Friday, December 31, 2004

A lingering question...

Mr. Jeff Jacoby's column in yesterday's Boston Globe contains the following quote:
"Alfred A. Knopf published Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," a novel in which two Bush-haters talk about assassinating the president. "I'm going to kill that bastard," one character rages."

Humble Elias hasn't read the above book, my question is, has Jeff?

One idly wonders if the Globe's Laughing Young Senescence has quite understood the author's theme.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

On liberal hate speech...

Jeff Jacoby has opened up his file folder entitled “Hate Speech” and for the umpty-teenth time found naught but liberals and their ilk within. Of course to fatten the list to column length he does have to quote curious dingbats like Cameron Diaz a girl whose mensa credentials seem to be gathering dust in the dead letter office.
Nevertheless and son of a gun, who’d a thunk it? The Globe must keep our Laughing Young Senescence busy, otherwise he’d surely be able to find one or two token instances of rightical chic hyperbole. Well what of it? Our white Jacobyn had a demanding schedule this year - he can’t be expected to keep up.
If it is hate speech Jeff was really after, he would need go no farther than the post apocalyptic wasteland that is the Yahoo.com news message boards. Three clicks and some reactionary somewheres is openly threatening death, genocide, and lobotomy from the safe fastness of cyber anonymity. Even as Humble Elias writes this, someone on one of those boards is openly demandind that all liberals be rounded up and put behind barbed wire.
Jeff could also give a listen to the Stephanie Miller Show on AM 1430 wherein callers with quaint drawls call up and airily fantasize about “bulldozing” Northeastern liberals into the sea. Humble Elias gives that caller a chrome plated “no prize” for evoking a classic anti-Israeli metaphor popular in Nasser’s Egypt back in the day.
Humble Elias will forego mentioning the citizenry of a certain nearby state who felt completely free to call his candidate for high office an “ass hole” among other choice epithets. And then there was that hand scrawled sign at a roadside visibility, the one that asserted “Bin Laden endorses Kerry”...rollicking high spirits from the GOP nothing more, nothing to concern Jeff Jacoby certainly.
Lets face facts though, Jeff doesn’t give two hoots in hell about hate speech, no true Jacobyn does. No, Jeff wants to seize the vacant throne of David Brudnoy and become the Hub’s all purpose principled conservative talking head. Sweetheart book deals, a comfy radio sinecure, ones film preferences fawned over, its an attractive gig for a man with mouths to feed.
Of course to do that he has to somehow come off as an independent free thinker of some type. Alas with freeper drivel like this pouring off his word processor the process of Brudnoyization will be tough sledding. Jeff wants to be seen as independent, but he doesn’t wanna sacrifice his addiction to rightical chic talking points. And anyway, when is Jeff gonna ever exit campaign mode? Does he have a single opinion that hasn’t been vetted for maximum conservative blast effect?
Still and all that what WILL Jeff do when we liberals are hunted to extinction? He'll run out of copy inside a month, without us to flail he has nothing at all.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Reality floods in...

Anyone else get the impression that La Famiglia Arbusto is faintly annoyed with the tsunami catastrophe in Asia? Bush refuses to leave Crawford Texas on behalf of the worst natural disaster in post war Asian history, he offers a paltry fifteen million disaster aid and gets all pissy when people call him out on it.
Petulant little bastard isn't he?
I think Bush spent fifteen million alone on voter suppression in Ohio and Florida just this year alone.
And not fer' nothing but you'd think for reasons of realpolitik alone La Famiglia Arbusto would go in for a big loud splashy relief effort. Its a painless way to recoup the world's goodwill so recently and wastefully squandered.
Nope not this crew, those are facts and the facts just make their bloated heads hurt it seems.
Herein are the operational limitations on a faith based Presidency...sometimes the truth just doesn't come to Gorver Norquist's meetings.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

The year in review...

Frankly it has been a year of catastrophic set backs for humble Elias. He is still out of work, certain blood kinfolk have entered immortality, and the national political situation is bleak and unpromising.
Still and all, we had fun on this blog.

Ripped up Romney to a fare-thee-well....his cynicism, his craveness, his naivete' all fodder for the Chimes at Midnight.
Correctly called the late Kerry surge in the NH primary, a phenom largely boosted by his own fanatical volunteer base.
Threw a lot of barbs at Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, although the comparisons to Allen Drury's fictional Fred Van Ackerman are going exactly nowhere. (not that your humble narrator cares)
Mused continually over whether we are faced with ideologues or voluptuaries.
Dicked on Schwarzenegger as well....may as well get used to it, he will be around for a while.
Oh and lets not forget Fox News' bid to create its own ersatz version of the democratic party.
Oh and dumped on Fineman, Matthews, LeHigh, McGrory, Jacoby, Ingraham, etc etc etc...flakes, propagandists, and freaks all.
And Caleb Jacoby, lets not forget that poor rhetorical prop of a child...
Good willin' and the creek don't rise, we will do it all again next year.

Monday, December 27, 2004

It is sad to see...

