Enjoy Every Sandwich

Rae's Day: How He Could Win and Why He Won't

2012-01-15T08:31:00.000-05:00

A lot of LIberals are speaking out against Bob Rae's apparent move to secure the permanent leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of Liberals are very stupid, which is why they're Liberals in the first place.

Those people are also the reason that the LPC is on its deathbed today. Unlike most political observers, I'm willing to state the obvious and say that it's incredibly unlikely that the Grits will ever hold government again. I think it far more likely that they'll be swallowed whole by the New Democratic Party in five years. And I believe it likely that the Liberals will destroy that party as well.

This is because Liberals love nothing more than going to war with one another. At this point, they love it more than winning elections. The party has been fighting their retarded leadership wars since 1975 and is divided into two factions: the Trudeau-Chretien-Rae wing and the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff wing. And each faction has acted as suicide bombers against the other for almost the entire time.

Granted, this didn't stop them from running the country. But that's only because conservatives were such an unmitigated goddamned mess most of the time. And when even a semi-competent Conservative leader appeared, the Liberals lost to him every time. They were beaten by three very different Conservatives; Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. The numbers show that it was only a divided conservative movement that allowed Jean Chretien to become prime minister at all. When the movement unified under Harper, the Grits were first reduced to a minority, removed from power altogether, and finally robbed even of their Official Opposition status.

The LPC is the most overrated political force anywhere in my lifetime. For at least forty years, they've only won when their opponents are so disorganized and dumb that they can't be trusted to run a profitable rub and tug, let alone a major industrial nation. And even under ideal circumstances, their own infighting does them in, as we've seen over the last decade.

Here's the thing. If I was a Conservative Party supporter (which I'm not. I last voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives in 2000, after voting Reform in '93 and '97), I'd be afraid of facing Bob Rae in a federal election.

Rae is easily the smartest and most experienced viable candidate in the party today. In a party of lifetime politicos, academics and bureaucrats, Rae is also the only person in the LPC who has ever run anything before.

Which brings us to Rae's time as Ontario's NDP premier, which the anti-Rae forces feel is disqualifying. That's a record that can and should be examined, if only because times have changed so much that it might actually work in Rae's favour during a campaign.

(For the record, I voted against Rae twice in Ontario, casting ballots for Progressive Conservative Mike Harris in 1990 and '95. After the 1999 campaign, I've voted exclusively for minor parties and independents provincially.)

Rae, as even he will tell you, was an accidental premier. He was elected because David Peterson's almost awesome arrogance - fighting no fewer than three elections in a single five-year mandate - finally blew him up, and the fact that Mike Harris had been leader for less than a year and no one knew who he was.

He was a socialist who was elected at the beginning of a worldwide recession, so he governed predictably, trying to spend his way out bad economic times. In the process, he created what was then record deficits.

But then Rae did something very unpredictable. He attacked those deficits and in the process destroyed his own political base. Instead of passing massive tax increases, which you would expect from an NDP government, he instituted austerity on the heavily unionized provincial civil service. That, you might have noticed, is conservative orthodoxy today. Indeed, the widely-hated Rae Days remain well to the right of what Republican governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich have attempting in the United States over the last two years. Walker and Kasich, like Paul Ryan in Washington, are trying things that won't produce savings for a minimum of fifteen years. Rae Days inflicted immediate pain on the bureaucracy and went a fair way in reducing the deficit.

I've spent that last five years trying to figure out exactly how the Harper Conservatives (or Harper's probable successor, Jason Kenney) runs against Rae. And I've got to tell you, I'm fucking stumped.

Bob Rae isn't a political novice, like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were. Indeed, he's been running bigger campaigns for longer than anyone currently in the Conservative Party. He also survived the Liberal Armageddon of last May, which few other national party figures managed to. That alone makes makes Rae a formidable opponent in ways that no other Liberal is. He understands what it is to run a major campaign, having done so four times in Canada's largest province.

Then there's his Ontario record, which is heavily mitigated by the way politics has changed over the seventeen years since Rae was ejected from Queen's Park. The Harris-Eves Conservatives left office with a fairly large deficit, and the current Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, has racked up deficits that dwarf Rae's. And the Harper Conservatives have pissed away money at a rate that would impress even Pierre Trudeau.

Yes, the Tories will almost certainly dive-bomb Rae with millions of dollars of negative advertising demagouging his record at Quuen's Park, which a broke and demoralized Liberal Party will be unable to counter. It worked maginificently against Dion and Ignatieff, so there's no reason that they won't go to that well again.

But at some point, the Tories are going to have to debate him on national television. And that's dangerous for them. Rae is smarter, a more experienced politician and a better speaker than Harper is. And if Harper leaves office before 2015 (which I think is a distinct possibility), Rae will almost certainly face Jason Kenney, who is a ward-heeling retard that only got where he is today by stealing the disgusting concept of identity politics from the fucking Liberals.

One can reasonably expect Harper or Kenney to start a debate by immediately attacking Rae's by then twenty year old deficits. If I was Bob Rae, my first answer would be "Yes, I was socialist who governed during a deep recession in the early 1990s, so I did what socialists are expected to do. Sir, what is your excuse for spending a $13 billion surplus on nothing and creating deficits that made mine look frugal by comparison?" That alone will be devastating because there is no plausible answer to it.

Then one can expect the attack on Rae Days. That's problematic in so far as if the Tories are even halfway serious about their deficit reduction plan - which they say will not include a tax increase - they'll have to do something that looks a lot like Rae Days, if not actually be more draconian. Remember, Harper pledged to reduce spending only down to 2009 levels, when the country was already in deficit and spending was at a high. If the Conservatives bar themselves from raising revenue and continue to use the tax code to buy themselves votes, the civil service is the only place left to save money. As a very smart guy, I expect that Bob will rattle off the facts and figures and look very credible doing it.

Also, by 2015 the Tories will have been in office for nine years, the standard exhaustion point for a government. Both Mulroney and Chretien were done at that point, and Trudeau was doing everything he could to postpone the election that would ultimately lead to his defeat. I think that Stephen Harper knows the history well enough to get the fuck out of Dodge and make some money before the next election, leaving a half-wit like Kenney as a sacrificial lamb that serves only to burnish his his own legacy, much like Mulroney did with Kim Campbell.

If the Liberals could mange to stop being Liberals for three whole years, I think that Bob Rae has an even chance of beating Harper, and could almost sexually humiliate Jason Kenney, even with a bankrupt and demoralized party. If Thomas Muclair wins the NDP leadership and takes Quebec off of the table for the Grits and Tories, I think that Rae could form at least a minority government. If the NDP falls apart, and Rae manages to keep Denis Coderre in line, the Grits could possibly win as many as forty Quebec seats and govern with a majority.

But the Liberals can't stop being Liberals for three whole minutes, let alone three whole years. As you're already seeing, there are factions of anti-Rae chuckleheaded strategists, bloggers and media types that are determined to pound the final nail in the Liberal Party's coffin if they can't have the Liberal Party all to themselves.

They don't care that Bob Rae is probably the only candidate that can work with the party machinery that the Libeals actually have, as opposed to what they wish they had. Instead of showing the kind of political discipline the Conservatives have always had in getting behind their leader, the Grits are flirting with an idiotic American-style primary system that will make getting behind the leader almost impossible, given that party's history.

Bob Rae has the best chance of any Liberal of beating a unified Conservative Party since Trudeau. But he can't do that if he has to spend his time as Opposition leader and a federal election candidate watching his own back.

Rae is alone as a Liberal who can beat the Tories, but the Liberal Party is incapable of unity, which is why the 2015 election will almost certainly be their last. If they give the leadership to another amatuer that loses even more seats in the interest of keeping Rae's critics happy, they won't survive it.

The decline and fall of stupidity in conservatism

2011-09-17T12:13:00.000-04:00

It never ceases to amaze me that people say, do or support catastrophically dumb things and expect them to end up being anything less than catastrophic. My mayor, Rob Ford, is an object lesson in how this works.

If you've read this space for any length of time, you know that I've hated Ford for years. During last year's campaign, I argued that he was singularly unqualified to run this city and that he would be an unmitigated disaster for conservatism, if only because he isn't especially conservative. He's more of a self-aggrandizing blowhard and a drunken idiot than anything else.

During his decade on City Council, Rob didn't do much of anything other than vote no a lot and make a Coors Lite-fuelled spectacle of himself regularly, which is something that I can do. Being something of an elitist, I always endeavour to vote for people that are smarter than I am, which is significantly harder than you would think it is. The mayor has never built or done anything in his life. His money, his business and his original political base were all inheritances from his Daddy. The guy was environmentally conditioned to be a monumental shithead.

More importantly, his entire election platform was built on a shockingly transparent set of lies. He vowed to withdraw from a fully-funded public transit plan called Transit City, but would expand subway infrastructure using only magic. Actually, that's not entirely true. Ford thought that the deficit-laden federal and provincial governments would give him metric shit-tons of money by virtue of the fact that Ford is a confrontational prick and a borderline retard. And private business would finance the rest, despite the fact that the very same notion proved to be a spectacular failure on the original Sheppard subway line, a decade ago.

Rob further promised to do away with all manner of revenue to the city without cutting services. As a matter of fact, he specifically said that he would expand services where needed. This would be accomplished by cutting things like gardening at Nathan Phillips Square and the hallucination that career politicians would vote themselves into oblivion by reducing the size of Council by 50%.

I spent the better part of a year pointing out that Hizzoner's policy positions were silly and that his math didn't work. Moreover, his plan was based on such a fantastical notion of how politics works that even toddlers shook their heads at it once it was explained to them. Among other things, I said that supporting Ford was an act of willful ignorance, and perhaps evidence of a particularly worrisome extra chromosome. But it sure as fuck wasn't an expression of actual conservatism.

Most of my commenters during the campaign were either as cosmically ignorant of the laws of both both politics and mathematics as Ford himself is, or they acknowledged that he was lying, but it ultimately wouldn't matter. The voters were of a similar mind, and Boy Rob won with a margin that seemed to surprise even him.

Being the fan of reality that I am, I decided to sit back and watch the debacle unfold. I may have placed too much faith in the chronically self-interested and genetically defective electorate of this city, but I do understand how politics and, more importantly, math works.

The brothers Ford thought that they could score some easy points a couple of months ago by engaging liberal has-beens like Margaret Attwood over irrelevant issues like library funding. But times have changed and the math hasn't. So now we're looking at pretty dramatic cuts to things like cops, firefighters and the public transit that Ford promised to expand. And the same silly fuckers that supported Ford and putting on their outrage helmets.

One of the biggest polls ever conducted in Toronto shows residents from every corner of the city are overwhelmingly against Mayor Rob Ford’s cuts.

From Doug Ford’s ward in Etobicoke to budget chief Mike Del Grande’s in Scarborough, the results will serve as a sobering warning to councillors within the Ford voting bloc.

A Forum Research telephone survey of nearly 13,000 people reveals that more than three-quarters of Torontonians want their local councillor to protect services rather than comply with the mayor’s wishes. And only 27 per cent of residents say they would vote for Rob Ford if an election was held tomorrow.

More significantly, because of the poll’s size, Forum was able to provide the first authoritative assessment of support on a ward-by-ward level.

Forum’s poll, which was paid for by CUPE Local 79, one of two major unions at city hall, questioned 12,848 Toronto residents on Tuesday using a random dial, push-button response, phoning system. The margin of error is plus or minus 0.9 per cent, 19 out 20 times.

Say what you will about the poll being paid for by opportunistic communist hacks, but the sample size is stellar and you almost never see a margin of error less than a third of what you usually see. I don't see a professional polling firm putting itself out of business just for a quick paycheck from some Gambino Family-connected librarians. These are serious numbers that should be taken awfully fucking seriously. Most importantly, the revolt is coming from the parts of the city that were the more vehement for Ford just 11 months ago. The numbers from wards like mine, which went heavily for Ford, are staggering and impossible to ignore. Once Hizzoner loses suburban councillors, he's done..

That fat asshole's political base has dropped out from under him. Right-leaning councillors now have the choice of either tying themselves to the fucking Titanic, or representing the wishes of their own constituents. If I know anything at all about politics, we're about to see the mayor reduced to irrelevancy by his own allies. The much-ballyhooed "gravy train" is getting ready to run right over that stupid motherfucker.

Here's the thing. I don't care all that much about service cuts. But the fact remains that Rob Ford went out of his way to specifically promise that they wouldn't occur. More importantly, his entire campaign was predicated on just how bad the municipal budget imbalance was, so he can't realistically hide behind the notion that the numbers were a surprise to him.

The fact is that he was lying, and most semi-reasonable and literate people should have known that. If this were a truly just and equitable world, the wards that supported Ford the hardest - like mine - would feel the goddamned axe most viciously. But I think that isn't going to happen, don't we? The coloureds along the Finch West and Eglinton West corridors are going to get hammerfucked directly into hell, while folks like me are going to get by. They already wait 9 hours for a packed and smelly cattle-car of a bus that seems more like it's going to Auschwitz than Yonge Street, so what difference is an extra twenty minutes going to make?

And no sane person thinks that Ford is going to annihilate the downtown wards that opposed him the strongest are going to get hurt, either. Shit, the Ford boys want to give those Marxist dickheads more fucking condominiums and lakeshore shopping malls that no one wants to pay for.

This isn't a local phenomenon, either. Ontario has a provincial election next month, and Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who had a double-digit lead just six weeks ago, is poised to have his ass handed to him by Liberal Dalton McGuinty, who has only ever been popular with shitheels and pederasts. And even shitheels and pederasts don't like McGuinty that much. They just like him a lot more than they do Hudak.

Let's look south of the border for a minute if you're not convinced. Take a look at the Tea Party candidates that actually got elected to positions of adult responsibility, as opposed to the MILF brigade of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. As I write this, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, and Rick Scott in Florida are all polling behind church burnings. Sure, you could argue that they're only polling slightly behind church burnings, but you you can't ignore the fact that the numbers are upside-down in a big, bad way.

Even weapons-grade morons like Rick Perry aren't immune. Perry took steps to inoculate young girls from an entirely preventable cancer and large segments of the modern right are painting him as a straight Michael Jackson, whimsically dispensing "fuck drugs" to pubescent girls, presumably because he enjoys kidfucking. And that's when they're not running against other applied sciences, like evolution. It's also important to remember that this is the same Rick Perry that was actually applauded when he said that he "didn't lose sleep" over the possibility of executing an innocent person, mostly because he already has.

And they're not wrong in doing so. If I had their economic policies, I'd want to distract everyone from them by running against Darwin and for cervical cancer as much as I possibly could. The only halfway coherent plan out there is Paul Ryan's, which immediately increases the deficits that Republicans are running against in a big, bad way, and might balance the budget in thirty years, which just happens to be about twenty-five years too late.

The only thing that has allowed these people to get as far as they have is the fact that liberals are liberals. As such, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If they were even halfway smart, they'd do what Bill Clinton did, which was steal issues from the right and address them in a way that's acceptable to the general electorate. At that point, it's pretty easy to paint your enemies as extremist assholes.

But even that's beyond the ability of most of the left. Dalton McGuinty is the exception in that he's blessed with ineffective and retarded enemies, much like Stephen Harper.

But that isn't always going to true, folks.

2008-06-25T10:44:00.002-04:00

FUCK IT, I'M GONE!

You can find me here from now on.

2008-06-25T00:55:00.004-04:00

The Passing of Greatness: Notes on the Death of George Carlin

I find that as I get older, things suck more. Music sucks, novels suck, politics sucks, and few things suck as much as comedy. I'm a crotchety old man and I'm not even 40 years old yet. But the fact is that none of those things are as good as they were just a twenty years ago.

The only thing worse than watching everything suck more and more is watching the masters of those forms grow old and die. We're in an age where we're not just seeing artists go, we're seeing entire art forms go with them.

Will there ever again be an album as great as Exile on Main Street or Highway 61 Revisited? How about a novel like Lolita? Does anyone seriously think that there'll be another president who achieves as much as Harry Truman or even Richard Nixon?

Does anyone think there will ever be another comedian like George Carlin?

Anyone who studies comedy - which really isn't something to studied - will tell you that there's a holy trinity of the form. It consisted of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Carlin. Anyone who followed them modelled themselves on at least one. As brilliant as he was for about three years, Dave Chappelle was essentially covering the same ground as Pryor thirty years ago. The same is true of Lewis Black and Carlin.

What's different is that they don't have the same insight or humanity. When you watch Chappelle or Black, you'll laugh your ass off, but you don't feel like you would after 90 minutes of Bruce, Pryor or Carlin. You'll laugh a whole lot, but you won't really learn anything. Watching the first group, you walked away thinking "I never really thought of that that way before." And that just doesn't happen these days.

Unlike today's comedians, Bruce, Pryor and Carlin all structured their comedy like music. If you listen to it without paying particular attention to what they're saying, you start to notice little rhythms and counter-rhythms developing. It beautifully built to a point as opposed to race to a punchline, which is what you see all too often now.

Of the three, Carlin was the only one not to destroy himself. In so doing, we got to see that you can take that form of comedy and have it mature with you. Unlike George Carlin's predecessors from the fifties and early sixties, he wasn't doing the same act into retirement that he started out with.

If anything, Carlin's humor got much darker as he got older. Routines like Football and Baseball and A Place for my Stuff were gradually replaced with far more existential riffs that were far more entertaining, at least to me. As much as I appreciated The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television, I fell in love with the more apocalyptic aspects of his last twenty years.

When I was a little kid, my parents were massively pissed that my older cousin introduced me to George Carlin. They were even more pissed that I loved his work so much. By the time I was twelve, I could recite several of his albums by heart - not just the material, but all of the breaks and inflections in it, too. That made them truly nuts.

But the more he listened, the more my father, at least, understood that Carlin was much more than just a guy who said the word "fuck" a lot. Nothing that he did was done for the sole purpose of shocking an audience. When he did it, which was often, there was always a larger point to be made. There was a universe of difference between George Carlin and an idiot like Andrew Dice Clay.

Having a point in recent years has been the death of otherwise great comedians. If you look at Bill Maher and Dennis Miller, as just two examples, you see how true that is. Both have suffered from the syndrome that killed Lenny Bruce's humor; they wanted to be right more than they wanted to be funny. But Bruce had been persecuted to the point that he earned that right. Maher and Miller just want to please their respective political comrades. Consequently, Miller has had a string of failed shows and Maher isn't far behind.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to George Carlin was on Monday's Larry King Live. Some of the biggest names in comedy were on the show, and only one of them, Lewis Black, has been remotely funny over the last decade. Carlin was on stage three times as long as Jerry Seinfeld, but he always stayed hungry and wanted to always be better at his craft, while Seinfeld was happy driving his Porsches and making bee cartoons.

Carlin worked for fifty years. He recorded 23 albums and made 14 HBO specials. He was one of the truly great ones and he will be missed

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: A Legend in My Time By: Johnny Cash From: American V: A Hundred Highways

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2008-06-24T10:36:00.006-04:00

WHEN DUMB AND CRAZY COLLIDE

I don't have aby first hand experience, but I'm pretty sure that being accused of rape would suck. That would be doubly true if you're actually not guilty.

Getting over a rape accusation would be pretty tough, assuming that you're even exonerated in the first place. This isn't a popular thing to say, but just the charge of a sexual assault makes a fair trial very difficult. The charge itself stirs up so many emotions that it can cloud the judgement of otherwise rational people. And no one wants to believe that a woman would make up such a thing.

Indeed, even if you're one of the few who manages to get acquitted, you still find yourself (pardon the pun) screwed. People will automatically assume that you must have done something to find yourself in a position where you're accused of that. People will always look at you just a little bit differently when they learn of your past brush with the law. It can ruin your life, both professionally and personally.

But women sometimes do fabricate a rape charge. In that, it isn't all it different than any other crime. Because even real victims frequently wait before reporting an assault, there is often no medical evidence to disprove the charge. In both the courts of law and public opinion, it is a matter of "he said, she said," and most people are naturally inclined to believe the woman.

In fact, it's probably more common when a celebrity is involved. Some accusers are little more than extortionists, who file a criminal complaint as a way to tee up a lawsuit which will inevitably be settled. And some accusers are just batsht fucking crazy. The fact that there are almost never any consequences for making a false rape accusation only encourages both the extortionists and the insane.

At the end of March, Poison drummer, Rikki Rockett, was arrested in Los Angeles on a Mississippi warrant for sexual assault. It was a pretty big story and things certainly looked bleak for young Mr. Rockett.

However, not only was Rockett not guilty, he wasn't even in Mississippi during the month in question. His exoneration wasn't as heavily covered. It was announced a month ago and I didn't hear about it until this morning at The Superficial. If you have as much time on your hands as I do, google "Rikki Rockett rape case" and you'll find his being cleared .... as the ninth entry. Seven of the first eight highlight his arrest.

Of course, I'd like to congratulate both Mr. Rockett and everyone in Poison, but that's hardly my point in writing this.

I always thought that if you were going to accuse a celebrity of doing something horrific that it would be helpful if you could find someone who is still actually famous. Seriously, Rikki Fucking Rockett? Is it still 1987 and no one told me?

If you're going to lie about a rape, why not make it interesting? Say that you were gang-banged by Rudy Sarzo, Alec John Such and the guy from Cinderella! Why not go nuts and further state that the whole thing was videotaped by Jeff Pilson?

False rape accusations hurt everyone. The more often they occur, the less likely it is that real victims will be discouraged from reporting real assaults by practioners of hair metal. The saddest part of the Rikki Rockett rape saga is that it makes it almost impossible for anyone to believe my story about being fingered by Lita Ford.

I'm not saying that it was an assault or even unwanted. In fact, it was rather enjoyable and something that I'd very much like to repeat. I just wish that I could tell the story and not have people roll their eyes at me. Because the part about being held down by Vixen is really sexy.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Talk Dirty to Me By: Poison From: Look What the Cat Dragged In

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2008-06-22T12:40:00.007-04:00

"DESTROY ANOTHER FETUS NOW, WE DON'T LIKE CHILDREN ANYHOW"

I'd like to describe myself as "pro-choice when it comes to abortion, but I'm not a coward. I'm not afraid to say what I'm for, and that happens to be abortion.

No one would describe themselves as being "pro-choice" on, say, civil rights. When was the last time you heard someone say "You know, it would be really nice if black people could vote without being lynched. Y'know, unless white people don't want that?"

No one is "pro-choice" on guns. You either have that right or you don't. Period. The same is true of abortion. If you believe in it, you're not "pro-choice," you're pro-abortion. And if liberals weren't such snivelling little assholes, they'd be proud to say so. When it comes to the rights of the people, there really is no "choice" involved. You either have a right, or you don't.

It might not seem like it, but I actually do respect "pro-life" voices. The problem is that most of them are the same kind of cowards that the "pro-choice" idiots are. If you believe that abortion is the murder of another human being, you do not make exceptions for "rape, murder or the life of the mother." If you believe that there are certain classes of expendable human life, then you're no better than a fucking Nazi.

Abortion is not a morally incrementalist argument. It's either murder or it isn't. A fetus is either human life, or it isn't. The only truly immoral voices in the debate are those of the vast middle, the "choice" believers on the left and the "exceptionalists" on the right. What they seek to do is, pardon the pun, split the baby.

I disagree with pro-life absolutists with every fibre of my being, but I can at least respect them for being honest. I can't say that for everyone else who isn't me. If you argue that "rape, incest and the life of the mother" are incremental steps in banning abortion outright, you might be the most immoral people of all. You are, by your own definition, willing to sacrifice innocent life for decades until you achieve some far away goal. Those terrorist assholes who bomb abortion clinics are more morally honest than you are, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for even suggesting that in public.

I happen to believe that if you can't prove that a fetus is human life beyond any legally definable doubt, then you should cede the choice of what to do with that mass of cells that will someday drop out of college to the person carrying them in their bloated bellies. That's just how I roll.

I have a very difficult time reconciling the belief that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects ... shall not be violated, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation" has any exceptions. If anything, the freedom of a woman's uterus from government interference is much more important than, say, your collection of sawed-off shotguns and Internet porn. My position on abortion rests on the foundation of security of the person, particularly the one that everyone can actually agree is a person. Without the security of the person, all other rights are essentially meaningless.

If I have a problem with Roe v. Wade, it is that Justice Blackmun's reasoning is almost incomprehensible. If I were to write that decision, it would be all of two sentences long. It would read "The Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution, taken as a whole, clearly establish a right to personal privacy. Fucking deal with it."

Even as strident a pro-life voice as Justice Antonin Scalia has said that there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits abortion. Whenever I see a doubt as to what the Constitution says, I feel compelled to side with the individual over the state, which the Ninth Amendment does, too.

Instead, Blackmun wrote an incredibly muddled opinion that has only served to make the United States the political laughingstock of the world. Even the people of a backward country like Ireland, that bans abortion totally, laugh their asses off watching American politicians obsess over an issue than effects a grand total of one (depending on your definition of "life") person.

Widely ignored is the fact that Roe was the least important of two abortion decisions from the 1973 term. The real ground breaker was Doe v. Bolton. Even if Roe was overturned, it wouldn't affect Doe, which established access to abortion.

As a Canadian, none of that matters to me particularly. Canada is alone in the industrialized world in having no abortion law whatsoever. This was a consequence of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Dr. Leslie Frank Smoling and Dr. Robert Scott v. Her Majesty The Queen, in which the Court found that the federal law violated the "security of the person" provision of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

After Morgentaler, there was almost no constitutional foundation upon which to write a new, restrictive law. Also, the politics were horrible. Just mentioning abortion in the context of an election campaign is a good way for a political party to get dead fast.

It should be noted that unlike the United States, all criminal law is by definition, the jurisdiction of the federal government under the Criminal Code of Canada. One of the most important parts of Morgentaler v. Her Majesty, the Queen was the finding the provinces cannot pass abortion laws on their own.

Amazingly, Canada has been an abortion law-free kingdom of tranquility and happiness ever since.

Of course, that doesn't stop the jackals in the goddamn liberal media from polling us on abortion.

The poll by Angus-Reid - a firm that I have found to be traditionally unreliable - finds that 91% of Canadian support abortion rights to one degree or another. That isn't hugely surprising. What does shock me is what happens to the numbers when you add public funding to the equation.

When it comes to funding abortions, though, there is not the same level of support.

The same poll found 44% of respondents thought the public purse should only pay for abortions that were medical emergencies.

Four percent think the health-care system should never fund abortions.
Egan said the numbers surprised her, but that they may not truly reflect people's thoughts on the issue.

She said many younger women, low-income women and women from rural areas could not afford abortions if they had to pay for them themselves, and so if the public system didn't pay for their procedures, it would amount to discrimination.

Firstly, the Canada Heath Act (socialized medicine to my American readers) doesn't, despite the best efforts of a bunch of liberal cocksuckers, doesn't deny treatment for maladies incurred by bad behaviour. Those leftist assholes would love to deny me coverage for my eventual cancer and heart disease because I love smoking more than anything in the world.

Furthermore, the taxes I pay on my cigarettes are, according to my government, supporting the fucking system in the first place. As I remember it, that's the justification for tobacco taxes in the first place. Should I demand that those taxes only pay the costs of smoking-related illness? How would all of Canada's remaining stupid motherfuckers react to that?

And what about all of those fatasses out there. McDonald's kills almost as many people as Imperial Tobacco does! Why are those sloppy, sweaty fuckers getting off so easily?

What said leftist assholes overlook is that most health maladies are the result of bad behaviour. When I first had this argument with a professor in college, I used the example of HIV/AIDS, perhaps the most preventable disease in North America after 1984. That didn't go over very well because liberals don't want to say that anything bad that happens to homosexuals might be a result of behaviour.

Making moral distinctions regarding care under a universal health care system would indeed be discriminatory. If you won't pay for a woman's abortion, why should I pay for her retard kid? Abortion is a one time payment of about three hundred bucks. Retards cost a fortune over their lifetime in health care benefits. That's to say nothing about the cost of their education. Them floppy-headed fuckers are expensive, and as a fiscal conservative, I object to footing the bill when an alternative exists.

