The Year in Review:

I started this blog solely as a means to carry on in as gross and incontinent a fashion as possible.
My goal, it would seem, has been achieved.
:)
What have I learned though?
Damn near nothing....but I sure did cover a lot of ground in the interim.
Lessee now...
I delved ad nauseum into George Bush's charisma potential. I think I finally concluded that charisma could be defined as a commodity.
Anyone else who wants to pick that ball up and run with it please do so. Despite a graduate degree in political science this is a theoretical question that I can do little with over the long term.
I dicked on the notion of a matched pair of democracy haters like Andrew Sullivan and Chris Hitchens presided over an Orwell Conference at Wellesley College.
Howard Kurtz, Mike Barnicle, Howard Fineman, Sean Hannity, Chris Matthews, and Tom Friedman were all abused in the grand style repeatedly.
Ditto and the same for Laura "Hollow Leg" Ingraham, Debbie Schlussel, and Peggy "Magic Dolphins" Noonan.
Oh and Cal Thomas and that senescent young cavalier Jeff Jacoby...they got whacked well and thoroughly.
And lets not forget Big Bill Bennett's gambling addiction, Rush Limbaugh's problems with junk or the President's fey tendecy to dress up like a fighter pilot and go swishing down the flight deck.
All dutifully denounced.
Mitt Romney got bashed almost every week.
The Globe's seemingly endless ranks of cheap Kerry-bashers were upbraided.
Eric Kriss was branded a dangerous crackpot.
Rick Santorum? pegged him as a screechy, ambitious demagogue.
Eric Fehrnstrom was labeled a snitch and creepy little bastard.
Held up Dick Cheney as naught but Halliburton's paid agent in the Federal Government.
Oh and I didn't forget Joe Lawless either...I only wish that I could!
I also predicted queer-bashing as the GOP's latest wedge issue come campaign 2004.
And I didn't let up on my entirely unique the-end-of-conservatism-is-upon-us routine.
Oh and sycophancy...I came down hard on that.

However in all truth I said some nice things about the following persons and things:
The Edgemere Drive In Shrewsbury Ma.
Senator John Kerry
General Wesley Clark
The Commonwealth's entirely sane and sensible electorate.
Lis Riba
The Romney is a Fraud Blog
Kim Thurlow
And I waxed nostalgic over the now-vanished vacant lots of Harvard Square.
As far as I'm concerned it's been a great year and what the hell the worst is yet to come.

Happy New Year,
JohnIAT@aol.com
Chimes at Midight will be back Monday January Fifth 2004.

Mitt Romney gets an electric chair for Christmas...

The Federales have sentenced Gary Sampson to death. Pointedly doing this in a state where there hasn't been an execution since 1947.
So there is no doubt in my mind that the mini-Mitts Romney has scared up to run for the Great and General Court in 2004 will be squeaking long and loud in favor of the gallows.
Like all Republicans with national aspirations, Mitt longs to campaign for re-election in 2006 atop a vast pile of duly electrocuted corpses.
Never mind the fact that the crime rate in the Commonwealth remains low thanks to our lavish spending on prisons and despite a sluggish statewide economy.
No, Mitt must have his noose and will screech for it interminably come next fall.
And what the hell, the suburbs are full of inexplicably fearful people Mitt will probably get his coveted electric chair in the end.
I'm not opposed to the death penalty per se, I don't think it deters anyone from doing anything...but there is a minority of offenders so gross and repellent to the polity that they must be turned to dust soonest.
On the other hand, I have no faith in Romney's ability to handle this particular power should it be granted him by the Legislature. Mitt sees the death penalty purely in political terms as a means to keep the masses in a perpetual state of fear and excitement.
Moreover the thought of these crude pro-death penalty adverts getting seen in Southern New Hampshire during campaign 2006 must have Mitt fairly fondling himself with glee.
There is only one solution, the state legislature must pass the death penalty but with a proviso mandating the use of a gallows and furthermore nominating the Governor as actual executioner of record.
I mean that, the only way Mitt should get his gallows is if HE is prepared to pull the death-lever.
My guess is, that for all his demagogic bluster, Mitt is a coward a heart, one doubts he could drop a perp without puking.
Now if we could only get that bout of post execution nausea on video....

Day of the Ass Clown:

God Scot Lehigh must've been pissing his pants in sheer glee yesterday.
His paen of praise to Governor Decaf was the feature article in this Sunday's Boston Globe Magazine.
Big frickin' whoop, Scot spun the deposition of Billy Bulger and the Governor's acquisition of new budget cutting powers into a irresistible march to glory before which all must bow.
He also asserted without much evidence, that Romney was "sweeping out" the bureaucracy of all it's encrusted political appointees.
And yet I haven't heard about Joe Lawless suddenly clipping coupons and Dollar Bill Monahan's law suit against the state hasn't been dropped either.
More than likely all those Swift-ites and Cellucci holdovers who are being broomed out of governance will be replaced with loyal Romneyans.
When that happens you can bet Scot Lehigh will pass over this in silence...his loyalty is ever to the appearance of the Kolobian Viceroy's reforming zeal.
Scot just like the sound of the word reform-reform-reform being said over and over again....that is all.
Whether or not any reforms are achieved is another matter...something for policy wonks to worry about , hipster columnistas like Scott can't be bothered.
The problem with Scot is, he fancies himself a suburban independent.
And the problem with suburban independent's these days is that they are given to bargaining away everyone else's freedoms to secure their own good fortunes.
Thus we end up with Romney with his cabinet loaded with arrogant weirdos, utopian uplifters and warrior CEOs, a hopelessly inane and opportunistic bunch whose every gaffe is called reform and every catastrophe is declared to be "radical reform".
To Scot Lehigh it certainly is...
I think the Globe is desperate to launch Romney into national politics, I really do.
I think they are cutting Kerry dead on the op-ed and news pages because they are trying to tempt Romney into the 2008 Senate race. Morrissey Boulevard either wants Mitt to succeed Teddy or else they want a loud rousing battle for Kerry's Senate seat...something that will sell lotsa papers and help obscure the Globe's unwanted reputation as a liberal rag.
Ultimately they wanna run an "ironic" op-ed piece announcing the death of liberalism in Massachusetts thanks to the national popularity of Mitt Romney....nothing would give them more pleasure.
The Globe is as light as ashes and as shallow as a bird-bath these days.
In the immortal words of William S. Burroughs "their bald-face motivation is hanging out there for all to see".

My Holiday Column...

The worst thing about Christmas is listening to Frank Sinatra singing the seasonal standards over the PA system in Macy's.
If there is one artist less in synch with the holiday zeitgeist it is ole' Blue Eyes.
His version of "Jingle Bells" sounds like he was forced to sing it at gun-point.
Musically, the only time Sinatra is "faking it" is when he is trying to put forth the mask of seasonal gaiety.
****
The season has it's cultural pitfalls make no mistake about it.
A friend relates that he brought his two sons to see a "great Santa Claus" at the Burlington Mall this weekend, at a cost of a mere two and a half hour wait.
I mused to myself, just what is a "great" Mall Santa Claus?
Not having seen this guy's act I couldn't say and neither could my friend owing to the state of enervation that lingers after such a task.
The killer is, my friend is Jewish....and a proud Zionist as well.
And who else but a Zionist would wait half a morning to undermine his four year old's sense of cultural-religious identity?
This couldn't be funnier to me if he was a Trotskyite quite frankly.
Well what of it, the jolly old fellow went over big with the kids and Papa and Momma are off the hook for another twelve months.
Maybe the Jews need a character to help put over the Festival of Lights bigtime?
They have a rich collection of luminaries to elevate to Saint Nick-dom...hell the Jewish walk of Fame stretches out seven miles and gets longer every week!
Howabout "Eli the Channukah Cowboy"?
Rides through the walls on his magic horse dropping off holiday treats to all good sons and daughters of Abraham.
Yup a cowpoke for the holiday seasons' that'll put a nice spin on the whole mishaugas!
Spins a mean draydl with his lariat, tips lavishly....this could be big I tells yuh!
:)

The Christmas Coup...

There but for Tom Ridge and his kaleidescope of alerts, we might have ourselves a neu ordnung today in the Bay State.
Romney was leaving to spend two weeks at his "vacation home" in Utah....Kerry Healey the alleged Lieutenant Governor was wandering off to visit her parents for some indeterminate period of time.
This left Billy "The Prince of Darkness" Galvin, the Commonwealth Secretary of State as Acting Governor....with two weeks of almost unlimited freedom of action and the Lege in recess as an added bonus.
Michael Collins couldn't have asked for a better opportunity!
:)
TELL ME, we couldn't have deposed Romney fair and square in that amount of time!
Good grief it'd be easy, just get a court finding asserting Willard was never a citizen of the Commonwealth at the time of his election in 2004.
While the damn fool is flailing around trying to scare up a lawyer to argue his case in Provo Utah we scare Kerry Healey into resigning.
That'll be plenty easy, she is a vapid suburbanite who has probably fallen for the olde "rubber-snake/Lady-yez-got-vermin-unner-th'-house" routine at three times already.
No just send her a e-mail message at her parents house in Colorado or Florida (or whatever floor the Lieutenant Governor is sleeping on this holidays season) announcing that Al Queda has taken over Quincy and Brockton.
Follow it up with a real "Al Queda" video that is composed of the pay-off scenes from the old "Flash Gordon" serial.
I guarantee you instead of flying back to Logan to die at the head of her loyal troops, Ms. Healey will be pounding on the gates of the White House screaming incoherently about Bin Laden's "rocket ship fleet".
With her safely tucked in a straitjacket at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital we could've finally gotten down to the hard business of saving the Commonwealth.
Alas it was not to be, that orange signal went up and Mitt came trotting back home...so clearly the Department of Homeland Security is on to us.
:)
Yeah I know....it's a harsh sort of a post, but it's fun-nee!

And anyway, face facts, if there ever was a real terrorist attack in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney would be the first to flee to safety spewing self exonerating press releases the whole way.
:)

I was just thinkin'


Chris Matthews is not on our side. He may have dicked on Peggy Noonan on his show last night, but lets remember Matthews was lauding Bush's flight suit nonsense last May.