Senator John McCain enter such a naive' dotage. the poor blithering fool thinks he can be elected President in 2008. The Rovian delusion, that the GOP can recreate the nation as a de facto one party state, shows no sign of abating among the republicans. Indeed the whole mishaugas is about to be embraced by an younger, livier, and even more brutal political generation, the Rick Santorums and Mitt Romneys who all think their time has come. Poor McCain, among these worthies, he comes off as a Methodist Missionary trying to teach the Marquis of Queenberry's rules to a drunken flight of Hell's Angels.
McCain has been run through the wood-chipper before and will be run through it again ere' the La Famiglia Arbusto is done. Hell, by 2008 the technique of ideological vituperation will very far advanced indeed. No doubt there is some "Swift Boat Veterans" type bunch laying for McCain even now. The man is decent and honorable, if he'd been nominated in 2000 Humble Elias has no doubt he could've carried forty states and run very well in Massachusetts. However McCain is not an advocate of smashing the two party system and so will be ground down into the mud come january 2008. It can be no other way.
Nope, America is running out of last chances it seems. The GOP could've embraced a worthier brand of conservatism in 2000 under McCain's leadership,just as the nation could've chosen a secular democratic revival with John Kerry in 2004. Both are lofty notions very much in keeping with Americn traditon and both crushed by the Rovian utopian fixation on rolling the nation back to 1899 lock, stock, and barrel.
Sadly, McCain's time is past, the battle is not over what direction conservatism will take, that has already been decided by the Delays, Frists, Santorums, Bushs, and Norquists of the world. No, the battle now is for the very survival of democracy in America. One wishes John McCain understood that, but time has passed him by and that is no sin in the final analysis.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

The ghost Pundit...

History teaches us that the great and the neurotic who wish to be great are sometimes tormented by the shades of that which they most fear. Leon Trotsky was said to have glimpsed Mexican mariachi singers on the edge of the vast proletarian crowds in Russia. Richard Nixon was allegedly tormented by the shade of Robert F. Kennedy who would mock the President’s necktie every morning of the trickster’s misbegotten administration.
And so it is with that laughing young senescence, Jeff Jacoby whose column today cites Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy as the sort of fighting liberals who whose devotion to terrorist preemption was real and palpable. It is ALWAYS a sign of impending intellectual bankruptcy when the righties drag out bygone libs to shore up their policy catastrophes. Its a form of rhetorical thumb sucking the rightical chic indulge whenever the wind starts blowing high through the halls of the Georgetown Think Tanks.
It is also a battered cliché used by GOP activistas to try and peel off a few more “disaffected” democrats whose allegiance might be up for auction. Citing FDR, Truman, and Kennedy is a bit of a dodge though. Faced with disaster in Iraq, Jacoby trots out the victorious liberal warlords and associates today’s failed policy with yesterday’s triumphs. You will notice Jeff passed over that other fighting liberal Lyndon Johnson in silence. In this fashion Jeff bleated ineffectually, “last chance to board the Baghdad Victory Special”-this would be a poorly armored vehicle sadly vulnerable to rocket propelled grenades. Jeff may be running out of ideas, but that doesn’t stop him from campaigning and maneuvering endlessly for some new phantom advantage.
The irony here is, the Jeff Jacoby’s of 1936, 1950 and 1962 HATED Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. FDR was branded as a sick demented dictator, Truman was called a boorish drunk, Kennedy was a spineless commie dupe.
if Jacoby had been a writer in an of those epochs, rest assured he’d a unloaded on the above mentioned presidents with all the brutality he once reserved for John Kerry and Bill Clinton. Alas though, with the Iraqi resistance shelling the Green Zone and blowing up our chow halls, Jeff needs all the imaginary friends he can dream up for this seemingly unending shitstorm.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Friday, December 24, 2004

I can't think of anything more

depressing for a wounded soldier than to be "comforted" by the glacial likes of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. But yet off he goes to Iraq to pat the heads of the injuried and wish them many happy returns of the day. Better he should stay at his desk tonight and solve the "up armor" problem...alas no, there are symbolic visits to make and TV cameras to appease.

So on that wistful patriotic note Humble Elias wishes all his readers and especially those in uniform and those in harm's way a merry christmas.

Decaf throws his hat in the ring...

all the way from the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee where no doubt he and Tagg keep a lonely vigil looking out of the cold winter swells for unwary boaters to rescue. In truth what else could Mitt do except run for re-election? having been rebuffed by the Admin in his covert quest for a cushy job in DC, nothing else will keep his lackwitted name before the New Hampshire public save running for a second term as Governor of Massachusetts.
Alas though, this is NOT what Governor Romney really wanted for Christmas. Mitt’s attempt to show horn one hundred and thirty supplicants into the state legislature has succeeded only in creating a new class of GOP mendicant for the holiday season. Insufferable when he has the upper hand and utterly laughable when he goes to the dogs, Mitt’s revolting pliability puts Plastic Man to shame.
He is by far spectacularly unsuited to the steady stream of dull details that the governorship offers. His so called leadership is a series of shrill yawlps that inevitably presage the trancelike chanting of Romney’s infallible power-word “reform-reform-reform”. His much praised businessman’s style has yielded up a personal staff that is wildly overpaid, arrogant and amusingly untalented. Meanwhile, the towns and cities of the Commonwealth are starved of state aid like greyhounds on a pre-race diet. Repetitive and tinny, whiny and spiteful, Mitt’s promises are virtual guarantees of failure and inertia. His administrative style starts at torpid and rises only reluctantly to ineptitude.
His “relationship” with the Great and General Court is actually even worse than that of his hated predecessor Jane “Jingle Money” Swift. The ex-governor noted for her fertility, could at least count on a vestige of courtliness from the male dominated House and Senate. Thus Romney has few accomplishments to his name and will likely have little to show for the next two long cold years.
The man is already bored and annoyed by his job, he knows the only game in town is gaining the President’s seal of approval for campaign 2008-in this so far Romney is failure. So quite literally because he has nothing else to do, Romney wants a second term. Empty of any real ideas and just spineless enough to take the remnants of the nation off a cliff, Mit begins his quest for the Presidency right here at home.
Still for all that, Humble Elias rates him a good fifty fifty shot to win in 2006. His roundheads and loyal spartans, the suburban independents, mortgaged to the hilt and desperate show no signs of abandoning his pepsodent smile. He can raise the money just of the basis of being the “only game in town” for the local and national GOP. Lastly, the Scot Lehighs and Brian McGrorys still love him and will do their best to paint Deceive as some sort of nice unthreatening moderate when the time comes.
Yet things aren’t quite so black for Massachusetts’ democrats. 2004 may have rendered up another defeat nationally, but the party demonstrated the ability to successfully fight on two fronts simultaneously, both in local races and in the New Hampshire Presidential race-that can’t be good news for Mitt. There will be plenty of money out there for strong running dems of that be sure. What the opposition lacks is a concise message and of course, the right candidate to put it over.
Time will tell, and Elias Nugator sez, that time begins now.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Not even Time Magazine's portraitist...

