Bush and Benedict: Two Nuts in a Scrotum

Hey everybody...Night the Cat here. While my human messes around with the banner again, I thought I'd drop a few pennies into the well here.

You see, I've figured out something about you humans: you're all what I would call...um...how to put this correctly?...Assholes.

Yep, that sums it up. Take this President of yours: he wants America to be a beacon for the world. Well, most creatures, whether or not they've been given the dubious gift of human language, would guess that in order to be a beacon, you have to give off some light. So since when did light come from wrapping yourself in darkness?

But you hear him use the expression all the time: "a beacon of freedom." He makes that by doing every foul and illegitimate thing possible to subvert human freedom—and then finally dogging Congress into writing his crimes into law. With freedom like this, who needs Gitmo?

Another favorite saying of this guy is "beacon of hope." Now I've never seen a more hopeless creature this side of a dog pound, but maybe that's just me. The only hope I see this guy beaconing is in the boardroom of Halliburton. But if you're looking for hope in Anbar province, Afghanistan, Baghdad, or New Orleans; well, happy hunting.

Who's running your country, after all? Why, it's Mr. Knuckles!

Hey, look at the bright side, people: you've got your own Pope there in Washington. You see, he's infallible, too. Two peas in a pod, these guys—or you might say, two nuts in a scrotum. The Vatican King's handlers are saying that it's "unprecedented" for him to apologize for anything—he's never wrong, you see; and when you're never wrong, you don't have to apologize. Tyranny means never having to say you're sorry.

Sound familiar? Yep, whether the Texas Tongue Step is done in Crawford, Washington, Italy, or somewhere in Bavaria, it's all the same thing: these guys talk trash like the planet's too clean or there's no tomorrow, and then their leash-holders get all in a huff when the crazies that they're insulting start spitting and growling for jihad.

Oops, here's my human...I guess he's done with his geek stuff for now. Meow.

"Night, you're right...you were always right...us people are a bunch of blithering, barking, raving morons, and we're getting stupider by the second!"

Hmm...not bad, human; I couldn't have said it better myself. See ya around, folks.

Let Congress know that if they dare to legitimize Bush's war crimes, they do so at their own electoral peril. Complete the short action form at the link and follow it up with a phone call to your local rep's office.

The Media: A Stream of Lazy Deception

Links and Downloads: Media Matters, the great site that keelhauls the neocon American mass media, has now added Eric Alterman to its stable of writers. Click the graphic to be sent to Eric's first post at MM. And while you're at it, you might take a moment to write MSNBC and let them know how you feel about their cowardly firing of Alterman.

Here at Daily Rev, we have Monday with McKenna as a download today (Word doc, 668kb). Terry offers his personal reflections on 9/11, with graphics and links that are well worth a look. It's the sort of document that a blog's space cannot do justice.

Terry has also done today's cartoon—click to enlarge.


Frank Rich's column is available to Times Select readers (even if you don't want to pay for it, just get a trial subscription); and his new book is also out: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. The opening of Rich's column points up an alarming coincidence of deception:

RARELY has a television network presented a more perfectly matched double feature. President Bush’s 9/11 address on Monday night interrupted ABC’s “Path to 9/11” so seamlessly that a single network disclaimer served them both: “For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression.”

No kidding: “The Path to 9/11” was false from the opening scene, when it put Mohamed Atta both in the wrong airport (Boston instead of Portland, Me.) and on the wrong airline (American instead of USAirways). It took Mr. Bush but a few paragraphs to warm up to his first fictionalization for dramatic purposes: his renewed pledge that “we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them.” Only days earlier the White House sat idly by while our ally Pakistan surrendered to Islamic militants in its northwest frontier, signing a “truce” and releasing Al Qaeda prisoners. Not only will Pakistan continue to harbor terrorists, Osama bin Laden probably among them, but it will do so without a peep from Mr. Bush.

