One of us; one of us.
I pretty much already knew Stephen Colbert was a geek; there was that bit when Viggo Mortensen hit the Daily Show and Jon Stewart played this recording of Colbert drily lecturing on Aragorn’s various names that was hilarious mostly because you could tell it was true. —But between the D&D and the improv theatre, it sounds like the Colbert Report’s an oddball campaign of Prime Time Adventures that somehow got itself ready for prime time.
The Gang of 25.
So I’m standing here covered in website dust as I try to plug all the leaks and I’m not paying too much attention to the events of the day and I was tempted, sorely tempted, to make a crème brûlée joke, and then I read Digby and I felt better.
The last time we had a serious outpouring from the grassroots was the Iraq War resolution. My Senator DiFi commented at the time that she had never seen anything like the depth of passion coming from her constituents. But she voted for the war anyway. So did Bayh, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Kerry and Reid. The entire leadership of the party. Every one of them went the other way this time. I know that some of you are cynical about these people (and, well, they are politicans, so don’t get all Claude Rains about it) but that means something. Every one of those people were running in one way or another in 2002 and they went the other way. The tide is shifting. There is something to be gained by doing the right thing.
I know you’re tired. So am I. Chop wood. Carry water. Repeat.
Further technical notes.
I was with DreamHost; now I’m with A Small Orange.
I was using WordPress; now I’m using Textpattern.
You do the math.
—Yes, feeds are not where they were. Working on it. Yes, permalinks are a bit wonky, if by “bit wonky” you mean “every link to longstoryshortpier.com out there in cyberspace has just been deprecated.” I’ll get ’em back. There’s this one little bit I’ve got to copy from a table in one MySQL database to another. If you know the SSH syntax to handle that sort of thing, hey. BFF.
Project much?
My mama done tol’ me
When I was in knee-pants,
My mama done tol’ me
“Son, a woman’ll sweet-talk,
And give you the big eye,
but when the sweet talkin’s done?
A woman’s a two-face,
A worrisome thing
Who’ll leave you to sing
The blues in the night…”
—Louis Armstrong
My mama done tol’ me
When I was in pigtails,
My mama done tol’ me
“Hon, a man is a two-face,
He’ll give you the big eye,
but when the sweet talkin’s done?
A man is a two-face,
A worrisome thing
Who’ll leave you to sing
The blues in the night…”
—Ella Fitzgerald
As a 48-year-old never married single man still in decent shape, successful and now retired, and having weathered the “feminist” cultural storm still raging since my teens, I can tell you that even your having read Norah Vincent’s book, you STILL have no idea of the anger, the hatred, the vengeance and the pain so many otherwise attractive and available women are afflicted with. It is an epidemic of conflict and self-distortion that begins and ends with an impenetrable sense of entitlement, based on a false sense of victimhood, and for which not just any man but every man must pay forever for the restoration that’s never good enough.
Oh, you can hum a few bars and fake the rest, I’m sure. —The above gacked from Roy Edroso, who’s been quote-mining again, and dug up some doozies…
This is what they have made of us. This is what we have become.
There’s this inch—
An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don’t know who you are, or whether you’re a man or woman. I may never see you. I will never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you.
—and it’s a really lovely thing to think about but ultimately, you know what? That inch is nothing.
They take it as easily as they take the mile and what do you do when it’s done?
Joe Sacco talked to a couple of men we picked up off the street in Iraq and tortured and interrogated and then let go without ever explaining why, and he sees just how easy it is to take that inch away. —Via the Beat.
Point, meet counterpoint.
Why, yes. This site’s been up and down rather more frequently than something that competes professionally on the going-up-and-down-frequently circuit. The fine folks at Dreamhost insist they won’t rest until the mystery is solved. Presuming you can read this, I thought I’d alert you to Tim, who, in comments, is disputing certain allegations of the “wear your own body armor and we’ll cut your death benefits” story; also, I thought I’d point you to this essay by Emma Bull, whose opinion on the new Battlestar is, shall we say, against the grain.
Our liberal media at work.
Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he “made a mistake” after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
I mean he sounds like an over-the-top Ann Coulter here, if not an Ann Coulter.
