Are secular liberals to make peace with that reality? Are we partners in this relationship, or are we to be kept as pets?

Kazin says that secular liberals mistrust the devout because we "still harbor a nagging contempt for the God-fearing, the unhip, and the poorly educated". Perhaps, but let's not forget the contempt that the religious sling at the secular for being the "enemy of normal Americans", "Communists" and so on. I often think of Woody Allen's line in Annie Hall "Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here."

The religious left needn't ask my permission to take control of the Democratic party. In reality, they already have it, though they may not be aware of it. No elected officials at the national level make claims to atheism or agnoticism, and it's not likely in the current environment that any could. Any candidate who wants votes better make sure everyone knows how often he prays and which church he goes to.

Pundits wearing every color of parisan livery exaggerate the secular left's power, mainly so that it can be the scapegoat whenever things go wrong for the left. I don't have figures, but of the 20% of the population that is secular I wouldn't expect more than half to consider themselves leftists. There are secular libertarians, anarchists, objectivists, moderates, and business/supply-side Republicans out there as well. The secular movement (if you can call it that) is disorganized. It lacks leadership. It can't agree on spokespeople. It has no lobby. It has no influence over who gets nominated for judgeships. If you ignore all this, what is left is earth-shaking power. I can't deny it.

So, if the religious left wants to make a revival tent out of the Democratic Party, it seems to me that they're at liberty to do so. If, however, they'd like the secular left to come along, they need to show respect for its issues, not all of which revolve around the teaching of evolution in schools. They need to understand that some of their brothers would still help the poor whether Jesus endorsed it or not, and that many of their sisters reached their moral conclusions in spite of, rather than because of, organized religion. They need to understand that secular people have had believers' footprints on their backs since civilization first came out, so many of them are touchy and suspicious. And they need to respect the secular left's desire for public policy to be based on reason, rather than on competing interpretations of Biblical passages. I don't expect this to happen because politicians don't do anything unless necessity forces them to; but if Kazin wants a leftist reunion for sentimental reasons, it's what has to happen.

Toward the end of his essay, Kazin quotes Czeslaw Milosz:

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

To which I reply (with a poem that proves that I should stick to prose):

I'm sorry I can't validate
Beliefs you say you have
I'm sorry that my doubtful words
Have made you very sad.
But if your faith is strong and true
What harm can my words do to you?
Since I don't resent it when you have to pray,
Stop telling me what I can and can't say.

The Myth of The Moderate Republican

Wondering where John McCain was when Bush said he'd violate McCain's new torture ban whenever he felt like it? Wondering why the only time Arlen Specter actually talks tough against the religious right is during election season? So is Andrew Altschul in his blog post The Myth of the Moderate Republican Check it out.

A Joke

Someone really needs to flay Ann Coulter alive with clam shells, cut off her head, and sell her corpse to the people who make Hygrade hot dogs.

Laugh it up, Ann.

Good News For Planet Hunters

Astronomers caught a brief glimpse of a rocky world of about seven times the Earth's mass orbiting a red star about 21,000 light years from here. Its discovery (made because of an extraordinary coincidence) suggests that smaller, rocky worlds may be more common than giant Jupiter-like planets, giving us better odds of someday spying a planet similar to our own. (LINK)

It's this kind of news that keeps me going after I read things like Jacob Weisberg's column on NSA spying. (LINK). In it, he recognizes that the claims of executive power the Bush administration is making lay the groundwork for dictatorship--albiet a dictatorship that is obliged to face elections occasionally.

Weisberg doesn't suggest this will lead to such things as the jailing of political opponents, and neither do I. Our reasons differ though. Weisberg thinks Congress would stand up to the President if he went that far. I don't. The administration has been going too far for years with scarcely a peep from Congress. The upcoming hearings on the NSA scandal will probably be a joke. No, I think the Bush administration, and its ideological allies, want to preserve the political opposition for the same reason that The Party in Orwell's 1984 preserved Goldsteinism--so that they can have something to drag out and humiliate whenever they need a propaganda boost. Having perfected their engines of slander and insinuation, the Rovists no longer need to do anything so crude as imprison a wayward writer or member of congress. They want instead to make each election a ritual of humiliation, where their candidate (righteous, patriotic, strong, religious, a Reformer with Results) will crush yet another weak, flip-flopping, bible-hating, gay-loving, Osama-backing opponent.