He sees himself as in the President's camp, but free to tear a new hole in some of his more for fragile supporters...Peggy Noonan is in the end, easy prey, being as soft as puppy dog shit.

Hey whatever happened to Robert Bly and the "Men's Movement"? Boy, that was a real flash in the pan wasn't it?
Anyone remember "Wingspan" the official newsletter of the Men's Movement?
Hilarious reading...the poetry was an extra hoot.

So it boils down to this...are Paris and Nicholle really that obnoxiously vapid and impulsive or are they playing up to the cameras?

I say they are playing up to the cameras.

I pity the poor Olympic silver medalist who has to go charging down the rink in a loincloth as part of Disney's "Tarzan on Ice" extravaganza.

Of course if you really want to do some riveting reality television lets drop a serious junkie demagogue like Rush Limbaugh on an Appalachia subsistence farm for a few weeks.
Mayhap the locals will mistake withdrawl symptoms for cholera and opt for leeches.

Seriously though, did anyone out there see Noonan on Chris Matthews last night?
Did she start jabbering about the magic dolphins that saved Elian Gonzalez from drowning?

There are rumblings out of the White House of reviving our manned moon program.
Apparently La Famiglia Arbusto are talking up a space race in China.
Why not put Neil Bush, the President's greedy debauched brother in charge of the whole mishaugas?
That way sending astronauts to the moon can be outsourced to the P.R.C. itself at a savings of billions.

Suburban Blight on Policy Street

If you are ever curious to know what we are really up against in America, then I invite you all to take a drive down South Policy Street in Salem N.H.
Therein is an edifying spectacle indeed, endless vistas of McMansions set up on little tree-less artificial hills....nouveau rich bunkers with two story columns...a Ford Explorer (or two) in every driv way.
And across the street, a trailer park as dingy and hopeless as ever plus the occasional outright shanty with a rusting Toyota Camry up on blocks in the front yard.
The only thing that interrupts this repetitive landscape is the regularly spaced mini-malls with the inevitable Tru-Value hardware stores, christmas shops, and gas stations selling to all comers for outrageous prices.
It is picture perfect portrait of widening income disparities and the corrosive effects of galloping sprawl.
Once, seventeen years ago, when I went to College in Manchester, southern New Hampshire was a genial wasteland with it's yearly hunting fatalities and local bus service that shut down at 6:30pm on weekdays.
What happened?
People in Boston started making mad phat cash in the High Tech Industry (and elsewhere) eventually a lot of money started chasing a finite supply of choice housing so homebuyers were forced further and further afield for the shit hole of their dreams.
Now however southern N.H. is running wide open with Bay State interlopers mortgaging themselves to the hilt to own a two-garage heap that was practically glued together by the builders.
As Boston declines into a cultural colony of New York City, so too does the Granite State become a commuter colony of Boston.
Everybody, rich and poor commute endlessly to work, their purchasing power is wasted in chain stores that send money far out of the region, and we actually wonder why the future is uniformly debt ridden and bleak.
Frankly I liked Massachusetts better when it was a proper wasteland back itself in 1975...nobody lived here....nobody thought they could make money here, our chief export was a quality education.
Once you had your diploma, you left.
There used to be empty lots around Harvard Square, if you bought a book there was a ninety percent chance your money went into the pocket of a fellow citizen of the Commonwealth....
Now?
Everyone in Massachusetts thinks they are a millionaire because they house they are living in, no matter how much they owe the bank, is worth $900,000.00
So it's just natural that with such tendencies in the electorate people would elect a millionaire to rule over them.
Oh how it all flies out of town though. Grocery money, movie tickets, mortgages everything....and Salem N.H. looks about as spiritually desiccated as Burlington or Belchertown Massachusetts.
Localism is disappearing, without the green and white highway signs we wouldn't know what community we were in thanks to 7-11, Starbucks, etc etc etc.
I don't know what is to be done....our economy is alleged to be mighty....but sometimes it's results are paltry and cheap.
And I hope as Dennis Kucinich, John Kerry or Howard Dean go rolling down those back rounds they look around and see what is becoming of the country they hope to lead.

Your Next Stop, The Romney Zone....


The Boston Globe reports today that Governor Romney wants to see more "focus groups" when he visits local High Schools.
You see the Kolobian Viceroy got booed lustily on a visit to Winchendon High last month, and that was when he wasn't being called a callous fool among other choice sobriquets.
So translated this means that he wants fewer students in the room in the hopes they will intimidated by his big scary State Police detail.
Frankly I pity any kid who gets dragooned into a face-to-face meeting with this vain condescending bastard.
The economy of the Commonwealth is at a standstill, we spend more on prisons than we do on higher education and the state legislature's legendary pedagogues are writing curriculum for the masses...and if you asked Willard about any of this you'll be rewarded with a cataract of clumsy evasions and sonorous nonsense.
More time wasted on standardized tests, and less money to go to college, Lord Gawd Almighty now there is a formula for success in the long run!
This "focus group" crap is the inevitable response of a thin skinned amateur politician who is simply unused to be disparaged to his face by a cohort that he naturally holds in contempt.
When faced with the unrestrained exercise of the First Amendment, Romney in true CEO fashion seeks to create a space where he can more rigorously control the discourse.
This called in business-speak "effective communication".
Meanwhile back at the State House, the Commonwealth's Eugenicist in Chief Eric Kriss has figured out our current economic plight is all the fault of the unions.
Y'know those same public sector unions such as the police and firefighters that these yo-yos couldn't stop praising to the high heavens two years ago.
If that doesn't fly look for Eric to start bitching about the cost of feedin' all those freeloading students in the public schools.
You can tell they are panicking because they've gone with such unoriginal scapegoats...it is a mark of deadline pressure.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Flailing Laura...again.


Y'know it's amazing but Laura Ingraham is just as boring on her own radio show as she is in her frequent appearances on the Imus in the Morning program.
So clearly, the notion that she saves the A-list stuff for her own program is right out the window.
I was shopping in a "publisher's close out" fly by night bookstore one town over and the torpid staff therein had Laura on at peak decibelage.
It had no effect on me, Miss Ingraham is as preposterously dull and repetitive as ever.
She can't even gloat in a interesting or infuriating fashion.
She was trying to suggest in a dispirited fashion that the "Today Show" was a hotbed of pro-Saddam liberals....but it was thin stuff even for this famously undiscerning fembot.
At one point Miss Ingraham was flailing around suggesting that Katie Couric was wearing black out of sympathy for Saddam or some damn thing.
I think Laura needs to adjust the color contrast on her TV.
This is assuming she really is up at that time of morning in a coherent state which I strongly doubt.
Or does everything look like it is in black and white after a long boozy night?
The callers were all a weedy whiny lot and Laura sounded like she had to go to the bathroom real bad.
Dreadful radio all around....nobody sounded happy about anything.
Still ya gotta give her credit, she shakes off the D.T.'s every day, cozies up to the microphone and jabbers away like those jackhammers in her head were a million miles away.

Such is the Kingdom of God
On the Congressionally licensed airwaves
and elsewhere
God Save the Republic.

Send in the Ass Clowns....

Is anyone on the op-ed page of the Boston Globe simply indifferent to John Kerry's candidacy for President?
If so, then I'd like to hear from them.
Eileen McNamara that perpetual impotent scold unloaded with both barrels on Sunday calling Kerry "imperious, arrogant, and indifferent".
Her column title?
"Kerry's style a real turn-off".
Apparently Eileen found some laggards up at the State House who are unimpressed with Kerry's willingness to get on the phone and jaw about the possibilities of loading up the D.P.S. with a few more deadhead consultants....hence the charges of egomania.
Good lord, the Winter Hill Mob has a higher favorability rating than the Great and General Court...but hand one of those yankers off on an aide and look out, dice are rolling and the knives are out!!
All politics is local, rumbled Tip O'Neill, and naught is more vicious and bitter than local politics adds JohnIAT.
So here we go again, debating style and comfort....when an editorialist feels uncomfortable watch out!
Candidates will fall and ideologies will be ridiculed until their intellectual backsides are in a comfy place.

There is nothing so grimly ironic as when a aloof and out-of-touch columnista starts flinging charges of egotism around....I mean look who is calling the kettle black?
Tripe like this is what keeps me in the writing game.
I mean if a self loving hack like Eileen can collect a Pulitzer Prize for jumping ugly on John Kerry like she was a social climbing middle school student then a talent like mine is just bound for glory!
:)
Lets face facts though, the Globe's op-ed page has systematically gone from mediocre to utterly unreadable.
Lazy brutes like Jeff Jacoby and Joan Vennochi print undocumented nonsense at the drop of a hat whilst Scot Lehigh, Brian McGrory and our own Eileen run around waving scary rubber swords over their heads in hopes of convincing someone somewhere they are not doctrinaire liberals.
A laughable and base canard, it is the very last thing I'd expect of those three.
I realize these are editorialists we are talking about they are under no compulsion to either like or support John Kerry.
However you'd think the Globe would caution this formidable front of Kerry-haters to pace themselves when spewing bile and venom at the Junior Senator.
Sadly this is not the case, most of these yankers are perpetually auditioning for better paying gigs elsewhere so the spewage goes on in hopes of attracting a cushy radio or cable gig.
The polls results that ran above the fold in yesterday's Globe don't bode well for Kerry, so look for Scot, Brian and Joan to get the boot in good this week.
Bad poll results from N.H. tend to set them off reminding that lot that the have a bare forty five days left to kick John Kerry around before it all goes to smash.
Boston is slowly becoming an irrelevant ideological and social colony of New York - so everyone up here needs to be mindful of where their next meal ticket is coming from.
Hence the current debased nature of op-ed rhetoric at the Globe....they are working for the Yankee Dollar.