We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication [and] homosexuality…
Asked whether bin Laden had expressed “almost the same” sentiments that [Sen. Rick] Santorum did during an appearance on [Bob] Schieffer’s Face the Nation broadcast, the CBS anchorman told WABC Radio’s Mark Simone: “Well, he did. That’s exactly right.”
Ha ha! Had you going there, didn’t I. Just kidding! —You can slag on Matthews for his inept dissection of rhetoric here, and I’d send you here to snarl at Schieffer, only they yanked the software that processes your comment sometime yesterday after Think Progress posted the link, and haven’t gotten around to fixing it, yet.
(Damn. All these fine, first-world, top-flight media organizations that can’t keep their commenting software in fighting trim. —Programmers! I smell job opportunities!)
An article of pinnacle stupidity.
I mean, I knew their sense of self was weak; when your character is based so strongly on hate the Other, you’ve got nothing to fall back on for yourself. When that Other is inextricably defined by sexuality and desire, those deep, anarchic, inarticulable forces we must control to control ourselves, then a religion of peace and love and forgiveness can be turned on its head, reduced to nothing more than hate the gay. —It helps to explain why their encomiums to Dear Leader are so comically fellatial, yes, but careful; it also explains why we find it so funny to refer to them as “Assmissile.” There’s two edges on that blade.
So I knew, yes, but dear Lord in heaven and all His little fishes below, I swear I had no idea what a deep and gnawing, rotten and terrifying, Echthroi-howling hole it was inside them, until now—
It is cognitively and nationally dissonant to propose on one hand the advancement of the homosexualization of your most identified national folk icon and simultaneously bluster with the impending force of a war to defend that same civilization. The homosexualization of your most revered masculinity is the cheapest and stupidest shot you can take at the survival of your own culture and it is really inappropriately timed when you are facing, from threats abroad, the most substantial existential peril the nation has ever known. You can’t fight Islamism with gay cowboys.
Oh God, if You are up there, please. Hurry down the Rapture. We’ll get so much more done with them all out of the way. —Via the Poor Man.
A public service announcement.
Thanks to Ampersand, I now know the Mo Movie Measure isn’t really the Mo Movie Measure. If anything, it’s the Liz Wallace Movie Measure.
The measure? Works like this: think of a movie that meets the following criteria—
- It has to have at least two women in it.
- Who talk to each other during the course of the movie.
- About something besides a man.
I’ll let you cogitate for a bit. —Comes from a Dykes to Watch Out For strip that’s so old skool Mo wasn’t even in the cast yet, which is why it isn’t the Mo Movie Measure. When Bechdel did the strip back in 1985, the last movie she could think of that passed was Alien.
(Only I don’t remember calling it the Mo Movie Measure myself. I always remember it being referred to as Bechdel’s Rule, or the Dykes to Watch Out For Rule, which is more correct, though it doesn’t address Liz Wallace’s displacement. But what can I say? Alliteration is against her. The Mo Movie Measure is just so darned catchy!)
“Not comfortable.”
The Democrats have chosen Tim Kaine, the newly elected Democratic governor of Virgina, to rebut President Bush’s State of the Union address. Presumably, selecting a Marine who’s tough enough to tell his Swift Boaters where to shove it would demonstrate the Democrats are weak on national security; Kaine, after all, unlike a solid majority of America, supports the war in Iraq.
Tim Kaine is also against same-sex marriage. He’s even against civil unions. Unlike a majority of America.
Virginia’s House of Delegates just passed House Joint Resolution No. 41 by a margin of 73 to 22. House Joint Resolution No. 41 proposes to amend Article I of the commonwealth’s constitution, its Bill of Rights, by adding Section 15-A. Section 15-A would read as follows:
Section 15-A. Marriage.
That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.
This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage.
Governor Kaine has stated he’s “not comfortable” with the breadth of this amendment’s language. He’ll sign it, should Virginia’s Senate approve likewise, turning it over to a commonwealth-wide referendum on whether it should be pasted into the constitution. But he won’t be comfortable when he does it.
One should, perhaps, ask him—and the commonwealth’s Senate—how comfortable they are with the idea that this amendment could strip unmarried couples throughout the state of basic domestic violence protections. Ohio’s similar amendment has been causing confusion on just that score.