Like it or not, Canadians have decided that health care is a right. Through our courts, we have also decided that abortion is a right. Furthermore, anything that involves sticking things into a woman's uterus that isn't me is by definition a health-related matter.

If nothing else, abortion and emphysema are at least fun-related conditions. Someone had a good time getting that way. But the 50% of you assholes who are body-surfing your way to Type 2 diabetes on a wave of fucking cheeseburgers and pancakes stuffed with chocolate and peanut butter are the last people who should bitch about funding abortions with your precious health care dollars.

Yet you fat, moralistic motherfuckers are going to be the first ones in my wallet when you have your fucking feet cut off, aren't you?

Let me get this straight, my tax dollars are only supposed to encourage certain kinds of behaviour and not others? Encouraging a girl to be a filthy little whore who needs it bareback is wrong because it costs a few hundred bucks, but holding a parade for you assholes who eat an entire pig for dessert because the fucking cow wasn't filling enough is right because you have a glandular problem is compassionate?

If that's true, fuck you and fuck Canada. I hope the goddamn terrorists win. At least they'll be more honest than you are.

Everybody in this fucking country is an asshole but me.

Thank you for your attention.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The Future By: Leonard Cohen From: The Future

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2008-06-21T10:29:00.010-04:00

BARACK OBAMA: HIS BATTLE WITH TRUTH

In 1995 the British journalist and historian Gitta Sereny published the biography Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, which examined the disconnect between his exculpatory statements during and after his war crimes trial at Nuremberg and the historical record. Sereny, although personally fond of the Third Reich's Minister of Armaments, found that he was nowhere near as innocent as he claimed to be during the last thirty-six years of his life.

Barack Obama is waging his very own battle with truth, and he's doing it within the context of a presidential campaign. Just this week, he has renounced not one, but two major pledges that he made during the primaries, the most recent of which was made just three months ago. It would be a stunning thing to see from an average politician. It is all the more so coming from an almost deified "change agent" espousing a fuzzy and vague brand of "hope."

During the Ohio primary, Hillary Clinton created a great stink regarding NAFTA and her intention to "renegotiate" it to protect American jobs. This was interesting, in so far as most of the lost jobs are more of a consequence of the rise of India and China and the self-defeating stupidity of the American labor and business communities. NAFTA became a catch-all for all the bad American economic choices of the last forty years.

No one was particularly surprised that Hillary would do this. The Clintons have a richly deserved reputation for doing and saying anything to win, regardless of how asinine those assertions are to anyone with a modicum of education. To almost everyone's surprise, Obama decided to compete with the Clintons on who could be tougher on trade, saying that he would use the "hammer" of withdrawing from the treaty to strengthen America's advantage. Not surprisingly, the Clintons won, crushing Obama in the Ohio primary.

Just on NAFTA alone, I was glad to see it and almost wished that one of them was telling the truth and won the presidency on the strength of such a platform.

The Clinton and Bush administrations have made it clear to both Canada and Mexico that the word of an American president is not to be trusted. Of NAFTAs three partners, the United States has been in violation of the treaty most frequently and most unrepentantly. And when that has been the finding of the NAFTA arbitration panel and the WTO, the Clinton and Bush administrations have ignored their rulings.

I've written about how Canada was essentially raped in the softwood lumber dispute before. Worse is the treatment that Mexico has received. 15 years after NAFTA specifically called for the access of Mexican trucks to American roads, the US Congress and Bush administration continues to stall on it, going so far as attempting to pass a law prohibiting it. No reasonable person can be expected to long deal with a partner who only adheres to the parts of a deal that benefit them and lie about or ignore the provisions that don't.

I was great supporter of both the US - Canada Free Trade agreement and NAFTA, so much so that I voted exclusively on those issues in the federal elections of 1988 and '93. To this day I don't regret that support. What I regret is the way that the United States government has conducted itself for the last sixteen years. I voted to partner with the United States of 1941-92, an internationalist nation that stuck it's word and honored its obligations. That country has effectively ceased to exist regarding trade issues.

In his memoir, My Years as Prime Minister, Jean Chretien explains the pressures an American president faces in trade disputes from individual senators when trade becomes an issue. A senator can - and often does - exert pressure on other parts of a president's agenda to force violations of treaties to get their way. And that's what created the softwood lumber dispute. Senators from the American northwest didn't like actual competition and forced the Clinton and Bush administrations to implement protectionist and illegal measures.

Especially priceless was President Bush's reaction when the WTO ruled against the United States. He said that he "would welcome" further negotiations on the matter with Canada. You know, I'm pretty sure that Charles Manson would have "welcomed further negotiations" with the Los Angeles District Attorney's office after he was convicted on 9 counts of first degree murder, but life doesn't work that way. Furthermore, the American government had no problem banning Canadian beef over Mad Cow concerns, but cried to the fucking heavens with other countries banned US beef for the same reason.

I would love like nothing else for an American president to come to Ottawa and demand a "renegotiation" of NAFTA to protect the environment and labor standards. I'd tell him or her to repeal Taft-Hartley and adopt Canada's. I'd also have a few things that I'd like to renegotiate myself. These would include the provisions that demand that Canada supply the United States with energy and fresh water at the previous year's levels, even if Canadians face a domestic shortage. Just to be a prick, I'd demand that the Americans allow Mexican trucking on their roads as NAFTA clearly calls for.

If that president refused, I'd use the "hammer" of opting out. I don't give a shit what pressures a president faces from his Senate or domestic opinion. If the United States can't be relied upon to keep its word, no one should give a fucking inch in dealing with them. No treaty at all is better than a selectively honored one.

Why would anyone renegotiate something that one party isn't complying with in the first place? Wasn't that the justification for invading Iraq?

The fact is that when Prime Minister Mulroney negotiated free trade with President Reagan in the eighties, Canada was being strangled by an out of control deficit and smothered in debt. We negotiated from a position of weakness. That's no longer true. Canada is now the only G8 country operating with a budget surplus and is rapidly paying down its debt. Oh, and we have all the oil now.

It is now believed that there might be more oil in western Canada than in the Arabian peninsula. If you believe President Bush's assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and know how the phenomenon of addiction works, you know that a junkie doesn't dictate the terms of a drug buy to his or her pusher. Can you think of another reason why Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers and the source of the overwhelming majority of terrorist money for decades, isn't a target on the War on Terror?

I'm still a free-trader. I'm just not sure that we can trade freely with the United States when it is incapable of trading honestly or fairly. As Senator John McCain pointed out yesterday in Ottawa, Canada is the single largest export destination for 36 of the 50 United States. That will almost certainly continue to be the case whether that trade is free or not. But while, say, Michigan cannot negotiate a free trade deal with China, India or the European Union, Canada can.

I'm sick to fucking death of being targeted by assholes like George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton because they want to please their domestic idiots. If you want to "negotiate," then let's do it. If you want to threaten to opt out of NAFTA, I'm at the point where I'm willing to do it first. Yes, I'll lose jobs in the process, but you'll lose ten times as many. And you'll lose your guaranteed access to oil and water in the process. Anyone who has read me for any length of time knows that I'm a great proponent of the American doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

Not surprisingly, just as McCain was coming north, Obama dropped his hammer.

Barack Obama, who once vowed to use the "hammer'' of opting out of NAFTA to force the renegotiation of the trade pact, now says he will seek change through dialogue if he is elected U.S. president.

The presumptive Democratic nominee says in the upcoming edition of Fortune magazine that campaign rhetoric can sometimes get "overheated and amplified," and he denies he would move to unilaterally reopen the trilateral trade deal.

(...)

"I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally," Obama said in the Fortune interview. "I'm a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.''

Hmmm, turns out that the famous Canadian embassy memo wasn't as false as Obama spun it to be, was it?

At a debate in Cleveland in the final days of the Ohio primary campaign in March, Obama agreed with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton when she said the six-month opt-out clause should be invoked on NAFTA to force changes.

"I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labour and environmental standards that are enforced," he said.

But every time Obama alters his statements on NAFTA, he lends credence to a Feb. 8 memo describing a meeting between his economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and George Rioux, Ottawa's consul-general in Chicago.

The Canadian memo, which was leaked to The Associated Press, said Goolsbee told Rioux that Obama's campaign remarks about NAFTA should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy.

American assholes decrying Canadian interference in the US primary process caused an unimaginable amount of shit in Canadian politics. The "Obama memo" led to an investigation of the Prime Minister's Office and, indirectly, the resignation of the chief of staff. And now we learn that the memo was largely correct.

What said assholes need to learn is that if American candidates are going to use foreign nations to their political benefit, those nations reserve the right to respond. And we'll do so in your precious fucking primary system if it becomes necessary. If Stephen Harper's staff was behind the leak of the Obama memo - which it almost certainly was - my respect for them just went up about fifteen notches.

After 15 years of being fucked over by the Clinton and Bush administrations, we should cut any other candidate who tries it off at the knees whenever possible. Whoever actually leaked that memo to CTV and the AP should be awarded the Order of Canada and a loving, sloppy blowjob from our super-hot Governor General.

American politicians have shown absolutely no reluctance in using every weapon in their arsenals for decades now. I see no reason why foreign governments shouldn't involve themselves in the electoral process if they continue to be used as a tool for American liars and scumbags getting elected. Besides, it isn't like the United States is entirely innocent in inserting itself in the democratic political process of sovereign nations.

If an American candidate says one thing to a foreign government and another thing to the American people, that foreign government has an obligation to its own people to point that out. So long as American politicians are going to present themselves as the model of openness and democracy, they shouldn't be allowed to hide behind diplomatic niceties as they screw their neighbours. I only hope the Mexicans start doing the same thing.

To use Obama's own pilfered phrase from The Untouchables, Canada brought a gun to his NAFTA knife fight. And you know what? We kicked his fucking ass. We know a little bit about "the Chicago way" our own selves.

Young Barack made another monumental flip-flop this week regarding public funding of his general election campaign.

Senator Barack Obama announced Thursday that he would not participate in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He argued that the system had collapsed, and would put him at a disadvantage running against Senator John McCain, his likely Republican opponent.

(...)

“The public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system,” Mr. Obama said. "John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he's not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations."

Mr. Obama had pledged to meet with Mr. McCain following the primaries to attempt to work out an agreement on financing the campaigns. That meeting never took place, aides to Mr. Obama said, because a meeting between lawyers for the two sides was not fruitful. "It became clear to me that there wasn't any basis for future discussion," said Robert Bauer, the general counsel for Mr. Obama’s campaign.

Let there be no doubt at all, Obama is completely full of shit. His lies in justifying his decision are nothing short of mind-blowing.

John McCain has a long-standing histoy of wanting to restrain 527s. The problem is that the law won't let him. He actually did speak out against the evil and wrong Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but since he wasn't on the ballot, the law didn't apply to him. A 527 is a tax-exempt organization and is therefore precluded from having any communication or coordination with a campaign. That's a matter of federal law.

If McCain were to even attempt to honor Obama's conditions, he'd be committing a felony and Obama knows that. You'll also note that Obama hasn't called on Democratic 527s like MoveOn.org or America Coming Together to hold their fire. Obama doesn't also point out that 15 of the 20 largest 527s in the 2004 cycle were alligned with Democrats

That goes double for Obama's assertion about McCain controlling the RNC. Under current law, the nominee is prohibited from coordinating with the national committee. That was just one of the campaign finance laws that President Clinton broke during the '96 campaign that led to McCain-Feingold in the first place.

If it were up to me, McCain-Feingold would have been avoided because the national parties and presidential candidates wouldn't get public money at all. Obama's right, but for all of the wrong reasons. And he's going to get away with it because so-called conservatives are so fucking dumb.

As much as conservatives like to bitch about campaign finance regulations, they never stopped taking public money to finance their campaigns, did they? Public financing is nothing more than welfare for rich white guys who want to rule the world. But as conservatives never fail to remind other welfare recipients, that money comes with strings attatched. Since recipients of the former AFDC program surrendered their Fourth Amendment rights, why in the fuck shouldn't the DNC and RNC surrender their First Amendment rights?

Besides, didn't President Bush sign McCain-Feingold even as he explicitly said it was unconstitutional? Didn't he also swear an oath to "uphold, protect and defend" the Constituton?

"Good government" shitheads love to say that campaign finance legislation is necessary to prevent things like bribery. What they overlook is that bribery is already a crime. As a matter of fact, it is already written into the Constitution as an impeachable offense. If conservatives were people to be taken halfway seriously, they would renounce "preventative" law enforcement measures across the board as opposed to the ones that just effect them at the ballot box.

If Republicans weren't completely full of shit, they wouldn't protest campaign finance laws as they accept public money. Wasn't "making government live by the same laws the people do" a part of the goddamned Contract With America?

If anything, Obama is taking the more conservative position on campaign finance. It would be better if he pledged to return his matching money from the primaries, though.

That doesn't mean that he isn't a duplicitious motherfucker, because he is. So far as I know, he has supported every reform law since Watergate but now refuses to abide by them. Obama is taking a prticularly rich "destroying the village to save it" position on public financing. It didn't work in Vietnam and it won't work in general elections. And thank Christ for that. I hope that all campaign finance laws are destroyed as a result.

If Obama believes that the system is "broken," he would do something other than abandon it to fix it, although that's pretty much the position the government has taken on New Orleans. The fact remains that Obama wants to save the city by watching it sink.

But Obama couldn't have picked two better issues to lie about. Every sensible adult thought he was lying about NAFTA and no one gives a shit about campaign finance, given what hypocrites Republicans have been about the system.

This guy's a pro, make no mistake about that. The only question is how stupid his adherents in the "new politics" movement are going to feel once they finally realize that Barack Obama was never one of them after all.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Lies By: The Rolling Stones From: Some Girls

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2008-06-19T00:19:00.008-04:00

DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND, STEPHANE DION TAXES CARBON

I've been studying politics like the sexless geek that I am for well over twenty years now. And if I've learned anything, it is that if you're a candidate whose leadership ability has been questioned for 18 solid months, you should come out of nowhere and announce that you're going to tax one of the very building blocks of life. That almost always works.

But be sure that you don't say anything specific about your new tax on all things animal, vegetable and mineral other than you'll implement it. Much better that your opposition can define you for months on end when you could be defining yourself. Better still if the only person willing to support you in public is Jason Cherniak.

That's all you really need to know about politics and, fortunately, that's all Stephane Dion knows. He's performing about as well as you would expect a guy who became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada by accident would. Since his ascension he has resisted repeated opportunities to bring down a government he himself has said is destroying Canada and waited for the perfect issue on which to campaign. And it turns out to be one that he explicitly rejected during the leadership campaign.

New taxes, as you might imagine, are not usually something that politicians promise during a campaign. They tend to be something that are lied about, usually prefacing the term with the word "no." This is either the craziest fucking thing that I've ever heard or Dion has learned a magical new secret about how the electorate thinks.

The plan started leaking on Wednesday and Dion is set to outline it in public today. To be fair, Dion's policy is actually being touted as a "tax shift." This will involve taxes being levied on carbon-based pollutants while income taxes are reduced. In theory, this makes the plan "revenue neutral," something that Canadians are supposed to cherish.

The problem is that taxes are never revenue neutral. It just doesn't happen that way. One can suppose that would be double true when the tax supposedly has a moral purpose such as saving the universe. Politicians are impatient and the public is stupid, so if the tax is implemented and Saskatchewan doesn't become Eden in the first six months, you can rest assured that the tax will become increasingly aggressive.

Furthermore, Canada is such a small country and our percentage of the world's carbon emissions is so insignificant that all 33 million of us could live the life of the Amish and it would do virtually nothing to stop global warming. Even the Bush administration, which created an energy task force comprised entirely of oil executives, is doing better at meeting Kyoto targets (which they didn't even ratify) than is Canada.

Then there's the issue of climate. You might not know this, but Canada gets awfully cold in the winter. And the winter lasts well into July. Home heating oil and natural gas are primary targets of the tax "shift." Not everyone makes enough to pay federal income taxes, but everyone does share the biological imperative to avoid freezing to death. Not only does the carbon shift expand the tax base, it does so in the most regressive way imaginable.

Yes, the Dion plan does call for credits for lower income Canadians, but those can be fleeting. Back in the 90s, when the Liberals learned that running an economy through massive deficits and carrying horrific debt loads, subsidies and tax credits are usually the first thing to go. Under Chretien even health care transfers to the provinces took a significant hit. If the economy goes into recession, which is happening even as we speak, the government is not going to start throwing money around.

Then there is the inflationary effect of the tax shift. Did you know that a chicken, for example, doesn't walk onto your plate and commit suicide? There are several, carbon intensive steps, involved in getting it there. Each one of those steps is about to become markedly more expensive if the Liberals get their way, and those costs will be passed on to you, the consumer.

Anyone who doesn't know what inflation in a recession looks like should study the 1970s. Not only does it cause extreme economic pain, wipe out your savings, and cost you your job, it makes you dress funny. Implementing this tax at the best of times would be inflationary in the extreme, doing it during a recession will be economic suicide. Furthermore, the costs of restructuring the entire tax code to accommodate Dion's pledge might be enough to put the government back into deficit.

Then there's the matter of doing this when gas prices are so high. As much as Americans like to bitch about that, they're paying the lowest price to the gallon of any country outside of OPEC. While US prices are averaging about four dollars a gallon, Canadians are paying over five.

While Liberal spinsters like Mr. Cherniak are saying that gasoline will be exempt, the leaks of the plan don't say that at all. What it calls for is "moratorium on new federal taxes on aviation and diesel fuel for the first year." The problem is that gasoline prices are dictated by the price of oil, from which both aviation, diesel and gasoline all come. I'm not at all sure that you can raise the price of some and not others.

This of course, calls into question the purpose of government. If you're of liberal leanings, this is the ideal tax for you. Not only will you still have your income taxes, the GST and provincial sales taxes, you'll get the Liberals behaviour modification tax as well. You'll be ever so happy if you believe in the power of the government to make life better.

I don't happen share that belief in government. I'm of the mind that the federal government should be limited to paving roads and killing foreigners, two things that it isn't particularly good at. Most Canadians are shocked when the government can shovel snow in less than a week, but now we're expected to believe that it can actually save the world?

Then there's the electoral politics of this, and I've never seen anything handled so disastrously. Dion started musing about carbon taxes months ago but refused to give ant details. This has allowed the Conservatives to define the plan for him and not in the ways that he'd prefer. And most Liberals are just dishonest, not stupid. They have been the government for most of the last century and are the most successful political party in the history of western democracy. They understand how elections work and they understand that no one is going to vote for a giant new tax, shifted or otherwise. This has understandably caused all manner of discontent within the Liberal caucus.

This is not a revenue neutral tax in the way that literate adults understand the term. Not only is it extraordinarily inflationary, it moves Canada away from the principle of progressive taxation and toward a system that rewards or punishes behaviour. The problem is that the poorer you are the fewer options you have regarding your behaviour. Worse still, if you subsidize the bad behaviour of poorer Canadians, you defeat the stated purpose of the plan.

Even if this plan were the greatest thing ever, it is almost impossible to properly explain the context of a thirty second commercial or a ninety second debate answer. And unfortunately for Stephane Dion, those are the only things that voters pay attention to. All Stephen Harper is going to need to say is "Yes, climate change is important, but so is the cost of feeding your family. If you think that you aren't paying enough, I encourage you to vote for my opponent. However, if you think that you're paying too much, you should trust the Conservative Party to manage our fuel crisis and stop inflation before it starts."

And then Stephane Dion will be destroyed.

I don't know what it is about Dion, but he seems determined to make every day Christmas for Stephen Harper.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Fall on Me By: R.E.M From: Life's Rich Pageant

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2008-06-17T11:19:00.007-04:00

CLAYTON WILLIAMS SAVES THE DAY

As you might have notice, I have a minor affection for US political campaigns. They tend to embody everything that's wrong with the human spirit, and any given campaign could take no fewer than five of the seven deadly sins and put them on a bumper sticker. The messier a campaign is, the more I tend to love it.

Perhaps my favorite race of all time is the 1990 Texas gubernatorial race. The candidacy of one Clayton Williams, the Republican nominee. Not only did he make every conceivable mistake in politics, he seemed to glory in it. It was truly beautiful thing to watch and I still smile when I think about it. It reminds me of a more innocent time when Texas politicians could be moral and political disasters without winding up president of the United States.

When I endorsed Kinky Friedman for governor in 2006, I asked "Where have you gone, Clayton Williams? He is truly a man for all seasons.

If I remember correctly (and I'm far too lazy to find a verifying source), Williams kicked off his 1990 campaign by proudly stating that he hadn't paid taxes at all the previous year. There are few ways to establish your "common man" bona fides better than that.

Things only improved with Williams reached out for the women's vote. This was important because the Democratic nominee was the late Ann Richards, who was thought to have a political lock on broads. When asked what his strategy against Ms. Richards was, Williams replied that he would "head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt" just as he would the cattle on his ranch. And if you know women like I do, you know that they love nothing better than to be compared to a pack of steer.

But Mr. Williams was nothing if not a helpful ally to broads in the war of the sexes. He was full to the brim of helpful advice to women everywhere. Particularly on the touchy subject of rape. On that, the prospective governor couldn't be more helpful. "As long as it's inevitable," Williams opined, "you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Even though that advice correlates closely with what experts on sexual assault tell us - with the notable exception of the part about enjoying it - women were less than appreciative of Clayton's sound advice. And it allowed the Richards campaign to run this ad endlessly.

What disturbs me the most about Williams' comments is the expression of hope that Richards hadn't started drinking again. That was strategically stupid in that Texans are nothing but enthusiastic about electing dry drunks to high office. Ann Richards, as we know, was succeeded by George W. Bush, who had actually been arrested for drunk driving. If Lindsay Lohan were only willing to move to Austin, she would have a bright future in Texas politics. She's certainly more fun than Rick Perry and more pleasing to the eye.

But the dreams of Clayton Williams were dashed, the way was cleared for the Dark Age of Bush, and we are all poorer people for it. I hope everyone remembers that the next time they get their panties in a knot about rape jokes.

Worst of all, Williams left us to suffer the consequences of what we had done as President Bush heads us and hoofs us and drags us through the dirt. Had Williams won, he would have almost certainly been renominated in 1994. Without that first election in Texas, Bush would never have been elected president. I hope all those busybody women's groups are happy.

Missing Claytie as I have, I was thrilled to learn last night that the McCain campaign brought him back from obscurity. Everyone else, however, was less enthusiastic.

John McCain should have been fundraising in the Texas oil patch yesterday alongside his good friend Clayton Williams. In the town of Midland, Republican heavy-hitters were lined up to sign some equally weighty cheques for their man's presidential campaign.

Instead, the candidate was busy trying to salvage an already shaky reputation after America's female voters had been reminded of derogatory remarks that "Claytie" Williams made about women and rape nearly 20 years ago. While running unsuccessfully against Ann Richards for governor, the Texan was overheard comparing rape to the weather: "As long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Following the resurrection of this and other off-colour remarks, the McCain campaign decided abruptly to cancel the fundraiser at Mr Williams's lavish Midland home. The campaign is also promising to hand back the $300,000 (£150,000) Mr Williams has already raised for the McCain campaign as it tried to contain the damage.

Mr McCain's spokesman, Brian Rogers, said: "These were obviously incredibly offensive remarks that the campaign was unaware of at the time [the fundraiser] was scheduled."

As I've often stated in this space, I've long been a great admirer of Senator McCain. I can't say the same about his campaign staff. They should clearly be set on fire and thrown down an elevator shaft.

How can anyone with even a passing acquaintance with politics be "unaware" of Williams' remarks? Those remarks were famous and students of political history giggle and masturbate when thinking about them to this very day. I'm a schmuck and I don't know much about anything, but if I'm familiar with Clayton's colorful past, how can million dollar campaign consultants not be? Haven't these fucking people ever heard of Google or Wikipedia?

That's actually a serious question. If Team McCain can't vet the potentially controversial people they attract, what would a McCain administration look like? Would Jeremiah Wright be in charge of the faith-based initiative program? How about Richard Ramirez as Attorney General? How would they explain that to, say, the Senate? "The nominee's conduct was incredibly offensive, but we were unaware that he raped and murdered all of those folks. As you know, the campaign didn't spend much time in Los Angeles and AC/DC endorsed Senator Obama."

I still think McCain is going to win, and win pretty handily. But that's not because his team is so scary smart. The fact is that Obama, his quoting of Sean Connery in The Untouchables" notwithstanding, is prone to saying stupid things and is demonstrably incapable of taking a punch.

But McCain better get is shit together quickly because it is possible to throw away a perfectly good election. Just ask Clayton Williams.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Rape Me By: Richard Cheese From: Lounge Against the Machine

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2008-06-16T23:09:00.006-04:00

JESSICA SIMPSON'S TITS HAVE A POINT!

Whenever a celebrity has a message, I have an overwhelming urge to punch them directly in the fucking head. This is because those messages are almost never fun. Those messages usually involve stopping the genocide in Darfur, not sexually harassing every woman I meet and not being a prick, all of which are beyond my power to accomplish. What else does the guy from Coldplay want me to do, walk on fucking water?

That's why I like simpler celebrities with simple messages. And great big hooters. Those are the celebrities that you can listen to and hold up to the children as an example. Let's face it, you're kids aren't going to grow up to be Rambo and they aren't finding Darfur on a map anytime soon. This is because your kids are going to be every bit as lazy and worthless as you are.

Now you know why Jessica Simpson is the greatest celebrity of all time. Other than having a breathtaking rack, she has simple, achievable messages that every young girl needs to know and, furthermore, live.

Real Girls Eat Meat. That's all you really need to know. Real. Girls. Eat. Meat.

Lots of you broads, particularly the young ones, think that vegetarianism is the answer to staying thin and sexy. And it might be. But vegetarians are also exceptionally annoying. Everytime a right-thinking person sees one of them, he or she longs for a well to throw them down. Or a pack of rabid wolverine to gang rape them to death. It doesn't really matter which, but a world with any justice at all would involve at least one.

But there's another way, a way that you might not have heard about because the goddamn liberal media has been keeping a secret. All you have to do to be thin and sexy is to go to Wendy's and eat seven or eight Baconators. Then as you feel yourself starting to digest it, run to the bathroom with your fingers in your gullet and puke the whole mess up. If you follow that up by eating no fewer than twelve laxatives, that helps, too.

Not only will that keep you trim and attractive, it's healthy, too. Those fucking Baconators will kill you. But they're too delicious to avoid entirely.

Jessica Simpson knows all of these things and, Christ, just look at those knockers! They're damn near perfect, and refuse to accept the word of any dopey doctor over the truth that those funbags speak to us all. All the truth you'll ever need can fit into Jessica Simpson's beautiful D cups. Arguing with those would be like kicking Jesus in the balls.

Those tits, as we all know, are hard nippled hammers of truth. They are incapable of lies. It's a biological imperative. The nipples hypnotize their owners into always telling it like it is. If you were to break a rack like that out at Guantanamo, waterboarding would go back to being what it was intended to be, a way to pass the time.

If you're a parent with daughters who doesn't hold Jessica Simpson up as a role model, I just don't know what the fuck you're doing to your kids. If the government was halfway responsible, they'd bury you alive.

Picture ruthlessly stolen from The Superficial

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson) By: Tom Waits From: Nighthawks at the Diner

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2008-06-15T12:41:00.005-04:00

HEY LOOK, TITS!: COUILLARD CONTINUES TO CAPTIVATE CANADA

Everybody loves a great set of knockers and the Parliament of Canada is no different. Fine tits have a way of speaking to a man in a secret language that you need a penis to understand. And like the rest of us, The Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois want Julie Couillard's tits to talk to them.

It's been a big week for Mademoiselle Couillard's formidable funbags. First, they brought down yet another senior Conservative that it turned was close to them. Then, the inept leader of the Official Opposition publicly mused that they might be the perfectly shaped instruments by which organized crime could infiltrate the Canadian government. Those are pretty powerful mammeries.

Canadian women from sea to shining sea are of course outraged. After all, none of their boobies get the kind of attention that Julie's are getting, and there aren't very many broads out there who captures the attention of a sexy guy like Stephane Dion, Gilles Duceppe or Jack Layton.