I devoutly hope John Kerry wins in N.H. for a lot of reasons, one of them that it'll spare us for a little while the sentimental-sarcastic political obituaries from all these jack offs.
Lehigh in particular can't wait to write yet another death-of-liberalism-twilight of John Kerry screed....I can hear him smacking his lips from my lonely Fastness overlooking the Lost Village of Menotomy.
Sick
Demented
Typical....
PS.
John Kerry is in a tight race for second place in Iowa,
The reason for this is simple, they don't get the Boston Globe in Iowa.

Laura Ingraham on Imus today...

So, why are so many functional alcoholics attracted to Roman Catholicism?
As this post unfolds, this question will loom in relevance, so stay with me.
Laura Ingraham was on Imus in the Morning today....she was actually in the studio for the interview,
Now Imus is allegedly germ phobic so I suspect Laura has incriminating photos of her host in bridal drag or something.
Well flu season or not there she was as tedious and trite as ever despite her wa-ay too loud impersonations of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.
Usually I'm exposed to the perils of falling asleep at the wheel whenever Ingraham makes one of her interminable Imus appearances, but today was special.
Laura revealed that she converted to Catholicism this year.
Yup thats right....MY CATHOLICISM!!! MY DAMN RELIGION!
Geezus Mary-n-Joseph we have to insist that the Bishop's poll the laity before letting in any adult converts...I mean forget the clerical sex abuse scandals and the misuse of charitable funds to pay hush money...letting in a screeching harpy like Laura Ingraham is just plain nuts!!
Is the R.C.C. that hard up that we are reduced to accepting drunken booze-worshiping viragos like Laura Ingraham?
We have to put a stop to this, we really do.
The Bishops are clearly pursuing an open door policy for any bum with a bankroll and a high Q rating.
And not for nuthin' Laura but you are figuratively speaking climbing into a burning lifeboat presided over by the dregs of the Hell's Angels!
I mean HE-LLO! The clergy are dying off (those that aren't under indictment), the church teetered on bankruptcy and the laity are about to inherit a burnt out hulk of a religion.
She claims to be an innocent "fallen Baptist" (and just what the HELL is that????!!!) who shopped around for a new religion and even took counsel from that social climbing dingbat Justice Thomas as to what was the hot new faith.
For some reason that is locked in his cold vengeful heart, Thomas (who has changed his own religion some three times so far including a stint as a Catholic seminarian) talked up the R.C.C.
A baptism, the Eucharist, and a confirmation later and now we are stuck with Laura Ingraham out in the pews flapping her arms and doing her too loud Hillary impersonation.
She will wear out her welcome quickly I assure you.
I'll bet the bitch stiffs us on the Stewardship Appeal when the envelopes come around.
Well...I suspect that Laura's alleged dipsomania didn't go down well the local Baptist divines so she went looking for a faith that would let her drink in peace.
The late Anthony Burgess became a Catholic late in life for more or less the same reasons. The conversion had an intolerable effect on the author's literary output reducing him to writing bizarro essays extolling the sexuality of Margaret Thatcher in the "Vanity Fair."
One might devoutly wish the same creative torpor to overtake Ms. Ingraham, but she is already a shrill boring witch who hit bottom years ago....

On the other hand it is kinda strange that the alpha queen bee of the United States of Junior High would go in for the One True Apostolic Church of Rome....because its always weird and annoying when the obnoxious head cheerleader suddenly goes all out for Jesus.
She's been setting the football team on you for three years now she's got to have a personal line to god as well!!!
In all a disheartening situation.
So Laura might just be a true believer...someone needy and insecure who requires the awe and majesty of the Papacy to function.
This was Anthony Burgess' official excuse for joining the R.C.C. back in the day, he saw the west being threatened the seventh century fanaticism of Islam, the only answer to that being the tenth century orthodoxy of Rome.
Of course the flip side of this is raw Orwellian power worship, let us not rule that motivation out.
Certainly Laura Ingraham has numerous bona fides when it comes to venerating authority and authoritarianism.
D'ye suppose deep in the heart of the confessional Laura would ever own up to simply being ENVIOUS of Hillary?
I mean doesn't the Junior Senator from New York have the whole rightical chic package, marriage, children, money, etc etc etc.?
She even declined to divorce Bill when the whole Monica deal-io came down, what could be more conservative than that???
I think Laura Ingraham secretly wants what Hillary Clinton has, why else does she obsess so on the Former First Lady?
Ingraham always dwells at length on Hillary in these Imus appearances...always....with a voice thick with raw unadulterated envy.
Lord God of Hosts I do pity the aged and careworn Prelate that must hear this awful vengeful she-brute's confession.
I really do.

My bet is she did it for the booze though.
The Curia in Rome is very tolerant of liquor idolaters like Ingraham and Burgess and Mayor Flynn etc etc etc....
Christ...some people just bite the bullet and go into rehab, not Laura though, she'll go through a dozen incarnations of the Almighty and sacrifice children to Vaal the Godzilla Head before she gives up her real Deity.
That would be "Jack" more formally known as "Jack Daniels"....
Such is the Kingdom of Heaven
On the Congressionally Licensed Airwaves and Elsewhere
10-12-03
God Save the Republic.

Debbie Does Mendacity

Does Debbie Schlussel think we are all afflicted with stupidity morbidus or something?
She was on Howard Stern the other day insisting that John Kerry married wealthy Theresa Heinz in order to "buy" the U.S. Presidency.
Does this inane screeching virago even know that it's illegal for Kerry to tap his wife's fortune to finance his campaign??
What do the facts matter on talk radio anyway? It is a perfect venue for the proverbial big lie, something Debbie did lip smacking relish.
Of the estimated quarter of a billion dollars Bush has raised by selling off the U.S. Government bit by bit Debbie remained decorously silent.
And indeed, excusing the wholesale theft is one of the most important jobs' performed by today's imbedded conservative punditariat.
This is a laughably easy sinecure, just lay on the empty headed sarcasm and trowel on the trendy rightical chic buzzwords.
It is a heady time to be a movement conservative in America, for thirty years these fanatics have marched behind a succession of sawdust Caesars. Reagan (their charlatan maximus), Bush 1, Bush the Terrible, and now at last they think they are on the brink of total power.
And what the hell, they may well be....clearly Debbie is anticipating nothing but a vast jubilee to come.
The fact that I have to listen to the Howard Stern Show (with it's midgets, mentally challenged guests and the occasional starlet drive to suicide) to get the latest skinny on Ms. Schlussel's power fantasies is naught but a sad comment on the death of rhetoric in America.
Sick
Demented
Typical

Our War Aims (revised and expanded)

Paul Bremer called into the Imus in the Morning Program today....it's an odd venue for a harassed quasi-viceroy in a no-win situation, but a fella has to take whatever he can get I guess.
Sometimes though, amidst all the feckless blather, a factoid is enunciated so ridiculous so inane that it stimulates the rare and dangerous laughter of outrage.
Such was the case this morning when Bremer, while ticking off all our nation building props to date, announced that Baghdad had it's first job fair yesterday "with over two hundred participants".
YE GODS! That is what our boys are dying for one by one - the freedom to carpet a job fair with resumes!
If only Franklin Roosevelt could see this....his noble G.I.'s, the granchildren of his Spartans, his warrior angels reduced to defending a Baghdad resume-mill with the last drop of their noble blood.
It's not that this is such a pathetic tawdry accomplishment, it's the evident pride Bremer takes in the job fair as "proof" we are winning hearts and minds in Iraq.
I can't even work myself up into a frenzy over his discourse, naive piffle like this always more sad than provocative.
Besides, Bremer isn't the problem here, he has been a faithful flunky since day one, dutifully implementing the policies of his notoriously whimsical and irresolute master.
And a flunky is what Bremer is, he was enthusiastically boosting Bush's weird pre-dawn appearance in Iraq on Thanksgiving, complete with it's shiny cooked turkey prop and hand-picked audience, as a tonic for troop morale.
Soon enough, when this whole mishaugas goes to smash, Bremer will be ousted and no doubt blamed for the debacle...but lets take a moment to honor, with all due irony and malice, his canine loyalty to the President.
When the time comes Pitiful Paul will happily dig his own grave, belching Bush's praises the entire time.

Such is the Kingdom of God
On the Congressionally Licensed Airwaves
And elsewhere
12-10-03

Endorse'd and abandoned

I must be the only person on the internet not awe-struck by Al Gore's endorsement of Governor Dean.
Oh endorsements are nice things to have, don't get me wrong, my candidate John Kerry has a fistful of them.
At best though, endorsements are symbols of a candidates allegedly diverse appeal....and Gore plays to Dean's base a rebellious democratic iconoclast.
Y'know almost everything Gore is not.
However the Deaniacs on line are having themselves a jubilee today....but then almost anything sets that crowd off in paroxysms of self congratulation. Frankly Dr. Dean could defecate on the deck of the U.S.S. Massachusetts and wipe his ass with the state flag and his supporters would fairly writhe on the floor like ecstatic snake handlers.
The matter is going to be resolved by money, luck, foot soldiers, and stamina in the snows of New Hampshire.
And the polls are an unreliable indicator of what will happen up there next month...if they were, then Mario Cuomo would've broken out of history's footnotes.

Meanwhile Kerry used the eff word in an interview with the Rolling Stone and the puritans, both left and right in this country are up in arms.
I say good for Kerry, it is a fucked up situation in Iraq, and getting more fucked up every damn day...I think he should swear some more...hell he was a sailor once he knows the lexicon.

