Friday Notes:

A Link, a Palpable Link!!

Dimmy Karras is now linking to the Chimes at Midnight (aka "The Little Blog that Cried").
For that I am profoundly grateful.
If this keeps up I just know Chimes at Midnight will surge past the "Kitchen Secrets of Angola State Prison" blog.
:)

Meanwhile....

Senator Rick "High Pitched Rich" Santorum showed up on the Imus Program this morning.
He manfully concealed his disappointment with Toomey's loss to Spector in the Pennsylvania GOP Primary.
Santorum also struggled unsuccessfully to keep up with his beloved President's latest evasions and revisions on the Iraq War.
Rick sounded downright surprised to learn the President had admitted there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the Al Queda Network.
La Famiglia Arbusto's policy flip flops are coming in too fast-n-furious for even the senate's rising young demagogue.
Oh he tried to the change subject...half heartedly implying a gay relationship between Imus and his candidate Senator John Kerry.
In an uncharacteristic burst of tastefulness the ancient radio golem cut Santorum off and croaked away about Bush's "admission" that there was no link between Saddam and Osama Bin-Laden.
In short the dogs days of Summer have come early for this GOP Vice Presidential wannabee.

And....
In congressional testimony yesterday Paul Wolfowitz was reduced to guessing the number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq.
Predictably everyone is up in arms about this arrogant spectacle....but lets face it, Paul is already conjuring with the conquest of Syria or maybe the Moon and can't be bothered with petty details like that.

But at the end of the day....
It seems Massachusetts National Guard Adjunct General George W. Keefe is in dutch with state democrats.
It seems the General has been passing around a joking e-mail that refers to the upcoming democratic national convention as hosting "terrorist appeasement workshop" (among other things including the usual crap about an "opening flag-burning ceremony).
In sum the usual crap from aging freepers and campus conservative bundists-the very cream of the Kolobian Viceroy's best-n-brightest.
This is less an indictment of the National Guard's mentality and more a revealing glimpse of the sort of bullshit the Romney admin trafficks in every day behind it's gladhanding rictus of reform.
Yez can read all about it here:
If the link doesn't work just go to the Herald's website, poke around, and curse my lack of skill at putting up good reliable links if you like.
:)
See you monday.
Elias

The Great Iraq Flip Flop...

FIRST...we were going into Iraq because it was an imminent threat armed with weapons of mass destruction.
THEN...the notion that our successful invasion was "monocausal" (a dee-lightful neologism straight out of the punditariat's revised lexicon of disdainspeak) was derided in the post coital glow of victory
Anyway those weapons of mass destruction were sure to turn up once Chalabi created a democratic government in Baghdad-didn't all the US columnists say so?
MEANWHILE...The President got all tarted up in a real naval aviator's flight suit and flew off to the carrier Abraham Lincoln and sneered triumphantly under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished".
Don Imus, Mike Barnicle, and a host of sad naive commentators all but publicly masturbated at this edifying spectacle.
THEN...violence flared up and up compelling our forces to shoot em' up, that is when we weren't passing out bread or negotiating with fiery wowser Imams for the sake of our own security.
WHICH...only inflamed the likes of Sadr etcetera to escalate the situation, win over the street, and present the Imams, wowsers and pro-Iran factions with a fait accompli.
SO...While our brave boys and girls are getting shot at on behalf of NO democratic solution and NO discernible WMDs...this administration dithers, babbles like a retardate, and starts recruiting Saddam's old Baathist veterans to help keep the peace.
APPARENTLY...these liberty loving worthies will be the loyal democratic cohort that'll form a counterweight to the religious fanatics and armed militias of Islamic wowserism.
SO...I ask you all....how long before we trash the feeble dilettantes on the Iraqi National Council and simply bring Saddam back to run this miserable god-awful shit-house?
***
The truth is, we have no Iraq policy.
Whenever Bush gets backed into a corner on this, he literally starts up with the glossolalia or else throws out a few grudging policy notions cribbed from John Kerry and goes on vacation.
What we have instead of a policy, is a series of fond delusional hopes all hanging off a calendar date that will more than likely simply mark the start of general uprising in Iraq.
If Newsweek is to be believed, we are feeding soldiers into this conflict that are indifferently trained and worse, poorly equipped.
Within a month, the Pentagon will likely ask for even more troops for this catastrophe....which promises more and more casualties as the summer wears on.
I think most Americans are waiting to see if the June 30th deadline is kept.
However given what we've seen to date, the violence will simply continue because that is the Iraqi factions way of pushing towards a full coalition pull out.
At some point after more soldiers are killed for no reason, Bush will simply pull in his horns and try in his clumsy arrogant way to internationalize the whole mess.
By then it will be too late though....the factions will be on the march and naught will keep them at bay.
After that the real game will be afoot as to who seizes power in Iraq for all times to come.
Iraq may well fall apart like the Sudan or Yugoslavia in due course and it will be a source of misery, fear, violence, terrorists, and refugees for a long long time to come no matter who gets elected this fall.
And yet somehow John Kerry is derided as a flip-flopper....