The week started out with a busty bang as the Minister of Public Works, Senator Michael Fortier shitcanned his senior Quebec advisor for bumping uglies with Julie just before Maxime Bernier hopped on.

"Mr. Bernard Côté failed to inform me that while he was in a personal relationship with Julie Couillard, at the same time she was also vying for government business for Kevlar and raised it with Mr. Côté," he said. "Mr. Côté should have recused himself of having any dealings with the matter at hand, which he unfortunately didn't."

Fortier said Côté offered his resignation "and I accepted it."

First Bernier, now Cote. You know that when you see a piece of ass that ruins two careers in a month, that it's probably worth it.

But those magnificent mammaries might also be instruments of evil, the Liberal Party of Canada warns us.

- There are compelling security reasons to investigate whether the federal government is being targeted by organized crime, Liberals said yesterday amid news the Julie Couillard affair has claimed another senior Conservative casualty.

"There is the possibility that organized crime is trying to infiltrate the government," Liberal Leader Stephane Dion told reporters.
"I'm not saying it's what happened. But certainly all the experts of security who have spoken (say) ... this is the pattern that you need to check."

Now any of you who know about biker gangs know that they're so ... subtle. Everyone who's seen The Wild One knows that. If you know a Hells Angel, you'll know that he excells at three things; anarchy, getting his red wings, and stealthily infiltrating the governments of G8 nations.

There's something you need to know about politicians. Sometimes it seems like they're actually speaking English. In fact, it is a stealthy facsimile of the Queen's tongue.

Indeed, the meaning, of what they say is often the opposite of what you would usually associate those words with. When President Bush said "I haven't made any decision about going to war with Iraq," he actually means "I'm going to war with Iraq on Tuesday night." When Stephane Dion says "I'm not saying it's what happened," he means "That's precisely what happened." And when Dion's deputy Michael Ignatieff says "I don’t care about her skirts, I don’t care about her cleavage," he actually means to say "I am a homosexual."

And now there are hearings regarding Madame Couillard and her beautiful breasts by the Commons Public Safety Committee. Our girl Julie is expected to appear this week. If my American readers remember how much fun the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill hearings were in 1990, imagine how much more fun they would've been if Anita Hill was smoking fucking hot and pulled a train of bikers and senior Republican figures.

There are serious questions to be asked of Julie and the committee expects answers. For example, is she completely shaved like all women should be? Does she like anal sex or does she love it? Is she dating now?

The hearings will continue endlessly and eventually Julie's nipples will get hard and Canadian society will rapidly disintegrate. And if Ujjal Dosanjh can keep his hands out of his lap during M. Couillard's testimony, he's a better man than I am. If it's wrong to question a witness before a parliamentary committee whilst masturbating furiously is wrong, then I just don't want to be right.

However, if we've learned one thing from l'affaire Bernier, it would be that journalists love writing about tits. They can't get enough of it, and the Canadian people can't stop reading about it. Last week it was the turn of the National Post to make breasts no fun at all.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The Bad Touch By: The Bloodhound Gang From: Hooray for Boobies

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2008-06-14T10:01:00.006-04:00

SLIPPERY SLOPES: THE DANGERS OF ANTI-TERRORISM LAWS IN A FREE SOCIETY

Toronto, like most cities of its size, has something of a gang problem. However, it is not as serious as most politicians would have you believe it is. For a city of nearly three million people, Toronto has never had more than a hundred murders in a single year. Compare that to a Detroit, a city less than a third the size of Toronto, which hasn't had fewer than a hundred murders a year in decades. San Francisco, with only 650,000 people, consistently has more murders than does Toronto.

What does trouble several people is that increasing proportion of assaults and murders that are gang-related. And by gangs, I'm not talking about the Mafia or biker gangs, which largely target one another. These are street-level gangs, who routinely murder innocent passers-by. There is nothing at all organized about the crime these thugs engage in.

In the wake of 9/11, most Western nations passed anti-terrorist legislation in hopes that it would prevent another attack. The problem is that it has been largely ineffective. Great Britain, with its decades of trouble with the Irish Republican Army, has always placed a higher legal and constitutional premium on security than it has on freedom. Its laws were further strengthened after September 11, 2001.

Those laws did absolutely nothing to prevent the 2005 transit bombings, which killed 52 and wounded 700. The same is true of the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 and wounded 1,775. Saudi Arabia, where personal freedom is a foreign concept, suffered repeated al-Qaeda attacks between 2003-05. Because most terrorists have no criminal records, even the most stringent anti-terror laws wouldn't stop American cell members from buying semi-automatic weapons and launching a paramilitary assault on a shopping mall.

Despite what anyone tells you, anti-terror laws do not necessarily prevent attacks, they just make the investigations and subsequent prosecutions easier. And since the United States Supreme Court effectively destroyed the avenue of "enemy combatant" military prosecutions last week, civilian prosecutions are the only course remaining.

Even after the horror of 9/11, I was extremely reluctant to accept measures like the USA PATRIOT ACT and its foreign counterparts, particularly in nations like mine where collective rights has always taken precedent over individual freedom. My reluctance was based on two things; I am a traditional (as opposed to the newer brand) conservative and I understand how government works.

Traditional conservatives understand that the only way to secure freedom for everyone is to secure freedom for the individual. In an adversarial justice system, the rights of the defendant must always hold greater weight than the interests of the state. If controlling crime, or even suppressing insurrection, were the main priority of society, we would not require the police to obtain judicial warrants before they could enter your home or listen in to your private conversations.

If security were the only interest of the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment would never have been proposed, let alone ratified. However, modern American conservatives use the access to deadly weapons as the yardstick by which they judge the freedom of other countries, even as they justify the government's extra-judicial eavesdropping in the convesrations of their countrymen.

Traditional conservatives understand that once government is given a measure of power, that power does not remain static. That power, as we have seen with the welfare state, only grows and metastasizes. If there is a vacuum in society, government will always move in to fill it if individual citizens don't.

As conservatives have lost their way over the last thirty years, they have pushed for the growth of state power at the expense of the individual every bit as much as liberals traditionally have. The only individual freedom that they fight for is financial, and even then they are dishonest. They budget government spending in a way that guarantees continuous government growth but do so with borrowed money, thinking that economic growth will eventually pay it back. As we have seen with previous large deficits, it doesn't. Eventually, tomorrow's taxes are always raised to pay for the spending of today.

Modern conservatives seem to have forgotten that government grows just as surely in security and criminal justice matters as it does in economic ones, and with much greater corrosive effects on a democracy. For the most part, they have forgotten that security without freedom is little more than totalitarianism. Modern conservatives have forgotten that government is not designed to contract its power, it constantly expands or it dies. They have essentially forgotten 4,000 years of human experience.

They support the Bush administration's violation of the National Security Agency's charter as they opposed an assault weapons ban. As a traditional conservative, I oppose both.

Giorgio Mammoliti is a Toronto city councillor that I have written about before. Last December, he actually called for the army to patrol certain Toronto neighborhoods, essentially imposing martial law. That those neighborhoods happen to be among the city's poorest and duskiest went sadly unreported. Also unreported was the fact that as he was calling for martial law, he was decrying the the local media's examination of his excesses with his office budget.

The Toronto police mocked Mammoliti relentlessly for his insane demand because it was too unconstitutional and fascist even for them.

Now our boy Giorgio is looking at using the cannon of Canadian anti-terror laws against the gnat of gang violence.

"I'm not prepared to wait 20 years to see whether a group hug is going to get rid of gang members in this city," Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti told the Sun a day after a brazen daylight shooting of two teens in a Regent Park playground Wednesday night. An 18-year-old youth was hit multiple times in the chest and a 15-year-old boy, whose family came here from Somalia a few years ago, was hit in the legs. They both underwent surgery and were in stable condition last night.

"We should use the tools federally that we have and deal with gangs as terrorists," he said. Mammoliti, who last year suggested calling in the army to address Toronto's gang and gun problem, said police should also have the power to hold gang members indefinitely.

"They know who they are," he said. "You pick them up and you hold them indefinitely and you question them for two years on their involvement with gangs.

What Mammoliti forgets is that we are a society that at least pretends to be predicated on due process of law, where preventative detention is abhorrent.

For my foreign readers, Canada has an interesting little tool called security certificates. Until last February, a security certificate allowed the government to hold a non-citizen - including even permanent residents of Canada - indefinitely without any of the minimal protections that allow us to think of ourselves as a democratic society.

After 9/11, several suspected terrorists were held for years without charge or the ability to see the evidence against them. After having two convictions of violating Canadian hate speech laws overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada, Ernst Zundel was held for two years on a security certificate before being deported to his native Germany.

Security certificates are as close to "enemy combatant" status as Canada dare get and they were being used for crimes as insignificant as Holocaust denial. Giorgio Mammoliti wants to extend those powers to Canadian citizens accused of street crimes.

At what point do you allow a government to detain citizens without charge and allow them to be questioned without an attorney before you officially become a police state?

If this were just a matter of of a waste of skin Mammoliti spouting off again, it wouldn't merit further comment. He is an insignificant bug of a human being and a profoundly ignorant one at that. That he continues to be elected makes me question my belief in democracy itself. No one can repeatedly put a facist in power and continue to pretend to be a lover of freedom.

Unfortunately, this isn't limited to people like Mammoliti. By any reasonable measure, street gangs kill more innocent people than do Islamist terrorists in North America. What then constitutes the greater threat civil society? And if those gangs are a greater threat to security, why not use anti-terrorist measures against them? If you believe government rhetoric about "serious threats," why not use the most powerful tools the government has at its disposal against them?

The use of asset forfeiture was first enacted during the U.S Civil War. That was an instance of demonstrable civil insurrection and habeus corpus had already been suspended, first by President Lincoln, then by the Congress. For those four years, the United States had ceased to be a constitutional democracy.

Then it was resurrected with the intensification of the wrongheaded war on drugs. Even in a period of domestic and international peace, the government was allowed to seize the property of a private citizen, even in the absence of criminal charges. But that was never used in the case of suspected espionage, only drugs. And it was certainly never used in cases of suspected political corruption. Randy "Duke" Cunningham had his day in court before he lost his boat.

Because only property was being charged as committing a crime, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Bill of Rights didn't apply. It was at that point that those amendments ceased to mean anything at all as a practical matter.

Modern conservatives continue to scream endlessly about Kelo v. New London et al, without making any adverse comment about asset forfeiture. But what Reagan / Thatcher conservatives are guilty of is ignoring their own rhetoric about government power. They wrongheadedly believed that they could extra constitutionally remove the property of one set of citizens without due process of law without it eventually impacting the rest of the population.

If you believe the comments of politicians about the latest threat de jour, why shouldn't you allow the government extraordinary power to thwart those threats? Modern conservatives are more than willing to allow the government to eavesdrop on private conservations involving an American citizens who might have a friend or relative involved in terrorism without a warrant, so why not allow them to do so with one involved in drugs or even tax evasion? How about public corruption?

Rush Limbaugh, despite entering a "not guilty" plea for doctor shopping, surrendered $30,000, revoked his right to personal privacy in submitting to random drug testing and gave up his right to own a firearm for 18 months. Why shouldn't the state of Florida eavesdrop on his conversations with his doctor? After all, medial privacy - or, according to modern conservatives, any privacy at all - isn't an explicitly recognized constitutional right.

When the post 9/11 laws were passed, we were assured by our governments that they were written to address a specific emergency. That hasn't been the case. The USA PATRIOT ACT has been used to investigate tax fraud, Atlanta strip club owners and Eliot Spitzer's love of whores. An anti-terrorist measure is now being used to regulate where cold medicines are placed in local pharmacies, and is used to pressure sovereign countries where they place those same medicines.

Anti-terrorism laws stopped being about terrorism before the ink on them was even dry. Once you pass laws like that, the question about expanding their scope stops being "why?" it becomes "why not?" Why not detain gang bangers without cause or legal recourse? Why not listen in on a tax cheat's conversations in the absence of a judicial warrant?

You'll notice that I haven't prefaced any of the above with the word "alleged." That's because everyone else seems to have dropped it. The presumption of innocence, something that defines us from those we fight, has almost vanished completely.

Well, the modern conservative era has passed, and the liberals are poised to take over. And anyone who thinks that what happened to cold medicine won't happen to the private right to gun ownership is stupid beyond words. What modern conservatives don't see is that in making the Fourth Amendment meaningless, they weakened the entire Constitution, including the Second Amendment.

As a Canadian, I really shouldn't care about any of this. But I love America and see it as the greatest hope of freedom in the world. I haven't spent my life and tens of thousands of dollars studying the country as a way to get laid. I love what America represents to the world, and I'm terrified of what liberals will do with the already unreasonable Bush precedents once they assume power. So-called "conservative" presidents have been abrogating the constitution for thirty years, and I can only imagine what a hard-core liberal one will do to it.

The single greatest reason I dissociated myself from the conservative movement is because they made people like Giorgio Mammoliti possible. If President Bush convinced me of anything, it is that I shouldn't waste my time trying to save a movement that's determined to destroy itself.

I resigned myself to being a lonely voice a long time ago.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Democracy By: Leonard Cohen From: The Future

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2008-06-13T22:17:00.006-04:00

TIM RUSSERT: 1950-2008

I came home from work minutes ago and was shocked and saddened to learn that Tim Russert, the moderator of Meet the Press and Washington Bureau Chief of NBC News, died this afternoon of an apparent heart attack. He was 58 years old.

If you love politics as much as I do, you loved and respected Mr. Russert. In a format - political talk shows - that has become little more than self-aggrandizing assholes competing to see who can yell the loudest, Meet the Press always remained a forum of quiet dignity and thoughtful discussion. In an industry dominated by curs like Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann, Tim Russert was one of the few remaining giants of a dying art form. As a matter of fact, after David Brinkley died, Russert was really the last one left.

Regardless of what crazy shit I've been doing on a Saturday night for the last two decades, I always made sure that I was awake and coherent on Sunday morning to see Meet the Press. I did that for no other reason than that you were guaranteed to learn so much from that one hour, something that is rarer and rarer in television news. Too many news organizations treat something like Britney Spears' latest fuck-up as something akin to the Kennedy assassination, but I seriously doubt that her name ever crossed Tim Russert's lips.

Mr. Russert could end a political career without even breaking a sweat. He did it to David Duke and he very nearly did it to John Edwards. But he never did it by being disagreeable. He didn't holler and he didn't berate his guests. Russert allowed his guest to recite their silly talking points, and then he would very politely and respectfully vivisect them with the facts and the record. It was a beautiful thing to watch and if you never did, you really did miss something.

Though he was a liberal Democrat who had worked for both Mario Cuomo and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you wouldn't know it from watching him on television. On the air, Tim Russert was someone who loved politics and knew more about it than most of his colleagues. He was probably the best researched and informed personality on television today.

More than that, you saw his love of his father, his son and his hometown of Buffalo and the Bills. And that wasn't some kind of folksy pretense that you see so often from middle-aged men who read a teleprompter and look like Gary Condit for a living. That was who he was as a man and not only was he proud of it, he had a sense of joy about it. It is fitting that the flags in Buffalo are flying at half mast tonight.

For someone so dedicated to his family, the timing of his death couldn't be worse. Just over a week ago, he had to put the father who inspired two of his books into an assisted living home, and his son had just graduated from Boston College. And Sunday is Father's Day.

Of course, the parade of jackals seeking to fill his chair will commence before the weekend is out, and I'll likely write about it. But this isn't the time for it. This is the time to remember and reflect on an important figure in politics and journalism, and more importantly, someone who seemed to be a genuinely sweet and decent man.

My Sunday mornings are going to be so much poorer without Tim Russert. And the rest of my life will be poorer for knowing that Bill O'Reilly will probably live forever.

My thoughts tonight are with Big Russ, Maureen Orth and his son, Luke. Hopefully, they know what their son, husband and father meant to so many people that he never met. I hope that Tim knew it, too.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Hallelujah By: Leonard Cohen From: Various Positions

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2008-06-12T11:28:00.008-04:00

ALEX KOZINSKI KNOWS HOW TO HAVE A GOOD TIME

Being a big time judge can be pretty stressful. That's doubly true when you sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and find yourself caught in the crossfire of their war against logic. Speaking only for myself, I'm pretty sure that it would make my head hurt.

Anyone can tell you that the best remedy for stress is the ability to kick back and relax. Hobbies are vital in clearing the head and allowing one to focus on life's truly important issues when the time comes. For that reason I find myself defending anyone who has their hobbies attacked by the Goddamn Liberal Media, particularly when the hobbies in question are those of someone as important as Judge Alex Kozinski.

No one knows better than I the healing power of pornography. It brings what the Quakers call "peace at the center." I personally know that nothing makes a bad day go away quite like taking off your pants and watching Nikita Denise take a 9 inch tool in the dumper. It calms me and allows me to be the steady voice of reason that you read here each and every day.

As you might imagine, I own thousands and thousands of hours of pornography, almost none of it gay, and I have no idea where I would be without it. My father loved pornography and that love was transferred to me at an early age. I just don't know what kind of a man I would be without it, but it very probably wouldn't be at all pleasant. If you don't own at least some pornography, chances are that you're an asshole.

That's why I'm mystified by the shitstorm surrounding Judge Kozinski. He's obviously a man who knows how to relax and that couldn't be more important in this Dark Age of Bush.

Yes, Kozinski is presiding over a trial involving pornography, but that's hardly the issue at hand. Pornography, as we know, is protected speech in the United States. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear about that. What Ira Isaacs is on trial for is obscenity and the use of the mails to distribute it, which is another matter entirely.

The Miller Test makes obscenity an awfully tough nut to crack, which explains why there really haven't been any convictions in the last 20 years. But the Bush administration hasn't let history or common sense stop them in any other area of government, so why should they start with justice?

Even without the burden of Miller, obscenity prosecutions are idiotic and serve no useful purpose. Furthermore, anyone who suggests that those prosecutions are "to protect the children" are just too stupid to take seriously. You may or may not know this, but furnishing pornography to children is already a crime. And I almost never hear "states rights" conservatives decrying the federal government getting into areas of state jurisdiction such as drugs or obscenity. Did you know that fucking murder isn't a federal crime but obscenity is?

The simple fact of the matter is that adults like watching pretty people fuck. Alex Kozinski loves it, Clarence Thomas loves it, and I love it, too. I probably love it enough for all three of us.

The law itself is so weird and wrong that not only do we have to read about the pornography the judge in an obscenity trial has online, he has to suffer the indignity of demanding an investigation of himself.

Having said that, the porn is pretty ... interesting.

The computerized cache included a picture of two nude women on all fours painted to look like Holstein dairy cows, images of masturbation, a video of a man being pursued by a sexually aroused donkey and a slide show featuring a striptease with a transsexual.

That's ... hot.

Actually, it's comedy, you assholes! And that's something that Kozinski is rather well known for. As a matter of fact, in the L.A Times "expose" on the matter, this exchange occurred;

Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading "Bush for President." "That is a funny joke," Kozinski said.

And you know what? It is a funny joke. But now The Man is coming down on him and the censorship begins.

The judge said he planned to delete some of the most objectionable material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

There's the tragedy in this. If a young girl can't go to a federal appeals court judge to learn how to shave her crotch, where else is there for her to turn? Is the LA Times thinking of her?

Of course they aren't, the cocksuckers! Because Scott Glover has such delicate sensibilities, we'll all be subjected to the return of Seventies Bush, and nothing is worse than that. Seventies Bush is a clear and present danger to an orderly society and no conservative should stand for it.

But nothing described on Kozinski's website meets the legal definition of obscenity and no one is suggesting it does. That Laurie Levinson and Diane Feinstien are upset should surprise no one as Laurie Levinson and Diane Feinstein are idiots.

I'm weird in that I'm looking at something deeper than this. I'm wondering exactly where the Times got the story about Judge Kozinski's website. I know that you've all seen All The President's Men and think of reporters are diligent seekers of truth. However, they are usually lazy motherfuckers and not infrequently drunk ones at that. They don't collect information as much as they have it leaked to them.

Who would do such a thing? Certainly not the defense. If they knew about this, they'd save it for appeal and almost certainly get a new trial. Why disqualify the judge before a verdict if that verdict happens to be guilty?

But Kozinski has a reputation of being a libertarian and a smart ass to boot. The Bush administration famously dislikes iconoclasts and doesn't cotton to losing in court, although it's gotten awfully good at it of late. The administration also has a reputation of firing US Attorneys who piss them off. You may have read about it even if Alberto Gonzalez hasn't.

United States v. Ira Issacs is about some pretty serious shit, both figurative and literal. The material at issue is so offensive that it might just result in a conviction even if it doesn't meet the strict legal definition of obscenity. If you have a cowed liberal asshole or some conservative tool on the bench, it might even be a slam dunk.

But it turns out that they can no longer do something as simple as denying due process to terror suspects or convict a smut-king, what the fuck are they good for? The answer? Get Kozinski off the case.

The sad thing is that it just might work.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Walking the Cow By: Daniel Johnston From: Hi, How Are You?

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2008-06-11T10:48:00.008-04:00

MY WEEKEND WITH A ZOMBIE, ADVENTURES WITH MORRIS DAY & THE TRANSCENDENT POWER OF MR. LEONARD COHEN WITH A SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCE BY DR. REVEREND

Okay, so I'm back from what was very likely the greatest weekend in the history of ever.

Sorry about all the mystery, but I'm getting a lot of hits from Toronto lately, you folks know what I look like and I didn't want you deviants bothering me in public. That already happens enough, and while I try not to complain about the random blowjobs my international readership insists I receive, I don't think they'd impress my future bride all that much.

While I'm from a major metropolis where there is much to do, my Zombie Queen is not. Where she's from, the most common weekend activity is domestic violence and I try to avoid that outside of the context of BDSM whenever possible. Also, I bruise easily. So it was decided that she would come up here for the weekend.

It was nothing short of glorious. There were, of course, numerous carnal couplings which likely violated the laws of god and man and they were repeated at every opportunity. Nary a moment passed when we weren't stuffing parts of ourselves into one another. But that's what love's all about, isn't it? Surely I needn't tell an audience as cosmopolitan as mine that.

But it wasn't all flying bodily fluids and I don't want to give you the impression that it was. Just mostly. There was a great deal of culture involved as well. As some of you might know, Toronto is a major cultural center and is famous the world over as such. There is an abundance of museums, galleries and orchestras in this town I call home.

Which is why Morris Day and the Time decided to visit.

As most right thinking people are, my Zombiegirl and I are dedicated followers of Mr. Day and all of his good works. No one who has seen Purple Rain can be otherwise and still think of themselves as a reasonable human being. Anyone who didn't immediately recognize Morris Day as a latter day messiah from that fine film should be butchered like a pig. Sophisticates like Zombie and myself find such Neanderthals intolerable.

There are those of you who don't know that Gigolos Get Lonely Too. They don't know The Bird and they almost certainly are unfamiliar with the healing power of some Jungle Love. How such people made it all the way to adulthood remains one of the great mysteries of my life.

Not only had I never seen the Time before, I don't remember them ever playing here. I might be wrong but I almost never am. It was an event I have looked forward to since childhood. My excitement was palpable, all the more so because I would be joined by my great love who also happens to be a dedicated Morris enthusiast. Best of all, it was a free show at Toronto City Hall.

At the appointed hour, the band took the stage. Unfortunately, this was not the original Time. Of the backline, only Monte Moir and Jellybean Johnson remained from their 1980s heyday.

And then there was Morris. A sexy man in a pimp suit. When he appeared, the crowd gave him the reception befitting a religious figure of his stature. Indeed, our pants broke open like a New Orleans levee, such is the power of the Time's music. Hundreds of people were there and all almost certainly suffered from excruciatingly swollen genitals upon leaving Nathan Phillips Square Saturday night. If there was anyone there who didn't, their very humanity would have been openly questioned by the rest of us, and such ugliness must always be avoided.

On Sunday, things took a much more serious turn as we prepared to spend a magical evening with Mr. Leonard Cohen.

This was the show that I wasn't supposed to ever see. As you may or may not know, Mr. Cohen hasn't toured since the fall of 1993 when he was, in his words, "a 60 year old kid with a crazy dream." In that time, he has released by two albums of new material, the disappointing Ten New Songs and Dear Heather. At 73, it appeared that one of the most interesting careers in popular entertainment was winding down. I had seen almost all of my heroes, but I lamented the fact that I would never see Cohen perform live.

Then something magical happened. In 2005 we learned that Leonard doesn't know the first thing about managing money. His retirement would be short-lived indeed, which is tragic for Mr. Cohen but worked out excellently for me, and most importantly, my Zombie bride. And of course, my spiritual counsellor, the great Dr. Reverend and his lovely wife. Of course, the good Doctor bought the tickets as I am almost as bad with money as Leonard is. The Doctor is incredible with money, as one would expect, given his background.

As you may or may not know, Mr. Cohen announced a 2008-09 tour earlier this spring. Other than a handful of warm-up dates in the parts of Canada that don't matter, the tour officially kicked off in Toronto last weekend.

And it is, as some jackoff at the Toronto Star put it, "breathtaking." Of course, there are really only two kinds of people in this world, those who love Leonard Cohen and those who were born wrong and are ignorant even of the fact that they'll never be right. Those who don't love Leonard are the kind of people that less civilized nations routinely slaughter and feed to farm animals.

The show was even better than those weeping pussies at Rolling Stone said it was. The only thing I can compare Sunday nights concert to was Tom Waits in 1999. The difference being that Waits played a few songs that truly sucked even though the show in its entirety was better than anything I had ever seen. Even Leonard's weaker, recent songs were interesting and fresh on Sunday night.

Take for example, "A Thousand Kisses Deep", which instead of being performed as a lesser song, was recited as poetry so beautiful it made my girlfriend cry.

There are so many highlights to that concert that it is almost impossible to list them all. Very rarely do you find yourself in a room with true, inescapable genius. If you have any doubts about seeing a 73 year old man rock out with the best of them, you'll be eating them out of your own ass if you have the privilege of seeing Leonard Cohen live.

Unfortunately, Leonard seems to be a little shy about performing in the United States. There are no dates there as of yet, but if there are, you all should spare no expense in attending one. If you have to travel across the country and see him opening for fucking Warrant in some rancid shithole like Oklahoma, you won't be sorry. It helps greatly if you see Morris Day and the Time the night before.

Of course, you won't get to go with the prettiest girl ever. She's mine.

And then we went to Wendy's on account of my being so romantic.

What have you teenagers been up to?

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Take This Waltz By: Leonard Cohen From: I'm Your Man

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2008-06-05T00:13:00.004-04:00

AN EDITORIAL ASIDE

I'm taking a few days off from the misery that is my life effective right now. There is much fun planned through this weekend. There's always the chance that I'll post between now and next Wednesday, but there's also a chance that I'll grow a fourteenth testicle. That is to say that I wouldn't count on it if I were you.

On the other hand, if something truly earth-shattering happens - like I lose my virginity or something - I'll certainly log in and let you all know about it. But I'm awfully attached to my precious bodily fluids, so I wouldn't count on that either.

There are certain things that you'll know when the time is right. And chances are that they'll involve my precious bodily fluids, but who can say for sure?

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from coming back over and over again over the next six days to review my five years of works of staggering genius. Show me you miss me while I'm gone, you godless bastards!

My life is a constant mystery and it almost always involves a little jungle love.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Jungle Love By: The Time From: Ice Cream Castle

2008-06-03T23:28:00.004-04:00

THE BEST NIGHT OF HIS LIFE

Tonight Senator Barack Obama effectively secured the Democratic presidential nomination and for this he should be congratulated. He barely pulled it off, but he managed to trump the entire establishment of his party, who had spent the last eight years lining up to anoint Hillary Rodham Clinton the next president of the United States.

Unfortunately, tonight was the best night of Obama's life. It's all downhill from here.

Actually, it's been downhill for some time now. If you believe as I do, that Obama had the nomination wrapped up in February, you realize that he's wasted four months dicking around with playing nice. Worse, he couldn't put away a woman who half the country not only dislikes, but actually loathes. That doesn't auger well for a general election.

