The Stern Fatwah


Normally I don't listen to the Howard Stern Show with a politically critical ear...all those strippers and the like tend to mute Howard's suburban libertarian fanaticism so he is hardly worth taking seriously.
Alas Imus had a perfectly painful interview with Steve Martin going on today...so having NO OTHER options I flipped over to Stern in the vain hope that Adam West or some other class act might be on.
Ah look how the mighty have fallen.....once a half hearted Bill Clinton apologist, since 9-11 Stern has done a 180 and now castigates the former President in the most gruesome terms imaginable at every opportunity.
However the discerning listener can usually tune out Stern's imbecilic diatribes with little effort.
Today though, the King of All Media put on his sacred execution turban and started wishing death on Bill Maher with Iranian gusto.
Now why should anyone want to wish death on a hopeless spineless wretch like Bill Maher?
I mean all you have to do is slap him hard and Bill starts crying like a child begging for forgiveness.
Maher is an easy mark in other words.
Still the weaker the target the worse the punishment it's the law of the schoolyard.
Apparently on his HBO show Bill was arguing "as the devil's advocate" with Michael Moore as to whether or not the war of terrorism had been over hyped.
Howard had a short excerpt from the Maher Show played on the air...he then deduced from this that Maher was saying "pro-terrorist" stuff on HBO.
Now to my ears it sounded like a rhetorical device to draw out Moore's particular opinions about terrorism....but then I heard only the brief excerpt used by Howard.
Be that as it may, The King of All Media then thunders "I only wish someone would fly an airplane into Maher's studio while he is saying stuff like this..."
And his audience Howard...they are deserving of death too?
I think for raw homicidal death worship Howard has The Ayatollah's beat...hell with his blow-up-everyone-I-hate mentality he's sounding more and more like Bin Laden every day.
Coulterism or maybe Coulterosis might be the best term for this condition...a desire to punish personal hate objects with the weapons and tactics of terrorism. It is a humorless homicidal inflammation of the bowels....accompanied by a discordant whine and irony poor blood.
Although on a serious note, I think if the war in Iraq wasn't going so poorly they wouldn't have this weird need to express themselves in such diresome terms.
Compensation I think is the psychiatric term for it.

Such is the Kingdom of Heaven
On the Congressionally Licensed
Public Airwaves
9-30-03

Poison is Queen,

Anyone catch former E.P.A. chairwoman Christie Todd Whitman's appearance on
Bill Maher last week?
There she was fielding wheedling softball questions from Spineless Bill with
that horrific Barbie Doll smile on her face.
Sickening.
For all you connoisseurs of insolent political pap out there, rest assured
Christie blames the whole matter of Lower Manhattan's post 9-11 toxic air
quality on a chronically insubordinate underling at the E.P.A.
As the old misanthrope sez "what rubbish!"
It was to be sure a wretched performance from both the ex governor of New
Jersey.
Whitman is a feckless reckless lying unrepentant weasel.
Evasive yet full of sad nervous tics she certainly didn't want to be accused
of lying, nonetheless the human scale of the post 9-11 toxic cloud didn't seem
to bother her one damn bit.
And indeed why should it?
Certainly as long as well whipped Media Whores like Bill Maher are on the job
she need not fear hostile invasive questioning from any journalists.
Nope I think her biggest concern was maintaining her future political
viability, after all Dick Cheney is looking rather pale lately.
This whole toxic cloud thing is naught but a tiny speed bump on the road to
glory.
Whitman has been and always will be a nasty little GOP fixer and a grandee of
the party's national political machine.
She is a member in good standing of that gubernatorial cabal that foisted
George Bush Jr. on the country at all costs.
They wrecked the constitution possibly beyond repair so what is a bunch of
lung cancer cases to them?
We the people need to step back a moment and remember, that citizenry should expect honesty from it's appointed guardians...it should NOT have to be demanded or extracted from any public servant kicking and screaming.
This admin has such a long time record of truculence and mendacity that I think we forget that honesty ought to be and has been in the past the first recourse.
Not Christie though, she is playing this whole sorry mishaugas on a long bow.
Shameful really.
By the time the denizens of Wall Street and Greenwich Village start dropping
dead in earnest Christie will already have gone to the throne of the
republican God of Thunder and Fundraising.

Sick
Demented
Typical.