can make President Bush look good. GWB is the Haughty Little Rag's "Man of the Year" and never looked worse despite heroic efforts to make him look...well...heroic. The squinty shifty eyes, the sneer of disdain, the obnoxious demeanor, the frankly simian bearing...the man is a mess by all contemporary standards. Sadly unless history is greater hater of hubris, we are stuck with him for the next four years. What is worse, Bush hasn't even peaked in his capacity to inflict woe and want upon us all in the name of his turgid necrotic ideology.
And on that note, a Merry Christmas to you all and a happy New Year.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Apropos of exactly nothing but...

Humble Elias was at the library tonight fruitlessly searching for a particular volume on the black arts, alas the shelves were all crammed with glib, clever, books by noted conservative funnyman P.J. O'Rourke. His whole bibliography fairly sneers with disdain at the unwary library patron. Right then and there your narrator conceived a strong desire to see P.J. handcuffed, stuffed in a stave barrel,and dropped by Coast Guard helicopter into the storm tossed Flemish Cap.
THAT would brighten up the holiday hearths of many people here in the cold cold heart of Massachusetts.
Merry Christmas from Elias Nugator.
:)

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

The politics of Links...

Humble Elias has buckled down and added some links at the bottom of the page. Now don't worry, he hasn't gone overboard-just a few friends, colleagues, and admired journalists thats all.
Lis Riba, an uncommonly sensible woman she was also the first person to link to this page.
Romney is a Fraud, an excellent blog also an early linker.
Dimmy Karras, good writer also links to this blog. Makes him a pal in Humble Elias' book.
Cosmo Macero, don't agree with him 1000% but he is nice enough to link to the Chimes at Midnight so what the hell.
Joshua Micah Marshall DOESN'T link to the Chimes at Midnight, but he is still a good writer and worth reading every day.

Monday, December 20, 2004

Just a quick shout out,

to Dimmy Karras who has come back from his post election hiatus and upgraded his blog. Since he is one of the few who in fact links to this, "The Little Blog that Cried" Huble Elias thought the event noteworthy.
Check out his very fine postings at www.dimmykarras.blogspot.com

Taste the wrath of Saxby!

Senator Chambliss is all outraged like to discover that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has been signing the KIA letters to soldier's families with what amounts to a rubber stamp. "I think this is another area in which the Secretary has been insensitive" yelped the junior Senator for Georgia on yesterday's "Face the Nation".
Good lord what a pious scumbag! Its okay to call Senator Max Cleland a terrorist and a traitor...but cut some time off the KIA notification process and suddenly its Katie-bar-the-door?! Who is this malevolent fraud to lecture anyone on proper treatment of veterans, fallen soldiers, or their families?? As far as Humble Elias is concerned, Saxby opened the door to the abuse of veterans and their families with his mendacious and brutal campaign against Max Cleland, himself a decorated disabled veteran of Viet Nam.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Xmas under attack...

in today’s rollicking effusion, Jeff Jacoby, ace columnist for the Boston Globe announced decided that christmas that decidedly christian holiday, is under attack from secular liberals or perhaps Crazy Horse and the Lakota Sioux.
The agenda here is clear, the conservative punditariat is trying to keep Bush’s fifty one percent in a state of permanent persecution dementia via grotesque campaigns such as these.
Having run the liberals out of Washington DC (again and again and again) Jeff and the Bill O’Reillys of this world bid on running local activists right out of town-their weapon of choice, that conservative icon-Santa Claus! No margin of victory is ever enough for these vengeful clowns-especially in defense of a bloated sixty day commercial saturnalia like Christmas.
Good grief but Jeff does live in the sovereign state of Delusion doesn’t he? December has the highest annual suicide rate of the year, billions are blown on toys that do naught but enrich the owners of plastics factories in Shanghai, and by December 5th any SANE person would happily consign “Frosty the Snowman” to a microwave oven to escape the omnipresent holiday musicale. Yet this annual eruption of holiday cheer is under attack sez Jeff...well the damn fool once claimed Saddam Hussein had a positronic ray in his arsenal too!
Christmas is the most high maintenance holiday on the calendar, needy, insecure, desperate for attention and tailor made for conservative pseudo crusaders who have run low on creativity at the year’s end.
Frankly, if this is the sort of bilge we can expect, Jeff will never slip into the late Brudnoy’s sinecure as the local bigthink conservative egghead. Jacoby just doesn’t have it, intellectually he has few critical instincts, and morally he too much of a sellout. Moreover, he is weirdly naive on an indescribable level, like he really believes the nonsense Karl Rove spouts.
As Humble Elias once wrote in a long dead venue. “Christmas, the holiday with claws that catch and teeth that bite” need fear nothing, for Jeff Jacoby is up on the roof shotgun in hand, ready to defend Santa from Al Queda and the A.C.L.U.
Lets hope he doesn’t slip or anything.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