Drive Time Dialectics

So...last week Don Imus, apparently overcome by a fit of jollity, called Howard Stern's girl friend Beth Ostrovsky a "bimbo".
The I-man then went on to air an skit in which it was implied that Beth had herpes or something like that.
Predictably Stern reacted with visceral hatred and rage promising dire if vague revelations about Imus' personal life before settling down today to promises of "a lawsuit".
In short just another typical day on drive time radio in America....the battle for ratings has entered the house-to-house fighting stage with no end in sight.
Imus is a senile old wretch and Stern is a corrupt reprobate and little more than a pimp with an F.C.C. license....their political views are remarkably similar both are loud righteous war-hawks who'd bat not an eye if Baghdad was nuked tomorrow morning.
Don and Howard have made millions off a lawless broadcasting milieu and a genial cracker barrel brand of demagoguery that is grotesquely called "entertainment" in these euphemism stricken times.
Both are craven George Bush worshippers of the lowest and crudest type and both of them have a pronounced authoritarian streak and a growing contempt for democratic society.
Let us not forget their morbid habit of wishing death on celebrities who deviate from their own dishonest pseudo populist line...these unfortunates run the gamut from the spineless (Bill Maher) to the crazy (Ted Turner).
So is it any wonder they are at each other's throat?
Yes I know, these two have a history, but they are also fighting over a static cohort of radio rightish listeners.
A sort of vulgar dialectic has set in, despite their rough similarity of their views Don and Howard are locked in a zero sum game for that magic white male listener stratum...the one with all that lovely moolah to spend.
Therefore, they've got nothing else to fight over except whose slack jawed trophy wife is a hottie...but fight over that they will because the outcome is a deadly serious paying proposition despite the surface tawdriness of it all.
Frankly at this point, I have to give the edge to Imus, any lawyer who would actually put brainless Beth Ostrovksy with her frightening little-girl voice on the stand is just asking for trouble.
Five minutes of testimony will be enough to conjure unhealthy visions of Beth dressing like a schoolgirl for the delectation of Howard in the minds of the jury.
She is truly that vapid I assure you.
On the other hand, Imus has to be raking something off the top for his so called "Cancer Camp" in the South West...the man is a sixty year old deejay fah crissakes he didn't last this long on the radio by indulging a puritanical refusal to steal.
And Imus has been married how many times with how many kids??
If it ever reaches "Court TV" I'll happily videotape every session as the resultant legal saturnalia will be a delightfully decadent forecast of the downfall of talk radio U.S.A.
Was it Lenin who said that competition is never more savage than just prior to the collapse of the olde order?
:)
Ah but I mock, no doubt Don and Howard's respective lawyers have warned them off this gaudy collision noting that the only victor will be Sean Hannity...or perhaps (dare I say it?) Jay Severin.
Who am I kidding here?
It is nice to think that sheer internecine warfare will kill off rightical chic talk radio but the supply of hosts is inexhaustible and there is apparently no limit to the potential loutish stupidity on the congressionally licenses public airwaves.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

School Houses and Jail Houses...

The Boston Phoenix pointed out yesterday that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is now spending more on prisons than it does on higher education.
Oh thank Ghod...we've caught up with Louisiana in the "incarceration race"!
Nothing so perfectly encapsulates screwheaded value system of the Romney Administration....we are building more prisons and lockin' em' up faster and faster meanwhile higher education falls to pieces.
And not for nothing, but what is this hang up with crime and punishment anyway? Isn't the crime rate low in the Commonwealth?
Have we become Texas, where lawless brutes do roam, armed to the teeth, and soused to the gills?
Why all the Department of Corrections spending?
Simple cause' the vast roiling independents, mortgaged to the hilt, and near bankrupt in their frigid suburbs live in perpetual fear of crime they must be appeased and placated.
We cannot expect anything resembling a sensible education policy out of Kolobian Viceroy...the few pronouncements he has made on the subject seem to revolve around semi-privatization and other inane warmed-over dreck.
Here again Governor Decaf seems unaware of a simple fact...one of Massachusetts chief exports is knowledge in the form of education.
Stiffing higher education means poor returns on one of our few real money-makers in the Commonwealth.
You'd think a former CEO would get that...but then Romney was more a crony capitalist than a genuine free market free thinker back in the day.
He mostly loaned money to other rich white men, that somehow makes him a titan of the business class.
Like most of our current financial princeling class, Mitt has internalized a harsh Manichean view of the public sector...he doesn't care if we all become stupid, brutal and ill educated...as long as there are plenty of prisons administered by "small government" then all will be well.
Which brings me to a rare serious point, Romney may be inept, callow, vain, pretentious, duplicitous, shallow, and opportunistic...but the ultimate reason why Mitt Romney is a bad Governor for Massachusetts is that he embodies the wrong value system for our state.
Romney believes in prisons not colleges...
Romney believes in private wealth and public penury....
Romney believes in class warfare if it means setting his beloved middle class in direct conflict with the poor.
Romney believes in an ideology...he has little use for real ideas.
Ultimately Mitt Romney is a entirely undistinguished movement conservative, his loyalty is to the best interests of that "philosophy" and not to Massachusetts as a polity.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

Open Letter to Kim Thurlow:

According to today's Globe, Kim Thurlow a Winchendon High senior had the audacity to confront Governor Romney about the MCAS.
Ms. Thurlow led a special needs student she'd been tutoring down to Romney's podium and asked just how this kid was supposed to pass the MCAS?
Predictably, Governor Romney responded with a swift cataract of fatuous nonsense.
Ms. Thurlow was left with nothing by way of a coherent explanation.

Dear Kim,

Speaking the truth to power is always a tough gig....speaking the truth to a vain unfeeling yanker like Mitt Romney is an especially lonely unpleasant business.
His reply to your simple query was vintage Romney...
A perfect example of malevolent buncombe it was...the MCAS which is ruining the lives of thousands of Massachusetts high school students is naught but a measure for avuncular old guys like him to assess school performance!
Like the olde misanthrope sez, what rubbish!
These "well meaning" old timers won't spend a penny more on your education but they damn well will make sure that you jump through a few more hoops on your way to college!
Mitt Romney is a former CEO who rose to prominence on the strength of his family name, his ideology is one of raw power worship, and his goal is to massage the process along until he either wins the New Hampshire Primary at some future date. This is assuming he isn't driven for office by a torch wielding mob.
Romney has NEVER give one hoot in hell about people like you Kim! If he could, he'd cheerfully disenfranchise you and all your friends. Hell Mitt is looking forward to world without elections wherein Princely sorts such as he can have you and me banished with the wave of a hand.
Hence his contemptuous and disdainful dismissal of your very legitimate concerns.
Your only mistake was in asking him a question, all that did was give Romney as chance to dissemble and prevaricate.
To paraphrase the late William S. Burroughs "he has nothing to offer but his bad intentions".
You can't expect Romney to give a straight answer to your question because the miserable phony hasn't answered anything honestly since the day he announced for governor.
If he did reply with candor he'd have to own up to the MCAS being a shuck-n-jive statute designed to exploit the fears of the mortgaged white middle class while loading up the student population with ever more insufferable petty irritations.
Torturing students with endless testing composed by the pedagogues of the State Legislature is good politics for a posturing fraud like Romney.
They wouldn't stand for this kind of bureaucratic abuse at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, yet Romney and his ilk will cheerfully visit punishments ten times worse on you and yours.
Kim darling, what does that tell you?
I am not painting a pretty picture here Kim sorry.
Don't despair though, you have two important weapons on your side kiddo, time and the vote.
It is a cliche' but people like you are the electorate of the future, when it comes time in 2006 to vote remember how little Mitt Romney thought of you.
Remember how out of step Mitt is with the Commonwealth and how often he resorts to arrogant piffle when confronted with an unpleasant truth.
Remember Kim, and vote on that remembrance.....the time will come when your generation will inherit the earth, nothing speeds that process along like ending the political career of a gruesome charlatan like Mitt Romney.
Keep your chin up and stop asking these jackoffs for help, start telling them what they need to do, you are the power, you are the Commonwealth.
Good luck
and happy holidays

Grace note for a cold December Afternoon

Neal Bush, the President's ne'er do well brother is in bed with the People's Republic of China...or so the unsealed documents from his divorce do attest.
He's been skimming an easy assed sixty thousand a year from a semiconductor concern run by Jiang Zemin's son.
What ANYONE in La Famiglia Arbusto knows about semiconductors is a sacred mystery.
Even the dimmest of Bab's nasty offspring knows to how to work their rolodex and land a cushy sinecure...it is increasingly a clan tradition.
These documents make interesting reading, at one deposition the feckless lout is forced to admit dallying with whores in Thailand.
You heard that right...whores in Thailand.
Alas for the electronic snoopery of our modern age, his wife's lawyer declined to ask Neal the simple follow-up question, "did you know the ages of the prostitutes that were sent up to your room?"
Thailand being the regional capitol for under-age prostitution....for a serious elite horn-dawg with a taste for young young flesh, Thailand with it's lax vice laws is a virtual mecca of gruesome sexual delights.
So much more here than meets the eye-but is anyone willing to exploit it?

Baghdad Blues:

Now the word from DC is, that resistance in Iraq will collapse once we nab Hussein.
That sounds like an explicitly neocon line of reasoning...ergo willfully optimistic to the point of delusion.
Once Saddam is strung up from a street light, Messr's Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld can presumably go back to their dreamy dreams of a free market, democratic, and Fox News oriented Middle East.
Dick Cheney can finally resume playing "Risk" with real countries in the game room of his undisclosed location.
All sounds like beer and skittles to me.
Yeah...and secretly bombing Cambodia was supposed to bring the Viet Cong to their knees.
We've heard all this before.
My thinking is, nabbing Hussein is the only remaining obstacle to a pell-mell evacuation of U.S. Forces from Iraq....by next summer at the latest and much sooner if we catch Saddam in the near term.
The occupation is a botch, the WMD's don't exist, the President looks like a liar and a willful sort of a weakling...not a pretty picture for a politician desperate to assert his manly bona fides at every opportunity no matter how inappropriate the occasion.
***
The handwriting was on the wall about this one long before Bush snuck into Baghdad under the cover of darkness for a tidy Thanksgiving Day photo-op with our soldiers.
Does anything else so perfectly illustrate the anarchic situation over there than the spectacle of an American President arriving at a military compound in a blacked out convoy under cover of darkness?
"Bring it on" indeed, just wait til Bush gets clear of Iraqi airspace willya?
Good lord, Lyndon Johnson had more freedom of movement in Saigon back during the Viet Nam War!
Ghod you just know that was the ass-end of some Rove extravaganza that originally included Bush riding a golden chariot in a Roman style triumph through the streets of Baghdad.
Perhaps the cheering throngs would've been treated to a Caligula style harangue threatening dire consequences for those Senate Democrats who opposed him...all breathlessly broadcast live on the Fox News Network.
As it was the poor wretch had to be guilt tripped into going by Massachusetts' own fixer maximus Andy Card.
And even then Bush looked all the world like a hobo who'd just been invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Salvation Army.
Yup, Bush has blown it, and Condoleeza Rice is gonna have to work sixteen hour days from now til next August to extricate our President from a catastrophe borne entirely of his own insufferable vanity.
No doubt more than a few well known names in the Admin will be up for the chop in due course... Wolfowitz? Cheney?
Who knows?
But don't you worry, Bush will survive this, no matter how much blood and money it costs, no matter how many of his followers must take the rap....regardless of all the lies that must need be told.
Sick
Demented
Typical

