sigh

the kerry campaign is in deep trouble. for the first time in my life, i have displayed a sign endorsing a political candidate in the front window of my home. what do i get for my trouble? this: the guy whose name is printed on it is a hopeless cipher. james carville might not even be able to pull the stick back on this terminal dive, although i’m sure the struggle in the cockpit is entertaining. when that corporate shill john “f” kerry went to the grand canyon and endorsed attacking iraq, i could hear the arteries popping in howard dean’s cerebellum. this tweedledum do-nothing senator is a tragedy of biblical proportions. he leaves no stone unturned in his search for ways to squander the presumably unbeatable advantage of being the candidate who can read.

by all rights, this kerry campaign is an epochal display of incompetence. today, the right is the easiest of targets. they are looking a lot meaner, greedier and more treasonous than usual. busybody suburban matriarchs wear purple-heart band-aids on their flabby forearms without a trace of irony or a pause for the purple hearts coming back from iraq in bags and wheelchairs. thousands dead and maimed, but not from going after bin laden. this turd alone is but the flagship of a punchbowl fleet encompassing haliburton, valerie plame, ahmed chalabi, wmd, the bin laden family, …the list is endless, like the colored handkerchiefs yanked by magicians.

yet, what’s that sound? it’s john kerry, dunking in his cup for his third helping of punch. “me too” he eagerly says. “see? i’m just like you, america. i can’t tell brown people apart, either.”

even america’s bloodthirstiest voters know the coach called the wrong plays after 9/11. some of them are even aware that it wasn’t really the coach, but the offensive coordinator who got us to this point. in the terror bowl, we’re down by two, it’s third and long, we’re on our eighteen and there’s 2:11 left. on the sidelines, bush and cheney won’t get off their cellphones to focus on killing the fundamentalists in afghanistan, they’re too busy with iraq to respond to 9/11. it’s plain for all to see.

kerry’s response?

mmm, good punch.

Typewriters

I have used typewriters. In 1972, when I was five years old, I used to bang on my dad’s old Underwood, use up the ribbon and get him all ticked off.

As much as I need to see George Bush run out of Washington on a rail, the recent case of CBS news producing this document and claiming that it was created in 1972, and therefore on a typewriter should never sway anybody’s opinion about the president’s military service. The document is a fraud. Shame on CBS news executives, editors and reporters for not resigning en masse over being duped so easily.

Even though it was enough to trick CBS News, this document is not even a skillful forgery. One look at the typeface is all it takes. Back in “the day” typewriters overwhelmingly used one of two basic typefaces, “pica” and “elite.” The one used in this document is neither. It looks instead like the font named Times New Roman, which is the default serif font used by Microsoft Word.

1972 had Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew, and other legendary Republican criminals walking the earth. It did not yet have Bill Gates.

I’m getting older and everybody’s getting dumber.

let’s review

okay, a few days before the us invaded iraq, at the peak of the war fever, at the exact moment the us was getting comfy with the idea to take some payback for 9/11, this blog made a few bold statements and predictions. we are more than 13 months later on; lets’ see how we did.

in this blog 13 months ago:

iraq did not destroy the world trade center.

since then:

http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/6797311.htm?1c

score: this blog 1 for 1

13 months ago:

[instead of iraq, let's examine the saudis.] at least 12 and possibly 17 of the 20 hijackers came from saudi arabia. osama bin laden came from saudi arabia. church and state are one and the same in saudi arabia. the holiest cities in islam are part of saudi arabia with zero degree of separation.

since then:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/948zywaf.asp

score: this blog 2 for 2

13 months ago:

iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were given to them by american corporations!

since then:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/22/60minutes/main613266.shtml
(note the bit about rumsfeld playing the gladhanding chemical weapons dealer to his pal saddam. i can’t WAIT for this trial.)

score: this blog 3 for 3

13 months ago:

it’s been decades since any president has truly been the commander in chief of the military-industrial complex of the usa.

since then:

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=43830

score: SAF blog 3 for 4. i’m not scoring this as a hit because the premise of my statement is still without explicit support that i can easily dredge up. but bush testifying before the 9/11 commission with cheney’s hand up his ass should illustrate how truly vacated the chief executive can really be, which remains an important point.

13 months ago:

iraq will be in huge risk of falling apart into bloody pieces as yugoslavia and russia did without the iron heel of [hussein] in charge…in order to not make the region much more unstable, the us will need to preserve the apparatus of repressive dictatorship even after we kill the dictator.

since then:

http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/news/war/7092677.htm

this blog: 4 for 5

you know, it’s a sad state of affairs when journalism has degraded itself as a profession so thoroughly that a rock band blog will tell you what the fuck is happening with more accuracy and prescience than any major media outlet.

if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it must be profound conflict of interest

contemporary american politics are like latte’: the scum rises to the top. in an era marked by unprecedented derogation of duty by top public officials and the military, only the most egregious abuses of office at the very highest levels even make it past my transom these days. here’s the newest one.

fact: vice-president dick cheney has sealed records pertaining to the formulation of the bush administration’s energy policy. in doing so, the proceedings at these meetings between himself, administration officials and energy industry leaders have been made secret. the vice president doesn’t trust the public to know what oil company said what to whom at these meetings.

fact: the vice-president has many personal ties to the energy industry as well as the defense contracting / construction industries.