A scant Thirty Pieces of Silver Later...

and Senator Zell Miller “democrat” of Georgia and proud denouncer of his colleague John Kerry, collects his payment in the form of a commentator’s sinecure at Fox News. Being way too humorless and unpleasantly angry to anchor his own show, no doubt Zell will be used as a featured talking head, i.e. a Judas Goat democrat used chiefly to sandbag the democratic party at every turn. Zell has clearly joined Fox News’ most interesting and under-reported project, namely Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to create an ersatz democratic party under his own control and populated by robots like Zell and hapless groveling losers like Susan Estrich and Alan Colmes.
This “Fox democrats” experiment is dedicated to the necessity of giving serious movement conservatives an easily beaten foe in any given fall election. One or two more fiascos like election iht 2000 and 2004, and Murdoch could credibly assert that “his democrats” represent some vast silent majority of freeper democrats who are being kept down by Teddy Kennedy or Henry Wallace or some such rubbish as that.
In this line up, Zell will clearly be the angry podium chewing pseudo populist whose rage is carefully directed at queers, liberals, and feminists etc etc etc. Murdoch may well be conjuring with getting a Miller-Estrich ticket nominated in 2008. Assuming of course that elections are still legal on Plantation USA by then.
Ah Zell, we almost made a man of him, almost. Anyone remember the aftermath of election 1992? Miller was being touted along with Lawton Chiles and a few others as the New Moderate Southern Face of the democratic party. All blown to hell by the GOP’s resurgence in 1994, in which dozens of southern moderate dems were quietly lynched in the polling booths. well Zell could read the returns, and rosily turned freeper with a loud rebel yell. H.L. Mencken has put it more succinctly, in a contest between patriotism and a politician’s job, the job wins every time.
And now all his yelling has paid off, with a guest commentator’s slot on Fox News. Sad isn’t it? He coulda been great or he coulda gotten paid...he went for the money.

Friday, December 17, 2004

Jenna gets a job...

The newspapers are reporting that Jenna Bush (one half of the dipsomaniacal Bush twins) is taking a job as fourth grade teacher in the Washington DC public school ystem. Details, as always, are pending.
This is naught but hilarious. Anyone else recall John Candy's old SCTV sketch in which he portrayed a drunken "Mr. Science" type kiddie show host-the project for the day was his patented hangover cure. All Humble Elias can say to Jenna's future pupils is "Nux Vomica Kids, don't come to class without a vial of Nux Vomica".
Still and all, The Bush twins are thoroughly graduated and inevitable gravitating towards their Father's imperial throne. Myabe Dad can keep the PRC's economic patronage of this country going strong by marrying one of these hoydens off to a Politiburo member.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Fedayeen on Morrrissey Boulevard...

Humble Elias suspects the Iraqi insurgents have penetrated the upper most editorial spaces of the Boston Globe. They spent the past few days burning mosques, bombing Baghdad's "Green Zone", and killing our guys all in demonic anticipation of this quote from Jeff Jacoby's current column; "things are looking up in Iraq". Jeff ought to call the FBI, someone is definitely undermining the facts in Iraq.
:)
It is a faith based war, less about the chimera of the "right values" and more about ardently buying into the "right fantasy". And as all good readers of the Chimes at Midnight know, Jeff is at heart a fantasist and naive' one at that. What else would animate today's column, otherwise a cataract of condescending colonial bilge?

The true Jacobyn faith burns brighter each explosion on the highway between the airport and down town Baghdad. Yup and if you think good thoughts, you can fly, bring Tinkerbell back to life, and who knows, privatize social security at a profit for all concerned.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

The Obstructionists feted'...

The Boston Globe reports that Governor Romney has finally gotten around to inviting Speaker DiMasi and Senate President Travaglini over for dinner. having pilloried these men not one month ago as corrupt exemplars of Beacon Hill insiderdom, Decaf now with tender solicitude passes them the fresh baked toll house cookies. Oh to be a fly on the wall at that little get together!!!
It would seem that after two long years Mitt Romney has finally awoken to the unquiet fact that he really IS the Governor of Massachusetts. So if he wants his vague and ephemeral “reform agenda” to get it’s day in the Great and General Court he must now suck up to those he’d happily lynch but for the majesty of the law and the quietus of the suburban masses.
Humble Elias expects Bob and Salvatore to make a great show of their good manners and classic Beacon Hill bonhomie. Let us not forget though, these are men used to dealing with back stabbing phonies like Mitt Romney with admirable dispatch. They do it every day in the state legislature. Nevertheless, Sal and Bob will be the soul of conviviality throughout the evening and in all such evenings to come. However, in the dead of night with no reporters around they will still nail Mitt’s reform agenda into a pine box, tie it to a wooden raft, soak it all down with kerosene, and give the whole thing a proper Viking Funeral in the Charles River.
Still, don’t you wish that Sal DiMasi would put his feet up on the Romney hassock, sigh, grin and announce “Nice dump y’ got here Governor...”