he Black Hole of CalThomas

I generally don't read the Boston Herald.
Now if I wanted to read wire service copy of world events, I just go to
Yahoo.com.
However, I was killing time in a bar and damn thing was sitting there.
Cal Thomas, that stalwart Reaganolate and columnist was predictably mad about something.
These ex-moral majority yankers are seemingly always pissed off.
The only time they are happy, you can be sure it is because some liberal somewhere is
getting a hard time.
Cal was up in arms though, the GOP dominated congress, ignoring the DC
punditariat has gone and loaded up the budget with billions of dollars in pork
barrel spending.
So there we find Cal hrrumpphing ominously about the GOP's abandonment of
it's "small government" ideology.
Never mind the fact that the current GOP has NEVER been for small government
as Cal Thomas understands it, they've always been pretty explicitly for big
government as the public service arm of their wealthiest campaign contributors.
The perpetual hallucinatory dream world of the modern rightical chic
columnist merely mistakes this avaricious czarism for "small government conservatism".
And anyway, nowhere in this naive' polemic does Cal question George Bush's
leadership or firm resolve to sign off on those wasted billions in the budget.
The good lord willin, and Karl Rove's heart standin' the strain Bush will
happily endorse trillions more in waste fraud and abuse before his nightmarish
presidency ends.
No amount of whining from Cal Thomas is going to change that, where is this
poor deluded fool to go to see his childish fantasies of small
government made real??
Nowhere quite frankly...if Cal Thomas wants homos locked up and liberals whipped in the streets then he must reconcile himself to billions of dollars in highway funds being hijacked by Republican congressmen.
Since he is not going to give up on mainstream conservatism's anti-liberal crusade, I'm betting he'll learn to live with the wholesale theft of public funds.
It hardly matters, like most DC columnists, Cal is utterly cowed by the mere mention of
George Bush's holy name.
He is content,like most other democracy-hating editorialists to blame
congress and only congress for the current round of orgiastic spending.
Cal does propose a solution though, it is laughable but also highly
instructive...so remember it.
He writes, by way of a closer "Isn't it time for another revolution?"
Isn't it just hilarious when a silly little pompous ass like Cal Thomas wakes
up and finds the whole shebang really has been run by men with the morals of
the Hell's Angels??
That the peasants must be ruled by strength?
It's got to be traumatic enough to make a good gawd-fearin' sap like Cal
start spouting like a true blue Trotskyite.
According to Cal Thomas, if the first revolution is sold out (or in this case
simply sold) then just keep making ever more conservative revolutions until
society is battered into an acceptable shape.
This is the mindset of the GOP's hard right, it is entirely revolutionary and
anti-democratic in character. It may even be, in time a revolution fully
capable of consuming Bush and his political apparatus.
But for the moment, my money is on the President to weather this storm on the
right...patronizing yelping dogs like Cal Thomas is second nature to the
commander in chief.
Calvin is a fool, and a naive' fool at that. But he is also a fool with dreamy-dreams of peasants with pitchforks and drums rolling around the Capitol.
Remember that....

The Middle School Jihad...

The Boston Globe continues it's assault on Senator Kerry today running a front page valentine to Governor Dean that gushes on unabashedly about the Doctor's moderation and civility.
You mean Dean entered a room and didn't start screaming for blood and dynamite? Oh be still my beating heart!!!!
Meanwhile Scot Lehigh predictably bashes Kerry on the op-ed page recycling the juicy bits from the Sunday Globe's hatchet job on the junior Senator. Eileen McNamara also tried to get the boot in over the medicare bill.
Alas she simply comes off as being her usual ineffectual and spiteful self.
In days to come we'll get the last in Kerry venom from Vennochi and McGrory and all the rest of the yokels, have no fear.
I think that article Sunday all but gave permission to the op-ed squad at Morrissey Boulevard to open up on Kerry sans let or hindrance.
I don't really expect the Globe to prostitute itself on John Kerry's behalf.
I do think it's reasonable for someone in a responsible position to call a halt to the snarky juvenile tone that has invaded even the straight political reportage of his candidacy. If Kerry has few supporters among the Globe's paid pundits well that is the luck of the draw...but the tone of the news reporting ought to be straightforward and unbiased.
Instead we are getting the usual kewl kidz drivel from writers who are way too impressed with themselves.
Days like this, post conservative civilization looks a long way off....

Sick
Demented
Typical

50%

Fifty percent of those surveyed in the Commonwealth support either gay-marriage or full spousal benefits.
Or so the polling goes from the Boston Globe.
Something like less than 40% of respondents are unalterably opposed to both civil union benefits or gay marriage itself.
The message is clear, the electorate is once again proving itself wiser than the laggards they've been sending to Beacon Hill.
The facts seem incontrovertible, now what is needed is wise and sane leadership on the matter, statesmen who are prepared to go forward with reasonable proposals that will that 50% margin together.
Alas this is Massachusetts and America circa 2003 and there is precious little that is sane, reasonable or wise to be found in the public arena.
That 50% is mute testimony that the citizenry is prepared be magnanimous-but it won't last I assure you.
Something like thirty groups with untold millions are organizing to beat back the SJC's decision.
They will zero in on the slim gap between civil union supporters and outright gay marriage proponents creating a phantom wedge issue that'll drown the whole matter ins a deluge of demagoguery and money.
These are the very constituencies Romney would need to appeal to in a presidential primary so don't look for a break from the Kolobian Viceroy.
Tom Reilly is running for Governor and so feels strangely compelled to cut the gays of Massachusetts dead.
And the State Legislature?
Well few of them were elected on the strength of their charitable broadmindedness.
Who is going to stop them?
No-one save the people of the Commonwealth are in agreement with the broad goals of the SJC's decision...O'Reilly, Romney and the State Leg are dead set against it for various reasons.
Soon enough they will compose their differences and the Court's decision will be overturned or overthrown by main force.
Hell the Great and General Court simply refused to implement "clean elections" despite referendums and court orders...they will do no less in this matter.
It was a nice and gallant decision but it will be crushed underfoot by a combination of out-of-state witch burners, money, rampant cowardice in our own leadership classes.
But I promise you, this sumbitch is gonna come back to haunt a lot of prideful bastards presently in public life.
The largest cohort supporting gay marriage is the under thirty crowd...sooner or later they will come into their own and then we will see some shit!

Monday Notes:


Before it all goes to smash, will some wise person out there please tell me why the Boston Globe hates John Kerry so?
They had a nice little hatchet job on the candidate on the front page of the Sunday Paper.
The article managed to review with lip smacking relish every poor speaking performance made by the Senator going back to his prep school debate days.
In all a disheartening read in many ways especially this collection of rumor and kitsch was sold as a news article.
I can understand the columnists all hating him, they are wretched intimidated lot, but a news article whose sole purpose was to update the masses on how wrong the Kerry campaign is?
Something is rotten on Morrissey Bvd.
The paper has gone steadily downhill since the New York Times bought them out, all sorts of articles are e-mailed in from staffers living in the Bronx and Queen, unconnected to Boston in any way.
Time servers most of them, no doubt hoping to move up to the eagle aerie that is the Times' city room when they've paid their dues.
The Globe has no sense of community any more-none.
Oh they still sniff out a good scandal and did yeoman work on the clerical sex abuse controversy....but try and get the Arts Section to take your local production of "Dr. Faustus" seriously...
I don't even read the op-ed page any more it's filled with petty scribbling yaps of the most disposable sort.
Brian McGrory?
A nervous hack trying to get out from under his mother's journalistic shadow by wallowing in populist pseudo conservative humbug.
Scot LeHigh?
A shifty smarmy sneak with a hopelessly inane and condescending writing style. I promise you, he has five different political obituaries for John Kerry on his hard drive just waiting if the Junior Senator drops out of the race.
Jeff Jacoby?
Ah Jeff, that laughing young senescence....turgid and vain the famous conservative columnists seems to have but three stock editorials:
1.) A mawkishly sentimental letter to his five year old son Caleb...full of dreary Victorian rubbish and cutsy anecdotes about the poor lad's first subscription to "National Review for Kids".
2) A sort of yammering poor mouth whine in which somehow labors to prove that global political correctness is out to abuse and humiliate helpless American conservatives.
3) A manic I-told-you-so-shriek....loud unpleasant and atonal it's deployed every time the GOP scores the slightest victory. Usually it ends with a the usual impending-death-of-liberalism nonsense...which is the approved closing paragraph for thousands of conservative editorial hacks all over the nation.
Joan Vennochi?
Naive pretentious...and a sloppy journalist as well. Just another silly another social climbing nitwit on the Op Ed page.
Ellen Goodman and Eileen McNamara?
Impotent hand wringers of the dreariest sort.
The Globe seems to be headed towards the sort of hopeless editorial fragmentation that characterizes the Washington Post these days.
There may be readers out there who feel an ideological affinity with this rabble, but I sure as hell don't.
Which is why more and more I read the Boston Phoenix for serious political reporting, the Globe has just gone to pieces IMHO.
In fact the only thing that unifies the Globe is this unconcealed disdain for John Kerry.
Why I don't know...perhaps they are hoping to drag him down enough this time to tempt Romney into the Senate race when JK's term expires in 2008.
A nice loud contested senate race does sell a lot of papers.
That is assuming that Romney doesn't appoint himself to the sinecure when Kerry becomes President next year...
:)

Links, Talcum Powder, and Lone Gunmen:

Well, the very nice people at the Romney is a Fraud blog have seen fit to restore the link to this poor scandal sheet.
Guess all those cracks about the "Kolobian Viceroy" didn't make em' queasy after all.
:)
Careful guys stuff like that only enables me....
:)
Lemme give the Governor credit...he is a handsome man-although that "touch of grey" at the temples is strictly from hunger.
I often wonder though, what does Romney's make-up staff dust him with to give his skin that soft pinkish non-reflective pallor?
When the light is right, it's frankly a little well...unearthly it's as if Willard hasn't got any pores or something.