Sick
Demented
Typical...

So how long before...

young Robert Hughes, the teenaged son of former Bush Family retainer Karen Hughes, joins the army and decamps for Iraq?
Yeah I know it's a cheap shot but it is to be expected given the way his battle-ax of a mother criticized John Kerry's war record and then started equating pro-choicers with terrorists.
In other words its April in an election year and the GOP is waving every bloody shirt it can lay it's filthy mitts on.
Poor Robert, if his mother keeps sounding off like that, Fallujah by way of the First Cavalry, will seem like a warm and inviting place.
Karen Hughes-in all her brutish glory is a handy example of the spiritual rot that pervades the GOP in particular and movement conservatism in general.
Ousted by Karl Rove back in 2002, Karen made all the embarrassing Betty Crocker noises asserting that she wanted to go back to Texas and be near her family-especially her teenaged son Robert.
Quote the olde misanthrope, what rubbish!
She'd still be on the White House staff today if Rove hadn't forced her out-possibly with the connivance of Dick Cheney.
This notion that her poor darling son somehow wants his momma underfoot is sheer nonsense...no sane boy of the 21st century wants a old conservative harpy like Karen around!
Between the lectures at breakfast about "Robert E. Lee's leadership principles" and the daily diet of Pastor John Hagee it has to be a nightmare life for young Robert.
Hell my mother was a Stevenson democrat and in my fourteenth year I was rotten glad when she got a full time job two towns away.
That Betty Crockerism is a ritual of abasement all conservative women (no matter how powerful or autocratic) must go through.
La Famiglia Arbusto excells at this sort of silly formalism-and it will be the downfall of the modern GOP mark my words.
Meanwhile, look for the kid to "jine up"or at least sign with a decorous Texas Air National Guard unit...one with champagne brunches on Sunday and tasteful barracks.
Hey ever since the NFL's Pat Tillman bought it in Afghanistan, the heat has been on these teen Republicans to put their money where there mouth is.
:)
Well no, none of these pampered minicons have come under any pressure to join the army-who am I kidding?
But it is nice to think about nevertheless.

Is Mitt Romney a classically charismatic leader?