And what happened in those four months? His defeats outnumbered his victories rather quickly. Other than in North Carolina, he couldn't score knockout punches anywhere, while Clinton pulled them off in West Virginia and Kentucky. And she did it while driving her own negatives into the stratosphere. Were it not for his early commanding lead and the strategic incompetence of the Clinton campaign, Barack Obama would not be the nominee tonight.

Back in 1960, Richard Nixon was studious about not going negative on John Kennedy and lost by one tenth of one percent of the vote. Had Nixon gone negative on Kennedy - and exploited the health issues that Lyndon Johnson brought up before Democratic convention - Nixon likely would have won.

The moral of this story is that, in politics, nice guys finish last. Hillary went negative on Obama and Obama almost immediately stopped winning. Not only that, Obama started losing by bigger margins that he ever had before. Barack Obama barely won a beauty contest against someone who was determined to get ugly.

And in campaigning the way she did, Hillary essentially set up John McCain's lines of attack for him. You'll see GOP and 527 ads painting Obama as an elitist liberal, lacking in both experience and judgement. And if you liked seeing Jeremiah Wright on TV as much as I did, you're in luck this summer and fall.

The worst part is that while Obama was trying to be everybody's best friend, large segments of Clinton's base grew to hate him. And while the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who suggest that they'd rather vote for McCain or stay home are full of shit, what if just 5% of them aren't? That could very well leave a mark in November. McCain, on the other hand, remains acceptable to almost everyone. That's why nominating him was the smartest thing the GOP could have done.

As the Clinton campaign can't stop saying, and current polling indicates, That Obama is going to have an uphill battle winning states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Michigan might be a problem, too. You see, Detroit has a hip, dynamic, young Democratic black mayor who talks about hope a lot. He'll be going on trial for perjury just as people start paying attention. By the way, Michigan was much closer in '04 than it should've been.

If Barack Obama loses West Virgina, Pennsylvania or Michigan, he'd have to make them up by winning Sweden or something. If he loses all three, there's no saving him in the Electoral College. Ohio and Florida aren't going to matter as much this year as everyone thinks they are.

There is one unlikely strategy that would fuck with the Republicans in a big way. That would be playing hard for the South. If you look at Obama's numbers in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and both Carolinas, they are impressive and they are intimidating.

The black vote that won him those states aren't going to win them in the general, but it could tighten them up enough that the McCain campaign has to spend resources there that it can't spend in states like Ohio, Florida and the aforementioned West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And since the Republican Party has the approval rating of you're average unreconstructed pedophile, the Democrats are going to have far more resources to play around with.

But a hard drive in the South by a black candidate would be such a ballsy move that I don't think that he'd try it. If he did that and still lost Pennsylvania and Michigan, he'd be laughed out of politics forever. Plus, given his newness on the national scene, it would be an open question as to whether the DNC would cooperate with a strategy that's just crazy enough to work.

The unpopularity of the GOP can actually end up helping McCain much more than any one is currently pointing out. With the Republicans having no hope of winning back the House and facing the likely prospect of a filibuster-proof Senate, swing voters might feel safe enough to vote for McCain without allowing "Bush's third term." And Americans tend to like divided government. It keeps both sides from doing anything too crazy.

Let's forget all this nonsense about putting Hillary on the ticket right now, okay? It simply isn't going to happen. This isn't 1960 and Hillary Clinton isn't LBJ. Furthermore, after sixteen years of Al Gore and Dick Cheney, the vice presidency isn't the office it used to be. It's far too powerful to occupy it with someone you don't trust. And the Clintons would demand even more influence than even Cheney has now.

Hillary believes in her heart of hearts that Obama can't beat McCain and she's probably right. Why then would she want to go down with a sinking ship? Does she really want to be the 2012 version of John Edwards or Joe Lieberman? Would anybody?

Expect Hillary to do for Obama what Ronald Reagan did for Gerald Ford or what Ted Kennedy did for Jimmy Carter; as little as they can possibly get away with. She wants to be positioned as the "I told you so" candidate next time out and that can't happen if the two of them spend the next five months on a fucking wedding cake together.

But this is truly Barack Obama's night. He came up against almost impossible odds and prevailed, if only on points. I personally think that he's a good man and an adequate campaigner. But I don't see a scenario where he becomes the next president of the United States.

But let's let him have the best night of his life. He deserves at least that.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Loser By: Beck From: Mellow Gold

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2008-06-02T00:53:00.006-04:00

"SO I CAN SIGH ETERNALLY"

One of the last big media events that broke my heart was the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain. Nirvana was the last band that meant anything at all to me and most right-thinking people of my generation.

Almost everything that has come after has been horrible beyond my ability to describe. It's almost as if the shotgun shell that ended his life exited his skull and killed the music industry, which happened to be standing right behind him.

Cobain was of course a giant mess. He was a heroin addict who suffered from chronic pain and lifelong depression. On or about April 5, 1994, it was all over and Kurt Donald Cobain, aged 27, found the "Leonard Cohen afterworld" that he sang about just the year before.

Of course, he never really found peace. Almost immediately an epic battle for his recorded legacy was waged between his widow and his bandmates. His person was commercialized in death in ways that horrified him in life. His Leonard Cohen afterworld turned out to be not at all different than the world he killed himself to escape.

And it turns out that even his earthly remains have been stolen.

THE music world was In Bloom-in' shock last night after hearing that the ashes of grunge god KURT COBAIN have been PINCHED!

I can also reveal that the wife of the NIRVANA legend, COURTNEY LOVE, is said to be "suicidal" after finding Kurt's remains missing from her Hollywood home.

She had kept the singer's ashes in a pink teddy-bear-shaped bag along with a lock of his hair.

But a couple of weeks ago, she was horrified to discover them gone, along with thousands of pounds worth of clothes and jewellery.

Courtney said: "I can't believe anyone would take Kurt's ashes from me.
"I find it disgusting and right now I'm suicidal.

"If I don't get them back I don't know what I'll do." The sad news will sicken the millions of Cobain and Nirvana fans worldwide.

A pink teddy bear shaped bag? That must be Courtney's revenge for leaving her without a husband and their daughter without a father. Can you imagine the Godfather of Grunge spending the hereafter in a pink teddy bear shaped bag?

God knows that Courtney Love is an ... acquired taste. It seems that she has been on a non-stop berserk frenzy of drug fuelled weirdness for the fourteen years since Kurt died. But that is her husband and the only part of him that his daughter has ever known. To take that away, even if only by accident, is one of the coldest things I can think of doing to someone.

I feel terribly for Courtney Love this morning and hope that whoever has those ashes realizes what he or she has done and returns them.

Besides, I'm pretty sure that selling human ashes violates eBay's terms of service.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: They Hung Him on a Cross By: Nirvana From: With the Lights Out

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2008-06-01T12:31:00.017-04:00

"THE STUPIDEST FUCKING GUY ON THE PLANET": DOUGLAS FEITH & THE MARKETING OF WAR

I'm a weird guy in that I often buy books by people that I'm convinced are idiots. Because I like to belittle the intelligence of people I loathe in public, I've found it helpful to know the precise dimensions of their ignorance. It's just one of the things that makes me so goddamn adorable.

For that reason, I recently bought Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. I haven't yet read it, as I am engrossed in Rick Perlstien's magnificent Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, which I recommend heartily to each and every one of you.

I was going to hold off on writing this until I had read Feith's book, but he decided to make that unnecessary by writing an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.

I began this by pointing out my love of calling people idiots and that's where I shall continue. There are few people who have risen to such a high level of the American government who are as profoundly dumb as is Mr. Feith. So disturbing is Feith's ignorance that his nominal subordinate, General Tommy Franks (himself no intellectual powerhouse), reportedly referred to him as "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."

Some would argue that Feith is more blinded by ideology than actually stupid. The former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy has a longstanding and often noted relationship with Israel's Likud Party and has been known to write policy papers for its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. So notable is this relationship, that during a meeting on the impending invasion of Iraq, the then-national security advisor, Condolezza Rice, told Feith after one of his briefings "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador."

Mr. Feith was one of the so-called "neocons" (a term I try to avoid using due to anti-Semitic connotations attached to it by the left) brought in to the Bush administration by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney. That group also included former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and former Chief of Staff to the Vice President and Counsellor to the President, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. They were seen by Cheney as a check on the influence of then Secretary of State Colin Powell.

According to several sources, Feith was instrumental in setting the stage for the American invasion of Iraq, first suggesting it approximately two days after 9/11. Like many in the administration, including former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Feith was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century's (whose website has been suspended) open letter to President Clinton calling for an invasion of Iraq in 1998.

Rumsfeld, as we now know from books such as Cobra II:The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq and Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005, wanted to test his theory of a lighter "new" American military in Iraq with a force that the professional military saw as inadequate.

Feith wanted to go even further than Rumsfeld, advocating an invasion force consisting primarily of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi with minimal American tactical support. Chalabi would then be immediately installed as the new president of Iraq, despite his lack of credibility with the State Department and CIA, and his in absentia conviction for a massive bank fraud in neighboring Jordan. Even Rumsfeld knew such a plan to be unmitigated nonsense. And few people in American history have proven to be as consistently wrong as Donald Rumsfeld.

In every aspect of the Iraq War that Douglas Feith was involved in, he was proven to be not only wrong, but fantastically so. This makes him an interesting critic of the administration's handling of the war to say the least.

In his Tuesday essay for the Journal, Feith seems to argue that one of the greatest challenges facing Operation Iraqi Freedom is one of communications.

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

As my longtime readers know, I supported the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. However, I thought that both WMD and the establishment of democracy were silly beyond words. My support was predicated not on WMD, but Saddam's penchant for strategic miscalculation in invading his neighbours.

If left in power as United Nations sanctions, Saddam would almost certainly have rearmed and threatened Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or all three, necessitating a US response. If he had to be removed from power - which I thought that he eventually would - better to do it when he was weak than when he was strong.

However, I did not see Iraq as an immediate threat. While it had to be done, it could have waited until Afghanistan was further stabilized. The UN sanctions against Iraq would probably have lasted for another year or two. Even if they were lifted, there is little chance that Saddam would have launched aggressive operations while there was such a heavy American military presence in the region, particularly after 9/11, when the United States had uniform international support.

Nor was the Ba'ath regime itself a serious threat. There is no evidence whatsoever that the party itself would have acted as it did in the absence of Saddam. In fact, the party had been in power for a decade before Saddam assumed power and went to war with no one. Was it repressive against its own people? Yes, but so is every Arab government, including some of America's closest allies. Saddam was the threat, not the Ba'ath Party. Unlike the Nazi party of Adolf Hitler, Ba'ath long pre-existed the arrival of Saddam Hussein.

Had Saddam been removed from power and a Ba'athist or military government been left in power, the American military could have been out of Iraq in a year or two. Every subsequent disaster in that theatre stem from those decisions.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

(...)

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president's speechwriters. I proposed that the speech "should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place." It would be useful to "make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism" in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."

In light of 9/11, the "danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great" to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven "unsustainable or inadequate." I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism."

Those arguments are wildly ridiculous and easily refuted by anyone who knows anything about the history of Saddam's Iraq. They should be addressed one by one.

1. "The Saddam Hussein regime had used WMD:"

So had the United States, so what? The last recorded use of WMD by the Ba'ath regime was in 1988 and the Reagan administration did everything in its power to ignore it. It was only after Time magazine printed photos from Halabja that the United States government said anything at all.

2. "The Saddam Hussein regime supported various terrorist groups:"

This is true, but with a very important qualification. Among Middle Eastern regimes that support terror, Saddam's was probably the most conservative. He did provide post-facto sanctuary to terrorists, but he did very little in supporting or financing foreign terrorist attacks before the fact.

Saddam was reluctant in the extreme to have anything at all to do with groups that he couldn't control. His first priority was maintaining his hold on power in Iraq and was very careful to insure that. It's important to remember that Iraq only invaded Kuwait after the American ambassador, April Glaspie, told Saddam that "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."

It is entirely possible that Iraq would not have invaded Kuwait were it not for the mixed signals the United States sent in the summer of 1990. One should also remember that, current conventional wisdom to the contrary, the United States supported Iraq's invasion of Iran, reestablished diplomatic relations during that period and provided it with both arms, loan guarantees and intelligence.

If Iraq was going to support terrorism against the American homeland or foreign interests, it almost certainly would have done so just before the 1991 war or in the period thereafter. There is no evidence that Saddam did and that is probably likely due to his instinct for self-preservation.

Saddam was likely involved in the 1993 assassination attempt against former President Bush, but that is noteworthy for its singularity. Furthermore, the only retaliation for it was a one night strike against the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.

Was one decade-old instance of prior support for a foreign terrorist act the predicate for war? Despite the assertions of the administration, Iraq under Saddam was not a state sponsor of terrorism in the way that Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan were and are to this day.

3. "In light of 9/11, 'the danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great:'"

This is the silliest and most easily refuted of all arguments. It was also the central premise of the 2003 war and the argument Mr. Feith insists that President Bush should have stood by.

Everything we know about Saddam Hussein indicates that his grip on power was his single priority. This is why he had 11 intelligence services devoted to spying on one another and it is why he called in Ambassador Glaspie to get the American position on his dispute with Kuwait prior to the invasion.

When American troops invaded southern Iraq during the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi WMD - which we know that there were then adequate stockpiles of - were not deployed. The only plausible reason for that is that a WMD strike against US troops would have forced a drive to Baghdad and the certain end of the regime as former Secretary of State James Baker made clear in his memoir. If there was a time to deploy WMD against American forces or pass it on to terrorists groups, that time would have been in 1991, not after 9/11.

Let's assume that Saddam did pass WMD to al-Qaeda or a like group despite the lack of evidence of any operational relationship, and such a weapon was used against the American homeland. Iraq would have to know that such an act would invite massive - and very probably nuclear - retaliation with broad international support. It would be an act of national and personal suicide that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no history of.

On the other hand, if he had WMD in 2003 and knew as a certainty that the United States was going to remove his regime, that would have provided the necessary predicate to give those weapons to terrorists as a retalitory measure. They certainly had enough time to do so, since the congressional vote autorizing military force in Iraq was in early October and the invasion didn't happen until the end of March.

By Douglas Feith's own logic, the Bush administration ran the risk of suffering a chemical or biological strike on the American homeland. But for the grace of God and the incredible incompetence of the international intelligence community, they missed an attack that their own actions practically invited.

There are, however, other nations with active WMD programs and significant ties to al-Qaeda. The most notable is Pakistan.

Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration passed Mujahadeen financing for Afghanistan through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence. It is believed that a significant proportion of those funds were diverted by the ISI to the Pakistani nuclear program headed by A.Q Khan.

We know that the Khan network was instrumental in the North Korean, Iranian and Lybian weapons programs. We also know that scientists associated with Khan visited al-Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and that the CIA found design diagrams for a nuclear weapon there following the October 2001 invasion.

We know that the government of Pakistan supported both terrorist actions against the Indian parliament, in Kashmir, and were indispensable early supporters of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. We know that they have a history of weapons proliferation.

We know that Iran has an active weapons program and has an operational relationship with terrorist groups such as Hezbollah with active cells within the United States. The same has recently been suspected of Syria.

That is the history. It is not, however, the history of Iraq. Furthermore, the case presented by the Bush administration is more applicable to other nations than it was to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

4. "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism:"

That might be the most unknowable and dangerous assertion of all. Iraq is not a natural country and never has been. It was a rump country haphazardly carved out of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. It is much more like Yugoslavia than any of its immediate neighbors in that it is populated by antagonistic ethnic groups with competing national aspirations.

When even a small measure of democracy was introduced in Yugoslavia, the country immediately disintegrated. The only thing preventing this from happening is likely the continuing presence of 150,000 American troops. To this very day, you would be hard pressed to find an Iraqi flag flying north of Kirkuk, which does not bode well for a future unified Iraq. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Iraqi Kurdistan will not democratically declare independence and claim Kirkuk as its capital once the United States leaves Iraq.

Mr. Feith also ignores the fact unified and democratic countries also have WMD programs. India and Israel are the two most famous examples. Iraq has already demonstrated that they have both the technology and the scientific capability to produce WMD.

Furthermore, if Iran is the danger that the Bush administration presents it as, why shouldn't have a defensive deterrent? In what way would a democratic Iraq be different than Israel? Does the administration forsee an endless American presence in Iraq to defend it from Iran?

Then there's the issue of terrorism itself. Most terrorist groups do not see themselves as such. They see themselves as "freedom fighters." That's certainly true of the African National Congress, which only renounced "armed struggle" - a popular euphemism for terrorism - after it had become the government of South Africa. As a matter of fact, Nelson Mandela remains on an American terrorist watch list to this day.

India is a democracy and both the Indian army and RAW have been accused of atrocities in Kashmir that can certainly be defined as terrorism. Then there's the small matter of the PKK within Iraq itself.

What if a democratic Iraq decides to ally itself with and support Palestinian "freedom fighters" such as Hamas? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has yet to recognize Israel or denounce Hezbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border, which predicated the 2006 war. Maliki still does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

Precisely how is that "an important victory in the war on terrorism?" The policy of democratic Iraq vis-a-vis terrorism is virtually unchanged from the Saddam era and could very well degenerate into operational cooperation that threatens Isreal that didn't exist under Saddam. Remember, Iraq offered compensation to the families of suicide bombers only after they were dead. There is no evidence that it was involved in the planning or execution of the attacks themselves.

Democracy is usually a safeguard against terrorism, but it isn't always. A conservative policy would assume that it isn't and plan for any eventuality, which the administration clearly hasn't done.

Again, I proposed that the president distinguish between achieving our primary goal in Iraq – eliminating a security threat – and aiming for the over-and-above goal of democracy promotion, which may not be readily achievable.

Mr. Bush gave his speech at the Army War College on May 24, as Iraq was entering into the last month of its 14-month occupation by the U.S. The president declared: "I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way."

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq's people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way.

In this, President Bush might prove to be more intelligent than even the celebrated defense intellectual, Douglas Feith. Once the canard of WMD and Iraqi intentions was conclusively disproved, Mr. Bush would have only looked foolish to remain publicly attached to them. How does one argue that there was a sucessful defense against a security threat that didn't exist? It's bad enough that the president of the United States continues to insist that Iraq was something other than what it was, a war of choice.

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq's future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam's record, the administration's record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration's prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

There is no evidence that Iraq was going to provide WMD to terrorists, had the capability to use them directly on the American homeland or engage in third state proliferation, and there never was. If they were going to, it would have been far more sensible for them to have done so over a decade before the invasion or in the months leading up to it.

The administration itself misstated Saddam's record and continue to do so to this day. And the tragedy is that it wasn't necessary. The provable likelihood of further agression by Saddam against his neighbors necessitating American intervention was more than enough of a causus belli to remove Saddam from power.

But that wasn't sexy or "imminent" enough for the president and his minions, and that's where the ridiculous "mushroom cloud" imagery came from. What it did instead was create a case that was far more applicable to other countries than it was to Iraq. Furthermore, it created a precedent for other countries to use with far more dangerous consequences.

What, for example, would the United States have to say if India launched a full-scale invasion of Pakistan citing its WMD program, proliferation efforts and operational relationship with terrorists? The above would all be far truer and more imminent than the Iraqi threat was and would leave the United States with no other option than to stand aside as an important strategic partner was dismembered.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.
To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president's shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president's words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

In his book, former CIA director George Tenant described "marketing meetings" in the Oval Ofiice to best "sell" the war to the American people. What the president didn't understand and still doesn't is that war is not a political campaign and marketing such a thing can only lead to a case of buyer's remorse with far more dramatic consequences than a single election can cure.

To this day, all Douglas Feith wants to argue about is marketing. And that's why General Franks was right all along. Feith was and remains "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."

Link lovingly stolen from Decision '08

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: War Pigs By: Black Sabbath From: Paranoid

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2008-05-31T12:33:00.014-04:00

SEXISM MAKES GERALDINE FERRARO ANGRY. YOU WOULDN'T LIKE GERALDINE FERRARO WHEN SHE'S ANGRY

Geraldine Ferraro was supposed to make history. After all, she was the first woman to be nominated for vice president on a major party ticket way back in 1984. As the first female vice president, Ferraro was going to change things, as this is what Democrats always promise to do. And to be fair, Democrats often do change things, the meaning of the word "is" is just one example.

But then something funny happened. Ferraro turned out to be a spectacularly bad politician, her husband was doing business with the fucking mafia, and the definition of the word "loser" was changed to prominently feature Walter Mondale's name and photograph. The Mondale / Ferraro ticket was humiliated in ways that anyone who hasn't worn a gimp suit and a ball gag can never truly understand.

Ferraro presents herself as something of a fairy godmother to Hillary Rodham Clinton, which only seems fair because they both define themselves by what's between their legs. Without their vaginas, they are nothing. It is almost impossible to come to any other conclusion given their recent statements.

Indeed, it was that attitude that got Gerry shitcanned from the Clinton campaign just shy of three months ago. She said "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept".

The problem wasn't so much that Ferraro said that as much as it is that she said it in public, where people who aren't Bill Clinton could hear her. Which is unusual, because everybody knows how much fun it has been to be a black man throughout American history. Christ, why didn't she just go further and say "Look, I know those people couldn't vote for the first 191 years of our history and die of things like sickle cell anemia and lynching, but they sure can dance and that has to count for something, doesn't it?"

Of course, pointing that out was terribly sexist and Ferraro has had her knickers in a knot about it ever since. She has launched a virtual jihad against those who would dare to vote against a woman. Fatwas have also been issued against the sexist media from Geraldine's asexual perch at Fox News.

Sexism, she tells us, is all around us. There's no escaping it, which also explains why women won't stop laughing at the size of my penis.

Yesterday, the former member of Congress from Neverland laid out her argument in a Boston Globe essay that's easily one of the top ten silliest things I've ever read.

Here we are at the end of the primary season, and the effects of racism and sexism on the campaign have resulted in a split within the Democratic Party that will not be easy to heal before election day. Perhaps it's because neither the Barack Obama campaign nor the media seem to understand what is at the heart of the anger on the part of women who feel that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly because she is a woman or what is fueling the concern of Reagan Democrats for whom sexism isn't an issue, but reverse racism is.

The reaction to the questions being raised has been not to listen to the message and try to find out how to deal with the problem, but rather to denigrate the messenger. Sore loser, petty, silly, vengeful are words that have dominated the headlines. But scolding and name calling don't resolve disputes. The truth is that tens of thousands of women have watched how Clinton has been treated and are not happy. We feel that if society can allow sexism to impact a woman's candidacy to deny her the presidency, it sends a direct signal that sexism is OK in all of society.

Among the words I would have included in the above cited headlines are: "shrill," "ruthless," "bitchy," and "cuntish." I'm frankly shocked that I haven't been hired by a major metropolitan newspaper yet. But the journalism industry is biased against white guys with shaved heads, potty mouths, overactive libidos and teensy peckers. Everybody knows that.

Ferraro says twice in those two paragraphs that Hillary was "treated unfairly" but never explains how or gives examples of that treatment. Is the fact that enough people didn't vote for her evidence of sexism? Would it have been racist if Obama lost and Hillary won? If so, why isn't Bill Richardson taking to the streets on behalf of overweight Hispanics named Judas?

If there really are women out there who think that Hillary's defeat (which actually occurred several months ago by any mathematical standard) is evidence of sexism, then those women are idiots and proof that the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution should probably be reconsidered.

When the primaries started, Senator Clinton and, presumably, Congresswoman Ferraro were fine with the Democratic Party's proportional allocation of delegates which has been the party rule since 1972. Now they argue that the only the popular vote should matter. In the beginning of this mess, they approved of not seating Michigan and Florida because they were "rogue states" under the party rules. Now "every vote should be counted" and disagreeing with that is comparable to slavery.

Allow me to suggest that if a white male candidate tried either one of those maneuvers, he'd be laughed right out of politics. Yet, Hillary Clinton hasn't been. Instead, she's being touted as the next majority leader of the United States Senate as I write this. Not bad ... for a girl.

If the Democratic Party establishment and its primary voters were sexist, do you really think that Clinton would have been the presumed presidential nominee for eight fucking years? I somehow doubt it.

The fact is that Hillary and her demented husband ran the single most incompetent primary campaign in my memory. The entire endeavor was predicated on the premise of inevitability, which is neither sexist nor particularly democratic. It was the devine right of the Clintons to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Clinton '08 was lazy, stupid and given to irresponsible spending in ways that have probably shocked even Al Gore. The delegation of resources was staggering in ways that indicated hubris, stupidity, or both. Clinton '08 raised a quarter of a billion dollars and is currently in debt up to their tits. Hillary ran her campaign in pretty much the same way that President Bush has run the federal government.

And that's fine when you're running against a halfwit like Chris Dodd. But Barack Obama, rightly or wrongly, quickly became far more than just another candidate, he became movement - closer to a personality cult, really - unto himself. That's a much tougher race to run.

That she didn't prevail isn't evidence of sexism as much as it of arrogance and a breathtaking lack of organizational skill. The allegations of sexism are a desperation play and not a particularly effective one. But don't tell Geraldine Ferraro. She's having fun.

That sexism impacted Clinton's campaign, I have no doubt. Did she lose a close election because of sexism? I don't know. But I do know that it will never happen again as long as women are willing to stand up and make sure that it is just a one-time bad experience.

Does that mean substandard candidates will henceforth win for no reason other than gender? That'll make for an interesting general election campaign. If Hillary couldn't beat Obama without flashing her weeping cooter for the world to see, John McCain would beat her directly into hell without breaking a sweat.

People like Ferarro seem to insist that the problems facing female candidates are almost entirely due to male sexism. Yet, study after study reveals two important facts. First, women are not as likely to run because they don't like doing things that are required in politics, such as asking strangers for money and going negative on opponents.

Secondly, women are far less likely to vote for women candidates than are men. In fact, Hillary has only consistently beaten Obama among women without college degrees and those over 65. Men aren't sexist against female politicians, women are.

And decrying sexism in the same sentence as the name Clinton is rich with irony. The candidate's husband is known to have at least once met a woman for the first time, dropped his pants and implored her to "kiss it."

When that woman had the temerity to file a civil rights lawsuit that their administration's legislation expressly provided for, both Clintons stood aside as their depraved minions excoriated her motives and morals. That pattern was repeated almost endlessly throughout the Clinton administration.

That same administration passed a welfare reform bill that was absolutely brutal on single mothers, the majority of whom are white, and Hillary has yet to comment either way on it.

Hillary, Geraldine Ferraro, and the women's movement generally never spoke out against the public or private treatment dished out upon women by President Clinton. But they sure took care of Bob Packwood, perhaps the greatest champion the women's movement ever had in the United States Senate, didn't they?

Packwood's private behaviour was probably not as bad as Bill Clinton's (Packwood was never accused of an actual rape), but the prices the two men paid couldn't have been more different. Packwood was ruined and Clinton left office with a 63% approval rating, due almost entirely to women. Packwood admitted to chronic alcoholism, which in no small contributed to his actions, and went into treatment after his resignation from the Senate. Clinton is on the record as saying that he treated women the way he did "because I could."

But Bob Packwood committed the unpardonable sin of being a Republican. That this isn't something that NARAL mentions in their dinners honoring Ted Kennedy, who is so enlightened that he won't even open a woman's car door for her, doesn't make it any less true.

The fact is that the women's movement does absolutely nothing for women and hasn't in a long time. It is, however, very good for the Democratic Party. Or is it?

Geraldine Ferraro won't rush to point this out to you, but she was hardly the most qualified candidate for the vice presidency in '84. She was in Congress for less than five years, represented one of the safest Democratic seats in the country and did virtually nothing when she was there. Walter Mondale wasn't looking for someone who could assume the presidency, he was looking to "make a statement."

If qualifications meant anything, Mondale would have chosen Gary Hart or Sam Nunn. Both are men that everyone would have recognised were capable of being president if it became necessary. They also would have made Ronald Reagan actually work for the states of Georgia and Colorado. But Hart and Nunn lacked the most important qualification of all in 1984: a vagina.