If the Rovists have their way, elections will be to the United States what trials were to the Soviet Union. The outcome will be decided in advance, but everyone loves a show.

It's a good thing scientists are finding other rocky worlds. We just might need to move to one of them.

Winfrey Dumps Frey

"I made a mistake," Winfrey said at the beginning of her show, shown this morning in Chicago, according to a transcript prepared by ShadowTV, a website that monitors broadcasts. "I left the impression that the truth does not matter, and I am deeply sorry about that. But that is not what I believe."

Link

Run I Tells You! Run and Hide!

Bush has a new health care plan.

Why Bush Can Spy On You

According to General Hayden, who manages the wiretapping program, the NSA can spy on you if they have a "reasonable basis to believe" that you are working with Osama. Not probable cause, not evidence, "a reasonable basis to believe".

Given the other things Bush claimed to have a reasonable basis to believe, this is a pretty fucking frightening standard. I suppose this means that if your neighbor is captured by the CIA, taken for a two-year long torture stretch in the People's Democratic Republic of Scrotumrippia, and he screams out your name while he has an elephant's foot rammed up his ass, you can have your phone tapped (pending confirmation of your reservation in the Shiny Happy People's Democratic Republic of Boilyournutsoffwhileyouwatchia).

Don't laugh. This is pretty much how they connected Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

I Was Born To Be Wild. My Mom Said I Was.

Last Frey post. Did any of you catch the Larry King Live appearance where Frey goes on King with his mom? There's the badass spirit.

All the Lies That Aren't His Life

I haven't gloated so far about James Frey's misfortune at having been caught in so many lies in his memoir/novel A Million Little Pieces. It is nice to see a guy who was a jerk about how "real" he supposedly was in comparison to Dave Eggers get his comeuppance. I never did buy his yarn, because it seemed like Frey's persona fit so neatly with the story he was trying to tell--a smart-but-alienated suburban student suffers a tragedy that turns him into a badass-druggie before he finds redemption in rehab. The slimy bathroom details of Frey's book aside, how many crime novels, movies-of-the-week, Hallmark Hall of Fame presentations, and ABC afterschool specials fit this general narrative arc? (Take the drugs out of the picture, and it closely matches the plot of I Accuse My Parents, an addlepated good-suburban-kid-gone-bad story that became a popular MST3K episode.) The way I figure it, Frey picked the narrative first, then fashioned a persona to match it.

This may explain why A Million Little Pieces never made it as a literary novel. When the protagonist fits the story too neatly, readers will lose the illusion that the protagonist's decisions (or the untamable, contingent forces of life) drive story events. They'll feel, instead, that the protagonist is merely a part of the author's prefabricated construct--a widget built to the author's specifications. Again, that's fine in genre fiction, which we read more to enjoy the unfolding of the plot than to explore the existence of a person, but it doesn't work for the kind of book Frey aimed to write. Editors, reading the book as a novel, probably found it too pat, too shopworn a tale, to capture their interest. And it's why, as nonfiction, the book raised so many questions. Perceptive readers sensed the fiction in the nonfiction, even if they didn't bother to check up on Frey.

Now, if Frey wanted to do some literary non-fiction, I've got a pitch for him. Why not do a book, film feature, or documentary, in the style of Sherman's March, Adaptation, Out of Sheer Rage, where Frey, a failed fiction writer, looks back in his life and transforms his unremarkable, vanilla suburban experiences into an exciting, page-turning, baditudinous, graphically violent "memoir" that fools Oprah Winfrey and brings him riches the truth could never earn? The theme could be "I can't believe people really think life is really this neat, much less that they'd fill my bank account for confirming their belief."

Check out The Onion's take here.

Gay Panic

Chris Matthews and Don Imus share an "I am so heterosexual" moment (from James Wolcott):

"MATTHEWS (1/18/06): Have you gone to see it yet? I’ve seen everything else but that. I just—

IMUS: No, I haven’t seen it. Why would I want to see that?