Fatally, I asked myself this question over vacation last week....thus here we are,back ruminating about power and charisma...again.
:)
On the face of it Romney has few charismatic attributes.
He is at best an indifferent speaker,unctuous and insincere, prone to mind-numbing "power point" presentations.
On the stump, Mitt is no Pitchfork Ben Tillman.
His pattern runs to droning and grinning, droning and grinning...
Moreover the reform ethos he claims as his own has a fairly low key leadership tradition here in the Bay State.
As I've said before, Romney's "reform agenda" is naught but a windy rhetorical exercise designed to cloak a fairly unoriginal brand of corporate state politics.
In an rhetorical sense, Romney the leader offers less than any of his three GOP predecessors.
All charismatic political figures offer a kind of "leadership myth"....with Reagan it was his survival of an assassination attempt, with the current President it is a sort of self-selected cowboy fighter jock hybrid....or at least that is what is on offer this week.
Even John Kerry offers us a narrative composed of his war-wounds and principled opposition to the Viet Nam War...something for everyone it seems.
What does Romney offer by way of a leadership myth?
His stalwart battle to reduce price gouging at the souvenir shops during the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics....
Paltry stuff by way of heroism.
Romney is a bit of a demagogue though...he is certainly exploiting the gay marriage thing for the maximum emotional advantage.
However he is doing it in a passive-aggressive legalistic fashion....there is little fiery zeal in his whining demands that the legislature permit him to personally lobby the SJC.
That could change though, as we move along to the fall campaign there will be ample opportunities for bombastic rhetoric from the Governor and his hand selected lower level candidates.
"Saving" the state for "traditional marriage" is a pretty potent leadership myth and a juicier issue than mere reform.
However the issue doesn't create charisma, it's charisma that makes the issue resonate.
Here Romney falls short.
I think Romney would like to govern via charisma, but his only hope after fourteen months in office is to simply buy that style of leadership wholesale in the fashion of his patron George Bush Jr.
This commodification of charismatic leadership I call pseudo-charisma...something he will need when it comes time spew and rant in the snows of New Hampshire.
Just remember Mitt, pseudo charisma costs money, just ask Karl Rove.

Otherwise despite an impressive package Romney just doesn't have the real stuff.
However, the matter requires observation...

A retraction…

Several months ago, I noted wrongly that Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory was the late Mary McGrory’s son.
I was wrong, in fact they are cousins according to Ms. McGrory’s obit last week.
Whoops…what can I say?
I’m sorry.
Chimes at Midnight is merely crude self-edited ideological warfare…mistakes (to paraphrase Saint Reagan the simpleminded) are made.
I still think Brian is a tedious Mickey Spillane type scribbler…
:)

In yesterday’s Globe…

I noticed the following headline:
“Romney: gay outsiders can’t marry in Ma.”

Apparently, the only thing confirmed outsiders can do in Massachusetts is run for Governor.
IF they have the money that is…

Good Grief, the Kolobian Viceroy can’t shut his yap about gay marriage for nary a moment! Every day he has to shout long and loud about the perils of faggotry so that the wowsers of Alabama can hear him properly.
You wouldn’t mind so much but the 1913 law Governor Decaf is invoking was designed to prevent inter-racial marriage…a very controversial issue indeed back in the palmy days of Woodrow Wilson.
Ya see the irony here?
Why do we let this shameless lout run amok like this?
The state is bedeviled with a legislature drunk on it’s own pseudo-pedagogy, the unemployment rate creeps ever higher, the bureaucracy is crammed with inert buffoons, and the municipalities are going bust one after another?
THIS is reform?
THESE are the reformers?
Dear Ghod I’m beginning to long for the enlightened rule of provincial insiders like Frank Sargent and Maurice Tobin.
At least THEY were uncursed with national ambitions a mere eighteen months into their first terms of office!

Sick
Demented
Typical

Friday Notes:

Isn't it funny to see that behind all the bluster, utopian illusions, and threats, basically Bush's current Iraq policy has been entirely cribbed from John Kerry?
Bush wants to bring in the U.N. expand the coalition partnerships, de-emphasizes American participation...all stuff suggested by John Kerry months ago.
It is just that Bush is doing a botched half-assed job of implementing these options.
It is hardly a radical proposal, mostly it is designed to give us some breathing space while we try to patch together a sensible diplomatic policy for the region.
Hell, the Syrians claim Bush has been soliciting their help in the current crisis...what does that tell you?
However, just who in La Famiglia Arbusto is supposed to round up these fresh partners?...Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney?
All defeated men in one way or another, bereft of credibility and ideas.
Meanwhile, as seen in his catastrophic press conference this week, even Bush has no clue as to whom we are handing over sovereignty in Iraq come June.
Either Cheney and Wolfowitz haven't told him yet or else no one really knows.
So truly, the worst is yet to come.