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Joe For King?

Senator Susan Collins, a reliable Capitol Hill layabout and stalwart GOP moderate has been talking up Joe Lieberman for Homeland Security Secretary in the wake of Bernard Kerik's mysterious political implosion. On the surface this is a semi-sensible proposal, Lieberman did write the legislation that brought DHS to life. However if he was to get the sinecure he'd become the Colin Powell figure of Bush's second term. An amiable impotent and trivial Loafer in Karl Rove's own version of a reality show. Otherwise Lieberman would become a handy weapon for the likes of Sean Hannity to pillory the democrats and amount to little else over the next four long cold years.
And anyway, why give up a cushy gig like junior Senator from Connecticut? Besides, you just know the moment a dirty bomb went off in Times Square on New Years Eve or a incendiary device went off high in an LA skyscraper, Joe Lieberman would go from pet of the right to its favorite scapegoat. The fact that he is democrat would be all the more delicious to the rightical chic radio tyrants out there. Humble Elias advises, "Joe Don't do it, they are laying for you boy".
Anyway...you just know Romney is on the phone to Kerry, Rove, Bush Senior, really ANYONE willing to risk take his resume in past the Secret Service. Mitt is above all a perfectly spineless puritan, a perfect potential DHS Secretary in these chilly post Kerikian times we do inhabit.

:)
On the other hand...DHS would make Lieberman, a democrat, what sixteen in succession to the US Presidency.
Long odds indeed.
However in this pre-apocalyptic era, much can be done with enough lawyers, money and ambition. Hell its the way Bush got in there back in 2000.
:)

Monday, December 13, 2004

A Mighty Draft?

Colonel David Hackworth was on the “O'Franken Factor” today openly predicting the imposition of a military draft by the middle of next summer. Normally Hackworth is a bit of a scenery chewer, but he did note that enlistment quotas may be down as much as fifty percent by the end of 2004. This apparently has an immediate effect on the combat readiness of front line troops in Iraq over the short term.
Hackworth posits that either we must introduce conscription or “declare victory and get out” otherwise the manpower issues in Iraq will become unmanageable. Perhaps Bush’s plan is to start troop pullouts after the Iraqi elections scheduled in January. If so he is leaving behind a god awful mess and a nation and region in chaos. However as Chimes at Midnight tirelessly points, out thats been his M.O. for years going back to his days as a drunken shyster oilman.
On the other hand Bush may decide to expend his political capital and bring back the draft. Letting other people die for him is also one of his signature moves going back to his days as a sadistic upperclassman at Yale. Of course congress has not yet passed the required legislation, but that is no great hurdle given the GOP majorities in both houses.
So at this point the only thing left for Humble Elias to point out is, that a mere seventeen percent of the “youth vote” bothered to cast ballots this year. This was after what must have been fifty million dollars spent on adverts and celebrity endorsements to motivate young people to vote. What is worse is, it was all for NOTHING. Exactly seventeen percent of that same youth cohort voted in the year 2000. So if it comes to a draft, some eighty seven percent of those sent off to war will have never voted at all on the great issues facing the republic. This is an increment roughly compatible with the millions of non voters drafted in World War Two when the voting age was a stingy twenty one!
In the lecture hall tomorrow, look on both sides of you...and imagine that person in khaki fatigues. Sorry kids, you had your chance, it looks like its gonna be your last chance as well.


Sunday, December 12, 2004

GeekWB...

The President, fresh from his month old electoral “triumph” has announced that the Social Security system is in “crisis” and must be radically reformed forthwith.
Then again this is the same President who once claimed that Saddam Hussein had every weapon of mass destruction in the catalogue up to and including the proverbial nucleonic planet buster.
But then lying has always been Bush’s M.O....he lied on a daily basis and bilked ghod knows how many investors in his many failed oil ventures back in the day. He lied to his wife about his own drinking and he lied and squirmed to get out of the Viet Nam War. The great lesson of George Bush’s misbegotten life is that “mendacity pays”.
Thus the President was lying then, and he is lying now. Nothing that has occurred to date has convinced him that lying is naught but his own personal trump card in any contentious policy debate. So if anything, given the content of his character, his lies will only become more blatant and outrageous. No one restrains Bush and he’ll go on in this rampant fashion until either he is out of office or the nation disintegrates.
In the mean time we will all be either impoverished or imprisoned, all to satisfy the howling winds of ideology that sound between his ears.
Humble Elias asks....”why”?
Why is the President such an unmitigated asshole?
Why is this son of wealth and privilege so obsessed with destroying fanciful elites? Why is this alleged conservative so fixated on destroying cherished and noble institutions? We have to disgard the notion that the President is some identifiable species of American conservative. He is not, his public spending habits alone are enough to get him drummed out of the movement. Moreover he is an ideologue consumed with a singular hatred of past practice. Peter Vireck once opined that the irony of American conservatism is that lacking a hereditary aristocratic tradition, US conservatives are left to conserve the gains made by liberal civilization. Bush has apparently decided to invert that notion by creating a new class of peasantry who'll pay the entire costs of the government (while deriving no benefits at all) and a new aristocracy to rule over them...brutes, fraud, and charlatans all. This is Bush's ideology circa 2004...it is medieval in scope and as usual breathtakingly simple.