If you're beginning to see a theme here, it is no accident: the American mass media have not progressed a single step toward the practice of actual journalism since the exposure of Jeff Gannon. In fact, it's gotten worse—a daily diet of spin, lies, and unabashed deception, from the very people who are paid and trusted to uncover the truth. That's why we carry Media Matters' daily feed in our sidebar; why we recommend that you visit Alterman's blog and bookmark it; why Terry drew that cartoon as he did; and why Frank Rich's book and column must deal at such length with the lies of this administration and the mass media's zomboid repetition of same. After all, there's a lot to cover—a quotidian stream of lazy deception.

Finally, on the same topic, Jon Stewart weighs in with a little piece about how to turn a question into an accusation. Watch it.

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Fortunately, millions of people around the world weren't watching the news this weekend...they were asking the leaders of this benighted world to finally show some leadership, and act to end the slaughter in Darfur.

Here are a few more links on the most urgent human disaster facing us now:

The dismal reality of Darfur
How to help
Oxfam
Let your Congressman know that you want Darfur to be a top-priority issue for this government.
Finally, demand that the media do their job and report the truth, every day, about what is happening in Africa.

Putting the Fun in Fundamentalism

God. He's so damned sensitive—have you ever noticed?

In case you haven't, here's your update: when it comes to institutional religions, God has a really bad attitude and an even worse temper. He always seems to be walking around in Heaven with a massive chip on his shoulder, ready to strike out violently at the mildest offense. You know, a cartoon in a newspaper or an action movie set in a French museum.

Or a few words in a speech by a former member of the Nazi youth who thinks the Harry Potter novels are the work of the Demon. Yeah, that guy, the Pope.

So the pundits of Islam are now slinging knives of resentment at the Pope, and the rest of us are sitting ringside, amazed anew at how easily God takes offense. You diss God, and he'll draw his T-bolts of retribution on you faster than a street druglord. If you dare say or suggest publicly that God's prophet or other designated spokesman might have been a tad too violent than is appropriate for a spiritual teacher, then you're gonna pay, homeboy.

An old black book with gilt letters on the cover; a saint or a prophet who's been dead for centuries; a stone monument or two carved with the laws of a primitive age and culture—diss any of these in the blandest, most circumspect terms, and you are one with Satan. No punishment is too severe for you; no Crusade, no jihad, too violent a response to your crime. Deal with it, G: that's justice on The Holy Street.

Killing Polonius (and Friday Reflection)

Time now to reveal the source of our banner quote for this week (surprisingly, no one guessed it). It is Shakespeare—specifically, Hamlet, Act II, Sc. 2. The speaker is the character Polonius, one of literature's quintessential figures of the political center. He lives his life teetering about under the weight of other men's ideas, constantly struggling to maintain an Aristotelian point of perfect, linear centeredness. In doing so, he is led from one self-deceit to another, until he is led inexorably to death. In our government, he would be Colin Powell or Condi or John McCain; in the media, he would be David Broder or Thomas Friedman; in religion, perhaps Billy Graham.

Polonius is the fellow who aligns himself with Power and spends his entire life and energy in rationalizing that alliance. In the end, of course, he is revealed as the petty, banal, common courtier he has always been; a man who buys position with the coin of deceit, and inevitably pays the ultimate price for the bargain.

How we strive and compete to gain and defend The Holy Center! With what a furious and squalid pedantry do we spill lies from that hallowed midpoint of the line! In what exalted and self-indulgent tones of punditry do we cry out from the sacred median that splits left and right!

But what if there were an alternative to this walk on the balance beam of political linearity? Might it be worth a try? Could it be that, in a scientific age of quantum mechanics, relativity, and nonlinear mathematics, we are still stuck in Aristotle's ancient, bipolar, duoplaned reality? I have offered an answer to these questions before, during the first post in this blog, two years ago. Perhaps we can revisit that experiment soon.

Friday Reflection

Treasure everything you have, and be prepared to lose it all. Accept all that comes to you and be ready to give it back. But ownership is a distortion of nature: in the real universe, no one owns, and nothing is owned. You can have all you need; but you cannot own a single thing.

Live this principle; understand it in every cell of your being, and you will never want for anything.

To grasp a thing is to lose it; to clutch at a person is to repel her. To own something or someone is to become its slave. Seek ownership of things or people, and you will find despair. Defend your possessions, and you will always be at war. Live for consumption, and you will always be consumed.