The fact is that qualifications mean nothing in American politics. Ferraro wasn't qualified, and neither is Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Neither, for that matter, was George W. Bush. Christ, the governor of Texas can't issue a pardon without getting eight other people to agree with him.

Ferraro is taking an intellectually interesting position here: It's wrong to vote against Hillary Clinton because she has a snatch (although there's absolutely no evidence that anyone has), but it's perfectly appropriate to nominate Ferraro herself for high office for no other reason than her possession of same.

Here's another fact. Hillary Clinton has received more primary votes than any other Democratic candidate not named Barack Obama in American history. Again, she raised a quarter of a billion dollars, more even than President Bush did in either of his races.

Ms. Ferraro stated early on in her dopey editorial "That sexism impacted Clinton's campaign, I have no doubt," yet presents no evidence that it did. She goes on to say "Did she lose a close election because of sexism? I don't know." If you don't know, isn't it safer and less divisive to assume that it didn't, especially since you're not presenting any compelling reason to think that it did? Does losing 19 primaries and caucuses in row make an election close? And isn't being divisive the GOP's job?

What Ferraro and Clinton are seeking isn't equality of opportunity or even equality of outcome. They couldn't be clearer that they want to win for no other reason than they used to bleed from their fucking crotches on a regular basis as that's the only qualification for office Ms. Ferraro mentions in her article.

Geraldine Ferraro has essentially come out and asserted something that I never would: that women can't win in a fair fight. And when you consider that Benazir Bhutto was twice elected in a place as sexually backward as Pakistan, where honor killings aren't unheard of, it tells you something about her opinion of America.

Which is her right. I just wish that she didn't have to be such a bitch about it.

Link ruthlessly stolen from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who has to deal with Michelle Malkin all friggin' day.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Suffragette City By: David Bowie From: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

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2008-05-30T10:02:00.008-04:00

SO LONG, SUGAR TITS: THE TREASONOUS JUGS OF SUSAN SARANDON

I always have a good time when celebrities get involved in politics. There's just something about it that smells like ... victory. I'm not sure why it is, but there are few things in life that I enjoy more than seeing society's luckiest and most fortunate people humiliate themselves. It makes me feel whole.

Politics is a complicated thing and celebrities (R.Kelly notwithstanding) are simple people. They are also simpletons. They, like 12 year old girls everywhere, don't necessarily need to know something so long as they feel it. This is particularly true of the film and music communities.

And if there's one thing that they are almost uniform in feeling, it is that Republicans are bad people. Oddly, they can never seem to explain why this is so. I've spent five years explaining just that, often in excruciating detail. Yet no one is giving me millions of dollars and the cosmetic surgery I need so desperately.

If just one celebrity could come forward and say "Look, Republicans are assholes and here's why. They spend way too much fucking money, can't plan a war for shit, and are given to sending dirty instant messages to teenage boys and getting suck started by other men in the bathroom of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport" I'd have a whole lot more respect for them. If nothing else, it would tell me that they've been paying attention.

Instead all you hear is "Bush is evil," "the death penalty is bad" and "Stop China." Granted, there are arguments to be made for all of those assertions, but you'll never hear them from Hollywood's chattering classes. This is because virtually everyone in Hollywood is an idiot. Their ability to explain complicated matters of public policy is even lower than that of politicians, who can at least lie in a semi-entertaining way.

What I like best about celebrity activism is just how ineffective it is. In 2004, there was unanimity of opinion among the artistic community that President Bush was a jabbering dupe and a dangerous one at that. All the support the GOP could muster was from Ron Silver and nobody knows who he is. Christ, even Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't have that many nice things to say about the president.

Bush was probably the most vulnerable incumbent president since Hoover. But he still won. It turns out that society's opinion makers didn't make very many opinions, huh?

I also love it when celebrities, actors in particular, threaten to leave the country when an election doesn't go their way. Whatever would America do without all that pretending by botoxed savants, they must be thinking. Alec Baldwin does that a lot, but never follows through. This must annoy his daughter greatly.

The latest to threaten expatriatism is Susan Sarandon. Ms. Sarandon is beautifully jugged in an almost classical way. She's exceptionally hot if you're into banging grandmas, which I am. She's also slightly to the left of the Pathet Lao. But she has a great rack, so what are you going to do?

I can sing arias about those titties. In fact, I do everytime I see them. Those are such fantastic udders that one forgets that their owner gave Benjamin Franklin his first handjob. One also forgets that she also does lapdances for the Shining Path. If nothing else, it beats selling Girl Guide cookies.

Now, I'm the type of guy who doesn't let something as trivial as politics get in the way of my appreciation of a fine set of speed bumps. I almost never go to Hooters to discuss an election. Come to think of it, I have no idea who most of the women in life vote for. I just tell them who they should vote for and trust that they do as they're told. Sort of like how it works in the bedroom. Or the kitchen.

There's something about a woman with huge jugs and a look of sexual desperation in her eyes that make me overlook any number of things. But if there's one thing that I can't overlook, it would have to be treason. You see, I love America and all of the wonderful things (the mainstreaming of pornography, snuff movies, wars that entertaining, presidents who can't speak in complete sentences) that it has given the world.

It literally sickens me to hear someone shit talk the United States. That's doubly true if that someone isn't me.

And that's where the marvellous milkbags of Susan Sarandon and I disagree.

You see, While the old broad that Tim Robbins fucks but won't marry has always said unflattering things about America, she seems to have finally tired of all of its democracy.

Always busy, Sarandon is about to start work on the romantic period drama The Colossus, but with the presidential election campaign being heatedly contested, she also has bigger things to consider.
"If McCain gets in, it's going to be very, very dangerous," she says.
"It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people. If they prove me wrong, I'll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don't know. We're at an abyss."

Oddly, she chose two countries that currently have their most right-wing governments since the Second World War. I thought she would've have picked someplace with a more current experience with liberalism, like anyplace south of Mexico.

If nothing else, I admire Sarandon's honesty. Let's review the most important part of her statement, shall we? "It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people. If they prove me wrong, I'll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don't know."

Having been in college in 1776, Susan Sarandon has seen a lot in her day. But she never lost faith in the American people. But her patience is being sorely tested by their stubbon insistence on voting for the person that they feel is best qualified to lead the country.

Seriously, how long should Susan be expected to put up with your fucking nonsense anyhow? She's stuck with you through so much, knowing all the while that Canada's inclement weather would make her nipples permanently hard and therefore make her boobies look even better. Your fucking impertinence is driving this woman to treason, goddamn it!

But when a woman with huge knockers is involved, I'm nothing if not helpful. In that spirit, I've been thinking of places that Sarandon can go to if things don't go her way. And I've found the perfect place for her - Iraq.

Stay with me on this. Iraq had a really bad government recently. Now it has several sort of bad ones. And they have elections all the fucking time. If the people of Iraq abuse Susan's faith in them, all she has to do is wait twenty minutes and there'll be another election where they can redeem themselves.

But I think there's something deeper and profoundly more human going on here. You'll notice that Ms. Sarandon only mentions her moving to Italy or maybe Canada. Tim Robbins isn't mentioned at all.

And frankly, who can blame her? The guy is a mutant and doesn't look as though he can fuck properly at all. How long should a woman be expected to tolerate something like that? Whenever I see them together, I imagine that she's babysitting an awkwardly tall retarded kid who has developed a crush on her and she doesn't know how to break away without breaking his heart.

For the love of Christ, he gets a woman with a body like that and what does Robbins do? He dresses her up as a nun for fuck's sake! There's definately something wrong with him.

It couldn't be clearer that she needs to get away from that Robbins retard. In which case, Canada is there perfect place for her to come. I can fix her little red wagon but good. And that goes double for her big-titted daughter. I know things that Tim Robbins almost certainly doesn't. Like how to satisfy an old woman and her starlet daughter.

And I'm willing to do that for one reason. I'll do it because I love America and everything it represents. But I'll do it for you!

Y'know, if my girlfriend lets me.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: She's Leaving Home By: The Beatles From: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

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2008-05-27T11:36:00.003-04:00

JAIL JIMMY CARTER

I couldn't have been more pleased when Gerald Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon was vindicated in his lifetime. Even the special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, doubted that Nixon would have received a fair trail in a reasonable time in the District of Columbia. Furthermore, all a trial would have accomplished was to drag out the freakshow of Watergate for years to come. In fact, it would have been much better if Nixon had pardoned himself before resigning.

While I supported the impeachment, conviction and removal from office of Bill Clinton, I also thought that his successor, whether it was Al Gore or George Bush, should have pardoned him. As a general rule, I believe that impeachment or resignation is punishment enough for a president of the United States for abuses that take place during his term of office. Regardless of how polarized American politics has become, few Americans have any desire to see a former president in prison.

Is that presidential immunity? Probably. But there's a significant difference a president and even the worst of criminal defendants. Someday no one will remember who Charles Manson was, but Richard Nixon's disgrace will live forever in history. Furthermore, if presidents face the prospect of prison, the quality of presidents will only go further downward. Frankly, the quality of presidents is bad enough as it is.

However, once presidents leave office, they resume being ordinary citizens and that immunity should cease, particularly in matters of national security and foreign affairs. It's enough of a nightmare that President Bush is allowed to continue making American foreign policy a bad fucking joke. He certainly doesn't need any help from former president Jimmy Carter.

Carter's actions over the last 27 years, while not always criminal (such as writing the individual members of the UN Security Council and asking them to vote against the the 1990 use of force against Iraq resolution), have been extremely distasteful and unbecoming of a former president. What has his conduct gotten him? Well, a Nobel Peace Prize for starters.

President Carter actually seems to believe one of two things, either that he wasn't actually voted out of office in a fucking landslide or that none of his successors have had the moral right to the presidency. Those are the only two things that can explain his almost thirty years of freelance diplomacy.

The problem with such diplomacy - other than it being a giant pain in the ass to his successors - is that it is a felony. James Earl Carter of Plains, Georgia, is in repeated violation of the Logan Act. Each such violation carries with it a penalty of three years imprisonment.

There is little doubt what Carter was doing in North Korea in 1994. He was negotiating a peaceful resolution to the dispute over that country's nuclear program. He wasn't shy about saying so and the Clinton administration was very forthright in saying that Carter was not an authorized representative of the United States government. Why the Justice Department didn't convene a grand jury is beyond me.

Since he was awarded the Peace Prize, Carter has grown even more insufferable. That culminated last weekend, when the former president publicly stated the precise extent of Israel's nuclear program.

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel's refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel's security was his prime concern.

Not only is Israel's nuclear program not a secret, neither is its proliferation activities. Isreal is widely suspected of having collaborated with the Apartheid-era South Africa's nuclear weapons program.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert accidentally (and idiotically) confirmed the existence of his countries weapons stockpile. However, Olmert is accountable to the Israeli people who elected him and Jimmy Carter isn't accountable to anyone.

Carter is the first person to be in a position to know - and he is in such a position - to confirm the extrent of the Israeli arsenal.

How is Carter in such a position? As a former president, Carter receives regular CIA briefings and maintains a high-level security clearance. If the American government knows something, there's a better than even chance that Jimmy Carter knows it as well.

That has never posed a serious problem before, but it appears to now. If the Israelis, or any foreign government, has to be concerned about senstive intelligence being made public by the likes of Carter, said governments aren't likely to long share their secrets with the United States.

Not that Jimmy Carter gives a shit. He's the third fucking Blues Brother and is on a mission from God. If American foreign policy is crippled as a consequence of that mission, all the better. For a guy who keeps harping about the joys of electoral democracy, he seemingly forgets that no one has elected him to anything in over three decades.

As we all learned from the Scooter Libby - Valarie Plame debacle, knowingly revealing classified intelligence is a felony. This is a whole lot more serious than even Plamegate was. This is a matter of international relations regarding nuclear war. It also endangers continued intelligence cooperation between the United States and its allies.

For that reason, Jimmy Carter's CIA briefings should be immediately halted and his security clearence revoked. Furthermore, the Justice Department should seriously start consider investigating Carter's continued private diplomacy.

Get the son of a bitch once and for all.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: You Got a Reputation By: The Byrds From: Sweetheart of the Rodeo

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2008-05-26T23:06:00.007-04:00

BERNIER'S BAD DAY

I slept in this morning and then masturbated three times before having a couple of perfectly barbequed hamburgers and going to work. And work was almost placid, very quiet with none of the usual mutants bothering me. All in all, it was good day.

You know what the opposite of my day would be? Maxime Bernier's day. His day kinda sucked.

Maxime probably woke up to read that his former , Hells Angels-approved piece of ass was on Quebec TV last night, bitching about what a horror her life had become. And that's important to remember, because Julie Couillard's ex-husband was facing a very long jail sentence before he flipped and became a Crown witness. If fucking Maxime Bernier had a worse fallout than that, you can be pretty sure that he was a lousy lay. And he got to hear about it on TV and read it in the paper.

Meanwhile, I was repeatedly and ferociously masturbating thinking of a three-way with my perfect Zombiegirl and Julie Couillard. If you absolutely must know, they were both rubbing my teeny schvantz between their glorious knockers. I'm pretty sure dreams can come true. Tony Robbins wouldn't lie to me, would he?

As I was throttling my putz into submission, Maxime probably arrived at the office and learned that his life had taken a decided turn for the worse.

You see, as soon as Couillard story broke earlier this month, the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois started screaming that she was a "security risk." I, like right-thinking gentlemen across Canada, assumed that this is because the Bloc and Liberal caucuses are exclusively populated by homosexuals. Also, everyone who votes for the Liberals or the Bloc is also a homo and loves the cock.

As it happens, all of Canada's right-thinking gentlemen and I may have been mistaken. It turns out that she sort of was a security risk. Or rather, Maxime's stupidity was a security risk.

You see, our boy Maxime left sensitive - and very probably classified - documents relating to the recent NATO summit in Bucharest laying about in Julie's place. Then he actually left them there for an unknown period of time. So he had to quit his job.

Far be it from me to cast the first stone in a matter like this. God knows that after getting some quality poontang, I'm known for being absent-minded my own self. I forget all kinds of things at the woman's home. These things have been known to include my pants. True story. If you ever wanted to know why I don't get to keep classified documents, now you do.

Oh, and it also came out that Julie ran a company that was bidding on airport security contracts. A lot of fucking busy-bodies are running around screaming that women with classified documents and ties to the Hells Angels shouldn't be involved in airport security. Most of those people are Michael Ignatieff , which doesn't surprise me. Ignatieff wouldn't know what to do with a body like Julie's if it fell out of the fucking sky and landed on his dick.

Ignatieff is still talking about "questions" regarding Madame Couillard and none of those questions are related to important stuff, like her blowjob technique. That's why I've always hated that Harvard cocksucker and always will. And for Foreign Policy magazine to recognize that cur as one of the world's top 100 intellectuals is a travesty and powerful evidence that world is getting awfully fucking stupid.

I'm well-versed enough in politics to understand that this would ordinarily be a big deal. But I'm also well-versed enough in life to know that the dopey rules that the rest of us live by don't apply to hot girls with rock hard bodies. Julie Couillard could spend eight hours a day stuffing babies into a goddamn meat grinder and I'd still nominate her for the Order of Canada. Hopefully, she'd engage in some lesbo fun with Governor General Michaelle Jean in front of the television cameras.

Yes, Julie Couillard has had numerous associations with the Hells Angels. Yes, she was bidding on an airport security contract, which might give some people pause. Yes, she was in possession of classified material for an undetermined period of time. All of that is true and no one is even bothering to dispute that anymore.

None of it matters because Mademoiselle Couillard has outstanding knockers. That trumps pretty much everything. Or at least it should.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Waving My Dick in the Wind By: Ween From: The Mollusk

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2008-05-25T00:26:00.017-04:00

AT LONG LAST, CALIFORNIA, HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?

If you're looking for a place that embodies everything that is wrong with the human spirit, you probably aren't going to do better than California. It is a land that has been made ungovernable by Hiram Johnson's softheaded vision of popular democracy, and allows brainless shills like Barbara Boxer not only to walk about unmolested, but to prosper.

California is the world's seventh largest economy, and its leading export is pretending. So important is the vapid emptiness of Hollywood to California that the state has been governed by not one, but two actors.

Despite its enormous wealth, the state of California hemorrhages money in ways that President Bush probably masturbates at night thinking about.

Way back in 1978 the retard voters of California passed something called Proposition 13, which inhibited the ability of the county and state governments to raise revenue to a degree that no right-thinking person would ever agree to. But that didn't stop the worthless jackals of the Land of Sunshine from demanding increased services from its government.

Oh no, at the same that revenue was restricted, discretionary spending went through the fucking ceiling. Idiot Californians couldn't stop bitching about their need of dumb things like schools and police. And artificially low property taxes have only served to make California real estate prohibitively expensive for almost everyone on the planet.

Proposition 13 was little more than a microcosm of what the presidency of George W. Bush would eventually embody; limited revenue, relentless spending and endless debt.

California is to responsible democracy what 2 Girls, 1 Cup (link truly revolting and stunningly NSFW) is to love. And the reaction of everyone who sees it is pretty much the same. (YouTube video below is also NSFW.)

But California is notable for one thing. It produces the best goddamned pornography in the world. Some gentleman prefer European porn, but I find that the women aren't as cute and the abundance of cock is disturbing. Also, things that aren't in English bother me. Then there's Japanese porn, but the kind of person who gets off on watching a girl stuff an eel inside of herself is the kind of person who votes for Proposition 13.

That's why American porn is the greatest porn in the world. They find the Girl Next Door and ensure that she gets thoroughly hosed down in seed, but they don't get all weird about it, like the Europeans and Japanese do. With American porn, you can jack off seventeen times an hour without feeling guilty about it later. That's more important than I can tell you. Guilt is an emotion best left for sexual encounters with another person.

Simply put, Californians are to pornography what the Swiss are to watches and chocolate. For that reason, the pornography industry makes approximately $3 billion a year more than mainstream Hollywood.

It therefore stands to reason that the California legislature is ready to kill the goose that caused the golden hard-on.

California state lawmakers are considering an unusual idea to solve the state's huge budget shortfall: Tax pornography.
The idea was proposed by a state assemblyman, and would impose a 25 percent tax on the production and sales of pornographic videos -- the vast majority of which are made in southern California.

The ultimate "sin tax." Cute idea.

A 25% tax should never be recognised as remedy to a government's budget imbalance. It's punitive, pure and simple. Imagine if you will such a proposal to tax any other industry at that rate. Republicans and conservatives would go batshit fucking insane because of the possibility that the industry would move or jobs would be lost. Christ, the state of California doesn't even tax cigarettes at that high a rate.

This isn't new or exceptionally original. The state of California and the local governments have been trying to shut down its pornography industry for decades. The LAPD was so intent on it in the early 70s that the industry relocated to the more tolerant San Francisco. It was only after the Supreme Court's decision in Miller v. California (1973) that they started to cool the fuck out.

Since Miller, successful obscenity prosecutions have been few and far between and guess what? The industry pumps approximately $13 billion dollars a year into the economy.

It is unknown, however, how seriously lawmakers will take the idea or how the porn business would deal with the new tax. It is likely, though, that porn-makers would simply pass the cost along to consumers by making pornographic materials more expensive.
However, many economists believe that pornography is an industry with inelastic demand -- meaning market conditions typically don't affect consumers' desire for the product. In other words, it is believed that most porn consumers would continue to buy regardless of how much it cost.

As always, "many economists" are wrong. Not about "inelastic demand," mind you. People like to watch hot girls fuck far too much to let something as trivial as taxes stop them. The taxes could be even higher if assfucking is involved. Not too very long ago, pre-Miller, obscenity laws were structured in such a law that jail time was a very real possibility. A stupid 25% tax isn't going to change that.

What the economists fail to recognize is that the proliferation of large computer hard drives and cheap broadband has made buying pornography almost redundant. I haven't physically bought pornography in almost two years, but I have over 200 gigs of it on this computer as I write this. The proposed California tax would only hasten the day that everyone does.

There's another small problem with this tax. In so far as the industry is becoming increasingly digital and being distributed on the Internet, just as Al Gore intended, there is a decreasing share of the market that produces and sells in the traditional sense. Internet sales are currently exempt from the sales tax in the United States.

And that's what this might be, a way for California to start taxing the Internet. Because most people are remarkably stupid, they aren't going to object to a "porn tax." But if you consider that an increasing percentage of the market is web-based, the idea that net sales are going to have to be taxed is inescapable. And once you acclimate the public to the idea of Internet taxes, they become much easier to expand.

And then there's another response that the industry can take: they can pack up and leave California entirely. Remember, when the LAPD became too bothersome, it decamped to San Francisco. Nevada happens to be much closer to Los Angeles than San Francisco is, and already has legalized prostitution. You think they're going to freak out over the making of fuck movies in Clark County? I don't.

That would leave California without a goose or a golden egg. And you'd think that those assholes would know that already. Wasn't a big part of Governor Schwarzenegger's platform during the 2003 recall election the loss of California's jobs and industries due to heavy taxation and regulation? The problem is that the governor and legislature couldn't or wouldn't stop spending money and Prop 13 limits their ability to raise property or sales taxes. So they rely far too much on "sin taxes."

I have both philosophical and practical problems with sin taxes. First, I do not believe that the tax code is the proper instrument of behavior modification. Taxes should serve as a revenue raising device to fund the building of roads and killing of brown people, no more, no less.

Second, once the government has a fiscal interest in an activity, they necessarily have to allow it to flourish, thus negating the stated purpose of the tax. If the government was truly interested in stopping, say, smoking, they'd eliminate the subsidy to tobacco farmers. Get rid of those and let the market decide. Condemning something you profit from is a morally tenuous position. But you can't subsidize on one end, tax on the other, and still pretend that you're trying to limit the activity itself. Well, I guess that you can. Governments have been doing it for forty years now.

Then there's the obvious question of whether the state of California really wants to have a fiscal stake in Briana Banks' continued ability to take a rock hard cock in her dumper. If so, shouldn't Arnold Schwarzenegger be the one pulling her hair? How about Cruz Bustamante? He could use a job.

Frankly, I think that pornography should be exempt from taxation the way that educational materials like books are. There's just so much you can learn from porn that you can't learn anywhere else. Most women will never sit down and teach you how to lick their cooters in a way that'll make their heads explode, but Janine Lindemulder or Felicia will be more than happy to show you. Any number of women will tell you that sodomy "hurts too much," but I've seen Nikita Denise take two cocks in her ass at the same time, so I know that most women are irredeemable liars. Or Nikita Denise is a super hero.

Peter North should be personally exempt from all taxes; federal, state and local, for the important public service he provides in hosing bitches down with his copious cumshots. On the other hand, I resent that he has a wang that makes mine look even more like an infant's than it already does, so I'm conflicted.

Having said all of that, I'm actually surprised that the Bush Justice Department, in their mindless and unconstitutional decency crusade, hasn't proposed using the tax code to shut down the pornography industry in its totality. Since the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has found the monstrous and wrong 2257 regulations unconstitutional, the administration is running out of criminal enforcement ammunition in their war on fun.

However, if the tax code were used, it would circumvent any First Amendment challenge. The Constitution is explicit in saying that Congress can tax anything it wants. It's right there in Article I. While taxation would have the effect of stifling free speech, that wouldn't be the stated purpose of the levy. Therefore, it would almost certainly survive any constitutional challenge.

I'm so much smarter than the Bush administration. Now I just have to figure out why I'm giving those ghouls ideas. I should really stop doing that.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The Girls of Porn By: Mr. Bungle From: Mr. Bungle

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2008-05-24T12:38:00.009-04:00

WELCOME TO HILLARY'S ASSASSINATION NATION

Right upfront, I'd like to apologize to Dewey in Toronto. She's one of my favorite readers and I know that she's tired of reading "about the Hilary, Obama, OR John McCain." Unfortunately, I have a headache and I can't think of anything new and adorable to say about my penis right now.

Besides, Hillary is having a great week of making news for insanely stupid statements.

It all started out innocently enough when Senator Clinton spoke to the Washington Post and blamed her continuing humiliation on misogyny. You see, people named Clinton don't lose, there are conspiracies that spring up and take what is rightfully theirs.

In an interview after church services in Bowling Green on Sunday, Clinton for the first time addressed what women have been talking about for months, what she refers to as the "sexist" treatment she has endured at the hands of the pundits, media and others. The lewd T-shirts. The man who shouted "Iron my shirt" at a campaign event. The references to her cleavage and her cackle.

"It's been deeply offensive to millions of women," Clinton said. "I believe this campaign has been a groundbreaker in a lot of ways. But it certainly has been challenging given some of the attitudes in the press, and I regret that, because I think it's been really not worthy of the seriousness of the campaign and the historical nature of the two candidacies we have here."

Later, when asked if she thinks this campaign has been racist, she says she does not. And she circles back to the sexism. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted, and . . . there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head," she said. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists."

Let's see, Hillary has had a former president of the United States compare Barack Obama's campaign to that of Jesse Jackson, despite the fact that all the two have in common is skin color, and had the governor of Pennsylvania say "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate." She herself has said that she has the support of "hard-working Americans, white Americans."

Yet, this race is just as much about sexism as it is about racism. Right.

If some dickhead yelling "Iron my shirt" is "deeply offensive to millions of women," then millions of women are fucking retarded. "Iron my shirt" and comments about the former First Lady's cackle and floppy titties had nothing to do with either the Obama or Republican campaigns. Every controversial statement about race has come from either Hillary herself or her closest supporters.

If nothing else, and she now has zero chance of being elected president this fall, Hillary Clinton has made George Orwell proud. The black man has an unfair advantage and her use of the race card has been trumped by some vague, untraceable sexism. All Hillary needs now is an endorsement from O.J. Simpson and her candidacy will have been made complete.

Now that all of her other cards have been played, Senator Clinton is now publicly musing about her rival being fucking murdered.

Precisely what does pointing out Bobby Kennedy's assassination have to with anything in 2008? Other than being a particularly nasty "get well soon" card to Ted Kennedy, not much. Essentially, she's saying "Hey, Ted, sorry to hear that you've got 'the flu,' but things don't generally end well for your favored presidential candidates. Just sayin'. "

Senator Clinton likes to hide behind the history of Democratic primary politics. In 1968 and 1992, the California primary was in June. In June of 2008, the Democratic primaries will be over. Furthermore, RFK announced his candidacy on March 16, 1968 - four days after the New Hampshire primary. His campaign lasted a full 82 days. Clinton and Obama announced for president in February 2007, a full 11 months before New Hampshire.

Hillary lost the presidency in February and she knows it. If she doesn't, she's far too stupid to even work at McDonald's, let alone become the leader of the free world.

But the fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy's murder is coming up in less than two weeks. To your right, you'll see the cover of the current issue of Vanity Fair, which lauds Kennedy's ill-fated campaign. Inside its pages is an almost hallucinatory sycophantic excerpt of a forthcoming book.

Before I go further, I should explain my views on Robert Francis Kennedy. He was perhaps the most evil man in American history. He was a soulless Nazi dressed up in liberal clothing, no more and no less. The only moral objection that any student of history can have with his shooting is that it wasn't immediately preceded by a trial before a jury of his peers.

People forget that Kennedy was a supplicant of the monstrous Joseph McCarthy and isn't remembered as such only because he was bettered in bureaucratic warfare by that hateful pervert, Roy Cohn. Even after McCarthy was denounced by the United States Senate and his bloated, drunken corpse was lowered into the ground, RFK was the only national figure to attend his funeral.

People forget that Bobby was the go-between for his brother's 1960 campaign and the murderous Sam Giancana's crime family to secure the support of the United Mine Workers in the West Virginia primary. Kennedy then turned on Giancana in particular, even as he was co-operating with the Kennedy administration's illegal plans to murder Fidel Castro.

If there was a conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy, it almost certainly involved either Cuba or the mob, both of whom his brother and attorney general betrayed. You'll remember that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with an American pledge not to invade Cuba. Instead, the Kennedys accelerated plans to assassinate Castro, using the Mafia for plausible deniability.

People forget that Bobby was a prime planner in the Vietnam war and instrumental in the coup against, and murder of, Ngo Dinh Diem, just 20 days before President Kennedy's own assassination in Dallas. Once Diem had been dispatched to the great beyond, American humiliation in Vietnam became unavoidable.