The guy is clearly hell bent for revenge on all those swells-n-toffs who kidded him in prep school, at Yale, and at Harvard Business School. What other explanation is there for his “destroy it all policy?” Clearly hell hath no fury like a geek scorned.

Because that is what Bush really is, a geek. Poorly socialized, proud, insecure, and weird he has all the classic symptoms of geekiness sans the critical intelligence. He also has a geek's persecution mania and concurrent self satisfaction. Like his geek brethren he is also obsessed wih empire building..."dungeons and dragons" on a global scale.
Truly, whatever was done to him, we will all have to pay for.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

A question for a rainy Saturday...

Just how many countries has William Safire advocated invading and or attacking down through the years?
He started as a columnist for the New York Times in what 1973? So its probaly up around a dozen or so...but that is a guess.
Does anyone out there have a good count?

If so drop me a note at eliasnugator@yahoo.com

Friday, December 10, 2004

"Amend for Arnie"

This political button has been sprouting like an aggressive weed all over silicon valley in sunny California. It happily refers to the movement to amend article two of the U.S. Constitution that forbids the foreign born to hold the Presidency. Presumably with that little detail disposed of, Arnold can seize power nice as you please and in a legit election too.
As Humble Elias has said before, this is a time for bad ideas to rise up and ride in America. However its always been like that in California going back to the strange days of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson all the way down to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. If there is a charlatan or a fraud on the make, count on California to give them a home. And so it is for “Amend for Arena”.
The Golden State is a strange shoddy place, it is full of atomized lonely people...nobody knows anyone else in a intimate fashion. Back east, loneliness and alienation are a badge of shame, but in California the atomized are fulsome glad handers and devotees of the latest fraud. There is no embarrassment over being shallow and thus the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger prospers. Nothing less than a wispy film and TV image can hold their depleted attention spans.
This is a serious case of demeaning caesarism at work here...no other man in US history has put for tha movement to amend the constitution to satisfy his own ambitions...and yet Arnold soldiers on and like any sweetly smelling bad idea has attracted able and unlikely supporters notably our own Senior Senator, Edward Moore Kennedy. Maybe it really is time to eject California from the Federal Union. Let Schwarzenegger rule as a rump President of a pacific Duchy. He'll be happy, the homunculi he represents will be happy, and the other forty nine will well clear of it.

Thursday, December 09, 2004

The Two Howards...

There seems to be two different versions of Howard Fineman out there on the radio talk show circuit. One is a blustering contemptuous freeper who calls into the “Imus in the Morning Program” and heaps scorn on Al Gore and Hilary Rodham Clinton. The other is a calm moderate soul who drops dimes on the demagogic likes of Senator Rick “High Pitched Rich” Santorum on the Al Franken Show.
Which is the real Howard Fineman? Who the hell knows...maybe they both are real. The name of the game in celebrity journalism is exposure anytime any where as long as you are clothed and your host is not on a sexual predator registry. If you’ve been at the game as long as Howard, then it is inevitable that one would shift political colors from show to show. So he less a case of “Jekyll and Hyde” and more an example of Woody Allen’s comical omnimorph “Leonard Zelig”.
If Howard has a political core, and that is debatable, then Humble Elias posits he is a sort of sentimental moderate republican...a character being rapidly run to extinction along with the classic American liberal.
Moderate republicans come in two classifications these days, the racketeers like Mitt Romney who see opportunities in the pose of moderation and ineffectual yaps like Colin Powell who are still believe the tooth fairy and the two party system.
Fineman falls into the later category. He still thinks there is moderate ground to be won and he refuses the evidence of his eyes when the likes of Karl Rove start planning for a century of movement conservative ascendancy.

Or maybe not...who knows? Howard is a slippery character adept at telling his hosts and employers what they want to hear.

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Scot Lehigh is appalled...

that local radio talk show tyrant Jay Severin was a notable headtable VIP at a Romney fundraiser last Friday night. Jay apparently was called upon to introduce Decaf to the usual pack of wealthy dilettantes and overloaded ne'er do wells.