And on that note, I go on vacation next week...this blog will be infrequently updated if at all.
But I'll be back Monday the 26th so don't worry.
That having been said, if it all goes to smash, and I don't come back...try to remember I was once an eagle.
:)

Item:

The Kolobian Viceroy is seemingly demanding the state legislature declare him an "attorney" so that he can argument for a stay in the gay marriage decision before the SJC.
Or rather he wants to appoint what amounts to a special counsel or to argue his fag bashing routine and bypass the AG entirely.
THIS is how badly Governor Decaf needs to play to his beloved out of state wowsers, he'll over turn any statute in order to further their interests at the expense of the commonwealth's citizenry.
As I've blogged earlier, as the law currently reads, only the Attorney General can represent the Governor before Supreme Judicial Court and Reilly ain't cooperating.
Well, why not demand the lege abolish the AG's office entirely and vote Romney a nice Laurel Crown while they are at it?
It is all of the same thing.

Are we to re-write the laws of Massachusetts so that Romney can belabor an issue ad infinitum?
Does Romney have any respect at all for the democratic process?
Is there anything in his sworn oath as Governor about kowtowing to powerful out of state fanatics?
The reign of the monocausal GOP hack is now complete, if George Bush's answer to every question is a tax cut, and Romney's sole response is a craven assault on the rights and lives of a sexual minority.
Sick
Demented
Typical

I caught about...

a half hour of the President's much touted prime time press conference last night.
If those thirty minutes are indicative of the Commander in Chief's mindset, this country is in so much more trouble than I had originally believed.
Chimes at Midnight, (aka "The Little Blog that Cried") is proudly partisan and makes no bones about it's daily dose of ideological warfare.
But good grief, all due sniping aside, what an asinine, inane, whining, incoherent, disheveled, self pitying press conference!
THIS is Karl Rove's political thoroughbred???
George Bush Jr. that "Sea Biscuit" of the pols, famously relentless on message and reliably folksy to a fault?
He sounded like a pleased teachable from the Fernald School fuh crissakes!
And that was when he wasn't spouting dangerous utopian nonsense, repeating himself like a broken record and affecting weird facial expressions that bespoke Bush's boredom with his own mendacity.
Good Ghod it was an embarrassingly amateurish performance even by Bush Jr. standards.
What did the President start hallucinating or something...the press corpse turned into giant talking Jack Daniels bottle before his eyes?
No wonder he looked so scared and befuddled!
JANE SWIFT could've done a better job of fielding those questions!
And Jingle Money was dumber than nine chickens!

Meanwhile, as the President stumbled through this disastrous performance (at one point he referred to Donald Rumsfeld as "The Secretary of State") off to one side sat the Three Horsemen of Disaster, battered shopworn Andy Card, bloated Karl Rove, and Dr. Condoleeza Rice her face an immobile mask of pure hatred.

But ah, hatred directed at whom, the White House Press corpse that was peppering Bush with simple questions that the President evaded or refused to answer?

Dr. Rice was probably fantasizing like a demented schoolgirl about the Marine Corps barging in and bayoneting the entire White House Press Corps on live TV. Then a hunky Marine Private puts a tiara on her head and proclaims the National Security Advisor "queen of the marines"....
Meanwhile in the background her President keeps droning on about a free Iraq with a free market and plenty of school vouchers for the chillun' and loads of yummy tax breaks.

Or maybe Dr. Rice has come to loathe the President, the author of all her present woes?

I'll be Condi was wishing she was back at Stanford grading and basking in the adulation of undergraduate co-eds.
Hell I think Condi was wishing last night she was Dejah Thoris, riding her six legged thoat across the martian landscape.
Really ANYTHING to take her mind off this feeble, repetitive presidential wretch to whom she is manacled for the duration.