Kennedy made President Johnson's life a nightmare for following the very policies that he was responsible for in his brother's White House. That made his self-righteousness all the more galling and explained why Johnson hated him with such intensity.

People astonishingly like to remember Robert Kennedy as a champion of civil rights, but they forget that he resisted his brother mentioning it very much and had authorized wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. Kennedy never bothered to disabuse his perverted dwarf of a minion, J.Edgar Hoover, that King was a communist and a traitor.

People remember Kennedy's '68 campaign as some kind of act of courage, but forget that he only announced his candidacy after Eugene McCarthy softened President Johnson up in New Hampshire. The only thing that RFK accomplished in running was ensuring the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. Primaries accounted for only a third of the convention delegates in 1968 and the party establishment, particularly LBJ and Richard Daley, would never have tolerated a Kennedy nomination. All he did was deny the nomination to McCarthy.

And he was murdered in June, which is somehow Hillary Clinton's reason for staying in a race that she lost months ago. Indeed, the only way she can win the Democratic presidential nomination is if someone shoots Barack Obama to death.

Like most Clintonian clarifications, Hillary's doesn't hold water. She was discussing why she hasn't suspended her campaign yet and said "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California." There are few other things that a remark like that can mean. She's counting on that uniquely American penchant for political assassination to save her career. Remember, the Clintons never say anything by accident.

Granted, I think her motives are more subtle than do most commentators. I think that if enough people are reminded that a President Obama faces the very real prospect of being murdered, they might not vote for him. A number of primary voters have already said that they have considered his personal safety in deciding who to vote for. If Obama loses in the fall, the nomination is hers in 2012.

But the nomination was supposed to hers in 2008, wasn't it? She had all of the money, all of the institutional support and that made her the prohibitive favorite. And she threw it all away. And in doing so, she managed to reinforce every negative perception people ever had of her. I started saying four years ago on this blog that Hillary Clinton would never be the nominee for precisely those reasons. I just happened to think that she would have lost to Al Gore.

Worse still, she even allowed Keith Olbermann to be right about something for once.

Robert Francis Kennedy was sleazy in a way only approached by his early mentor, Joseph McCarthy. But Hillary Clinton is RFK's natural heir in that she, too, will do anything to win. Like Bobby, Hillary is utterly without an ounce of decency.

And she might well yet win.

Easy Listening of the Day: Man in the Box By: Alice in Chains From: Facelift

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2008-05-23T10:01:00.008-04:00

ON BEDS, THE BOOTS UNDER THEM, THE MESSY DIVORCE OF SHANIA TWAIN & THE VINDICATION OF skippy

The seperation of Shania Twain and Robert "Mutt" Lange probably wasn't a very big story in the rest of the world, but the rest of the world isn't Canada. Shania is from a place called Timmins, Ontario, which is so roundly horrible that it makes the shithole that spawned Avril Lavinge look like Shangri-La. Also, Shania has sold a hundred zillion records. Canadians like it when one of own becomes a global phenomenon and moves as far away as humanly possible. We've been building statues to her and considering creating a state religion dedicated to worshipping her for a decade now.

For that reason, her divorce from the Man Called Mutt is being covered like the Kennedy assassination in her home and native land. When the news was announced last Friday, it was on the front page of all four of Toronto's daily newspapers. It is also believed that Shania is hiding out in Toronto, so if she's reading this, I hope that she'll call me.

Celebrity divorce is always amusing and this one has the potential to be more amusing than most. Most people seem genuinely heartbroken over this, if for no other reason than most people are sexless dwarves who live vicariously through celebrities and anguish themselves over their trivial trials so that they can better ignore the true horror that stares back at them in the mirror every morning.

Canadians, being every inch the rancid starfuckers Americans are, responded to the news with waves of collective sobbing. I'm a more down to earth guy, so I reacted by blasting an industrial sized dollop of goo from my mighty prick directly into my eye. It still stings.

I'm going to be completely honest with you folks. I would very much like to fuck Shania Twain and have from the second I first laid eyes on her. That might not mean a lot to you, but it's important to me because I try to avoid sleeping with women who live within 200 miles of me and she's believed to have a place in town.

But there's no ignoring the soon to be former Mrs. Lange's body. Even after shitting out a kid six years ago, it's damned near perfect. You'd never know that she's 42 years old, which leads me to believe that her fitness regimen includes a pact with Satan. We might have to ask a famous fitness blogger these important questions. A lady never answers questions like that and we can't be sure that Satan would tell the truth.

But the whole sad spectacle reminds me of an "Ask skippy" question I got many years ago. The question was an age old one, can a woman that hot be a good lay? I contended that she couldn't be.

The answer wasn't without controversy. Every regular hot woman I know was up in arms. And these were indeed beautiful women. I didn't mean them. Rather, I was talking about totally flawless women. Women who were more like paintings than flesh and blood human beings.

The example I used four years ago was Halle Berry, perhaps the most objectively beautiful woman alive. She had been married and divorced twice. Both husbands reportedly cheated.

The question is obvious. Do you think those dudes found someone more beautiful than Halle Berry to fuck? Really? Do you suppose that's even possible? I don't. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure the scientific odds are against it.

And, as the fine folks at People tell us, the same has happened with Mr. and Mrs. Mutt.

As Shania Twain copes with her sudden split with the support of family and friends in her native Canada, sources close to the singer say she is reeling from a double betrayal – not only by her husband of 14 years, music producer Robert "Mutt" Lange, but by a woman she considered a close friend.
Lange's relationship with Marie-Anne Thiébaud, 37, a longtime secretary and house manager at Twain and Lange's estate in Switzerland, was behind the breakup, say several sources familiar with the situation.
"Mutt and Marie-Anne left their spouses for each other and are still in a relationship," says one source, adding that the Swiss employee was a fixture in the household Twain, 42, and Lange, 59, shared with their son, 6-year-old Eja D’Angelo.

One of these things does not look like the other. The appearences seem to indicate that Mutt has left Shania for her mom. There's only two problems with that theory. Shania's mom is dead and Marie-Anne Thiébaud is actually five years younger than Shania is.

"Gadzooks," you might be saying to yourself. "We have a mystery here!"

Not really. What happened couldn't be more obvious. Shania Twain has no idea how to satisfy a man. It's a tragedy, really. If only this had happened just three short months ago, I would have been more than happy to teach her. However, I am connected at the soul with a beautiful girl who could teach an advanced class on the finer points of fucking. And since I can't seem to persuade my beloved into a three-way, I'm off the market.

But I will offer some advice to the intensely beautiful women who I know comprises 93.6% of my international readership. What kind of a man would I be if I didn't? I couldn't just sit idly by as your menfolk abandon you for pigs.

Look, you're all extremely attractive and we're proud to have you on our arms in public. That's even true of agoraphobic recluses like myself and Mutt. But that beauty is a big pain in the ass if you think of it as a license to just lie there when we're engaged in the making of the love. Beauty is a wonderful thing the first sixteen or seventeen hundred times we fuck you. But after that first weekend, there just has to be more. We already know you're hot. Start acting like it.

For example, under no circumstances should you refuse to blow us just because we haven't showered in a week or so. After all, we're very busy making Bryan Adams sound like he knows what he's doing. And when you're down there, swallow, for Christ's sake. You're not Karen Silkwood and my cum isn't toxic waste. It'll be fine, I promise. Begging to swallow wouldn't hurt, either.

Look, I know anal sex hurts a little at first, okay? But I'm pretty sure that the 19 hours of aerobics that you do every day to keep your body looking like that isn't comfortable, either. There's no point in having a banging little ass if we don't get to bang it. Unless there's hidden treasure up there, you really oughta share. Be a daredevil with your dumper. Not only will you thank us for it, you'll thank yourself.

We also know that our irrational demand that you call us "daddy" during frenzied intercourse is humiliating. That's why we want you to do it. Unless someone is feeling worthless and humiliated after the orgasms stop, chances are that you're doing it wrong.

You can act like you're too fucking precious to do any of those things all you want.

That's fine, because we know that there's always going to be that a longtime secretary and house manager at our place in Switzerland who would like to meet Angus Young and the guy from Def Leppard. And do you really want to lose a guy as hot as Mutt or me? I didn't think so. We'll still be the one, just to somebody else.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: You're Still The One By: Shania Twain From: Come On Over

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2008-05-22T09:46:00.007-04:00

"THEY SAY THAT BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO"

Last weekend John McCain was on Saturday Night Live doing a Weekend Update segment on the seemingly endless Democratic primary battle. In the middle of it, the two anchors (who I've never heard of) began arguing. McCain just looks to the side and says "That's right, fight among yourselves" to emphasize the Obama-Clinton split.

That seems to be happening in the Canadian Liberal blogosphere and I think it's the funniest fucking thing in the world. Warren Kinsella and Jason Cherniak are like the Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth of people who are wrong. Both of them get about eleventy billion hits and almost never talk about fucking. That of course gets me very upset and insanely jealous.

Cherniak, who spends most of his free time knitting sweaters for Stephane Dion, is a big fan of a proposed carbon tax that the Liberals are dumb enough to build a campaign around. Jason agrees with Dion more than Dion does, which isn't all that hard, actually.

Warren's days are filled with alienating himself from the federal Liberal Party, watching John Tory throw away a perfectly good election and proclaiming himself an electoral genius as a result. But he wants you to know that he's a punk rock guy. Being a middle-aged former chief of staff to a federal minister and a registered lobbyist is all about raging against machines of all descriptions. When not raging against a machine, Warren Kinsella works to further its interests. John Lydon would be so proud.

Anyhow, Kinsella has been saying for weeks that running on a giant new tax is so blinding stupid that anyone should recognize it immediately. Jason suggests that, as a nuanced policy, a carbon tax is just what Canada needs ... even though he and his leader didn't feel that way just three years ago.

One of my favorite things about this blog is when I write that a given policy is stupid. Inevitably, one of my commenters will deftly compose sixteen paragraphs explaining why I am an idiot and the policy is the most wonderful in the history of civilization. They often use large, impressive words with many syllables to do so.

What that does is reinforce my original point. If you can't explain something in a 30 second ad or in a sound-bite, you're fucked. Election campaigns are about reaching out to voters and voters are exceptionally lazy and ignorant. They resent to actually have to go out and learn something and they inevitably punish the politician who insists that they do.

Besides, a candidate's job in politics is to communicate ideas in a brief, yet memorable way. That's where nonsense like "a shining city on a hill" and a "place called hope" comes from. If you go any further than that, voters head to the refrigerator or resume beating their wives. Knowing that might make me incredibly cynical, but it also makes me right.

You might have every perfect argument in the world for a carbon tax, but if you can't communicate them in 30 seconds, all the public is going to hear is "new tax" and they'll vote accordingly. Jason might not like that, but I'm pretty sure that he doesn't like it when it rains on his birthday either. There are just some things in life that you can't change, regardless of how unpleasant they are.

This morning Mr. Cherniak decided to interrupt his virtual saliva-swapping with Mr. Kinsella to educate his readers about their differences on the carbon tax and Kinsella's possible motives for his heresy. All things being equal, it was a rather respectful post. Much more so than mine would have been.

The problem is that Warren doesn't do respectful. The guy is, after all, a punk. He demands total fealty and god help you if you don't give it.

If you disagree with the philosophical basis for hate speech laws, Warren calls you a nazi even though he hates being called that himself. If you e-mail him outlining your differences with him, he publishes your IP address. And he threatens to sue. A lot.

All Jason did was point out that some of Kinsella's professional associations might be a factor in his political positions. That would hardly be unique and probably not even something that would discredit an ordinary blogger's credibility. There are two problems with Warren's situation.

First, he never mentions a potential conflict. If he came right out and said "Look, I have the petroleum association as a client but a carbon tax is still ruthlessly dumb politics," no one would make an issue out of it. Blogging is blogging, and your job is your job.

Second, Mr. Kinsella has a long history of being allergic to full disclosure until it suits his interests. He wrote an anonymous column about Ottawa politics for Eye, yet bitches endlessly about anonymous bloggers and commenters. He rues that they make money from prostitution advertising, but he made sure that he got his share of it. The same is true of his tenure at the National Post, which only became an organ of the KKK when he stopped working for them. Warren seems to be willing to overlook a lot so long as he's getting paid.

Calling Warren on his almost stellar hypocrisy is an invitation to jihad. Whether you are his friend or foe means nothing to him. Christ, this guy goes to war with his former employers on a regular basis.

The response to Jason Cherniak's entirely fair points was classic Warren.

Yeah, that's respectful.
Hey, Jason, now that we are including a few thousand people on the conversation, perhaps you can tell me why - when you were lobbying people at my firm and elsewhere to get me to hire you - you weren't so very preoccupied with client lists. Your outrage is selective, I'd say.
Among other things.

Wow, that's awfully personal, isn't it? I don't think that I've ever seen someone who calls himself a political professional and actually wrote a book called "Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics" get all fucking hurt and sad like that before. Jason pointed out something that Warren should have mentioned himself and Kinsella responded like he was Jake LaMotta and didn't like the way Jason cooked his fucking steak.

Look, I disagree with pretty much everything Jason Cherinak has ever said. I question his political judgement almost every day and some days I question his very sanity. But I think that he's a pretty good kid. I don't question his motives at all. Warren, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who would attack Hitler only after the war was safely over, as is evidenced by his stands on prostitution advertising and the free speech stance of the National Post.

I don't think that Jason was at all out of line with what he wrote in his post. The fact that Warren didn't point out his own professional connections before making his political position public is a valid point. One sentence would have negated the entire thing. And the fact that Jason might have sought employment with Warren's ridiculous little company is irrelevent.

Even though I'm pretty sure he won't, Mr. Cherniak should respond to Kinsella's jihad in kind. First, it would show a killer instinct that the Liberals haven't shown in a long time. Second, it's always funny watching lawyers engage in a slapfight.

Breaking up is not only hard to do, it's sad to watch. And like most sad things, I enjoy it immensely.

As Senator McCain said last weekend, "That's right, fight among yourselves."

UPDATE, Saturday 24 May 2008: Welcome Daimnation, Blazing Cat Fur and Jay Currie readers. There sure are a shitload of you, aren't there?

I don't get many readers from my home and native land. I'm much bigger in the United States and, oddly enough, Korea, than I am here in Canada. Canadians almost universally hate me. You will, too. Just look around the blog and you'll find something that gets you really angry.

Anyhow, thanks for stopping by.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: You're Gonna Miss Me By: The 13th Floor Elevators From: The Psychedelic World of the 13th Floor Elevators

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2008-05-18T14:50:00.008-04:00

BUSH, HYPOCRISY, IDIOCY AND ISRAEL

Turns out that making a dry drunk leader of the free world wasn't as funny as I had originally hoped. As it happens, the brain damage chronic drinkers are prone to suffer might just disqualify someone from the presidency.

We learned that all too well on Thursday when President Bush adderessed the Israeli Knesset and spoke out in defiance of two hundred years of political tradition, personal decency and common sense. It was a speech that was contrary not just to world history, but the history of his own useless administration.

For most of America's history, its statesmen have abided by the dictum that "politics ends at the water's edge." Political campaigns were not to be waged overseas, and certainly not by sitting presidents. Nixon did not go to China and declare that the Democrats would destroy the world and Ronald Reagan would never have dreamed of doing that. I suspect that the current president's father would rather have resigned his office rather than break that proud tradition.

President Bush didn't do that on Thursday. Instead he broke with even his own disjointed version of history. It was a speech that stood out for it's ignorance, arrogance and short-sightedness. When one considers the incredible damage to America's future foreign policy, it becomes almost mindblowing.

We believe that religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society. So we condemn anti-Semitism in all forms -- whether by those who openly question Israel's right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.

We know this because the president of the United States rountinely condems Saudi Arabia and Egypt for making after-school specials based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Egypt's case that's of particular importance as they receive about $2 billion in American foreign aid each and every year. A more cynical blogger might argue that the American government is actually subsidizing anti-Semitism. Luckily, I'm not at all cynical.

We believe that targeting innocent lives to achieve political objectives is always and everywhere wrong. So we stand together against terror and extremism, and we will never let down our guard or lose our resolve.

Unless that terror eminates from Kurdish Iraq. That's different.

And that is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the "elimination" of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant "Death to Israel, Death to America!" That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties." And that is why the President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Here's where the president's intrepretation of history gets interesting.

Firstly, the founding charter of Hamas indeed calls for the elimination of Israel. The first problem is that Hamas hasn't referenced that charter in public for years. Second, both Fatah and the Israeli government knew that Hamas would win election in 2005 and begged the Bush administration to support a postponement of that election, which the president ignored.

The administration then attempted a half-hearted coup against a democratically elected Hamas, which directly led to the forcible takeover of Gaza and further endangered Israeli civilians. President Bush didn't point that out.

If I were a Jew, I would be outraged by Bush's contention that "Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred." From that, one can only assume that the president is referring to Holocaust. While it's true that Americans saw the consequences, only Jews suffered them. The Allies were well aware where the death camps were and what their function was. And they did nothing at all to stop it. Despite having uncontested control of the air by 1943, the Allies wouldn't even destroy the rail links to the camps as a gesture to the victims of places like Auschwitz.

While the Germans perpetrated the Holocaust, each and every Allied government was complicit in it because we did nothing. We may not have been able to stop it, but we didn't even attempt to slow it down. And the Allies had air superiority for almost all of the period that the Final Solution was carried out.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That might be the most incredible distorition of the facts to come from a president who has excelled at doing just that.

When Nazi tanks crossed into Poland, the United States was practising a policy of strict neutraily. As a matter of fact, the United States Congress passed, and President Roosevelt signed, no fewer than four Neutrality Acts during Hitler's first four years in power. In fact, the Neutrality Act of 1939 passed two months after Hitler invaded Poland.

When the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were passed, the United States was neutral. Even after Kristallnacht, the United States remained neutral. The Anschluss and invasion of Poland did nothing to change American neutrality, in fact, they strengthed it. Were it not for Hitler's ill-advised declaration of war against the United States after Pearl Harbor, it's an open question as to whether America would have fought in Europe at all.

Neville Chamberlain may have been wrong to negotiate with Hitler, but the United States ignored the threat entirely until the war came to its shores. How fucking dare any American politician claim moral superiority to Chamberlain given that history? Most Americans believe to this day that the Second World War began 26 months later than it actually did.

All of the Western powers are complicit in the Holocaust. We knew it was happening and we did nothing to stop it. Worse, we refused to accept refugees from it and sent them back to the ovens of Poland. Millions of Jews were murdered and we bear that guilt along with Germany because we didn't even try to stop it. It just so happens that the United States bears a special burden because as a neutral, it refused to call Nazi aggression what it was.

But let's look at Bush's position on negotiating with "terrorists and radicals." Since Hamas doesn't have tanks or heavy artillery, one can only assuming that he's speaking of actual states, specifically Iran.

Not only did President Bush's hero, Ronald Reagan, negotiate with the terrorist state of Iran, he sold them weapons. Furthermore, he sold them weapons as a ploy to release American hostages held by Iranian sponsored terrorists. When questioned about it, President Reagan not only lied, he backdated Presidential intelligences findings authorizing the sales, which is clearly an impeachable offense.

Worse still, President Bush himself has negotiated with terrorists, specifically, Muammar al-Gaddafi of Lybia. Gaddafi was directly responsible for the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 that killed 270 people, including 180 Americans. Bush negotiated with Gaddafi to stop his joke of a nuclear program, most only of the components of which hadn't even been taken out of their shipping crates.

Gaddafi was a major financier of Black September and Carlos the Jackal. He was the prime state sponsor of the PLO during the 1970s and 80s. In 1986, Gaddafi ordered the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by US servicemen, killing two and wounding another 50. President Reagan responded to this by calling Gaddafi "the mad dog of the Middle East" and bombing his house.

To this very day, Colonel Gaddafi has not renounced terrorism or accepted the right of Isreal to exist. Yet, Bush still lifted American sanctions against Lybia.

That's who President Bush is willing to negotiate with. And let's not forget that his administration was instrumental in electing Hamas in the Palestinean Territories and giving Hezbollah legitimacy in Lebanon, both of which border on Isreal and are an existential threat to Isreali democracy.

America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Bush has cited several remarks by the Iranian leadership calling for the destruction of Israel. What he doesn't tell you is that every single Arab country has said the same or worse. In fact, each and every one of those countries have attacked Israel one time or another, and most of them don't recognize Israel's right to exist to this day.

Not only was Iran the second country in the world to recognize Israel, it has never declared war on her. In fact, you would have to go back over 300 years to find an instance of Iran invading anybody. Indeed, the American missles sold to Iran by the Reagan admisistration were routed through Israel. How many countries have the United States aggressively attacked in its history? I happen to live in one of them.

Does Iran have a nuclear weapons program? Yes, they almost certainly do. But one should consider Iran's stragetic position. Iran is in the immediate vicinity of a nuclear Israel, Russia, China, Pakistan and India. Oh, and the United States government that has been screaming for regime change in Iran for the last thirty years now has about 200,000 troops on no fewer than two of Iran's borders.

Can you imagine what the United States would do if it were surrounded by so many aggressive nuclear powers? Saddam Hussein was thought to have WMD that no serious person thought that he could deliver to the American homeland, but that was enough to warrant an invasion. If you don't think of the Iranians as guys in turbans with religious beliefs almost nutty enough to qualify them for a Republican congressional seat, you quickly come to the conclusion that Iran isn't crazy to have a nuclear program, they'd be crazy if they didn't.

How many democratically elected American governments has Iran overthrown? America has overthrown at least one freely elected government in Iran. The United States has nothing to fear from Iran, but Iran has everything to fear from the United States and they have very good historical reasons for them to do so.

That's not to suggest that I'm in favor of Iran having nuclear weapons, but it should be taken as meaning that I'm not against it either. The Bush administration, in its enthusiasm of pre-emtive war, has even given Iran a plausible excuse to attack the Israeli reactor at Dimona.

You know what could kill the Iranian nuclear program tomorrow? A guarantee that the United States won't invade Iran. That's all. I believe that the Iranians would even recognize Israel if it received an American security guarantee. It would cost the United States nothing and go further than anything else in reaching a Middle East peace agreement. Besides, the US extended the same guarantee to Cuba. What did that cost?

Neither Iran or Saudi Arabia recognizes Isreal. But Saudi Arabia has attacked Israel and Iran hasn't. Furthermore, there was no Iranian involvement in 9/11 and there were 15 Saudis on those planes and there were financial transactions that flowed in and out of the Kingdom both before and after the attacks.

The worst thing about President Bush's remarks is that they were aimed at American politicians - almost certainly Barack Obama - from foreign soil.

Not only is that a break with 200 years of American political tradition, it is incredibly damaging to American foreign policy.

Let's assume for a moment that Obama wins the presidency in November. Bush would have already tied his hands in foreign policy and created an ingrained distrust toward the new president with one of Israel's closest allies. No president in American history has ever done that before, and that is just another reason that George W. Bush is a cheap fucking punk.

There would have been all manner of hell to be paid if Bill Clinton did a world wide tour saying that Republican policies would kill everyone just before an American election. Now, I hate President Clinton just as much as I hate President Bush, but there has to be some measure of fairness here. If nothing else, Clinton wouldn't have made those remarks during wartime, like his successor did.

If Bush can't sustain his shithead policies through an election, it seems that he'll damned do it in foreign relations.

I agree with most Republicas that Barack Obama is hopelessly niave regarding foreign policy. But I can't escapre the conclusion that Bush is, too, and he's actually been president for almost eight years. And the worst president since James Buchanan has done much more damage to his country and its relations with the rest of the world than even that closeted cocksucker and his cabinet of traitors ever could have hoped to.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: There is a War By: Leonard Cohen From: New Skin for the Old Ceremony

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2008-05-17T09:32:00.007-04:00

CALIFORNIA TAKES THE PLUNGE, BIBLE BEATERS BREATHLESS

With a divorce rate that has been over 50% for over thirty years, I have a very difficult time seeing what the imperative to "protect marriage" is. If marriage needs to be "defended" from anybody, people like Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani - who are each on their third one - seem like the people it needs defending from.

Truth be told, I don't think that married people should have any inherent rights or benefits granted by the goddamned government. Anyone who thinks that marriage and the family need to be encouraged is a fucking idiot. I would argue that anyone who gets married and starts shitting out kids because of a tax break is the last person who should do either.

Get married or don't. I don't give a shit, and I can't think of a reason why anyone else, particularly the huge bureaucratic machine of government, would either. People are way too involved with other people's families. Worse still, is this conservative penchant for being busybodies in the name of small government. Jesus, how can any rational adult advocate the government defining the family when that same government was not long ago headed by a guy who couldn't define what the meaning of the word "is" is.

There's only one reason that I'm for gay marriage: I can't think of a reason to be against it without feeling like an idiot. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to be against it. The anti-gay marriage jokes practically write themselves and it's very difficult to be funny supporting it. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to stupidity.

In a perfect world, the government wouldn't have a goddamned thing to do with marriage and people would mind their own business. In that world, conservatives would understand that arguing that the government can't deliver the mail, yet has a duty to sanctify and protect the family unit only serves to make them look foolish.

Conservatives, especially those of the silly social variety, base their opposition to homosexuality on biblical principles. Jesus, they tell us, wouldn't like all of this faggotry bounding about. Why, if Jesus saw, say, David Guest, He'd kick him square in the nuts. As we all know, He ain't down with that.

There's a small problem with that reasoning. The New Testament doesn't actually address homosexery. It does advocate the subjugation of women and the submission of slaves though.

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. 19 Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. 20 Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. 21 Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. 22 Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 25 Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism. (4.1)Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

- Colossians 3

Wow, it turns out that modern society isn't based on biblical principles after all. Either that or Ike Turner is at God's right hand and Abraham Lincoln is burning in Hades as I write this. Amazingly, some folks are awfully selective about which biblical principles they advocate.

Having said that, same-sexery is mentioned quite a bit in the Old Testament, which is notable for its extremely pissy God. Not only is gay sex punishable by death, so is eating shell fish. Christ, the Book of Deuteronomy actually lays out the case for taking your wife to the gates of the city and stoning her to death should she backtalk you. Want to live by biblical principles? Let's start by banning Red Lobster and making spousal abuse fashionable again.

Furthermore, Christian conservatives believe that issues like gay marriage, or pretty much anything else should be decided by their elected representatives and not the courts. That ignores the fact that the concept of democracy is completely foreign to the Bible and the courts aren't. As I remember it, Jesus himself had an unfortunate encounter with the judiciary.

I find it incredibly odd that those most staunchly against same sex marriage are the same people who advocate monogamy the loudest. But the denial of marriage rights serves only to encourage homosexual promiscuity, which is the thing they seem to fear the most. As much as the Onward Christian Soldiers crowd wishes to the contrary, gay people aren't going anywhere. Wouldn't you prefer them behind a white picket fence as opposed to in a leather bar?

I've long maintained that adult life isn't all that different than its second grade counterpart in that we've never really grown out of pointing at one another and yelling "homo!" really loud. And nowhere is that more apparent than in American presidential politics.

I've had this argument before and I'm sure that I'll have it again. I'll always maintain that the 2004 election was won by the GOP on the backs of gay people. 11 states had gay marriage initiatives on their ballots that year and all of them carried.

The only state that passed a gay marriage amendment that went for John Kerry was Michigan, and that was much closer than it otherwise would have been. President Bush carried Ohio, which also had a ballot initiative, by about 100,000 votes. People vote against their economic interests all the time, but they rarely vote against their silly cultural interests. Does anyone really believe that 100,000 people voted to ban gay marriage and to elect Kerry at the same time?

Even though the president has absolutely nothing to do with marriage or constitutional amendments, Bush called for one banning gay marriage at about the time that Kerry became the Democratic nominee. This is what political professionals call "framing the issue." By making Kerry oppose the amendment, the GOP made him the candidate of homo nuptials. That Kerry's position on gay marriage was even more patently fucking ridiculous than Bush's was left unsaid.

And wouldn't you know it, just as another election is coming up, gay marriage becomes an issue again, this time in California. On Thursday the California Supreme Court ruled that the same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 22, violated the state's constitution.