One should, perhaps, ask him—and the strutting 73 members of the House who ignored their colleague’s stirring denunciation—how comfortable they are with the idea that this amendment will strip property from people like Sam Beaumont because of a legal technicality.
One should ask him, and the commonwealth’s voters, how comfortable they are with the idea that this amendment will ensure that people like Laurel Hester will never see justice in Virginia.
Look: I have some appreciation of the political realities. Tim Kaine isn’t in a comfortable place right now. His legislature’s in the hands of power-mad, scapegoat-hungry radicals. Shooting down a resolution that passed with a 73 – 22 margin is suicidally stupid for a rookie governor who just barely won a hard-fought campaign, and Democrats everywhere owe him for a breath of hope this past November. And there’s many a slip yet betwixt this poisonous cup and lip: the Senate could be compelled by vociferous national outrage to reject its cameral compadre’s bigotry. If it ends up as a referendum, that vociferous national outrage, along with some very public boycotts, might could motivate enough decent human beings (and shame enough bigots) to shoot it down before it’s scribbled permanently in the margins. Kaine could even step in to water it down to a less horribly divisive and discriminatory measure, though what a weak thing that would be to call victory. —So, yes: there’s no reason to believe his refusal to sign would do any good, and enough to believe it would actively harm, to allow as how one might sympathize with how not comfortable he is.
Doesn’t mean we have to be comfortable with him speaking for us this year. Doesn’t mean we have to be comfortable with the folks that think we should.
...his power will be broken, the panoply of his office scattered, his house razed...
Oh, hey. I’d forgotten all about what Tom DeLay said when the tsunami hit.
This woman’s word.
Go on. Guess.
Well aren’t we peppy today.
“Mokona-Ondo de Pupupu-no-pu (Puu’ing to the Mokona-Ondo),” the Magic Knight Rayearth soundtrack; “Walkabout,” the Sugarcubes; “Do Re Mi,” Ken and the New Incredibles; “Bonanza,” the Books; “Panic,” the Smiths; “Clarissima,” Jocelyn Montgomery; “The King and Queen of America,” Eurythmics; “I,” Pizzicato Five; “Train Song,” Holly Cole Trio; “Stacks,” Pulp.
A fitter and generally a more effectual punishment.
We were at a restaurant somewhere in Shaker Heights and laughing over this absurd remark or that when he leaned back in his chair and jumped the conversational tracks. “I’ve got one,” he said, an evil glint in his eye. “How does every joke about black people begin?”
Which pretty much stopped the laughter dead. Thing was, see, he wasn’t known for this sort of joke. At all. Thing is, though, how well do you ever really know someone? —Final scheme, and all that.
“Okay,” said someone, after a bit too long. “How?”
And he rested his elbows on the table, looked ostentatiously over his left shoulder, ostentatiously over his right, and then leaned forward, mouth open as if he were about to speak.
We got it.
Would that some guardians of our discourse had the shrunken, shriveled enlightenment of the butts of that particular joke.
Lay down the mony upon the nail, and the business is done.
Oh, even-the-liberal-Kevin-Drum.
First, at the very least, trust but verify; it’s a long way from “ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe” to the blithe assertion that “we did get one of al Qæda’s big fish in the attack on Damadola last week.” Remember: never assume, for if you do, you make an ass out of you and me.
But.
Even if one were to grant the shockingly naïve assumptions available, each in their particulars, you’ve got the question wrong, all wrong: it is not up to us to tell you whether the death of a 52-year-old master bomb-maker and the disruption of an “apparent terror summit” are worth the deaths of 18 genuinely innocent bystanders. The question on the table is and always has been: how many genuinely innocent bystanders must die before you say enough? Would twenty make you uncomfortable? How about fifty? Maybe if they weren’t “genuinely” innocent? If ironclad proof of each of those assumptions were, somehow, available, would you go as high as a hundred bystanders, wedding guests, in-laws, kids? Were it possible to claim on the nightly news that Midhat Mursi and Khalid Habib and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi would convene no more terror summits, and Ayman al-Zawahiri now slept with “his eyes wide open,” “wondering who handed him up,” would it be worth your death?
War is wrong. It may sometimes be necessary, or at best unavoidable, but it is wrong. It makes monsters of us: soldiers, pundits, commenteers all.