I don't think that the President answered one question honestly in the entire half hour increment that I saw.
Mostly he indulged clumsy evasions or else babbled incoherently when faced with a particularly difficult inquiry.
When asked why he was going before the 9-11 commission accompanied by the Vice President, Bush simply refused to answer at all.
Ghod look what the 9-11 Commission has to look forward to, the absolute disintegration of a sitting President of the United States right before their eyes.
If we won't answer the press' questions in a relevant engaged fashion...how will he do when the commission lights into him?
Geez maybe Cheney should've gone out there with him last night?
If this is the level Bush is functioning at, then the press corpse is well within it's rights to start skipping these new conferences entirely.
Just let the guy wallow in cliches on national television and be done with it.
He isn't answering the questions anyway so why bother?

Such is the Kingdom of Heaven
On the congressionally licenses airwaves
And elsewhere
4-14-04
1:15pm EST
God Save the Republic
God Save the Commonwealth

The President's Iraq policy is in ruins...

cautioned Condi did exactly nothing for her leader's plummeting poll numbers.
Hence Bush sighs, swears, and cuts short another vacation to fly back to DC for a rare press conference.
Normally this would be an option fraught with peril for the famously incoherent George Bush Jr....But with spineless cretins like the New York Times' Elisabeth familiar in the press corpse, his majesty can look forward to an easy time of it.
It is a measure of Bush's personal contempt for the White House press contingent that he is appearing sans the comforting presence of his nominal vice presidential puppet master Dick Cheney.
Clearly this is one situation that President Pinocchio can handle all by himself like a big boy.
No doubt, Bush will reiterate his asinine and embarrassing "we didn't know nuthin'" defense regarding the 8-6-01 PDB.
It is not about knowing anything though, it is about caring and by all estimates La Famiglia Arbusto couldn't have cared less about terrorism prior to the World Trade Center attacks on 9-11.
They thought Al Queda was a paltry Clinton-era feelgood sort of a threat....stuff and nonsense compared to the looming menace of Russia's aging collection of liquid fueled ICBM's.
A threat so terrifying it required a multi-billion dollar revival of strategice defense to deal with it.
Or so Dr. Rice was going to assert that very day in a never used speech.
Thus the planes sailed into the buildings....
Alas this is La Famiglia Arbusto we are talking about, their greatest weakness is that none of them can ever ever admit they were wrong or even complacent.
This character flaw will be Bush's downfall, either this year or a thousand days from now...but it will count on it.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Easter in the romantic village of Menotomy

NPR had a piece on Friday afternoon about the last of the lady's milliners.
Y'know hat-makers....milliners still abound in Washington DC thanks to the black church the tradition of dressing up like "God's People" on Sunday.
So you can just imagine the pressure is really on the perfect hat to top off an Easter in D.C.
The woman they interviewed was wildly enthusiastic about her work and drew elegant parallels between an ornate hat and the bliss of the kingdom to come.
Fair enough, at least the work isn't be outsourced to slave labor camps in Thailand.
Of course in my parish, God's People pretty much come to the Lord's House dressed to pull up weeds in the front yard.
Even the altar boys wear bulky sneakers neath' their linen robes.
I didn't see too many Easter bonnets in the pews...and the few that I saw were firmly planted on the heads of girls under the age of five.
Which is still an age that can't put up much of fight about holiday millinery.
Meanwhile Momma is still dressed in flats-n-slacks all set off with the intriguing look of a royal blue sweatshirt...she looks like she'll be taking the dog for a walk after mass or something.
Well what of it?
The R.C.C. is a mass religious phenomenon, it works on volume-volume-volume, there has never been a big dress up tradition therein.
Still, I felt a little foolish in my suit coat and tie...but then I'm a traditionalist living up to a nonexistent tradition.
Otherwise the homily was appropriately platitudinous and no one got hurt.
***
Meanwhile the Boston Globe breathlessly reported this morning the presidential candidate John Kerry received the Eucharist at his favored' church yesterday.
As it turns out, O'Malley can rail against pro-choice Catholics and insist they much skip communion til they are in line with church doctrine....but at the same time the dioceses makes it a policy not to refuse communion to individuals.
So we are back to passive aggression in the pulpit I guess.
I still think O'Malley is sucking up to the R.N.C. on some level.
Last summer he singled out pro-choice Catholics as being outside church teachings and therefore must forego the Eucharist.
The archbishop had nothing to say though in regards to the equally numerous pro death penalty R.C.'s out there...