Friday Notes

I wanted to write a quickie on the spectacle of John Ashcroft hurling his defiance at those avatars of a new and corrupt class...America's Librarians.
Anthrax mailers, terrorists, and all like that walk this earth proud and free, but don't worry Ashcroft has the librarians on the run.
The more I thought about it, the more I decided the whole shameful episode spoke for itself.
I'm on vacation next week...I'm off to New York for three days.
But if it all goes to smash and I don't come back, try to remember I was once an eagle.
Meanwhile drop by my good friend Lis Riba's blog for more in depth stuff on the librarian thing.
www.osmond-riba.org
Well worth it IMHO.
And in closing, lets hope I got the above hot-link to Lis' website right.

King Snitch in Massachusetts Bay

The Chairman of the Terrorism Subcommittee of the National Governor's Conference is none other than our own churlish dilettante Willard Mitt Romney.
Predictably in answer to the challenge of domestic terrorism that gung ho CEO has called for the creation of "state wide intelligence networks".
As if we don't do ENOUGH poking and prying into each other's lives as it is.
Romney doesn't even have the sense God gave a floorwalker at Sears...he is more like a seedy bottomed out police snitch...so it's inevitable that his answer to terrorism is better and better perches from which to sing like canaries about our neighbors and loved ones.
It's that old "If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem.

However let's give Romney some credit...at least his staff practices what the Kolobian Viceroy preaches.
I read in today's Globe that Mitt's communication's director Eric "shit-eyes" Fehrnstrom wrote a haughty letter to WLVI's general manager decrying a "partisan" speech made by news contributor Shannon O'Brien.
Some of you may remember that O'Brien lost the gubernatorial election last year and has since been forced to sing for her supper on the public airwaves.
Apparently Eric didn't care for the precise contents of a speech "journalist" Shannon O'Brien made in Worcester and has gone tattling to Vince Manzi, the GM at WLVI.
"By not curbing her political activity" whines this loathsome arrogant toady "You give us little confidence that Ms. O'Brien's reports will be free from bias..."
Cheeky little bastard isn't he?
But he has the true snitch style down pat.
I also love his use of the imperial "us".
Boy oh boy just carry a few suburbs by a wide enough margin and these out of state courtiers start comporting themselves Austrian Archdukes don't they?
Eric has a point though, there is a thin line between journalism and partisanship...and WTKK Jay Severin and Howard Stern and a vast legion of radio talk show tyrants routinely cross it every day thumbing their nose at the public good all the while.
The FCC has decreed the Howard Stern Show a "news" program-drunken angry dwarves and all...whilst 96.9 FM talk STILL advertises Jay Severin as "live and local" despite the fact he calls the show in from his home in the Bronx.
And there are still worse excesses out there...but it suits Romney's petty Huey Long like governing persona to continually bully someone he beat last year by a wide margin.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

Stupid is as stupid governs...


Rumsfeld sez there is no discernible link between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein.
A line faithfully parroted by his most reliable henchman George W. Bush Jr. the current President of the United States.
It's sequences like this that force us to confront once again the unquiet notion that Bush is naught but the meat puppet of his advisors.
Putting that aside for the moment this kinda leaves Dick Cheney in the lurch doesn't it?
I mean he was bravely toe-ing the Admin line last Sunday on "Meet the Press" asserting Al Queda's links to Saddam...and then Rummie and the Chimp pull the rug out from under him.
Bad craziness indeed-the Kay Reports allegedly disputes the existence of Iraqi WMD's and now the Bush regime won't stand by the Baghdad-Bin Laden link.
Why did we go to war the world wonders?
If you asked me I'd say Rove and company are getting ready to replace Cheney on the 2004 ticket with some nice handsome unthreatening mediocrity like Mitt Romney or the late John Ritter.
And not for nothing, but Cheney is looking plain awful these days. He mumbles out of one side of his mouth like a stroke victim and his body language even seated, is eloquent of Parkinson's disease.
Of course Tim Russert can't bring himself to browbeat such a feeble old wretch, no Tim has to save that animosity for Wesley Clark or some other suitable victim.
Remember, Tim is the pimp who called Rummie "America's Stud" in the Reader's Digest....you don't have to know anything else about Russert's journalistic objectivity other than that.
Mean while...back at the White House.
It's times like this that I recall a certain episode of "Gilligan's Island" with the simplest nostalgia.
In one of that show's trademark freak-out dream sequences, Gilligan imagines himself the hapless puppet dictator forced to dance and kneel at the command of Nehemiah Persoff.
I think Bush has that dream pretty much every night now....sometimes it's Condi pulling the strings, other times it's Rumsfeld but it is the same scenario night after night.
No wonder the First Lady slips out of the White House for solo vacations....

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Laura Ingraham on Imus Monday morning...