This is unintentionally hilarious...it really is.
There is nothing funnier than when a neocon appeaser like Scot awakes to discover that the modern GOP depends on punks like Jay Severin for it's prosperity.
Indeed without WTKK's daily dose of blatant conservative ideological warfare blasting out every day over the public airwaves one doubts that Romne would've every seized the governorship. Doesn't Scot listen to 96.9 FM Talk?? Hasn't he heard their none-too-subtle practice of using Romney sound bites to back up their "public service" tinged bumpers??
WTKK has been sucking up to Romney for two long years now and is betting the mortgage that Mitt will be around for a long time to come AND in a position to do them favors in due course. They have made an investment in him and it will pay off come hell or high water. This is not a surprise, as corporate media consolidation proceeds apace it is logical that said companies would draw ever closer to their ideological soul-mates on the public payroll. Its a few big companies chasing a few sharp ambitious politicians in search of less regulation and more profits.
Still its a stitch and a half to read Scot's denunciation of Severin, calling him "a bigot" and a number of other things. He just REFUSES to recognize the Governor's crude opportunism here. Is a foulmouthed perv like Jay Severin a proper master of ceremonies at a fundraiser for a cartoonishly puritanical GOP governor?
CERTAINLY he is, if that Governor is a man of few principles, much ambition, and much contempt for the public good.
Scot Lehigh has been living high off the hog thanks to liberal civilization for a good long time now. However the big bill is finally coming do and lists are being draw up even as Humble Elias writes this. Alas, them phat times for liberals is over-and we are left with a craven appeaser like Scot to defend the remnants of our rights in these troubling times. Lehigh thinks he can play the game of "honest broker" in the coming clash of ideologies...this is a cruel fantasy to say the least.
When the gruesome likes of Jeb or Neil Bush are annointed with blood, handed a sceptre,and proclaimed Supreme Godhead of Plantation USA, Scot Lehigh will literally be the first yap put behind the barbed wire. All his well meaning warnings to phantom GOP moderates like Mitt Romney will be long forgotten.
Well what of it, if that terrible day ever does come, Elias Nugator will be nowhere to be found. Cause' Mr. Nugator Senior didn't raise no fools.

God Save the Commonwealth
God Save the Republic

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

So Tom Reilly wants to be Governor...

Good effin’ luck to him, he will need it.

On paper his is a formidable candidacy, Steve Grossman has signed up as his fundraiser and the usual suspects among local dems have already gathered around Reilly like moths to a flame. Reilly has already run statewide twice and can easily step up organizationally and thematically to the Corner Office-or so spouts the conventional wisdom.
Humble Elias though, has his doubts. The democrats haven’t elected anyone Governor from an inferior statewide office in nigh on forty years. Dukakis was a former state legislator at the time of his election in 1974 and King was the head of Massport in 1978.
Moreover, a biblical host of statewide aspirants have gone down in flames over the last fourteen years, Bellotti (another Attorney General), Harshbarger (ditto and the same) and O’Brien, herself the State Treasurer. All were judged wanting in their respective races. Clearly the electorate dominated as it is by fickle independents places a low value on experience in politics.
If nominated Reilly would be running against one Willard Mitt Romney a tragically inept buffoon whose one political strength is in casting his opponent as a exemplar of a corrupt regime on Beacon Hill. Decaf is a cheap and puerile dilettante in every way but he understands intuitively his precious darlings in the suburbs all hate,fear, and ultimately misunderstand state government...this renders them easy prey for a political hyena like Romney. So if its Reilly, then brace yourself for another defeat.
Sadly this doesn’t have to be the case, Romney has racked up a stunning record of defeat and sheer unmitigated stupidity in the past two years. Last night Channel 56 reported that the “Liberty Tunnel” had sprung not one but two leaks reducing southbound traffic to one lane and creating a mile long slowdown. Yet the only mention of our governor in today’s Globe was in the society pages which reported that his pious jests went over big at the Gridiron Club in Washington DC. You see the problem? The Big Dig is taking on water and all Willard can do is crack smarmy down on the Potomac.
James Michael Curley would’ve personally rushed to the leak and started patching it with duct tape, even a dolt like Ed King would’ve acted...but not our Mitt he keeps touring the nation in search of greener pastures. It doesn't take brains to fix the Big Dig, it does take a talent for governance, and a willingness to put the public interest ahead of Bechtel Parsons...something Willard cannot and will not do. This is a failure of leadership and it ought to be hung round Romney's neck like a toilet seat for all to see.
What the democrats need is a candidate from outside the local political milieu, someone with money, and someone who can make the case that Romney is a fraud and a dilettante and very much a part of the problem. The Attorney General or the Secretary of State no matter how bright their bona fides can’t make this case to those sweet independents. These are people who read the newspaper once a year and vote out of a mindless distrust for governance itself. They don’t see what is at stake. They aren’t stupid, they are ignorant and naive...most of their dearest clichés simply haven’t yet been sullied. Somehow we’ve got to make their suspicion and lack of trust work for us.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Jacobyns Storm the U.N. Part Two...

BTW, John Danforth, our ambassador to the U.N. has resigned after holding the sinecure for a mere six months. Word on the street is, this former Senator from Missouri was sick of getting a signed hall pass from the neocons infesting Foggy Bottom every time he wanted to use the men’s room.
:)
Or perhaps he knows something we don’t....like maybe the U.N.’s days are numbered and that as soon as Iraq is reduced to ruins Turtle Bay (to paraphrase the Mighty Goldberg) is “next”. Who can blame Danforth anyway? Nobody wants to go down with flags flying on that particular ship.
No for nothin’ though, but is ther anything in this country that modern conservatives wish to CONSERVE anymore? You name it and the GOP and it’s thinkers want to destroy it, old age pensions, affordable health care, unemployment compensation, a sound currency, the U.N. the list is endless.
All must be replaced by some utopian fantasy spun by ardent and naive uplifters like Jeff Jacoby.
One can only imagine the sort of market worshipping, bumptious international fraternal lodge the likes of Safire, Jacoby and Karl Rove would gleefully whomp together. It'd be something like the Dartmouth Review perhaps....with Dinesh D' Souza as Secretary General and Maggie Thatcher as hall monitor...yeah dats da ticket!!! The rightical chic have been rattling their playpen bars for a long time at the mere mention of the United Nations....now though they have a powerful co-religionist in our President. The dream of Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) is about to come true.
Well at any rate we will soon find out and it won’t be pretty either.