Meanwhile we are all wallowing in the 40th Anniversary of J.F.K.'s assassination. The last remnants of the New Frontier are all over the cable news outlets.
On a cursory viewing I can say, Pierre Salinger's toupee looks awful, Ted Sorenson looks and acts like he could walk into the Oval Office today get everything shipshape in short order, Evelyn Lincoln is old unhappy and sharp as a tack, while poor old Arthur Schlesinger is still jabbering on about his pendulum theory of U.S. politics.
I make fun of these people, but I'd rather be ruled by the ruins of the New Frontiersmen in their extreme dotage than the vile and vain rabble George Bush has swept into office.
In some ways I'm glad Kennedy died young, he'd be 86 if he was alive today.
What the late President would've made of these preening conservative louts we got down in D.C. and elsewhere can only be imagined.

Thursday Notes:

Well....I've had one little setback here at the Chimes at Midnight this week, the unknown entities behind the superlative "Romney is a Fraud" blog have dropped me from their links!
Oh well...all those references to the "Kolobian Viceroy" probably made everyone a tad queasy.
What can I say, bitter effusions such as that make me laugh....
Nonetheless, the Romney is a fraud blog is a very worthwhile daily read, all and sundry should bookmark it pronto.
Dang I was listed under "heroes"....
And while you are at it, take some time to drop by my good friend Lis Riba's blog "Riba Rambles", she is concise and factual to a fault.

Oh and Senator Kerry has spiffed up his website, check it out.

If these links all work it'll be a miracle.
:)

A Gay Olde Tyme....

In 180 days, a mere six months, the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hath decreed "gay marriage" will be legal in this state.
A nice pleasant thought, but don't you believe that this will come to pass without an almighty fight!
The State Legislature, defied the Courts and the Electorate to gut "clean elections" last year and they will do no less in regards to gay marriage.
Count on it.
Bob Travaglini, Terrible Tom Finneran, and Bishop Romney will jump through the hoops like acrobatic monkeys to get this ruling hamstrung-believe that playa!
My Ghod these are the men appointed by us to protect our own rights and lives...the lot of them would sell us all out for nickels.
It's sad to see any number of democrats desperate to restrict the rights and fortunes of a particular minority, especially over an issue that yield up in the short term naught but symbolic significance.
On the other hand, we've gotten used to republicans and their biblical revulsion towards any type of sexual liberation...so their desire deny rights to others comes as no surprise anymore.
I strongly doubt that there will be stampede of homosexuals seeking marriage licenses some six months from now- I don't think the SJC's ruling will hold up in the fracas to come.
Howver the economic consequences of broadening the definition of marriage is another debate.
Trust me on that one as well, said debate will never happen.
I look forward to an uninterrupted cataract of homophobic excrations for the next six months.
Yup, the Commonwealth will fill up with every witchburner, snake handler, and sundry voodoo practitioners they'll be buying teevee time and howling that old time religion on every street corner.
There will be gruesome talk about protecting what George Bush calls "the sacred institution" of marriage from queers and trannies. Loud bellows will be hard about the diresome threat "gay marriage" poses to that aforementioned sacred edifice.
As if marriage could be any more debauched given our current divorce rate and the number of single parent families out there right now.
No...it is not marriage that is threatened, but the sexuality of a lot of windbags and frantic virtuecrats.
And when their sexuality fragile though it is, is threatened it's strictly Katey-bar-the-Door!
It'll be anarchy I tells yuh.
And not for nothing, but if Willard Mitt Romney really IS a Bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, and IF he agrees that marriage is a "sacred institution", shouldn't he recuse himself from any discussions about the issue?
Isn't this the very picture definition of a conflict of interest?
Granted the LDS defines his Bishopric as a "lay" position but it is still a position within the hierarchy.
The current word is, that Romney will offer an amendment to the State Constitution blocking gay marriage entirely.
Woo! That didn't take long!?
No doubt Eric Fehrnstrom was up all night polling and tabulating results.

JohnIAT@aol.com

London's Bawling

A mere seven months ago, George Bush was strutting around the flight deck of the Carrier Abraham Lincoln like he was Pappy Boyington or something.
The illusion managed to last quite a while thanks to groveling little bastards like Chris Matthews screeching his praises all summer long even as the body count inched up higher and higher every day in Iraq.
Now today we are presented with the edifying spectacle of a President of the United State forced to turn London into a armed camp for the duration of his visit to Olde Blighty due to the hordes of protesters on hand to "greet him".

This is a long way from "Mission Accomplished" lemme tell you...
And not for nothing but something is seriously wrong when the President of the United States has to surround himself with a brigade of armed sharpshooters and secret agents before visiting the capital of our closest ally.
The notion that "our" President can move about London only under the protection of a shoot-to-kill order is a sad commentary of the state of western civilization.
Still none of this will have any affect on Bush's outlook on the war, fanatics such as himself are famously immune to self reflection or doubt.
Having a view of militaryoperations gleaned seemingly from childhood games with G.I. Joe dolls, no doubt the President finds all the armed guards and gulag pageantry secretly thrilling.
The whole sordid affair begins to take on the appearance of mad old Gaius Caligula "inspecting" the Roman Empire's garrisons on the Rhine.
It's almost pointless to protest, almost.
I mean, Bush is exactly the sort of monochromatic mentality that never changes it's mind no matter who gets hurt or how much the cost.
This sort of narcissism is called "Texas Hardheadedness" by the likes of George Will.
Sick
Demented
Typical
I remain, you obedient servant....

The Hercules Putsch:

Seizing power in a coup is a pretty undignified messy business most everywhere else in the world.
This is despite the fact that the old fashioned coup with it's flags and tanks is the accepted manner of changing governments for something like 75% of the world.
Thanks to Good Old Fashioned American Know-How, we've even managed to standardize this peculiar foreign custom.
And so we come to November 17th 2003, a day in which thanks to an obscure law written by well meaning goo-goos in the 1900's Arnold Schwarzenegger, a vain preening lout, is seizing power in the State of California.
I'm sure his inaugural address with be mercifully bereft of the usual truculent threats that have characterized Arnold's movie work to date.
"I'll be back" and junk like that.
No it'll be naught but indigestible rubbish about the free market, opportunity, and the California Way of Life.
And amidst these bloviations the Golden State will be whisked off on a waltz with yet another tedious demagogue.
There is a tiresome cliche on the neocon right to the effect that the states are "fifty little thrifty beehives of social policy experimentation".
Hence they should be allowed the widest possible latitude in order for a "hundred policy flowers to bloom".
This is of course errant nonsense on a cosmic scale.
They are less fifty little social policy labs and more like fifty nasty semi-bankrupt banana republics mostly presided over by the lowest most contemptible scoundrels on Ghod's Green Earth.
In fact most of the nation's demagogues and dictators have been state governors not U.S. Presidents.
A President has precious little time to set up a really effective tyranny, he's got to be fund-raising for re-election practically from the moment he takes the oath.
And he's watched like a hawk even by his own so called supporters and sycophants, there is nowhere to go but down once you are in the White House.
Plenty of people are gunning for you...
Not so being a state governor a man can safely don jackboots and a Sam Browne belt and rate nothing more than a snarky picture in "Time Magazine".
The Gubernatorial roll of dishonor features many such stalwarts as Huey P. Long, Herman Talmadge, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Pete Wilson, James Rhodes (who pumped the National Guard up to a shooting frenzy just prior to Kent State) and of course lets not forget Massachusetts own James Michael Curley.

Yup not only are all politics local, but all Dictatorships are local as well.
That is a consequence of Federalism that the Heritage Institute would rather not deal with.
Or maybe when they say "laboratory" they mean "gulag"....who can tell in today's rhetorically debauched times?
Sick
Demented
Typical

Friday Notes:

The lowest most simple-minded jobber will tell you that one of the best ways to move up in the game of politics is to get yourself noticed.
No less a solon as the Late Tammany Hall Sachem George Washington Plunkett preached as much all his livelong days.
Plunkett spent most of his time at street fairs, religious holidays, wakes, funerals, baptisms and whatnot passing out boons and perks and courting public approval.
It wa axiomatic that the State Senator could beat most fire-engines to a house fire in his district....it was said he could hear a fire bell ten blocks away.
Truly the successful politician is a ubiquitous politician.
And so we come to the ghoulish spectacle of Pennsylvania Senator Rick "high pitch Rich" Santorum in the well of the U.S. Senate pounding the podium and smacking his lips with relish at the thought of outlawing "partial birth abortion".
Rich's moment was a hand last week a nice juicy incremental blow to a woman's right to choose, a feast for any main chance GOP politico.
And what the hell he got his way, the Senate transformed itself from a den of thieves, brutes, and fixers and into a medical commission just long enough to outlaw a rare surgical procedure.
Rich then stood behind the President grinning like a Mongoloid as GWB signed the bill and made the usual effusive remarks about the culture of life and other hallucinations.
This week Rick helped Fox News stage manage the Senate GOP's 30 hour filibuster highlighting Democratic obstructionism on Bush's judicial nominees.
As we all know Bush watches Fox News as often as possible so no doubt he is beginning to take notice of the fighting young reactionary from Pennsylvania.
It helps being one of the Capitol's most resolute Bush idolators...his call ins to the Imus program set a new standard for public sycophancy of the lowest and crudest type.
So I have to ask...what does Rick Santorum want in the quickening autumn of 2003?
He is already a telegenic, sought after U.S. Senator, his sinecure seems secure.
I think Rich wants to take his screechy psychotic whine into the office of Vice President of the United States.
Yup you heard it here first, Rick wants to be veep.
Currently Dick Cheney holds that position but the famed Halliburton rain-maker is looking mighty shopworn these days...this Iraq thing was all his idea after all.
Rick has to sense the President might be looking to change up come next summer's GOP convention...
If I had to guess Santorum has probably already done some polling to buttress his popularity in other states and among the sought after cohorts.
His GOP bona fides are perfectly sound, he's all for giving carefully selected groups (poor women and queers) as hard a time as the law will allow...which is sound conservative thinking in the 21st century. Certainly Rick would have no problems running on a platform of fag-bashing and limitless military pre-emption....hell he has been dreaming all his unnatural life of campaigning on such morbid nonsense.
As the Senate goes, he does have some competition in the complex game of Vice Presidential Ambitions, chiefly Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
But Orrin is old and sounding more than a little querulous lately....that prissy little voice of his sounds impotent and school-marmish compared to Rich's Mick Jagger-ish shrieks of studied outrage.
Bush-Santorum in 2004...how does that sound?
Prefectly dreadful in every way.