MATTHEWS: I don’t know. No opinion on that. I haven’t seen it either, so—

IMUS: So they were—it was out when I was in New Mexico and—it doesn’t resonate with real cowboys who I know.

MATTHEWS: Yeah—

IMUS: But then, maybe there’s stuff going on on the ranch that I don’t know about. Not on my ranch, but you know—

MATTHEWS: Well, the wonderful Michael Savage, who’s on 570 in DC, who shares a station with you at least, he calls it [laughter]—what’s he call it?—he calls it Bare-back Mount-ing. That’s his name for the movie.

IMUS: Of course, Bernard calls it Fudgepack Mountain..."

The transcript doesn't indicate whether buttocks were slapped or potted beef products were consumed during this exchange of manly views.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting mighty sick of this straight male pose that says "We can't (do this/go there/watch this) because we're too straight." I hear Brokeback Mountain is a pretty good picture, and I'll probably check it out either in the theaters or on DVD. I won't go there for an erotic charge because unlike Mickey Kaus I grew up and figured out that not all movies with sex in them are meant to be straight-guy stroke material, and because my track record of turning down offers of gay nookie makes my arousal unlikely. (Though not impossible. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are good looking guys, and I imagine if anyone could induce me to suck a dick, it would be one, or both, of them.)

Besides, I'll never get to be a gay cowboy trying to thread his way through a very straight culture. It might be interesting to consider what that's like. Why not? In my imaginative life I've used books and movies and plays to explore existence as a king, a prince, a princess, a slave, a beggar, a child prodigy, a private detective, a professor, an out-of-work auto mechanic, a boxer, an actor, a Soviet dissident, a victim of the Nazis, a British spy, a singer, a gangster, a starship captain, an alien, an FBI agent, a teacher, a lawyer, a tribal chief, an radio commentator, a serial killer, and a hundred other kinds of things. Why not add a gay cowboy to the list? It may not get me off, but that's not the only way for a story to capture my interest.

Another Memory

A long time ago, I was an actor. And once upon a time, I auditioned for two shows. One audition was for a part in a short film where I played a dimwitted mafia enforcer. The other, which injured me in ways that make me leery of ever returning to the acting trade, was one I arranged just as something else to do while in town. It was held in this little coffee shop/cocktail lounge run by two older women with beehive hairdos. The director was a large, flamboyant black man; the writer was bald and mousy. Their play, they said, was called "In Tandem With Vicki", and my part, they said, was that of her gay friend.

They asked me to camp it up, and I did. But even as I sat there I wondered how the writer, Alan Neff, had the patience to sit and write sixty-some pages of this nonsense. The script contained dialog Ed Wood, Jr. might have written if someone removed his talent for unintentional hilarity. It was attempt at a campy take on the murder of Vicki Morgan, a hustler who'd somehow gotten mixed up with the married Republican millionaire Arthur Bloomingdale. If we take Susan Sontag's definition of camp as failed seriousness, then what do we call failed camp? Even as I read it, I knew I didn't want to do it. I also knew, when I flopped on Neil's futon later that afternoon, that Neff would offer the part to me the first chance he got.

So began four miserable weeks, which ended, mercifully, with them firing me. It wasn't all bad, of course. I learned during the course of the costume fitting that an S&M lifestyle is very hard on the wallet. I learned, by watching a negative example. how important it is to treat actors nicely if you're paying them nothing and holding fourteen-hour rehearsals. Another negative example showed me how dreadfully misguided the maxim "Never give up on your dreams" is. Alan Neff was nothing if not persistent in pursuit of his, as I learned some years later in The Seattle Times:

Up until a few years ago, he directed his creative energies to free-lance movie reviewing. Then one day he checked out of the public library a biography of Vicki Morgan, a 1970s Hollywood call girl. He read the book in a single day and couldn't shake its images from his head.

So, for reasons never much clearer than "I woke up one morning and realized I didn't have a life," he sat down and wrote a play. Lo and behold, he was eventually able to persuade the Northwest Actor's Studio to produce it. He accomplished this largely by badgering the studio's director for months, until she finally relented.

"If I do this, will you leave me alone forever?" was the way the proposition was put to Neff. He accepted. The show went on and Neff still occasionally sweeps the stairs of the Actor's Studio in gratitude.