Just another glorious day in the Bay State my friends...

The obligatory Good Friday Donald Trump column...

The internet is a marvelous thing, typing in the pejorative phrase "short fingered vulgarian" on the google search engine yields dozens of sites about real estate developer Donald Trump.
Yup, the Donald himself the man who brought bombast home to American architecture.
Purists out there will also recall the publicity obsessed Trump is also host and executive producer of "The Apprentice" a so called reality show wherein aspiring managers compete for a single cushy slot in the Trump High Command.
"The Apprentice" is fascinating for all the wrong reasons, Trump (a wench grabbing lout by all estimates) seems to have chosen the female contestants on their looks and the male aspirants on their ability to spout the latest business cliches like Old Faithful.
In sum, a dismal collection of shiny Babbits chasing a buck sans shame or dignity.
Just another day in the Trump Empire, which is a vast expanse of tasteless buildings, rhetorical superlatives, and promissory notes...all presided over by that bloated billionaire vulgarian whose pinched constipated look recalls the Emperor Vespasian.
My favorite part of the show are the bumpers wherein Trump looks into the camera narrows his beady little eyes and belches some Dale Carnegie bromides for the delectation of aspiring moguls in the audience. In an economy about equally divided between near bankrupt software designers and soda jerks at Dairy Queen these paeans of praise to "being passionate about what you do" are irony to put Turgenev to shame.

Hell no less a journal than Fortune Magazine can't seem to properly estimate the exact extent of Trump's wealth due to his plethora of half consummated deals, debt, and fluctuating real estate values.
In the end that vast fortune could all be hot air and may well be as Trump bids to restructure the huge debt he has incurred whilst fruitlessly attempting to conquer the gaming business.
Frankly, if I was one of Trump's offspring I'd save every penny from my allowance or trust fund, take the subway everywhere and clip coupons like a madman. The time may come when there will be less money there than meets the eye.
Well, what of it there is always some mega-clown stalking the earth playing a gleeful god with either their investors money or public revenues.
In the 1920's it was Jimmy Walker the funster Mayor of New York....in the 1950's it was wily bipolar Earle K. Long then governor of Louisiana.
And lets not forget William Randolph Hearst and freakish gigantism that was his "San Simeon" estate.
Trump is merely another free market embodiment of long cherished profligate tendencies....we sigh and chuckle over his neronian excesses even as he turns the New York skyline into what amounts to a garish "Mattel Super City" toy.

Crosses to Bear, Ballots to bless....