Ownership splits the self—rends it into pieces labeled "Mine" and "Not-Yet-Mine". The compulsion of accumulation will turn you into an object as well; the more you own, the more life will you waste in defending it, with scarcely a moment left to love it as a gift.

The more gilded the robe, the more rotten the soul beneath it; the more gleaming the shrine, the darker is its basement.

Ten thousand years of civilization, and we have yet to learn a thing.

Now Entering the Terrible Twos

We have an announcement to make tonight, but first a few fun links:

Lysistrata in Colombia: The ladies brandish what may be the most effective weapon in the war on terror. May this inspiration soon spread to the Middle East...

Stewart Sings: C & Dubya music.

Strip Poker Super Bowl Does a Janet Jackson: SI's John Rolfe gets the sports stories that others miss.

The Flaming Assholes From Down Under: To what depths of idiocy can grief drive men? How about a vendetta against those evil stingrays—a stingray ethnic cleansing?

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Daily Revolution Turns Two

I didn't want to make a big deal of this—first because, as Tony Snow would say, "it's just a number"; and second out of respect for the other anniversary that has come upon us this week. But yes, it is true, and you can check the archives to corroborate it: Daily Rev is now 2 years old. Our first formal post was September 13, 2004, although I had been blogging for well over a month before then (I deleted those earlier posts during a moment of lucidity, because they were nearly all of them the most abysmally lame drivel).

DR began as an unabashed shill for the candidacy of Mr. John Kerry. When that failed, the blog became a personal coping strategy, and a place where I scribbled notes for various book projects, all in the near-complete anonymity of a newbie amid the blogosphere.

Somehow, and through no conscious intervention of my own, the blog eventually found a voice; and people actually started to read it. This was an alarming development, since it seemed to demand a broader perspective and a more inclusive tone than DR had started with. Fortunately, the arrival of Terry McKenna amid these pages, in the spring of '05, added much-needed depth and scope to the blog. His knowledge of history, and his ability to apply its lessons to the events from the front pages of each week's news, have provided the context for our stream-of-consciousness vents on the dangers of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist politics.

Terry's GOP roots also taught me a lesson about enmity that is constantly reinforced on me. It happened again yesterday: we joked about the confusion arising from the help that America received from Syria the other day, when its military forces stopped an attempted car-bombing of the American embassy there. To paraphrase the famous Pink Floyd song, the question arose: is Syria "us" or "them"?

Those of us on the portside of the political ship might ask a similar question about the effect of division and enmity in the national discourse. Our government has missed opportunity after opportunity for growth, accord, and international progress in the past five years, mainly because of its lockstep fundamentalism, which is defined by the Us-vs.-Them system of belief. If every dialogue and every difference is to be defined in the terms of an armaggedon-style battle for civilization (the spin that Bush himself repeated on Monday evening), then we will be drawn inexorably into deeper divisions of polarization and darker regions of tyranny, both here at home and internationally.

This goes for the left, the right, and every point in between on the narrow line of discord. If Democrats wish to regain power through division and isolation, they will be going down the same road that the Bushies have taken us these past six years. Because we globally conflated Syria with "Islamo-fascism", we allowed some significant potential for growth through diplomacy in that region to slide through our fingers. The era of white hats and black, if it ever really existed, is over; deal with it. More than that: welcome it: this is the first step in the dance of truth.

So to my friends on the left, I urge you to listen to Republicans, and engage them as if they were your allies in the quest for peace and freedom. Because, for the vast majority, they are. Question them, pester them, needle them, challenge them, yes—but do not abandon or isolate them. This, in essence, is the "daily revolution" that we attempt to foster here: a turning-away, from the cult of opposition and the slavery of a narrow group affiliation. If what we write here, even with all its many flaws and errors, contributes to that revolt upon the foundation of tyranny, then its purpose will have been achieved.

Thanks as always to everyone who has visited these pages over the past two years.

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Ann Richards, 1933-2006

It is rare, but not unheard of, for a politician to care, and to make a commitment to the true and original purpose of government, which is to serve and support the people of a society, a community, or a nation. Ann Richards, the great Democrat from Texas, was such a politician. She will be missed, but, we hope, never forgotten. After all, she still has plenty to teach us.