Sick
Demented
Typical

Sunday, December 05, 2004

The Jacobyn's storm the U.N...

In today's breathless spewage, Jeff Jacoby calls the United Nations "...a corrupt institution , one that long ago squandered what moral legitimacy it had".
It would seem that the Globe's Laughing Young Senescence is taking up the old Birch Society crusade to deport and dissolve the U.N.
Why?
Cause' full of dictatorships and tyrant coddlers...that is when it isn't wallowing in corruption, depravity, and ineptitude.
Well what of it?
The United States Congress is currently run by wowsers, charlatans, fanatics, and persons who'd happily sell out the nation for as little as hat full of one dollar bills.
Still nobody demands the dissolution of Congress...not yet at least.

Maybe Jeff is working from "the outside in".
:)

***
Still and all that this IS the old army game in all its unseemly khaki glory. Halliburton and whozis are making gujillions off no bid contracts in Iraq...so to conceal the swinish squeals of favored conglomerates on the make, Jeff and his bilge start up with the war-dance demanding Kofi Annan's wrinkled scalp.


Friday, December 03, 2004

The Vichy Network(s)

What are all the fag-bashers in America gonna do when they die and are met at the Pearly Gates not by Saint Peter, but by Truman Capote, Panama hat and all?
Case in point, the United Church of Christ runs up a commercial covertly noting their toleration for gay congregants and of course CBS and NBC RUN from said ad like rats in a firestorm. CBS even went so far as to cite the President’s advocacy of an anti-gay marriage amendment as a GOOD reason to decline broadcasting this commercial. A more grimly authoritarian rationale cannot be found outside the pages of one of the lesser works of Allen Drury.
Good lord CBS has been taken over by spineless freaks or something...twenty plus years of relentless right wing bullying has reduced the Tiffany Network to a gruesome state of truckling cowardice. You wouldn't mind so much but the advert itself is utterly harmless in every way and makes its point by relatively subtle inference. Xian fundies though, can’t bear to have their prejudices even gently chided and so they scream like spoiled brats until someone somewhere gives in to their insolent demands. So to forestall this, CBS/NBC caved and in a predictably undignified fashion. Thats all the big networks are good for these days, conceding hat-in-hand to every rightical chic jackass out there...Such is the New Day here in America.
And not for nothing though, but thousands of hours of congressionally licensed airtime every week is given over to fag bashing of the lowest and crudest sort. if you don’t believe Humble Elias, just check out Paul Crouch’s Trinity Network or the 700 Club or the syndicated protestant divines and faith healers that kill time on Boston Catholic Television. These bloated gimps prattle on for hours about healing homosexuals when they aren’t openly propagandizing for a myth called “abstinence education” and the Federal funds needed to finance such nonsense!
The day of the sycophant is apparently upon us, no fanfare and no queers need apply either.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Decaf in the Big Easy...

The Romney is a Fraud blog paints a grim picture of Mitt and his gruesome henchpeople jetting down to New Orleans last week to party with automatons like George Pataki at the Republican Governor's Conference.
Fair enough, but you just know Mitt was there to size up the competition. Pataki, Jeb Bush, Schwarzenegger...all potential rivals for the big brass ring come 2008. Give Romney some credit, the Commonwealth is running a billion dollar deficit, the central artery project is leaking, and the state civil service is so constipated it is literally defecating hacks, and yet he is still carelessly mincing around country like a Prince of the Realm.
Still and for all that, things don't look so good for Mitt, his hired candidates got pulverized this fall and the President is clearly uninterested in giving him a cabinet post. That missing DC sinecure might well be Romney's biggest political setback to date. Truly Mitt needed an early exit from the governorship in order to ingratiate himself with GWB and start the frantic process of obscuring his politically incorrect Massachusetts address. Moreover, lacking that cabinet seat, Mitt has to wonder if he has the gonads for a brutal struggle with McCain, Jeb, Pataki, Santorum,and who knows maybe Schwarzenegger in the snows of New Hampshire?
Romney's best bet might be to start toadying up to Jeb now, compliment him on his orb, sceptre, and purple robes in hopes that maybe he might catch some traction as a Vice Presidential candidate. Or he could just come back to Boston and start dealing with our problems....but who the hell wants to do a damn fool thing like that??

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

A timely quote from Edward Gibbon:

"The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked into the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerging from their obscurity."

This is George W. Bush in a nutshell, Romney too for that fact. Is there any question that without the power of patrimony behind them, that Bush couldn't function as an intern at a Staples customer care desk whilst Romney might scrape by as a night manager at a Dairy Queen? Mere birth and millions of dollars in programmed ideological warfare yet keep them both aloft as Princes Among Men-nothing else. However surveying the wreckage of the last two elections, it is enough to keep them bothing going until the nation goes up in chunks.
History is always unkind to liberals...the best of intentions, votes, and the survival of the republic ultimately doesn't mean shit to the ladies on the loom behind Zeus' throne. Hubris however they love and always have going back to the days of King Oedipus. And so that is what Humble Elias is reduced to this evening, waiting on hubris to carry them all away.