Yesterday, it was reported in the Boston Globe that Archbishop O'Malley called our culture "a hostile alien environment" for American Catholics.
Yowza!
No beating around the bush with this boy-o is there?
There is a sturdy myth among liberals, first enunciated by Sinclair Lewis that the Catholic Church is a less puritanical institution than is generally suspected.
Similarly among educated Catholics there is persistent and irrational belief that priest who come out of the individual orders are a little more reasonable and rational than the usual diocesan hangers-on.
O'Malley for example is a Franciscan Friar who did not come up through the ranks of the Boston dioceses...but thanks to this recent hyperbolic effusion he has blown to hell that ridiculous myth of sectarian reasonability.
I don't even know why I subscribed to this legendary notion, the worst, most dogmatic ideologue at the teensy Catholic college I attended was my ethics professor, a full time Franciscan Friar.
So seems that the Archbishop in addition to shoring up his fast shrinking dioceses has decided to become a Catholic cultural warrior a'la Pat Buchanan.
Hence the crazed cult-like hyperbole and hysterics.
It would seem then that Archbishop O'Malley is playing to GOP oriented catholic cultural conservatives who want to impose their secular rightical chic agenda on the R.C.C.
That is what it comes down to in my humble opinion.
It is not revealed religion penetrating politics, it is a debased strain of modern politics that is manipulating religious institutions.
So what remains is, a mind numbing debate from within and without the church as to whether or not the Archbishop will refuse John Kerry communion on the grounds of his apostasy regarding abortion etc.
If this happens, then count on it like his corrupt and egomaniacal predecessor Bernard Cardinal Law, O'Malley will have lined himself up good and early with the wowser wing of the GOP.
So the question comes down to this, shall the Boston dioceses police the conscience of liberal catholics on behalf of the GOP's entirely secular agenda?
Are we, practicing Catholics and non practicing alike, subordinated to the holy see or the RNC?
Has the RNC somehow joined the congregation for the propagation of the faith?
It must have or else why would O'Malley be taking what amounts to orders from Ed Gillespie?
On the other hand, I don't see Archbishop O'Malley cabling the ranking Roman Catholic prelate in Toronto asking him to refuse communion to former governor Cellucci on grounds that his pro-death penalty stance placed him outside the catholic community.
And you damn well won't see O'Malley doing anything like that either.
Cause' Pope Ed wouldn't like it.

Time is the fire in which we all burn...

As the swallows return to Capistrano as a dog returneth to it's vomit, so does "Time" Magazine linger over revealed religion every god damned Easter.
Yup, yew guessed it, Time has put poor old Jesus on the cover.
That would be God's beatnik son the one who got fresh with the Sanhedrin, dumb kid cheesed off the centurions and look what happened?
Well it is about time, the Son of Man was perishing for lack of publicity.
I just love it when Time feels it has to get dressed up in it's Sunday best and gwan down to the church to hear the preachin'....there is nothing more unintentionally funny for the money.
Nonetheless all the Jesus-talk in the world can't disguise the fact that Time (to quote the olde misanthrope) is a "haughty little rag".
In other words, they are just pretendin' to be saved...they'll be back hyping "erotica" and its "power to excite" as soon as Lent is over.
But first the long running newsweekly has to fool the marks down in Anniston Alabama into thinking Jesus still rates with the board of directors at Time-Warner-AOL.
Where Time gets this obsession with christianity I do not know.
Even a cursory reading a cursory reading of the newsweekly reveals that if Time worships anything it is a pagan trinity of fame, money, and most of all power.
Especially when it is fame-money-and-power concentrated in the person of some GOP Hack...that is utter heaven to Time Magazine.
Well...it really goes way back to Time-Life Founder Henry Luce, the demented son of xian missionaries in China...he spent his life making millions in publishing and attributing it all to God's special favor.
He died back in 1967 and now thirty plus years later his gospel of success and GOP puritanism has degenerated relentlessly into craven commerce worship and a smirking toadying tone.
Well anyway....Jesus is their cover boy again for like the fiftieth time and they made the same vacuous platitudes they reserved for Dino De Laurentiis 1976 remake of "King Kong".

Lemme see if I get this right...