A Zombie's Defiance:

There is nothing funnier than false braggadocio...really nothing.
Some loudmouth seething with truculence promising dire vengeance at some future date when all the time the audience knows this hammerhead would sh*t himself at the first gunshot.
Such a sublime moment occurred spontaneously on the Imus Program yesterday.
The upper west side's most notorious ambulatory corpse was staggering through an interview with "Bias" author Bernard Goldberg.
Bernie is a whiny bore whose critique of CBS News alleged liberal slant amounts to little more than the usual Allen Drury style boilerplate.
His insistence that "reporters write the news for their elite pals at Elaine's and not Middle America" could well have come verbatim out of "Capable of Honor" or one of Spiro Agnew's speechs.
All of which proves that originality is no requirement for successful on the "conservative poormouth circuit".
Imus then tried to liven things up going on a hysterical screed impugning Dan Rather's cowboy credentials before he wound himself up into a delirious fury asserting that he'd "quit" if Mel Karmazin ever tried to alter the content of HIS show!!!
Now usually I ignore Imus as a personality, he is old, incoherent, decrepit, and mean...his show is chiefly a means to get a concentrated dose of whatever rubbish the media whores are peddling this week.
However this "I'd quit!" stuff was actually laugh-out-loud funny-never has a more spineless dependent wretch sounded more hilariously defiant.
If tomorrow morning Mel Karmazin ordered Imus to get a sex change operation and give the show a "trannie perspective", the I-Man would be in surgery by noon screeching at the Doctors to "HURRY!!!"
Imus has nowhere to go at this point in his sad wasted life, his virago wife stays on only because the checks come in steady, he isn't talking to ex or his OTHER children...if Viacom-CBS cancelled his show tomorrow Imus would die of despair within a month.
"I'd quit" who does this vulgar senile fraud think he is kidding?
NOBODY quits today, the money is too good and too easy!
Still it was uproarious to listen in on his empty threats....
Such is the Kingdom of God
On the Congressionally Licensed Airwaves
And Elsewhere
11-13-03
God Save the Republic

Hit someone, anyone...THEN make them good democracy consumers....

What color is the sky in Tom Friedman's world?
Can you smell colors therein and perform other extra-rational miracles?

All sorts of fantasies, grim and otherwise were implied from his call in to the Imus program yesterday.
His latest justification for the war (on the heels of "Saddam has a doomsday bomb" and "I saw skulls, Human Skulls!!!")
is that we must save that those stalwart progressives, the House of Saud.
Yup...Tom Friedman insists that 9-11 was cooked up by Bin Laden as part of a scheme to embarrass Saudi Arabia by loading up the operation with suicidal Saudi terrorists.
Never mind the fact that Saudi Arabia has been exporting terrorists for years, bankrolling them, and is perfectly happy as the world goes up in chunks as long as their tribal hegemony is not attacked.
Nope we are doing all this to save that olde tyme religion in Riyadh.
As usual, Tom sounded scared, and when Friedman is scared he starts spouting "complex" theories about foreign policy and quoting ad nauseam from the "Arab Human Development Report".
His conclusion? The yokels are starving, stupid, fertile, and angry...and that represents a threat to "our open society".
He also loads up his discourse with gratingly trite cliche's like "empower", "invest", "alternative energy", "shareholder" and my favorite "stake-holder".
As if the voters of the once proud republic are a bunch of grizzled miners a'la Gabby Hayes.
To Tom, it is a mere matter of weaning John Q. Public-Iraq off the local roast and enticing him across the street to the new Starbucks franchise wherein the coffee is just more reliable.
I've called Friedman a lot of names down through the years, "hopeless naive' hack" being a fave, I've also derided him as spineless and a passive aggressive yutz.
But yesterday I finally figured it out, Tom's real problem is that he is a helpless utopian, he really believes in his heart of hearts that the global free market can create nothing but positive change for the man on the street in Baghdad.
In truth, it is not all Tom Friedman's fault.
He came of age in a fiercely illiberal age and feels the only alternative to being a mindless reactionary is to assert patently liberal utopian ends can be achieved by simply cheerleading the free market.
After a while if you mumble this patent nonsense to yourself often enough, you begin to believe it.
It's called auto-suggestion and Tom has it bad.
Meanwhile he goes on prattling nervously about "our free society" ....that once glorious polity in which elections are overturned and recalled on a moments notice....this blessed plot in which thieves run amok in high places, louts make the laws, and young Americans die for a policy summarized as "hit someone anyone!".
Tom looks at all this and sees a utopia....
Me?
I'm looking into cheap plots of land in the Baja.

Bargains, Faustian and Otherwise....

"There are no honorable bargains involving the exchange for qualitative merchandise for quantative commodities"
William S. Burroughs

D'ye suppose if this cockamamie "all day kindergarten in exchange for life learning classes for the troglodytes" thing goes through that anyone in public life will take to teaching the Hottentots?
Will Joe Lawless give up his lonely vigil guarding the docks of Boston to instruct the yokels of Brockton on the proper use of tupperware?
Will Tagg Romney (the Kolobian Viceroy's eldest offspring) ditch his lucrative phoney-baloney job at the State Republican Committee to teach the wretched refuse of Holyoke how to fill out subscription forms to the "Nation Review"?
Will Eric Kriss the Cabinet's unofficial witch doctor of eugenics, resign his post to show the heathen the secrets of roasting cheap chicory coffee?
A host of volunteer opportunities beckon to the stalwart pay-triots' of Massachusetts...will they answer the call?
My guess is no...in an conflict between volunteerism and careerism, filthy jobbery wins out every damn time.
Still it is just plain funny to think of Tagg Romney (who has gotten sleek living off the dregs of the Mass. GOP's overfished mailing list) playing social worker in the windy streets of Fall River.
I mock this idea with all due genial contempt, but it does prophesy many malign things for the future...having had a de facto viceroy installed as Governor we are now witnessing the opening stages of the ideological colonization of the once proud and lonely Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The notion that we are gonna squeeze the hapless parents of children in "non performing" schools into classrooms to teach em; how to check their kid's homework would be laughed to death had it been proposed by Messr's Dukakis, Weld, Cellucci, or Madame Swift.
Romney however is an uplifter and improver of the most meddlesome conservative variety...it actually helps his utopian world view to have little real emotional with the Commonwealth...so much easier when it comes time to move the poor into air conditioned underground bunkers or build a tunnel to the South Pole to encourage housing start-ups.
Like I've said before, Romney has ideas...most of them marvelously bad.
Nevertheless he is hell bent on catching up to the rising tide of conservatism nationally and will no doubt have many more destructive notions before he is done.
He has been sent here to preach a new gospel of limitless government snoopery yoked to limitless tax breaks and like a good missionary parson, Bishop Romney will see this thing through come hell of high water.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

Queer bashing 2004:

The Boston Globe has a front page story today detailing the President's desire to make "gay marriage" his wedge issue of choice in the upcoming campaign.
I hate it when I am proven right.
Serious Chimes at Midnight readers (that is, all five of you) will recall I've been predicting an orgy of homophobia in campaign 2004 for several months now.
Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, so too does La Famiglia Arbusto return to it's life-giving menu of "wedge issues".
George Bush Jr. may well go down in history as the First President to run for re-election on a promise to deny certain rights to a carefully selected minority.
Rights said minority doesn't even have yet!
Gotta love that doctrine of pre-emption.
The usual suspects will chalk this whole appalling spectacle up to the "southernization" of American politics.
Y'know the forcible introduction of harsh puritanical southern clerical values into the political debate.
That of course is an interesting and suggestive phenomenon...because despite their undeniable electoral strength, the political south has been wrong about so many issues in relentless succession that it calls into question their collective sanity.
They were wrong about the Civil War, wrong about Prohibition, wrong about Civil Rights, wrong about the Viet Nam War and in the end they'll be proven utterly wrong about gay marriage as well.
But not before a lot of people are hurt and humiliated ere long.
Given this record of error and catastrophe is it any wonder the political south follows palpable frauds and liars like Tom Delay or Newt Gingrich?
Given the need to furnish the south with some blood sacrifice is there any doubt Bush will happily deliver up America's gay community to the tender graces of Reaganolaters, brutes and snoops?
But ah, remember the President does this ugly and churlish thing from his heart-he is an authentic man or so Mike Barnicle helplessly sighs.
If it mean a comfortable re-election, George Bush Jr. would happily book time on VH1 tomorrow night to wipe his ass with the original U.S. Constitution.
THAT is the core of his so called authenticity.
Otherwise Bush may steal and lie...but he calls down imprecations and punishment for the loftiest of reasons.
Vain power worshipping, dishonest...but painfully direct when screaming up a mob to oppose a right that as yet doesn't exist.
Bush knows his rabbles, and the GOP's mob is one of the best trained since the Parisian route that executed Marie Antoinette and Robespierre in succession....there is nothing he cannot do, no minority he cannot punish with them on his side.
I'm not saying the whole of the south has gone apeshit crazy, I do assert that the "commanding heights" of the southern polity is controlled by persons

Oh that Word....