Did I mention that?
If I didn't you have to understand, Laura is one of the most stultifying personalities on the radio today-I simply forgot.
I mean...the morning farm report holds more visceral excitement for listeners than this turgid old witch.
All her high pitched adolescent snarkiness can't conceal the utter boredom she routinely generates.
I have no idea how this woman prospers on talk radio...she doesn't have an original opinion to save her miserable life.
Oh the I-Man tried to make her seem interesting, actually allowing an in-studio interview as opposed to his normal germ-phobic practice of doing call-ins.
Gotta hand it to the famously dipsomaniacal Ms. Ingraham,...she might've been drinking kerosene the night before but she always sounds fresh as a daisy for these Imus appearances.
Somehow at Dartmouth Laura learned the secret of overcoming hangovers...so all that alleged beard time she put in with Dinesh D'Souza seems to have paid off.
Does it even matter that she was on Imus to flog some trite new book?
"Shut up and Sing: how elites from Hollywood, Politics and the U.N. are ruining America..." or some such twaddle like that I forget the exact title.
Guess she is pissed off at Hollywood...like Chris Ruddy she can't figure out what George Clooney knows about foreign policy...but then what does a drunken fembot harpy really know about national politics anyway?
More to the point, how did a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School somehow exempt herself from the elites she so casually decries?
Hell where would she be without elite patronage?
I mean you can't expect someone this banal to bootstrap themselves up by themselves....there is a reason why they are called TEDIOUS MEDIOCRITIES y'know.
Her book sounds like boiler plate stuff that was old when whatzername wrote "The News twisters" back in 1969.
Frankly any idiot can write one of these rightical chic media elite denunciations...just roll out the usual lies and spin, collect yer advance, and then hunker down when Joe Conason shows up to expose the cynical mendacity that stains every page of your book.
Sweet Laura, Milady Tedium Maxima....I think I'd prefer old fashioned mob rule to the reign of giggly beeyotches like her.
Sick
Demented
Typical....

Rumsfeld in Wonderland

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lives in a fantasy world.
It is a very nice fantasy world all told, happy little capitalists jet to
work in free market rocketships, parents ecstatically waving vouchers send their kids to private schools, US troops are hailed as liberators throughout Iraq, and the schoolchildren of Tikrit will soon be downloading the sermons of Pastor John Hagee from the internet unmolested.
In sum a sort of low tax no government Heritage Foundation Utopia available
to all consumers.
Those helpful souls at NPR broadcast the Secretary's appearance at the
National Press Club, a very suggestive use of the public airwaves it was too.
A surprising amount of the talk was given over to the Secretary's
simpleminded economic nostrums.
Don Rumsfeld thinks he is a businessman with a lavish experience of the
private sector. Never mind his origins as a sort of Waylon Smithers character in the Ford White House, Don still thinks his decades of crony capitalism qualify him as simple entrepreneur.
Don Rumsfeld worships the so called free market, with naive intensity. This
allows him to conveniently forget his years of raking it off the top via a
rolodex stuffed with vital phone numbers and pass himself off as a rugged
individualist/moralist...a kind of Tarzan for the Rotary Club.
"Government doesn't create jobs and investment, the private sector does" he piously squawked at one point.
Which is nothing sort of bleakly hilarious given the fact that he spent a
good portion of the interview defending the President's request of 87 billion
tax-payer's dollars for Iraqi reconstruction.
THAT according to Secretary Rumsfeld is a perfectly fine use of public funds.
The irony of course, doesn't occur to Mr. Rumsfeld but then as I've said
before true believers are not known for their sense of humor.
Of course the language of this 87 billion dollar boondoggle is couched in all
the latest rightical chic jargon, it'll be used to "build opportunity" and
"unleash the productive powers of the Iraqi people"...
Smells like a subsidy to me kids.
A big fat subsidy to pay for something that Rummy, Wolfowitz, Perle etc were all claiming would pay for itself painlessly via oil revenues not five months ago.
87 billion could go a long ways to terror-proofing vulnerable industries,
ports and institutions in America. It would buy a lot of first responder training for Police and Firefighters.
But they are never gonna see a penny of that money not as long as Rummie and his fellow acolytes are still mesmerized by a vision of Iraq as a free market utopia.
And that is what we are fighting for in Iraq, to give those poor benighted
hottentots the same opportunities as any smart finance worshipping GOP hack.
The Secretary of Defense's delusional missionary zeal is nothing sort of
appalling given our steady casualties in Iraq.
The link between our occupation of Iraq and the need to prothelytize modern business civilization therein was heavy and explicit in this speech.
Irrational?
Yes especially given the casualty rates....but it's all to the greater good in Rummie's mind.
That is what those guys are dying for, the chance to create an "opportunity
society" in the Middle East.
Sick
Demented
Typical....