The Ship of State has struck an iceberg, the engines have malfunctioned and exploded, fuel has leaked out over the water and ignited creating a sea of fire, the First Officer is in hiding having left behind naught but an epistle demanding new tax cuts...Halliburton sold us the lifeboats with are either rotted or full of termites, the wretches in steerage have seized machetes and bread knives vowing jihad...unwary crew members are being jacked up in the passages....the first class passengers have suffered a collective nervous breakdown and are offering blood sacrifice to "Poseidon Lord of the Deep"....the purser has raised the price of cigarettes and boozes to astronomical levels...and the ship's doctor (another Halliburton alum) is systematically desecrating the mounting pile of corpses for gold filling and the like.
Plus the stokers all wanna get married-now and damn the laws of man and god!
Oh and according to the meteorologists at the Congressional Budget Office, there is a hurricane coming down on us at top speed...
But don't worry, according to Jeff Jacoby the Captain's MBA trumps all.

If we don't dare change horse in mid stream (to mix all metaphors beyond hope of recovery) whaddaya supposed to do when the damn horse drowns and you are being tossed down the river like a cork?

Welcome to the Commonwealth of Arkansas...

Anyone else out there recall Arkansas' inept pro-segregation Governor Orville Faubus?
He called out the National Guard in 1957 in a bid to stop the court ordered integration of Little Rock High school.
Romney is starting to remind me a little bit of old Orville.
More importantly will he do likewise come May 17th?
Yup despite a firm rebuff from the Attorney General and a clear mandate from the Supreme Judicial Court, today's Globe reports that Romney is still noodling around with "other means" to thwart the issuance of marriage licenses come May 17th 2004.
One Faubusian move requires that the State Legislature OUTLAW marriage entirely and simply compel the localities issue civil union licenses until November 2004.
Again, this is the sort of nasty passive aggressive Dairy Queen regional manager type thinking that will in sort order be the downfall of the Commonwealth.
It also irrationally presupposes that the lege will actually revisit the marriage issue any time soon, one doubts they will do this short of a sudden outbreak of galloping dementia.
Alas these are the tattered bankrupt notions the Kolobian Viceroy is conjuring with.
Of course this being Romney he could well invite the usual out of state "volunteers" and interested wowsers to invade and occupy all 351 town and city clerks offices in a mass act of civil disobedience.
The idea being to get all the brides and grooms in the Commonwealth mad at the gays for "causing" all this trouble.
I promise you, dangerous and inane stunts like this are under discussion in the Romney politburo even as I write this.
The court has spoken, the state legislature has spoken, but GOD FORBID Governor Romney should act as anything but an enforcer of the law...no no no....his sworn constitutional duty comes in a distant sad second when there is serious toadying to do before an ugly national constituency.
Rest assured that when the Governor settles on a "transitional" anti-gay marriage policy it will be a churlish and unpleasant thing indeed.

Sick
Demented
Typical....

Echoes and such like...

The nice thing about writing the Chimes at Midnight is the sure knowledge that very few people are actually reading it.
If the "blogosphere ecosystem" is to be believed this teensy page's popularity runs somewhere behind the "Jesus for President" campaign weblog.
So when a local columnist actually agrees with me on a subject, I can happily attribute the confluence to serendipity and move on with a light heart.
Such was the case this morning with Joan Vennochi, who has abruptly decided that the Governor's tortured permutations on the subject of gay marriage are a function of his growing appetite for higher office.
Waaa-aal sheee-it...ah told yuh just the same over a month ago!
Yay for serendipity!
Hell, gay marriage is not only the debut of Romney's presidential dementia but also concurrently the early demise of his "reform" program in the Commonwealth.
One might even say that a steadfast opposition to gay marriage and Romney's ambition is a unholy but not unexpected set of nuptials all on it's own.
Whatever happened to defending people's rights?
Whatever happened to enforcing a law you personally disagree with?
All vanished under the wintery blasts from a few mouthy out of state wowsers who have taken up stations on Boston Common.
Romney saw these people with their inflexibility, fanaticism and ignorance as future Romney serfs and voters in every way.
And not for nothing but Joan Vennocchi ought to be smart enough to realize Romney was a glib, ambitious, spineless opportunist back in campaign 2002....
Alas a charmless naivete' characterizes local political reportage these days.
I realize that I am repeating myself here....but as any columnist will tell you, repetition is the soul of punditry.