Yes, Alan Neff never said die, which was too bad really. After I was fired, my agent called me and told me that Neff and the Gang showed up during the intermission of the Northwest Actor's Studio's production of MacBeth and started doing scenes from In Tandem With Vicki on the MacBeth stage. They apparently did this without the knowledge or consent of MacBeth's director. Anger and recrimination followed. My agent told me that I got out at exactly the right time.

She was wrong. I should have gotten out before I got in. But I was my own victim here. I thought I could reach into the pile of offal that was Neff's script and extract a good performance for myself. With similar optimism, Napoleon escaped Elba.

Still, looking back, I wonder what happened to Neff. I've heard nothing from him in the last few years, and a quick google of his name turned up nothing. Maybe his job as a bill collector absorbed more and more of his time and he found his true calling. Maybe he gave up after spending tens of thousands of his own dollars on plays that only drew a handful of ticket buyers per run. He was not a better writer than Ed Wood Jr., but I hope he came, or comes, to a better end. I really do. These are the last lines of Neff's lone story in the Times

The production has a lot of "Hey guys, let's find a barn and put on a play" quality to it. There is not much polish but everybody seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. The cast and crew, who outnumber the audience about two to one, all work for nothing. Still, the production overhead is likely to come in at around $10,000. It is, Neff says, "not a very financially gratifying business."

That, not the quality of the work, is what initially interested me in this story. I wanted to know what might motivate people like Neff to spend so much time and money pursuing such high-risk, low-gain adventures.

What goes on inside their heads? I wondered.

I still don't have a clue, and after seeing the play I'm not entirely sure I want to find out. I do know this, however: We are a very unusual species."

Yeah. That's about the size of it.

Preach on, Brother Al! Testify!

Al Gore gave on hell of a speech yesterday. If you haven't caught it yet, go to CSPAN and check it out. (You'll need Realplayer, and it runs a little over an hour).

Five Little Known Things About Me

Last list for a while, I swear:

1. I, like Majikthise, once tried out for the teen version of Jeopardy!. I actually got pretty far. I passed the test and won all the simulated games, but two things probably killed me. I was kind of a cold fish in the interview (the story of my life right there), and I had, at the time, a case of acne that America really wasn't prepared to see.

2. I have a large collection of teddy bears, and I have invented personalities for each of them. (Hey, you spend most of your free time alone with pages and pages of your own prose and see if you don't invent a few friends.)

3. Someone once successfully dropped my name to Middle Passage author Charles Johnson.

4. In the early months of 1997, I had an affair with a polyamorous married woman. It didn't last for the following reasons: her husband kept pestering me to read his 300-page screenplay, the couple's raging homophobia turned me off, and I balked at having a MMF threesome.

5. Harlan Ellison once called me up and yelled at me because I wrote him to complain about the delay in the publication of "The Knife Man" in Pulphouse. Why did I write him about this? In retrospect, I haven't the foggiest. Ellison wasn't the publisher, and the publisher, Dean Wesley Smith, had a very good reason for delaying publication--his magazine was going broke at the time. I chalk this incident up to adolescent frustrations gone way too far. When Ellison told me I was being an asshole "five different ways", he was underestimating me. Dean was cool about it, though, and the story came out a few months later.

So, I figure this takes care of any future blackmail attempts, unless someone finds out about...no fuck you, I only have to name five things in this list. This blog post is over.

Explain America In Ten Movies

From Lance Mannion

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.

The idea is not to give them a history lesson, so you don't have to start with The New World and end with Jarhead.

What you're trying to do is give them a sense of who we are---your take on our dreams, our attitudes, our idioms, what we think we are, what we are afraid we are, what we really might be.

My list:

1. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
This movie explores better than any in film history our misplaced faith in technological/systemic solutions to human problems.

2. Goodfellas
An excellent portrayal of not only organized crime in America, but also our drive for status and first-class treatment.

3. Superman: The Movie
We've always wanted to believe a man can fly.

4. Inherit the Wind
Don't mistake it for a documentary on the Scopes trial, but it gets the feelings right.

5. Full Metal Jacket
Because we still want to see exotic lands, meet strange and wonderful people, and kill them.

6. JFK
If you want to understand why Americans are cynical about their government, this is as good a place as any to start. Again, it is not to be confused with a documentary.