With California, where 1 in 10 Americans live, recognizing gay marriage, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act - which was always unconstitutional - is essentially useless. Furthermore, just as the California ban violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution, it won't be long before the remaining state laws violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

If you look at marriage as a civil service provided by the government, the argument becomes clearer. If you see a civil marriage as being no different than education, you can't escape the conclusion that outright bans or "civil unions" are in violation of constitutional guarantees.

In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate yet equal" schools for African American children were in breach of the equal protection clause. How then can the states plausibly maintain a separate yet equal civil union regime for homosexuals. That was struck down on a racial basis in the 1967 Loving v. Virgina decision.

While it is true that the word "marriage" is not to be found in the Constitution, neither is "education." What Brown corrected was the application of a government service to a specific minority. And very few people would today assert that Brown was wrongly decided. Not even a strict constructionist would argue that because education is not a specifically designated right, Brown is an example of an activist judiciary.

Conservative commentators and bloggers have charged that this is another example of the judiciary "creating law." It is not. The Fourteenth Amendment never refers to race, gender or sexual orientation, merely "the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." This is not the creation of new law at all.

Furthermore, the California ruling, like the one before it in Massachusetts, does not compel religious institutions to perform marriage ceremonies for homosexuals, as that would violate their free exercise rights under the First Amendment. The rulings are exclusive to government recognition of civil marriages. The Catholic Church, for example, refuses to recognize divorce and no one suggests that that is unconstitutional. This is not an example of the courts controlling religion. It is the courts forcing the state government to comply with its own constitution.

Of course, California is a peculiar place in that they allow for the incredibly dumb and counter-productive practice of direct democracy. Proposition 22, we will be reminded, was passed with 61.4% of the vote less than eight years ago. That means less than nothing in so far as if the will of the majority were paramount, there would be no need for constitutional protects at all. Those individual protections are a specific check on the power of the majority. If, for example, the people of California voted for the internment of Muslims after 9/11, it would still be unconstitutional even if 100% of the voters approved it.

But this will be a major factor in this year's elections, just as the Massachusetts decision was in 2004. Republicans, losing as they are seats in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi, will argue that this is another case of an activist judiciary, despite the fact that the case was decided solely on the merits of California constitution, not the federal one.

It also puts John McCain in a peculiar position. In 2006, he opposed the incredibly wrongheaded Federal Marriage Amendment, but supported and campaigned for a similiar measure in Arizona. McCain rightly believed that marriage is an issue for the individual states to decide.

The problem for McCain is that the state of California has decided and Governor Schwarzenegger has declared that he will not support a constitutional amendment to moot In re Marriage Cases. McCain cannot very well be supportive of the decision lest he antagonize the retarded right wing of his party, but he can't condemn it without undermining his support for state's rights.

Of course, the GOP will return to it's cudgel of "activist judges." It's worked for them before and it is one of the very few selling points it has left. That that argument undermines the third branch of government and the rule of law itself doesn't matter, nor does the fact that the current child president of the United States arguably owes his tenures of office to an "activist judiciary."

Not that any of that matters. Gay marriage is too far along to realistically stop now. Between California, Massachusetts, the "full faith and credit clause," and a distinct lack of support for a marriage amendment in the country and the states, the cause of same-sex marriage is unstoppable.

Gay marriage is now legal in California, Massachusetts, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain. Foreign marriages are legally recognized in Aruba, Israel, New Mexico, New York and Rhode Island.

And you know what? Life hasn't ended in any of those places. It won't end anywhere else either.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Honeymoon Blues By: Robert Johnson From: The Complete Recordings

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2008-05-15T10:41:00.007-04:00

SOME GAVE ALL

In the six years since President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had concluded in front of a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner that his administration paid for, then lied about, 4,000 American servicemen and women have lost their lives. For the first time that I'm aware of, over 95% of the causalities were suffered after a war was declared over. That's pretty impressive when you think about it.

It used to be that war demanded shared sacrifice. The soldiers went to fight and die and the civilian population gave up the luxuries of peacetime. Gasoline and sometimes food was rationed, wage and price controls were almost always imposed, and taxes were raised across the board to pay for the war, which is always an expensive exercise.

President George W. Bush knows this because, as his book reading competition with Karl Rove indicates, he is a serious student of history and military affairs. That's why in the days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he darkly asked the American people to make the ultimate sacrifice. He wanted you to go shopping. "Buy yourself something shiny," he seemed to say. "And for Christ's sake, don't pay attention. This is a job for Big Government."

And nobody really did pay attention. As everybody was obsessed with whether President Bush could actually spend more money and antagonize homosexuals more than even John Kerry, both Afghanistan and Iraq started sliding irretrievably into chaos.

Of course, dark and desperately dumb threats were made - and not just by the terrorist vermin who murdered 3,000 innocent people for no reason at all. The government began darkly intoning that if the unprecedented power accumulated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney were in any way minimized - even if only to reign the executive branch back within its constitutional limits - everybody would die violent and terrible deaths. To question the psychotically tyrannical USA Patriot Act was to invite the beheading of those you love most.

And the only way these apocalyptic visions could be held at bay was to get yourself something pretty, like a Segway. After all, this is wartime and no one wants to be seen contradicting their commander-in-chief.

Perhaps no one sacrifices during a time of foreign conflict as does the president of the United States. For example, bankrupting an entire country is hard work and doesn't pay all that well. George W. Bush knows those better than most. He also knows that he could receive endless riches if he returned to the private sector and bankrupted companies one at a time, like he did before he entered government service. But President Bush is a patriot and he knows that his country needs him. Three trillion dollars doesn't just pointlessly spend itself and 60 years of American foreign policy has to be destroyed in a particularly reckless way.

But the president revealed this week that he's given up more than previously thought. That's right, he quit playing golf five years ago.

US President George W Bush has revealed that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year.

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said in an interview for Yahoo and Politico magazine.

"I don't want some mum whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them."

Of course, he could have been in solidarity by reversing a criminally negligent policy of trying to occupy a country of full of crazy people who hate one another with a dangerously small military force, but that would be crazy talk. Besides, Rumsfeld wouldn't let him.

On the other hand, giving up golf gives him more time to express his quiet dignity and solidarity with the fallen through the power of dance.

Y'know, maybe I was wrong. Maybe - just maybe - George Walker Bush is everything that a president should be. Or he thinks it's Lent.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Dancing Days By: Led Zeppelin From: Houses of the Holy

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2008-05-14T01:41:00.006-04:00

"...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL"

Like most folks, I tend to have positive feelings about justice. It just seems so ... fair. Somebody does something particularly stupid, they are called to account, a high-priced hack of a lawyer blames the police, and everybody's happy. It's the kind of a system that makes North America the envy of the world and allows Robert Blake the time he needs to start dating again.

I should also point out that I'm not a particularly big fan of rape unless, of course, it is a part of the rich fantasy lives of the women in my life. Then it can be rather fetching. Otherwise, not so much. Rape is considered highly impolite and the authorities tend to frown on it.

Maybe even more troubling than rape is false accusations of same. If nothing else, your average rape at least involves dinner and perhaps a movie. One almost never gets a lovely steak and a viewing of "What Happens in Vegas" when one is falsely accused of rape. It is a bothersome, troubling experience that involves a great deal of time before the courts, expensive lawyers and, not infrequently, getting sodomized in jail. If you can avoid a situation like that, I suggest that you do.

Worse than the false accusation itself is the fact that there are few if any legal repercussions for making one. This despite the fact that a false accusation necessarily involves committing a number of crimes, including filing a false police report and perjury. Those things are usually not encouraged by the justice system. However, charges are almost never brought against someone who levels a false accusation.

Upon acquittal for what I believe to be one of society's most heinous crimes, I'm of the firm belief that one of two things should happen; either the defendant should be allowed to publicly impugn his accuser's integrity, or he should be allowed to actually rape her. After all, justice should work both ways.

Things didn't work out that way for Gilbert Oldfield of Farmington, New Mexico. It turned out that justice fucked him twice.

A 51-year-old man acquitted of rape charges was sentenced Tuesday to serve a month in jail for contempt of court after calling his accuser a liar after the rape case verdict was read.

Gilbert Oldfield, of Farmington, was accused of picking up a 21-year-old woman at a gas station in his mobile home, and driving her to the Bubble City truck stop, allegedly to rape her.

Rape is bad, but raping someone in a mobile home at a truck stop is worse because it proves that you're white trash, and white trash is highly unpopular in prison. This is a lot different than a misunderstanding between two sets of genitals after, say, a fine lobster dinner and a romantic comedy.

Mr. Oldfield took exception to being associated with low-rent behavior and used the occasion of his acquittal to express his displeasure with the entire sordid affair.

Following the three-day trial that ended April 25, Oldfield was found not guilty of the crime by a jury, but while leaving the state district court room he called the alleged victim a "lying bitch."

That sounds reasonable to me. Accusing someone of rape is a pretty bitchy thing to do, and if there was no force-fucking, the person levelling the charge is indeed a liar. In fairness, I can only fault Mr. Olffield for the mildness of his observation. Perhaps my extensive vocabulary gives me an unfair advantage, but I'd be screaming things like "atavistic cunt" and throwing chairs about the courtroom were I to find myself in similar circumstances.

Seriously, a gas station, mobile home and a truck stop? I'm a far classier man than that.

However, if you're found not guilty of something so tacky and terrible as a truck stop rape, you would do well not to be before Judge Sandra Price. She really has no sense of how justice works.

In the normal course of events, an acquittal ordinarily means that you get to say "good day" and go about your business of trying to convince your family and friends that you're not in fact a sleazy fucking rapist. Judge Price has what can only be described as a unique interpretation of what "not guilty" means and sent our pal Gilbert to the hoosegow for a month.

District Judge Sandra Price said the 30-day jail sentence was the most she's ever given on a contempt charge.

"I thought the behavior, given it was in the courtroom in front of everyone, was pretty egregious," she said. "I was very offended by what he did."

You know, Your Honor, I'm pretty sure that ol' Gil found the whole "three day rape trial" pretty egregious, too. I'll bet he was offended as well. I'd venture a guess that he was even outraged.

After Oldfield's statement was heard by the court bailiff, Price filed an order for the man to appear at a Tuesday hearing to explain his behavior.

"Part of his defense was, Court was over, you had sent us on our way,'" the judge said. "My perception is it doesn't end until someone is out of the courtroom, and out of the parking lot."

May I be the first to suggest that the judge is a fucking moron. In the ordinary course of events, the court's jurisdiction in a matter ends when the one in the robe says "case dismissed." Apparently, I was wrong. An acquittal isn't enough anymore. Now you have to be home in your jammies before Judge Price will get off of your fucking dick. Fuck her.

On that happy note, I'm glad that I have no plans to go to New Mexico because she might find me in contempt, too. And I'm too pretty for jail.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: And Justice For All By: Metallica From: And Justice For All

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2008-05-13T09:57:00.008-04:00

LARRY KING IS A FUCKING PUTZ

One of the iron laws of modern life is that when you fuck everything up beyond redemption, it's time to visit Larry King. Larry's such a sycophant that after an hour of his kissing your ass, his retard audience will worship you forever. And if you take phone in questions and don't treat Bob from fucking Omaha like the half-wit that he is, you'll probably get a parade out of it. It seems that pretty much anybody can be a King for a Day.

It doesn't matter who you are or what shitty things you've done in life, if you agree to do Larry King Live, the host will brown nose you right into the fucking afterlife.

I think that Ted Bundy's great mistake was not taking advantage of Larry's hospitality. I can guarantee you that Larry would introduce Bundy as "the famous ladies man," and begin his questions with "You're so handsome. Why the rape and murder? Were they asking for it?" And it would only go downhill from there. Remember, Larry's the same guy who once said "I would bump God if OJ Simpson was available."

Being a media whore par excellence, Larry shares his opinions on anything, despite his total lack of qualifications or knowledge on the subject. Christ, if he spent a weekend judging the Kentucky State Circle Jerk Finals, he would have written about it in his USA Today column for a month. For a guy who hasn't had a solid bowel movement since 1986, he sure is busy.

That's why I wasn't surprised when the former Mr. Zeiger repeatedly turned up in Carol Felsenthal's new book "Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House." The book is a portrait of one president's return to popular esteem from self-imposed disgrace. It is a classic tale which tells us more about the short memories and incredibly misinformed judgements of the public than anything else.

"Clinton in Exile" is a good book to read if you're stuck in an airport or are one of those mere mortals who actually tires of masturbation. It's a quickie book and hardly a scholarly tome, as the presence of Larry fucking King amply demonstrates. If you want to read a great book of the form, I can't recommend "Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon" by Robert Sam Anson enough. It's out of print, but it isn't that hard to find and richly rewarding.

Mrs. Felsenthal's book ends with a quote so shocking that I couldn't decide whether to laugh out loud or shit myself to death. That quote naturally comes from Larry King. "I think people regard him as a guy with a weakness who happens to be a tremendous person, who if he didn't have this weakness would be up there with Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln." (page 311. Emphasis added.)

That might be the most stellar example of overstatement I've ever read.

George Washington won his country's independence on the battlefield and ensured an orderly, peaceful transition of power previously unknown to man. Thomas Jefferson doubled his territory without firing a shot. And Abraham Lincoln preserved the union from chaos and ended the rancid institution of slavery in North America.

What precisely did William Jefferson Clinton do? Sure, I know he looks good when compared to his immediate successor, but that's hardly what gets you on Mount Rushmore. Autistic children look like competent administrators when compared with the current President Bush.

Bill Clinton is a lot like Jack Kennedy - people love them without being able to tell you what they actually did. In Kennedy's case, they point to the Cuban Missile Crisis without realizing that it wouldn't have happened in the first place without the Bay of Pigs. The serious tax cuts and the civil rights bills were carried out and strengthened by President Johnson, which most people forget. That leaves the Test Ban Treaty as JFK's only real presidential accomplishment.

Oh, and he caught a bullet with his skull, which is about on par with Clinton's use of Monica Lewinsky as a cock catcher's mitt and his impeachment for same.

Despite being in office over three times as long as Kennedy was, Clinton has a similar paucity of accomplishment. His modern supporters point to the economy of the 1990s, but history never records economics unless a depression occurs. Do you know anything about the economy under Jefferson? How about Lincoln? If the economy were a barometer for historical achievement, Calvin Coolidge would be remembered as the greatest president of them all.

So what exactly did President Clinton do other than get reelected and interrupt a perfectly good blowjob so he could jerk off into a bathroom sink?

NAFTA: The North American Free Trade Agreement was certainly important and Clinton should be credited for passing it against the wishes of his own party. Christ, if Hillary is to be believed (which she isn't), he passed NAFTA against the objectives of his own wife.

Every time an election rolls around, the majority of Democratic candidates piss and moan about NAFTA, which only proves that Democrats are idiots. Most manufacturing jobs in swing states aren't going to Canada and Mexico, they're going to China and India, which aren't a party to NAFTA.

Plus, I always get disturbed when the majority of Democrats agree with a lunatic like Pat Buchanan about anything.

Welfare Reform: Another nice idea that was only implemented for political expediency. If you want a president of another party to sign a bill that you know he otherwise wouldn't, pass it during an election campaign. Clinton hated the welfare reform bill and still spits on the ground whenever he talks about it (which isn't often.) But he signed it because Bill Clinton is an unprincipled whore.

It is also worth noting that people who love President Clinton hated the welfare reform act.

The Northern Ireland Peace Accords: The English could never stop the fighting in Belfast, but the English can't clean their own teeth properly either. Even though no American president ever took Northern Ireland seriously - and they all allowed American citizens to be the prime funders of the terrorist Irish Republican Army - Clinton should get credit for the agreement, which has astonishingly held.

This accomplishment should be mitigated by the fact that our penchant for drunken havoc is one of the very few things that makes the Irish interesting. The peace treaty also freed up Bono's time to allow him to be annoying about several other issues.

Other than that, there isn't much. Sure, there's a completely unconstitutional assault weapons ban that Bush was prepared to extend and midnight basketball and school uniform initiatives that never had any hope of passage.

And that's pretty much it. At best, Clinton was just like one of the presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, he accomplished a few things, but very little of consequence and would be completely forgotten in 50 years were it not for his impeachment. President William Jefferson Clinton is the picture of mediocrity and didn't even have the skill to get blown properly let alone be an inspirational leader.

Granted, he's not George W. Bush, but Ronald McDonald isn't John Wayne Gacy. That hardly qualifies one to have his picture on the currency. If Bush is the yardstick by which the presidency is judged, I fully expect the United States to be colonized by Cuba in the next three weeks. Pointing out the Clinton was a better president than Bush is like saying that Andrew wasn't half the hurricane Katrina was.

Having interviewed every president since McKinley, Larry King should know better. But Larry is a sycophantic half-wit in ways that make the Memphis Mafia look like the picture of quiet dignity.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: My Little Problem By: The Replacements From: All Shook Down

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2008-05-11T14:40:00.007-04:00

A STRANGE & SAVAGE LOOK INSIDE THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CLINTON

As the Soviet Red Army stormed across Poland toward the German border in the spring of 1945, Adolf Hitler called Albert Speer to the fuhrerbunker beneath his ruined Chancellery. Hitler ordered Speer to commence a "scorched earth" operation that would ruin Germany's remaining industry and civil infastructure, thereby complicating any Allied occupation. If Hitler could not keep Germany, Hitler reasoned, Germany would not be worth having.

Despite being far more of a monster than he would ever admit in public, Speer knew that the scorched earth policy would do nothing to forestall that fall of the Third Reich and serve only to cause further needless suffering among the German people. In perhaps the only courageous act of his life, Speer defied Hitler and ignored his twisted and useless order.

Adolf Hitler spent his final weeks unaware of Speer's treachery and spent his remaining days ruminating darkly that he was surrounded by "incompetence and disloyalty," a line so perfect that I've been using it in my own professional life for years now. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker and a week later, peace returned to Europe. And we all lived happily ever after.

There is no Albert Speer in the inner circle of Hillary Rodham Clinton. There is no one who would dare suggest that there is a greater good unattached to her own future. If the Democratic Party cannot be hers, they think, better that the Democratic Party be destroyed.

There's something about the House of Clinton that inspires the same brain-damaged loyalty that Hitler inspired. When President Clinton was being impeached for High Crimes and Misdemeanors, many of the same monsters who surround Hillary declared him "one of the great presidents in American history" despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary and basic common sense.

The same cultish devotion extends to Senator Clinton and it is even more baseless. To argue that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent president or has any presidential experience at all is to argue that only Juanita Jordan was capable of leading the Chicago Bulls to the playoffs after Michael retired.

Even though her dreams lie in ruins now, still smouldering from the destruction wrought in North Carolina and Indiana, her minions continue plotting their final scorched earth plan of attack from their very own bunkers in Washington and New York City. The Democratic Party, which elected Bill Clinton nine times and Hillary twice, must now be crushed in the cause of her own dashed hopes of restoration.

Hillary can count on her dwarfish lackeys in ways that Hitler could never count on Speer. To judge by the Sunday morning talk shows today, Terry McAuliffe and his demented deputies are preparing to tear the house down on top of themselves and leave it as monument to their own shattered dreams and everything that's truly ugly and wrong about the human spirit. They will finish what the Reichstag fire of 1938 began.

If you support John McCain as I do, you see the cancer of the Clintons destroying the body politic of the Democratic Party as nothing less than a beautiful thing. There will come a day when poems and songs are written about it and school children will learn of the glorious days in which we live. "A place called Hope" is being rapidly evolved into an ideaology of death, and decay assumes the scent of roses in spring as the good ship Clinton sinks, taking everything they ever proclaimed to love to the ocean floor with it.

In their nightmarish vision of governance, a season in hell for the party and one nation under McCain is far better than even one day of an Obama administration. Any world without at least one Clinton at its center is a world better off destroyed. Even today they refuse to admit that their bridge to the 21st century intersected perfectly with George W. Bush's road to nowhere.

All that is left to Hillary now is the professional collection of mutants that she calls a staff and a bedraggled army of "hardworking, Americans, white Americans" determined that Barack Obama's message of hope is drowned just as surely as the offspring of Andrea Yates and this is the only thing left that gives them joy.

I resisted comparing Clinton '08 to the final days of the Third Reich for months if only because it seemed unfair to the Nazis, who, while desperately wrong and unspeakably evil, at least fought for something they truly believed in. Instead, they campaigned on a platform of slightly more statist Bushisms and find themselves wrapped in a cocoon of their own KKK rhetoric and no other option than to destroy everything around them.

Why are they embracing a racist strategy? Because they're getting the same level of support from African Americans that President Bush did in 2004. Better for them the final fortification of elderly Aryan Volk, the same people who defended Berlin during the last days of the war.

The Democratic Party has always been a choice between cancer and polio, and the Clintons are to the party what the Sex Pistols were to music, a brief burst of nhilistic fury. And now they are choosing the "no future" option.

During those last deperate days in the bunker, Hitler is said to have admitted knowing that war as lost at Stalingrad. But he fought on and millions died needlessly to feed his messianic and craven hubris. The same can be said of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Any adult with a passing familiarity with basic math knew this race was over at the end of February when Barack Obama won 18 primaries and caucuses in a row. The Clintons are political professionals. They knew it was over then, too.

In this case, the Hitler analogy is apt. And this video might be the single most hilarious thing I've seen in a quarter century of following politics.

Video lovingly stolen from the Ace of Spades HQ

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Underneath the Bunker By: R.E.M From: Life's Rich Pageant

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2008-05-11T00:58:00.010-04:00

CINDY McCAIN WANTS YOU TO GO FUCK YOURSELF

There aren't very many 53-year-old stroke victims that I'd like to have incredibly dirty sex with, but I have to admit that Cindy McCain is right at the top of that list.

Back when the presidential primaries were something other than a fatalistic freak show for mutants like me, there was a great deal of attention given to Jeri Thompson. While Mrs. Thompson is endowed with might very well be the most formidible jugs on earth, I still prefer Cindy.

The reasons for this are many for they are legion. First, John McCain isn't a congenital loser like Jeri's husband. Second; although Fred was only the race for about a month, he managed go through something like three campaign managers. This was reportedly due to Mrs. Thompson being a world-class pain in the ass. Third, Cindy doesn't look as beaten up in the face at 53 as Jeri does at 41. Fourth and finally, Cindy McCain is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million.

Mrs. McCain is also a woman of some character. During the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, a group of mouthbreathing vermin surrogates of the Bush campaign politicized her past addiction to prescription drugs and levelled viciously unspeakable and racist slurs against her adopted daughter, Bridget. That she didn't exploit her endless financial resources to have the then-governor of Texas assassinated speaks very well of her indeed.

Furthermore, you have to admire someone who has come back from a near-fatal stroke just four years ago to the degree that you wouldn't know that she'd been ill at all without being told. That takes a phenominal amount of hard work and incredible personal courage. Regardless of partisan interest, I think we can all join together in saluting Cindy McCain for that. She might be just as tough as her husband, which is no small feat.

Also, she's hot and worth $100 million dollars. I did mention that, didn't I?

As much I appreciate attractive women with great cans and mondo bank, I also appreciate that they can pose a political problem for their office-seeking spouses. Anyone who doubts that should ask John Kerry how much Theresa, Queen of Mars, "helped" in back in 2004.

But there's a significant difference between Cindy McCain and Theresa Heinz Kerry. Whereas Theresa refused to shut the fuck up about literally swimming in ketchup profits, Cindy has kept her "fuck you money" close to her beautiful, beautiful chest. She's actually been pretty shy about the fact that she could single-handedly buy and sell any four members of the Bush family.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of voters are lacking in "fuck you money." And they tend to be awfully nosey when it comes to people who have an abundance of same.

And that's where tax returns come in. Americans in particular have something that comes awfully close to a fetish when it comes to poking through the finances of their ruling class. If you're a candidate who doesn't disclose your tax returns, you very quickly find yourself shit upon from a great height.

Dwight David Eisenhower very nearly decided not to run for president at all because he had no desire to tell the public what he had been paid for his memoir, Crusade in Europe. Of the modern presidents, only Lyndon Johnson's financial dealings have risen to the level of possible serious criminal conduct, that arising from his wife's purchase of radio and television stations as he manipulated the FCC from the senate majority leader's office to make those stations profitible beyond reason. If today's disclosure standards were in place then, LBJ would have gone to prison instead of the White House.

Financial disclosure has become little more than a voyueristic exercise that makes asshole voters feel better for absolutely no reason at all. Furthermore, it accomplishes absolutely nothing. To my knowledge, there has never been a corruption prosecution arising from disclosure requirements but there is no paucity of corruption. Disclosure requirements are one of the things that keeps smart people out of politics and it should be abolished immediately.

Of course, that'll never happen. We love humiliating those who govern us too much for that to ever happen.

Cindy McCain is about to find that out for herself.

Cindy McCain says she will never make her tax returns public even if her husband wins the White House and she becomes the first lady.

"You know, my husband and I have been married 28 years and we have filed separate tax returns for 28 years. This is a privacy issue. My husband is the candidate," Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain, said in an interview aired on NBC's "Today" on Thursday.

Asked if she would release her tax returns if she was first lady, Cindy McCain said: "No."

Mrs. McCain is in a unique position to refuse disclosure. You almost never see political spouses who file seperately from the candidate, so it almost never becomes an issue.

If you want to know what Senator McCain made last year, he'll be pleased as punch to accomodate you. He reported $405,409 in income for 2007 and paid $84,460 in federal income taxes. If you'd like to know what Cindy made, she'll very politely insist that you go fuck yourself.

Cindy's wealth is primarily inherited, so there's very little chance of a conflict of interest. And even if there was one that involved her husband, it almost certainly wouldn't come out in financial disclosure. As a member of Congress, Randy "Duke" Cunningham filed disclosure, too. According to that, Duke was as pure as the driven snow. Except that he wasn't.

Oh, and there's the small matter that Cindy McCain isn't running for a goddamned thing. In a perfect world, Mrs. McCain would hit whoever asks her about financial disclosure in the face with a vodka bottle.

Of course, things aren't going to work out that way. She's going to release her tax returns eventually. The only question is when and whether she makes it easy or hard. But make no mistake, she will end up doing it.

The Democrats have already started their clarion calls for "openness."

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Cindy McCain's refusal to release her tax returns gives the appearance of a double standard on the part of her husband.
"What is John McCain trying to hide?" Dean said in a statement. "Throughout this campaign, he has acted like his own calls for openness and accountability apply to everyone but himself. Now he thinks he can bring that same double standard to the White House."

This is patent horseshit and Howard Dean is either lying or too stupid to know the difference. You'll notice that one of his candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, categorically refuses to release the donor list to her husband's presidential library until after she's sworn in as president.

Now, some very real questions have been raised about the donors to the Clinton Library. Denise Rich, as you might remember, was reported to have made a $450,000 donation at the same time that President Clinton was considering a pardon for her ex- husband, the fugitive and traitor, Marc Rich. The Clinton Library (as opposed to his charitable foundation, which the Clintons keep playing bait and switch with) received any number of donations from people with business before the Clinton administration.

Howard Dean, like liberal fuckheads everywhere, is trying to have it both ways. Cindy McCain is a private citizen who has never held public office. Hillary Clinton is a sitting US Senator and the wife of a former president. If there's a public interest in disclosure, any reasonable person would argue that there's a far more compelling argument for disclosure from the Clinton Library.

Furthermore, under the Presidential Libraries Act, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library is owned and operated by the National Archives and Records Administration. The federal government is now a party to any and all funds that are or were raised by the former president and that makes the case for disclosure all the more compelling.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are sponsoring legislation that would compel disclosure of all donations to presidential libraries - just in time to complicate fundraising for the George Walker Bush Presidential Library. But she refuses to disclose the Clinton Library's donors before the election and Howard Dean doesn't see that as something worth mentioning.

But they'll beat the shit out of Cindy McCain endlessly and continue to keep as much of the Clintons dealings with a federally governed property as secret as they possibly can without committing a felony. The hypocrisy is fucking stunning.