Authenticity is back it seems.
The punditariat has been whispering it lately, it seems President Bush is still the most "authentic" guy around which suits these stuffed shirts just fine.
Political connoisseurs will note that everyone from Maureen Dowd to Mike Barnicle got weak in the knees back in campaign 2000, insisting that Governor Bush's callowness, fanaticism, and ignorance were somehow...authentic.
Being "authentic" is considered a virtue among the chattering classes.
It is a clear case of projection though....what else would our native class of perjurers, hopeless dissemblers and pseudo intellectuals ever aspire to?
Frankly authenticity is a trite meaningless virtue, your average Mongoloid can achieve it very handily.
As far as the rankings go it stands far down on the list next to the comparable vice of hypocrisy..they are both utterly inevitable in life and utterly forgettable as well.
Frankly to call someone "authentic" is to indirectly catalogue their many missing virtues....
These days authenticity is rapidly becoming one of those Orwellian types words that signals little more than a pleasing characteristic that even the worst and most cruel personality must be able to project if they are to succeed.
At the moment though, authenticity stands as little else than an advertising slogan, a term in the transitory stages of corruption and debasement.
If English was written and spoken correctly we'd say a person was "honest" in place of the murky honorific "authentic".
But ah...honesty still means something these days, and to call George Bush Jr. honest is to instantly call up memories of his many gaffes, lies, distortions and revisions on the road to war with Iraq.
So we are back to the punditariat citing GWB's simple authenticity....it is safe, vague and inevitable.
The advantage is, that under the appellation of "authentic" the President can go on stealing, lying, and conniving like the scoundrel he is sans reproof.
So it's a win-win situation all around.

Idle Worship....

We are in the midst of another revival of paganism in this faltering republic.
Last month a bunch of screechy wowsers in Alabama decided that God Almighty
inhabited a stone slab inscribed with the ten commandments.
This month it is proclaimed that any depiction of the Grand Senescence that
deviated from the standard hagiography is contrary to the will of de lawd
and grounds for immediate Mob Rule in America.
Pity poor CBS television, they thought they could trot out a bland miniseries on
the life of Ronald Reagan sans controversy.
HA!
In the past they've rendered inert and unmemorable everyone from Benito
Mussolini to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-but when they opted to depict the Iconic
Little Father of Santa Barbera-Look Out!
To Ronald Augustus' many worshipers, the Divine Vacuity's
sacred heart is a powerful fetish that must be constantly defended.
Ed Gillespie, Matt Drudge and a host of cheap trashy fanatics rose as one to
prevent the broadcast of some perfectly forgettable biographical tripe.
We may wallow in JFK's love life and sit stupefied at Lyndon Johnson's
tawdriness...but dress up an actor as Ronald Reagan and it's Katie bar the Door!!
The wowsers were out in force threatening lynching, barn burnings,
investigations, and no doubt the Salem Water Cure as well.
And what the hell, CBS caved selling their dull epic to Showtime for a secret
late night burial on Cable TV.
As Jeff Jacoby can tell you, there is no power on earth so pleasurable as the power to force people to do stuff.
For the rightical chic it must be doubly gratifying to bend the tiffany Network to their will, since they routinely blame CBS personally for losing the War in Viet Nam along with a host of other imagined societal ills.
I can't get behind "The Reagans" as anything else but an object lesson in
the burgeoning and irresponsible power of conservative media.
It is worth remembering that there are many books out there far more critical
of Mr. Reagan's tenure as President than this dumb-ass movie....books just
itching to be burned.
Think about that.

Yup...Ronald Reagan may be the first Saint to achieve secular beatification
in this country prior to his own death.
That is no small thing.
But then Saint Ron has always been marked with more than his share of
religious hysteria going back to his days as the grinning Governor of California.
William F. Buckley used to cross himself at the mere mention of Reagan's name.
Ronald Reagan brought a lot of things to Washington back in 1981 when he was
sworn in.
Phoney machismo, a revoltingly condescending optimism, mendacity, and dippidy
doo for men.
But worst of all he brought in his train, a biblical plague of
flatterers, courtiers and raw sycophants who have since remained in Washington and debased public discourse past all hope of recovery.
THAT is real legacy of Reaganism...toadying.
We used to be a nation of persons who laughed at groveling little bastards
like George Will....now these servile bootlickers are dictating content to the
Networks.
And indeed why not?
These people steal elections, governorships, impeach, investigate and
threaten with increasing confidence truculence.
What is suppressing a little miniseries to them?
Don't know who is gonna stop em'...but these guys desperately need a nice fat
setback and soon or else we are headed to real trouble in this country.
Sick
Demented
Typical

Item!

He is shrill...
He is self righteous...
He is a well connected, powerful Washington personality...
He is one of the President's most notorious apologists...
What would his famously puritanical constituents say if the rumors are true and their boy stands revealed as a homosexual?
For that fact what would his wife and children say??
***
More than likely they'd say nothing...America seems to admire nothing so much as a successful unrepentant lout....and they'll wink at the most corrupt hypocrites as long as the perp seems to be a stand up guy i.e. a loud obnoxious demagogue.
It is just this sort of shamelessness that'll return Rush Limbaugh to the airways sans reproof and allows William Bennett to scold and upbraid without let or hindrance.
It's no wonder our hero allegedly dallies with rented leather boys, he'd be a fool not to in today's brave new world.
And next year, when Bush's issue of choice is opposition to "homosexual marriage" you can bet our boy will be decorously anti queer at every opportunity.
Sick
Demented
Typical

Chris Matthews on Imus today...

He has a new book out "American Beyond Our Grandest Notions"...despite it's preposterously pompous title it's apparently about all the super kewl klassic movies Chris like really really loves.
Based on a close analysis of "The Searchers", Matthews has decided we are a "relentless, lonely, rebellious nation....no wonder we don't like government much..."
So now the wellsprings of Chris' pretentious purehearted Americanism originate in Hollywood....how that jibes with the rest of the media whores hatred of tinseltown I don't know.
This IS Chris Matthews we are talking about consistency is not his strong suite.
Certainly publicly masturbating over the President's appearance on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln back in May hasn't stopped him from voicing vague "suspicions" about the war now.
Neither have these self same qualms prevented him from making plain his contempt for the current democratic field of presidential candidates....there is no link between those two congruent concepts and none will be forged by Mister Matthews either.
After all he is a journalist and he has his standards: democrats of all types and persuasions are all equally repellant.
Good Ghod I'm not back from vacation ten minutes and there is this frantic unlovely clown spouting this rubbish like it's fresh gold on the public airwaves!
I'm suspecting more and more, that Chris was the gazoonie in Tip O'Neill's congressional apparat.
You know the Jimmy Olsen-ish dingbat who got sent out for coffee at the drop of a hat. Nice dim-witted kid close to power but not trusted with a bit of it. Clearly the late Speaker got down to cases only after Chris was safely out of the room.
I can't account for his rise to pre-eminence as a journalist-although I haven't ruled out some diabolical transaction with Mephistopheles. Perhaps the demon took Matthews' soul but let him keep the rest of his annoying preadolescent personality intact.
Who knows really?
Chris has the opinions of a very hyper 12 year old boy...shallow, opportunistic and shrill beyond hope of redemption.
Trite turgid obvious...Chris is the total package...to listen to him on Imus to believe the U.S. is on the verge of enfranchising cartoon characters.
Not just the charming ones like Daffy Duck either, I'm talking the morbid caricatures of "South Park" of John Kricfalusi's "Ren and Stimpy".

Such is the Kingdom of God
On the congressionally licensed airwaves
and elsewhere
11-3-03

Republican Re education

We suffer the most when the White House bursts with ideas.
H.L. Mencken January 1933

Henry Louis said that with Woodrow Wilson and sundry divines in mind.
No doubt he'd revise the concept to include the Governorship of this
Commonwealth if he was alive today.

We are just now realizing with dawning horror what a fidgety frantic yap
Willard Mitt Romney really is.
Elected amidst the hosannas of debt burdened burgers from Natick to Pelham
Governor Decaf was expected to provide nothing more than the usual blovial
sentiments and low taxes.
Instead we are finding out that he is just overflowing with ideas...in other
words the Kolobian Primate really believes Eric Fehrnstrom's tripe about
innovative market friendly solutions.

So before we can all become savvy superconsumers on info megahighway...some
of us the dumb, the lame, the latte-less apparently have to go back to school.
Yup that is right, Eric Kriss' "taker" class, the ones with kids in the worst
performing schools, will get all day kindergarten but only if their shiftless
mothers and father go to mandatory parenting classes on Saturdays.
This is quite literally a wondrous inversion of Pol Pot's old "lock up the
city slickers and the school teachers in labor camps" routine.
It is in short, class warfare, Romney style.
I give Willard credit he apparently has read a little Asian history while he
was learning the ins and outs of loaning money to rich white men at Bain
Capital Gruppe.
Except this time it is the untermenschen, that 25%, "the taker" class will
be forced to scan the columns of Jeff Jacoby for homey child-rearing tips.

This is the inevitable consequence of electing these pie-in-the-sky
innovation worshiping free market fanatic CEO types to positions of high public trust.
They immediately start acting out on their every gruesome fantasy, the sort
of malignant rubbish that previously was only preached behind the closed doors
of the executive suite.
The notion that these pirate sector vultures represent cautious conservatism
is sheer nonsense. Time and again they are demonstrated to be as prone to
utopian delusions as any Juan Peron or Achmed Sukarno.
Fortunately, Romney is still pretty selective in what social class he wants
to police and improve...so the yokels and white trash are in for a hard time
under Romneylus Augustus.
However the rest of your should beware, all that tokin' drinkin' and high
living doesn't go down well with our famously puritanical Governor.
He'll get around to you in due course.
Sick
Demented
Typical