7. In The Heat of the Night
A genre film that nonetheless confronts racial issues in an intelligent way.

8. Network
So others can understand what our TV diet is doing to us, and what it might someday do to them.

9. Glengarry Glen Ross
So that other countries can know that this is the way we keep score, buhbie.

10. Pearl Harbor
Not that I'd actually wish this movie on anyone, but it does show how some of us, desperate for cash and certain that the audience is stupid, are willing to turn a terrible national nightmare that plunged our country into four bloody years of war into the backdrop for a badly written love triangle.

I invite LADblog and Bitterspice to play.

Quite A Weekend

The Patriots go down, as all good people wanted them to. The Colts and Steelers fought one hell of a game, and the Seahawks finally win in the post-season.

To me the Colts game illustrated one fallacy that dooms a lot of good teams--the belief that resting the starters once home field is won is a worthwhile idea. The Colts took a quarter and a half to find their rhythm, and it was during this time that the Steelers built their 14-0 lead. Maybe if they'd played their starters the last three weeks, they'd have preserved their timing on offense and come into the game sharp. Did they learn nothing from their blowouts of the Denver Broncos over the last two seasons?

It is true that James Dungy's suicide was a horrible distraction, but that's all the more reason to have the team play through the end of the season. It gives players something else to focus on.

It's too bad, really. I was looking forward to seeing Peyton Manning in a Super Bowl. He's a fun quarterback to watch.

Maybe next year.

The Newest Fashions for 2006

I do love election years, when the new grave threats come out.

You May Be In A Jerry Bruckheimer Movie If...

Well, I'll let McSweeney'sbrief you.

I'll just add one more:

20. Someone is always reminding you that "The clock is ticking" and that various objects are "going to blow."

Jerry Bruckheimer used to work in advertising. If only he'd listened to Bill Hicks.

People Sometimes Say the Dumbest Things

LB Joey Porter on the tactics the Colts used to beat his team a couple of months ago:

"They don't want to just sit there, line up and play football," Porter told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "They want to try to catch you off guard. They don't want to play smash-mouth football, they want to trick you. ... They want to catch you substituting. Know what I mean? They don't want to just call a play, get up there and run a play. They want to make you think. They want it to be a thinking game instead of a football game."

Hmm, a team doing everything they can within the rules to win a game. I can see where that might be upsetting. Porter's opponents should be obligated to do exactly what he expects them to do. Only then is the game fair.

This doesn't quite reach the level of that Jets player who, after losing to the Raiders said, "We didn't lose, we just ran out of time." It's still pretty dumb.

The Alito Hearings

The hearings are a kind of banality-of-evil-fest, wherein a dull technocrat to whom people (especially those who are poor, black, and female) are simply gum stuck in the gears of an otherwise perfect legal engine, sits in front of a tribunal and engages in sophistic sparring matches with Senators (ones where the Senators do most of the talking). These are tiresome ceremonies. Alito's a bad guy, and will probably be a very bad justice, but there's nothing to be done. He'll be on the court. The best that can be done is to educate the public on just how bad he'll be; but, if they don't know, they'll find out soon enough.


Side note: I didn't catch the crying jag that Alito's wife had, and I couldn't care less that she had it. There's her poor husband, who has to sit through, at most, two more days of futile questioning before the Republicans hand him a lifetime job. I'll save my pity for people with actual problems.

Not Our Spokesman

The fundamentalists in this country have taken to claiming that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who say a lot of batshit crazy things, aren't their spokesmen. Well, let's see, there's Jack Van Impe, who believes that the aliens in UFOs are fallen angels and that the Illuminati have been engaged in a conspiracy to usher in the reign of the antichrist. Or there's Ann Coulter's pal Rod Parsley, who's tells his worshippers to burn their bills and send the money to him to get out of debt.
Or there's this guy that Majikthise caught up with:

"Dinosaurs were lizards. Lizards never stop growing. That's why old alligators and crocodiles can grow to 25 feet or more. If they lived longer, they would grow even bigger. Before the flood, life lasted longer. Men lived to be 400 to 900 years old. I am sure you don't wish to embrace that thought, but if you embrace God, you embrace His word, and He does not lie. The climate changed after the flood. The earth itself burst open and poured forth floodwaters. The rift probably split the continents asunder, created the mountains, and even tilted the earth off an even 0-degree axis to a 23-degree angle to its orbit. Seasons were born, and winter is hostile to lizards. Thus the dinosaurs died out." MeInKC

So if the fundies don't want Roberston or Falwell as their spokesmen, that's okay with me. There's a sumptuous banquet of batshit crazy to pick from in their spiritual neighborhood.

Translating the Delay Departure in Star Wars Terms

Headline (AP) Coruscant: DARTH MAUL is out as second in command of the Lords of the Sith.

Potential successors include Darth Tyrannus and--after a recent party switch--Darth Vader. A closed-session lightsaber duel between these two Dark Lords will decide the matter, and the Empire waits to unite behind the victor. Each stands ready to deploy Force Lightning against all who "hate freedom".

You can check out the real world equivalent here. Finding out who wins this battle is kind of like finding out whether you're going to be impaled or disemboweled.

Damn

It looks like the Patriots are going to win going away. (I've stopped watching.) Could someone please destroy these bastards?

Yaweh Soprano Makes Another Hit

From JTA--Global News Service of the Jewish People

The Rev. Pat Robertson said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being punished by God for dividing the Land of Israel. Robertson, speaking on the “700 Club” on Thursday, suggested Sharon, who is currently in an induced coma, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, were being treated with enmity by God for dividing Israel. “He was dividing God’s land,” Robertson said. “And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.”

So the manifestation of God's punishment is to give a heavy man in his late seventies a stroke? I guess that's as logical as saying God broke George Burns's hip when He didn't think Burns was funny anymore. First intelligent design and now intellegent gerontology. New sciences spring from the fecund mind of Pat Robertson.

Realignments

Josh Marshall and Max Sawicky discuss the parallels between the congressional elections of 1974 and 2006 here. And for those of us on the left side of the ledger these parallels won't blow a lot of sunshine up our skirts:

But it does at least suggest one point worth considering: the other side's scandals can reshuffle the political cards temporarily. But it probably won't be for that long if the scandals aren't intrinsically connected to the bases of the afflicted party's power or if their fall-out doesn't catalyze a some deeper political and ideological reconfiguration in the country. Nixon's dirty-tricksterism wasn't at the heart of the rise of the American right in the late 20th century. So it continued on without him.

I'm not convinced that the Democrats will do nearly as well in 2006 as they did in 1974. The Right has learned a lot since then, and while none of it has been in the areas of good government that betters people's lives, they've learned better how to contain scandals. They have a well set up media apparatus that Nixon didn't have during Watergate, and they know how to get their people on television to muddy things up just enough so that their boy can get away more or less clean. Further, unlike 1974, we don't have a majority in either house that can do some genuine investigating. Even if we took back the House or Senate this year, the shredders will have been given a year (two if you count the year The New York Times sat on the story) to run. Also, Nixon never had the advantage of a cluck like Joseph Lieberman, who'll throw downfield blocks for Bush by running to every network to caution us about the national security implications of trashing the President. (Isn't bipartisanship sweet?)

And ultimately, even if Bush were to go down, it doesn't mean much unless he brings Dick Cheney, Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Senator Ted Stevens with him. As long as the rich get their money and the fanatics get their judges, they don't care who's delivering the goods. Tear down Bush, they'll put up someone else just like him--another plainspoken guy from the sticks who's honest as the tress are tall and who cares, really truly madly deeply cares, about the poor. He'll call himself a "different kind of Republican", and all his commercials will be in soft focus. And you and I, knowing what unctuous crap is being mass dumped on our minds, will shake our heads, thinking "This can't work again. No way is this going to work again."

It'll work again.

As George Carlin once said "I gave up hope and it worked out fine."

Happy Fucking New Year

Bitterspice and I turned the calendar over while watching a DVD of Bill Hicks's HBO specials. Is there a better way to start a year off? I don't think so. If anything, it's probably all downhill from here.