Unfortunately, that's a complicated argument to make and doesn't quite fit in a 30 second ad or a bumper sticker very well - certainly not as well as "What's Cindy Hiding?" It's not fair and it's certainly not right, but it is what it is. This isn't a fight that the McCains are going to win.

Hillary got her ass kicked at Democratic debates for months over her refusal to release her tax returns before she won the nomination. Buckling to pressure, she relented and we all learned just how much lucre Bill pulled in over the last seven years. The same thing is going to happen to Cindy McCain and the McCain campaign has to know that. They can't afford to take a hit like that for months on end.

Sadly, Mrs. McCain has little other option over the long run but to cave. But I wish she didn't have to and hopefully someday someone will actually stick to an adamant refusal and tell people to mind their own fucking business once and for all.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: It's the Money That Matters By: Randy Newman From: Land of Dreams

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2008-05-10T00:58:00.012-04:00

NOTES ON TRUE LOVE LOST & WHY EVERYBODY IN CANADA IS AN ASSHOLE BUT ME

Most Canadians are pretty fucking stupid, so their dreams are limited to playing professional hockey, being a shithead like Don Cherry, or owning a Tim Hortons franchise. Canadians are a simple people with simple dreams, and I'm frankly shocked that we're a G8 country. If we didn't corner the export market in space arms, oil and comic actors, we'd be worse off than Uganda. We worship Wayne Gretzky as a god and engaged in five months of nationwide cannibalism when "The Beachcombers" was cancelled.

Canada is the kind of country where the strong are eaten and only the weak survive. Were it not for the intrinsic beauty of our reproductive organs, we would have died off as a nation long ago.

If there's anything worse than Canada, it's Quebec. Besides being "the French fact in North America", it is also a cauldron of corruption. La Belle Province is seemingly controlled by biker gangs who have childish names like "Rock Machine" and no motorcycles. This is preferable to popular democracy, which has only been able to produce life-long losers like Jean Charest. If Canadians were truly serious about making the world a better place, we'd wall off Quebec, plow their fields with salt, and drown the fuckers with their beloved Pepsi cola.

The only worthwhile things to emerge from Quebec is Leonard Cohen and Mitsou. But Maxime Bernier wants to join that esteemed company and make it a holy trinity.

Bernier is Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a notably ineffective one. This is particularly shocking in so far as Canada hasn't had a foreign policy that inspires anything other than laughter for 70 years and pretty much everything the Canadian government does springs exclusively from the fevered dreams of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

You would think that such a job would be difficult to fuck up, but Monsieur Bernier is doing yeoman's work of it. In his short time in office, he has publicly called for the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai to fire the governor of Kandahar province, Asadullah Khalid, for the type of corruption that makes him suitable only for the Liberal Party of Canada.

Since I'm not foolish enough to believe that Afghan democracy is going to accomplish anything but sadness, I'm not necessarily against calling for the removal of a corrupt bureaucrat who cannot effectively govern a place where Canadian soldiers have a nasty habit of getting dead in large numbers. What I don't support is making that demand in public because doing so never accomplishes anything productive and only serves to make us look like arrogant occupiers.

Having established that Maxime Bernier might be retarded, it would be unseemly not to point out my admiration for his skill with the ladies.

For his swearing in by my super-hot governor general as minister of foreign affairs, Bernier was accompanied by a comely fuckslut who had her beautiful jugs hanging out in a way that still makes my balls boil whenever I think about it. It was an impressive display of tits and ass and one that has earned the minister my undying respect.

As it happens, the fuckslut in question, Julie Couillard, has quite the history to accessorize her formidable ta-tas.

Tongues first wagged over Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier's striking companion at last summer's cabinet swearing-in, and Parliament Hill is buzzing anew with revelations she was once married to an outlaw biker and lived with another gangster murdered during a bloody turf war in the 1990s.

The divorced Bernier, 45, first began dating former model and aspiring actress Julie Couillard, 38, during the summer of 2007, and the pair caused a minor furor with her revealing attire at last August's cabinet ceremony. According to newspaper reports, officials in the Prime Minister's Office admonished Bernier over her choice of outfit.

I can only assume that Harper's discomfort with Mademoiselle Couillard's sexy, sexy outfit is an outgrowth of his inbred priggishness and inability to truly satisfy a woman. But pretty much everybody in Canada knows that about the prime minister. But the part about her biker history has certainly raised some eyebrows.

According to documents, trial transcripts and newspaper archives, Couillard was romantically involved with two men with strong ties to the Hells Angels biker gang, La Presse reports.

In 1995, Quebec's elite anti-biker squad stormed the house Couillard shared with her then-boyfriend Gilles Giguère, a well-known underworld figure, in a pre-dawn raid.

Couillard was questioned in connection with a murder and extortion plot allegedly involving Giguère, a Hells Angels lawyer, and a Montreal loan shark named Robert "Bob" Savard, key lieutenant to jailed Hells Angels kingpin Maurice "Mom" Boucher.

After a long interrogation, she was released, later filing a complaint to the provincial police commission. She talked of her ordeal in a 1996 interview with Allô Police, a now-defunct Montreal crime tabloid.

Couillard lived with Giguère for three years beginning in 1993, until he decided to become a police informer after being arrested with a cache of machine guns and 20 kilograms of marijuana.

But Giguère was gunned down in April of 1996, before his trial could begin. Police discovered his body in a ditch east of Montreal.

The next year, Couillard began dating Stéphane Sirois, another gangland figure who would later become her husband.

Sirois was a member of the Rockers, a Hells Angels puppet club that biker experts say was responsible for taking over drug territories in and around Montreal and eliminating the Hells Angels' competitors.

Sirois later admitted to being a member of a Rockers "baseball team" – who intimidated rivals with baseball bats and smashed up bars that refused to allow the gang to deal drugs – and testified against more than a dozen of his former associates in a 2002 mega-trial.

During that testimony, Sirois contended Boucher had presented an ultimatum: he had to choose Couillard or his gang. He chose the former, but after their 1999 divorce, Sirois became a police informant, and returned to the gang as a mole.

To my knowledge, a biker slut has never gotten into the pants of a federal cabinet minister before, and this frankly speaks well of Quebec. It's nice to see that they still have a criminal element that isn't involved in the Liberal Party's endless kickback schemes.

I'll admit that I have no small reservoir of affection for whores from Quebec. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Toronto's strippers were almost all French Canadian and were only put out of work because their Eastern European sisters are infinitely filthier.

I also spent a weekend with a girl from Montreal several years ago and learned that if you have a finger or two in their asses while you eat them out, they tend to be screamers when they come. And they do tend to come a lot. Not having had a screamer before or since, I cherish the memory. As swinish as Quebec's general population is, their women are a precious resource and should be exploited without mercy once the Great Day of Reckoning comes.

While I applaud Bernier's romantic choices without hesitation, Ottawa's churlish political and journalistic establishments are displaying what they are best known for, jealousy and stupidity.

In Ottawa, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said he had no independent confirmation of the allegations, but what he had heard caused him concern. "Certainly, Mr. Bernier needs to explain because we want to know if there were any matter of national security involved," he told reporters.

This is further evidence that Stephane Dion should shut the fuck up. Bernier is minister of foreign affairs, he's not justice minister or running the Treasury Board. What's the worst thing he can do, give Saskatchewan to the Arizona chapter of the Bandidos? And would that really be so terrible?

Christ, does Dion even like girls? It sure doesn't look like it. And that goes double for Gilles Duceppe. Unless and until either one of those sexless dwarves can demonstrate that they can handle the slutty sphincter of a trained biker whore, they should put their fucking kid gloves back on and leave the important stuff to Maxime Bernier and me. It's easy to think that you can handle a woman experienced in pulling a train of hardened, hairy criminals, but the reality is very different. Don't ask how I know that, just know that I do.

We're also learning that, besides being the greatest fuck in the world who isn't my bride-to-be, Julie seems like the kind of girl who can get a self-important cesspool like Ottawa to lighten the fuck up, if only a little.

The cabinet minister’s girlfriend always stood out in the genteel diplomatic crowd that inhabits the foreign affairs building.
Whether smoking cigarettes in an ambassador’s limousine or striding into meetings snapping bubble gum and clad in leather boots and tight jeans, Julie Couillard raised eyebrows.

The prime minister is being surprisingly cool about the whole spectacle. I always figured that if Harper were ever presented with a perfectly shaved pussy, he'd physically recoil and immediately declare martial law.

"I hear that one of my cabinet ministers has an ex-girlfriend," Mr. Harper told reporters at a hastily called scrum Thursday.

"It's none of my business, none of Mr. Duceppe's business, none of Mr. Dion's business," he said, referring to the leaders of the Liberal and Bloc Quebecois parties.

"Mr. Dion and Mr. Duceppe are quite a group of gossipy old busy-bodies," the Prime Minister added.

Harper should have concluded his remarks on the matter by asking if Dion and Duceppe are also "worthless cocksuckers", but the man is the prime minister of Canada, and apparently some things actually are beneath him. Who knew?

Of course, none of this is stopping the Liberals and the Bloc from looking extraordinarily silly and sad.

At one point, Tory MPs booed so loudly during a question by Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale that the Speaker had to intervene. Peter Milliken ruled such queries were in order.

"This is not about Madame Couillard. This is about national security," said Mr. Goodale.

"This is a fundamental issue of democracy and if the government is not prepared to let the people of Canada have their say and ask decent legitimate questions, then this government stands exposed as government that is denying fundamental democracy."

Fucking a girl who fucked a bunch of bikers is a "fundamental issue of democracy?" Really? Jesus Christ, it's getting to the point that Canadian democracy is so fragile that a gang bang might just plunge us all into the darkness of fascism.

Furthermore, Goodale is the wrong person to lead this charge. The Liberals need a recognized expert on sluttishness. By the way, where is Belinda Stronach, anyway? She'd be good at this as she could ask questions like "Mr. Speaker, did the minister ejaculate in Madame Couillard's ass? Because a man will do anything, including jeopardize the national security, for a woman who lets him do that."

Only a true dumper daredevil like Belinda knows what the stakes really are in a situation like this. Belinda knows it, Peter MacKay knows it, I know it, and now you know it, too.

Of course, the jackals in the Fourth Estate are giddy over the prospect of talking about tits and ass while pretending that it's really about something other than tits and ass. The sexual frustration of the Toronto Star's James Travers in particular is almost palpable.

It's as easy to make too much of Maxime Bernier's latest twirl in the spotlight as it is to miss the point. Who he dates is mostly important because it muddies the message he was trusted to deliver.

What "message" is Bernier's cock supposed to be delivering, Jim? "I Break for Nuns?"

Bernier's success in annoying separatists is measured by reports that Bloc mischief-making was central to the resurrection of the Julie Couillard story reporters previously explored and found wanting. While ticking off the Bloc delights patriots as well as Conservatives hoping Quebec will help push the party from minority to majority, it's slim compensation for the wreckage trailing the minister mandarins half-jokingly call "Mad Max."

High in the damage report is the Conservative law-and-order image. As unfair as it is to a woman with no criminal record, politicians in particular are judged by the company they keep and it's hard to find worse company than bikers.

I disagree. Politicians are seen in the company of journalists all the time. Most surveys show that reporters rank somewhere around the level of child molesters in the public's esteem and well below blogger scumbags like me. Something tells me that I've had filthy, nasty sex with more of my readers than James Travers has with his. Accordingly, I'm much more important than he is. Giving up the nappy dugout is much more of a personal commitment to a writer than, say, paying seventy five cents on the way to work. Just sayin'.

Worse still, the Star's own chronically wrong editorial page forcefully disagrees with its star pundit.

All of the above goes double for Stephen Maher of the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald. Maher is seemingly incapable of making a point and writes for a newspaper that probably has fewer readers than I have, which is fucking pathetic. Almost nobody is reading me at this point.

There are a few points here to remember when considering the importance of Monsieur Bernier's past-tense bumping of uglies with Madam Couillard

Maxime Bernier doesn't take a dump without a note from Stephen Harper explicitly allowing it and dictating the size and girth of the turd.

No one has managed to explain how a former fucktoy of the Quebec Hells Angels constitutes a national security threat. Has Sonny Barger allied himself with al-Qaeda without telling anyone?

Bernier is sadly no longer fucking Julie, therefore any "threat" has receded.

Stephane Dion, Gilles Duceppe, James Travers and Stephen Maher are all singularly incapable of satisfying a woman and probably aren't interested in learning. You could send all four of them to the fucking Learning Annex and none of them would be able to find the clitoris with a flashlight afterward.

Maxime Bernier used to fuck Julie Couillard. The Liberals plan on fucking the Canadian taxpayer straight into poverty for a long time to come.

This is the best scandal that can be dug up on the Tories? Really?

Have you seen her tits? Canada has no real national security policy to speak of and Mme. Couillard has fantabulous funbags. If I absolutely have to worry about something, I'd prefer to worry about something that I know for a fact exists.

I've said a lot of incredibly sexist things in this little essay and all of them happen to be true. But I'm also telling you something that the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois and the goddamned liberal media isn't - that this story isn't about national security and never was. It's a story about slutty pussy written under the pretext of national security.

If this was a serious story, the media would have been on top of it (so to be speak) when the Bloc started pimping it out months ago. And they did check it out, but decided that it just wasn't as important as the fact that Dion was going to be a coward about forcing an election for the sixth month in a row.

But Parliament is about to go out of session for the summer and, since neither Harper or Dion is going to do anything remotely interesting, pussy is as good a topic for the press gallery to write about as any.

I can't prove this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm being read by a few Canadian journalists. If that's true, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell them that they're fundamentally dishonest. When I write a story a story about cunt, at least I tell my readers (and usually in the headline) "Hey, look at this story about cunt!"

However, if you don't know the difference between biker cunt and national security and can't explain how one impacts the other, chances are you don't understand either. Julie Couillard isn't Ellen Rometsch, you dumb bastards. At best, she's a girl who spent a decade being passed around at keggers and traded for particularly good crystal meth.

It's adorable that assholes like Ralph Goodale and James Travers think that a former Hell's Angels cum dumpster is a threat to "fundamental democracy" when the all of the available evidence indicates that they themselves - and the proud and profoundly ignorant voters and readers who support them - are a much more serious threat.

The public likes being stupid and the political and journalistic classes of North American society are more than happy to keep them that way. If they can do that while writing about a girl with big tits and a well-worn cooter, all the better.

But that's just another reason that you should get all of your news from skippystalin, isn't it?

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Is She Really Going Out With Him? By: Joe Jackson From: Look Sharp!

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2008-05-09T00:06:00.004-04:00

EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND!

I'm sure that everybody has heard the sad and savage story of Josef Fritzl by now. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the matter and that opinion is almost unanimous - Josef Fritzl sure can fuck!

Granted, he choice of dates might leave something to be desired and his method of seduction is somewhat unorthodox, but like I always say during my court appearences "Who are you to judge, Judge?"

Of course, the goddamned liberal media wants to take a story of kidnapping, forcible confinement, incestuous rape and immolating the remains of a recently deceased toddler in a furnace and turn it into something .... ugly. The goddamned liberal media frequently takes beauty and makes it tawdry. Just ask Monica Lewinsky. Or that undercover cop in the stall next to Larry Craig's.

The goddamned liberal media lives for stories like this because, as world-renowned perverts and scholars of everything that truly wrong with the human spirit, they can relate to it. Now, before everybody gets their fucking knickers in a knot, I'm not saying that all journalists are twisted, child-fucking deviants, just most of them are. Between the Fritzl story and the Texas polygamy cult, I'm amazed that most reporters can stand up without holding their notebooks over their crotches. And those demented bastards want a shield law?

Well, it isn't just Richard Nixon and me who know that journalists are vermin anymore. Josef Fritzl wants you to know that he isn't real fond of them either. He knows that if this continues much longer, a guy won't be able to rape his own daughter for two or three decades without some asshole who knows how to write a pyramid story getting up in his grill about it.

Well, Mr. Fritzl is good and goddamned tired of it.

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her imprisoned in a windowless dungeon in his cellar, has complained about poor media coverage of the case.

His criticism of the international media's reporting was published in the German tabloid Bild Zeitung.

"I could have killed them all," reads the front page headline of today's Bild Zeitung. And Fritzl, dubbed a monster by the Austrian media, told his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, "I'm not a monster," according to today's report.

You might think, like I do, that "hero" is an overused word, but Josef Fritzl doesn't. And he wants you to know that he is one. Perhaps the Greatest Austrian Hero.

Fritz's lawyer has been seeing him and, according to Bild Zeitung, his client has complained to the lawyer that media coverage has been "unfair" and "completely one-sided."

And one-sidedness is perhaps the single greatest reason that reporters are assholes. They believe that locking a child in a basement and force fucking her through 7 pregnancies over the course of 24 years is the kind of story that can only have one side.

But that might be a story that has several different sides. It might just be that dad didn't have any other choice. When a parent tells a child to, say, clean his or her room, the child has to know that there are consequences if they don't. Also, a curfew is a curfew and the garbage doesn't take itself out, now does it?

Of course, the goddamned liberal media doesn't see it that way. They need a "bad guy" in almost every story involving simple family dynamics. The fucking Fourth Estate refuse to see the bright side of the Fritzl story. That leaves it to Josef to demonstrate that he's a "glass half full" guy.

"I could have killed them all, and no one would ever have known, no one would ever have found out," he reportedly told his lawyer.

Fritzl has confessed to locking up his daughter for almost 24 years, and fathering seven children with her during that time.

Three of those children, Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, had never seen sunlight until they were released from their captivity by police last month after Kerstin became seriously ill and was taken to hospital for a life-threatening disease. The young woman has since remained in a medically induced coma and is said to be in critical condition.

Look, John McCain has been warning people about the dangers of exposure to the sun for years now, and he's going to be the president of the United States. And that makes him a role model, doesn't it? Well, not only did Fritzl not kill his children / grandchildren, he saved them from the horror of melanoma.

"If it wasn't for me, Kerstin would not be alive today," Fritzl is quoted by his lawyer as saying. "It was me who made sure she was taken to hospital."

Mr. Fritzl is like an overly kinky paramedic who fathers his paitients. If stories like this existed in the 1970s, "Emergency!" would never have been cancelled and my life would have been so different.

But journalists just won't leave him alone until they take away his "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mug. It's sick, it's sad and it should be stopped.

Far be it from me to suggest that Josef Fritzl get a framed declaration of heroism from the Amstetten Parent Teacher Association, but it's the little things that the media doesn't tell you that makes all the difference in the world.

You know what else the goddamned liberal media won't tell you? That because of Joself Fritzl, Austria is famous for something other than Hitler for the first time in 70 years. And that's gotta count for something.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Steal My Kisses By: Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals From: Burn to Shine

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2008-05-08T10:09:00.007-04:00

THERE'S NO POWER LIKE WHITE POWER: REFLECTIONS ON THE SAD, STRANGE END OF HILLARY CLINTON

You know things are bad when even George McGovern can't refrain from coming out in public and declaring that you're a born loser. Previously, the former South Dakota senator only publicly walked away from someone if they had electroshock therapy.

As much as I question the assertion that either one of the Clintons are actually human, hearing this has got to hurt.

"She has run a valiant campaign. And she will remain an influential voice in the American future," he said.

But Obama has won the nomination "by any practical test" and is very close to a majority of the pledged delegates, said McGovern, who is 85. Obama moved within 200 delegates of clinching the nomination with his split decision on Tuesday of a win in North Carolina and a narrow loss in Indiana.
It's time to unite the Democratic Party, he said.

"Hillary, of course, will make the decision as to if and when she ends her campaign. But I hope that she reaches that decision soon so that we can concentrate on a unified party capable of winning the White House next November," he said.

When the only guy in history to lose 49 states to a ticket that had to resign in its entirety 21 months later tells you that the jig is up, it is the better part of wisdom to listen. Senator McGovern isn't considered an expert on much, but getting crushed like a bug is something that he seems to have invented. His advice should be studied very closely by Hillary. However, few people have accused Hillary Clinton of wisdom. An almost reptillian survival instinct, yes, but not wisdom.

That's not to say that she's stupid by any stretch of the imagination. She certainly is not. Being a woman who half the country wants to his in the mouth with a vodka bottle and getting as far as she did speaks to a not inconsiderable level of intelligence. She knows that a Clinton restoration is now mathematically impossible.

What Hillary also knows is that a Democratic nomination that isn't hers should be devalued beyond recognition for whoever does eventually win it. She knows that if she can't be president, neither can Barack Obama. After all, he's not the kind of person you want answering the phone at 3 am, now is he?

There are any number of reasons why Hillary is still in this race after Tuesday's pathetic perfomance and all of them are ridiculous.

Some folks think that she's staying in the race in the hope that some new and explosively damaging scandal erupts around Obama. No serious adult would risk their reputation and tens of millions of dollars and the unfounded possibility that there's another scandal lurking out. The only dumber thing a serious adult could do would be to continue giving such a person money. If the good Reverend Wright didn't destroy Obama, nothing will. At least not in the primaries.

Former Clinton punching bag George Stephanopolous seems to think that Clinton is trying to bully her way into the vice-presidential nomination. On the other hand, Stephanopolous is only two feet tall and can be safely ignored as all short people should be. Hillary is far too self-important to take the number two slot and she's already the presumptive 2012 nominee if Obama loses in the fall.

Furthermore, Obama isn't crazy enough to have anyone who has spent the last three months suggesting that he's unqualified to be president anywhere near him after the convention.

Even though the Clintons are congenital liars, I take them at their word about staying in the race, at least for another week or so.

The Clintons - and Bill in particular - are serious students of political history. And they know that West Virginia is up next week. Visions of 1960 must be dancing through their demented heads right about now.

The 1960 West Virginia primary is where the unholy Kennedy forces completely ruined the dreams of Hubert Humprey forever. Every dirty trick in the book was utilized in acheiving that dark goal, and sure that Bill and Hill have each and every one of the committed to memory.

If Hillary's victory in Pennsylvania was based on throwing "the kitchen sink" at Obama, West Virginia will be where the rest of the plumbing comes out.

By the way, you haven't forgotten that Barack Obama isn't fully white, have you?

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Yes there is, Hillary. Yes there is.

In case you're wondering why Hillary would say that to USA Today, you have to appreciate who actually reads that paper. USA Today's core demographic is illiterate white people who buy it because it's so colorful and shiny. In advertising, this is called narrowcasting your message. It would look bad for Clinton '08 to buy space in White Power Weekly, so USA Today is the next best choice.

But the strategy of blackening Obama up some has been the raison d'etre of the Clinton campaign of late. If white Democrats weren't naturally predisposed against voting for a black man, Hillary, Bill and Ed Rendell are going to do their damndest to convert them to the "dark side."

There is a pattern here, but not the one Hillary wants you to notice. But South Carolina and Pennsylvania sure make it hard to overlook.

The fact is that Obama can hurt Hillary badly with both blacks and liberal Democrats by bringing up the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which hurt single mothers - who are disproportionately black - and making Hillary either endorse it or further distance herself from her still-popular husband's legacy.

This isn't about winning for the Clintons anymore and hasn't been for some time. The math isn't there for Hillary to get the nomination and, barring the revelation of Obama's involvement in a sex crime, the super delegates are not going to start the second Civil War.

This is about making Obama unelectable and giving Hillary a clean shot at President McCain four years from now. Obama could use welfare reform to destroy her future in the party, but he's too married to his intellectually empty "hope" platform to do it. that precludes him from engaging Clinton's scorched earth strategy like he should.

And that's precisely why Hillary's going to win in the long run. She's going to spend the next week or so turning Barack Obama into Amos and/or Andy, withdraw before the convention, and give McCain the presidency, knowing that she's perfectly positioned to run again in four years when everybody forgets just how ugly her tactics were.

If you were wondering why I think that Obama is going to get crushed in the fall, it isn't because he's got "the Wright Stuff," although that doesn't help. If he can't beat a shrill, evil, twat of a woman like Hillary decisively, there's no saving him from the Republicans in the fall.

Unless the press reports that John McCain is running a crime family that isn't the Republican Party, this election is pretty much over.

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Piss Up a Rope By: Ween From: 12 Country Classics

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2008-05-06T22:36:00.007-04:00

JOHN BOLTON IS FEELING BOMBY

Never let it be said that President Bush is a humorless prick. In fact, his sense of humor veers toward the darkest corners of the human spirit - just like everybody's should - and this is best exemplified by his patronage of John Bolton.

Bolton, who is clearly fucking insane, opined to the masturbatory Federalist Society in 1994 that "There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

I hate to be a fucking know-it-all but there pretty clearly is a United Nations. I know this because they actually have a building. Things that don't exist ordinarily don't have a headquarters. That was the bonus question on my poly-sci final in college, if you were wondering.

But the part of Big Crazy John's thoughts on the UN that stood out was where he mused on the building losing ten floors. Particularly after another New York City landmark lost considerably more than 10 floors. You probably didn't hear about that, though. The goddamn liberal media didn't really talk about it much.

Being the scamp that he is, the president of the United States nominated Bolton to represent his country at that very building. Before that, Bolton, who never really seemed to care all that much about arms control, was the Undersecretary of state for same. So dedicated was he to the principle of arms control, he destroyed a 2001 conference dedicated to the enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention.

I think it's the mustache that makes Bolton so naughty. You should see some of the crazy shit I did when I had a shaved head and the world famous Saddam beard. I lot of people thought that I'd someday regret having Eva Amurri's tits tattooed on my chest. But I showed them by never sobering up. I didn't sober up and godfuckit, neither did Bolton. At least I hope that's what's up with John.

Anyhow, the United States Senate didn't think President Bush was particularly funny and refused to confirm Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. Bush then used a recess appointment to ensure that Bolton could only do two years of damage.

Well, now he's out of a job, and John Bolton's feeling the urge to bring the crazy back!

John Bolton, America's ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq.

Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be "far higher" if Washington took no action.
"This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we're not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do," he said. "Then the ball would be in Iran's court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops."

If you've never reached the pinnacle of international diplomacy like Bolton and me, I should tell you that only way to reverse years of bad trends in a foreign war is to bomb the country next door. It worked in Vietnam, didn't it?

And let's explore the possible hostile Iranian responses for a second. These could possibly include chemical or biological-armed ballistic missiles fired at Saudi Arabia's oil fields and refineries, flooding southern Iraq with Revolutionary Guard forces and swamping the already overwhelmed American force there, inciting Iraq's Shi'ite majority to agitate against American forces, and activating Hezbollah cells in the United States to launch massive terrorist wave attacks against the American homeland. Pretty trivial shit, actually.

If John Bolton knows anything, it is that to win one war, you almost always have to start another war. If the second war you start is with a country that is three times as big and three times as crazy as the one you're already in, all the better. If nothing else, you'll eventually find somebody who sponsors international terrorism and has WMD and an active nuclear program. And that would be nice.

Here's the problem as I see it; if you merely bomb the Iranian camps, they will move and build new ones - preferably deeper into the country. That's sort of exactly what happened when al-Qaeda's Afghanistan bases were bombed in 1998. When they were bombed in 2001, the bases were merely reconstituted in Pakistan.

Air power would only serve as an act of war against Iran and not a particularly effective one at that.

Ground forces will almost certainly be necessary to accomplish much of anything. However, if the United States had the ground forces available to attack Iran, they would have secured the border and the Iranian-trained insurgents would never have infiltrated in the first fucking place.

The interesting thing is that folks like Bolton and his Project for a New American Century cohorts spent years berating Clinton's bombing strikes as "pounding sand" and advocated an actual revolution in how international relations worked. But most of them - and Bolton in particular - were awfully shy about committing the resources necessary to change the world.

I don't have a particularly big problem with attacking Iran, provided that it's done properly and done in such a way to minimize the possibility of negative consequences, meaning a ground force commitment of about 500,000 troops. After Iraq, no sensible person should trust this administration or any of its mouthpieces to do that - or much of anything - properly.

What John Bolton is advocating is a bombing program that offers virtually no prospect of success and maximizes the potential of truly horrific consequences for the United States, its people and its international interests.

But having a giant mustache and constrantly adjusting your glasses means never having to say that you're sorry, doesn't it?

Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: November Spawned a Monster By: Morrissey From: Live at Earls Court

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