fact: the vice-president, while sitting in the second-highest office in the land, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks from his former company, a defense contractor named haliburton.

fact: the president, while campaigning in 2000, used the private jet of kenneth lay (ceo of the disgraced enron corporation)

inference: the texas-based energy and construction industry has lots of friends in the white house. the most famously corrupt of these companies, enron, was so chummy with g.w. bush, the ceo lent him his private jet to help him get elected.

fact: the vice-president is being sued by watchog and environmental groups to unseal the records of those energy policy meetings. these groups are rightly concerned about the vice-president’s secrecy combined with his financial ties to the oil and energy industry. the lawsuit has proceeded to the u.s. supreme court, where it will be heard next month.

inference: the u.s. supreme court will take seriously the matter of the vice-president’s secrecy and will act on behalf of anyone not benefiting from any sweet deals cut at these secret meetings - in other words, act on behalf of the american people.

horrible, sickening fact defeating the previous inferece: u.s. supreme court justice anton scalia and vice-president dick cheney just went on a duck hunting trip together in louisiana.
i bet none of this makes much difference to the republicans in your workplace or family. because it’s clear that right now, we are in the middle of a grand experiment in distraction - how much can a corrupt administration get away with, anyway?

the real question is: what can’t they get away with?

retaliatory haiku

the television won’t shut itself off, and so i have been bathing in its blue radiation. it’s horrible aura darkens the circles under my eyes and keeps me reeling. a glass teat squirting its high-calorie low-protein mush into my living room. it’s almost embarrassing, nearly obscene. but you have to give the people who make this stuff credit for having world-class imaginations.

for example, there’s this great show on now about an austrian, a philandering son of a nazi who achieves the governorship of california. exquisite fancy! there’s also this elaborate “fantasy baseball” show that comes on every few evenings where they pose the question “what if the chicago cubs didn’t suck?” delicious! there’s also this amazing documentary series about the band califoneand their travels on the road.

often, there’s lots and lots of smaller screens on the screen where you can see the heads of people inside. you hear the heads yap, a torrent of steady yammering about this and about that. and then some more about this, then that. i think its supposed to be news, but some of these people are so full of their own dump, you cannot fail to be entertained.

the parade of television personalities is a very long one, dominated by jingoist rhetoric and flag-draped distraction. the only sane response to this interminable procession of babble is retaliatory haiku.

ann coulter

thin yellow tresses
unmussed by any helmet
her spittle cries war

rush limbaugh

chika-chicka-chick
hear the little maracas?
painkiller bottles

cokie roberts

nostrils akimbo
an insider inside her
and inside him, scotch

sean hannity

wally george’s wit
adolf eichmann’s compassion
little richard’s tact

robert novak

underneath the bridge
lived an obedient troll
who dabbled in treason

bill o’reilly

hippies are okay
maybe kind of lost, sure, but
at least they’re not you

oh, and about this fucking war

look:

1) iraq did not destroy the world trade center. 7th-century islamic fundamentalists did. iraq does not have a population of islamic fundamentalists any more than stalinist russia had a population of religious fundamentalists; iraq is a brutal and efficiently repressive dictatorship, but it is a secular dictatorship. in order for that mustached stalin-appreciating asswipe to stay in power as he has for the last 24 years, the last thing he can allow is iraqis who value allah more than they value saddam. so wake the fuck up.

2) at least 12 and possibly 17 of the 20 hijackers came from saudi arabia. osama bin laden came from saudi arabia. church and state are one and the same in saudi arabia. the holiest cities in islam are part of saudi arabia with zero degree of separation. in the videotape of bin laden bragging ofthe attacks to his pals in afghanistan, sympathetic saudi religious leaders are named. 7th-century fundamentalists come from 7th-century governments, such as the oligarchy that is saudi arabia. do the math.

3) iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were given to them by american corporations! when iraq’s neighbor iran underwent a religious fundamentalist revolutionin 1979, hussein, threatened by the religious influence, went to war with them almost immediately and our government allowed iraq chemical and biolgical agents to use to kill iranians! physician, heal thyself!

4) if i hear one more lefty idiot telling me that i caused all of this by voting for ralph nader in the 2000 election, i’m gonna start squeezing throats. it’s been decades since any president has truly been the commander in chief of the military-industrial complex of the usa. the last (and really, the only) president to warn the public about this was dwight eisenhower on his way out of office. what, do you think the guy who won world war II had limited credibility about this? what, you think the us government has become less beholden to private interests since the fifties? you think the dead silence on this issue by every successive president is because the problem went away? you think al gore wasn’t bought and paid for? you’re dreaming.

5) assuming the us kicks hussein out of bagdhad without needing three to ten times the number of combat troops currently marshalled (can anyone say selective service?) iraq will be in huge risk of falling apart into bloody pieces as yugoslavia and russia did without the iron heel of the head killer in charge. make no mistake, in order to not make the region much more unstable, the us will need to preserve the apparatus of repressive dictatorship even after we kill the dictator. consider this: as hanna arendt writes in her excellent book about nazi germany and soviet russia the origins of totalitarianism, in 1963, 18 years after the fall of nazi germany, there were 11,500 judges sitting on the bench in the democratic part of the country. 5,000 of these judges were active in the courts under hitler - and the nazis were in power for only 12 years -the ba’ath party have been running iraq for 35 years! run away! get out! stop!