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Thursday, September 26, 2002
two prominent liberals make the case for war:
christopher hitchens & jacob weisberg
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
i don't want this to turn into a warblog. ok, well, it already has. at any rate, here's some more excellent fodder for all those ritter-bashers out there. not sure which explanation is best. it would seem that it's probable that all of them are true. at the very least, the guy has clearly gone south for the winter. i remember those 1998 hearings. him and biden going after it. he was so clearly anti-iraq and clearly saying that they still were a serious threat.
good fisking of al gore's latest speech.
No, in AlGoreWorld, the Bush administration has been twiddling its thumbs, wondering what to do, and when it decided, it decided wrong. Every time. Al again:
I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than predicted.
We are not distracted. Operations against the enemy in other parts of the world will not stop just because the US strikes Saddam.
Who says this task is more difficult and lengthy than predicted? Al Gore says, that's who. Who supposedly predicted it would be easy and quick? Not President Bush nor any other member of his administration:
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
a-fucking-men.
Monday, September 23, 2002
my oldest son, thomas, likes to create mini-graphic novels. he draws pictures in a notebook and then asks me or my wife to write down what the captions should read.
some excerpts:
Who is walking through my rainbow? A giant. He caught the giant and threw him in the trashcan.
also:
The gingerbread man said "Nanny Nanny Boo Boo. You can't catch me." The wolf ate him and he was sick. The end.
the fog of peace
Sunday, September 22, 2002
i read this the other day:
sentimentality is unearned emotion.
Saturday, September 21, 2002
just when you think you've got it bad. life during wartime. good blog by an old-school webhead.
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
finally, a morning edition columnist after my own cold, dark heart:
Sadly, these are not options. Instead, you just get helplessly drawn into the dank, gum-snapping vortex of the pop-culture chyme that is a show like "Sorority Life" and are enormously, vapidly entertained on the most hollow of levels, as you feel your very anima being sucked through your eyeballs. Is this really all there is?
portions of a letter to israel aguirre:
you don't know me, but you stole my car. it was in the parking lot of uncle julios on the east side of dallas. i was in town for business and sick as a dog; hating dallas as i always do and just suffering through your miserable city for the sake of some stupid meeting. i didn't want to drive my car, but was trying to save my cheapskate company some money. you broke the window, cracked the steering column, put a screwdriver in the ignition, clipped a jaguar and sped off. you don't realize it of course, but in this simple way, you ruined my life for 8 long days. let's forget all the other lives you've ruined for a second. don't start with that "this was my first time" bullshit. save it for the judge. for my 8 days alone you should go to jail for years. not days. not months. that's my opinion. everyone else is interested in your rehabilitation. your attorney has worked out a sweet deal for you and the district attorney accepted it. you get parole. maybe you have to pay me back. that's if the court or anyone else cares to follow up on that. i know how these things go you see. my wife had the same thing happen. and she was never paid back in full by the young asscracks who demolished her car. so you get out of jail free.
i'm sure you're not reading this, so i'll sum it all up in a nut. i'm betting on the odds. and what are the odds? that you'll think you got away with it. that you'll do it again. that you'll get caught. and that you really will be stuck in a cell with someone named lucky. he'll have gold teeth. more than you've ever seen. and the days will go on forever in your mind. you'll wonder where it all went wrong. you won't remember any of this stupid letter, but you'll wonder.
i could give a shit less about your rehabilitation. i want you to pay me the $500 deductible and never do this again. otherwise, it's me and the odds my young cabron.
the artist as a young birdhouse.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
chuck palahniuk's latest spill sounds like a winner.
think iraq has given us what we want? think again.
Monday, September 16, 2002
do you keep on going
'cause you like all the stuff?
if you keep on going
it'll never be enough
Sunday, September 15, 2002
the jump to conclusions game.
ok, ok, the 3 guys really were medical students. and the lady that allegedly overheard them was making it all up in her head. but don't you at least suspect that they prob. were joking out loud? do you really think she made the whole thing up? and instead of being enraged about civil liberties and racial profiling, don't you feel at least a smidgeon better about the fact that they caught these 3 guys on a stretch of highway spanning 3 states off 1 woman's tip? and furthermore, if you were detained on some sort of suspicion, after it turned out to be a mistake, would you come out and publicly decry the very people who are trying to make us safe?
lonanne's still pretty bad off with cellulitis. it's a bacterial infection on her face. or at least that's what they think. they really don't know. we don't know what to do. we've been to the dr. to the specialist. to the e.r. to the after-hours clinic. they just prescribe stronger doses of antibiotics and tell us to wait. meanwhile her face is swollen and red and she's in constant pain. i think we both wish they'd just admit her to the hospital, but they'll only do that if it appears to be getting into the bloodstream.
some of the doctors and nurses are great. others seem like they could care less. all of them say what you can pretty much find on the internet about cellulitis. it's like they go off and read the same site you looked at and regurgitate it back to you. is it me or are they just becoming more and more like car mechanics; only able to rip off the folks who can't tell the radiator from the transmission? at least the auto-mechanic can remember what they worked on. i feel like i've re-explained the situation 500x to just about everyone from the admitting nurse to the otolaryngologist.
and why can't prescriptions be automated or online? they still write this shit on a piece of paper. it's a freakin' luxury if they phone it in for you. oh could you? thanks so much.
put your hands on the wheel/let the golden age begin.
Saturday, September 14, 2002
in case you were wondering, i caused 9-11.
Friday, September 13, 2002
patty griffen's voice on "chief."
goddamn.
his hands wouldn't work the machinery
his brain told him what to say
it was a hell of a life
but it was somebody's life
up and down the street all day
footnotes from the city of hate.
excerpts from a phone call i received from an ass't d.a. in dallas regarding the prosecution of one israel aguirre; better known as the punk who stole my car.
me - "what's he gonna get?"
da - "um, well, the grand jury has greenlighted the case so now i can recommend a punishment."
me - "jail time?"
da - (slight laugh) "well, since he has no priors i'm going to recommend probation."
me - "probation?"
da - "3 to 5 years. yes sir. since this was his first time."
me - "first time for what?"
da - "first crime."
me - "you mean the first time he got caught?"
(long pause)
me - "he broke the steering column like steve mcqueen in the getaway."
da - "i'm also recommending that as part of his punishment, that he pay restitution to you."
me - "he's going to pay me?"
da - "yes sir. i need you to tell me what this cost you."
me - "in money or time?"
da - "well, if you could provide receipts."
me - "for my time?"
me - "has he been in jail this whole time?"
da - "no, he's been with a probation officer."
me - "you mean no jail time?"
da - "well, he spent 2 days in jail during his arraignment."
me - "can i write him a letter?"
da - "well, um..."
me - "i want to write him a letter. can you give it to him?"
da - "yes sir. i can make sure he gets any letter you want to give him at his sentencing."
me - "it's gonna be a bitch of a letter."
da - "well, please don't make any threats."
lonanne's sick with a skin infection. she's in bed and i'm sitting here reading about those 3 "medical students" headed to fla. i think they should give people like that shoney's waitress the lotto. here you go. no numbers this week. you win the lottery. it sounds so goddamn trite, but it really is people like that who save us all from becoming european.
i've got another (last call for alcohol) rant for bucho...
why do we need ANOTHER u.n. resolution? isn't the one that nut signed in 1991 still valid? the one where we promised not to destroy him if he stopped trying to buy weapon's grade plutonium on the open market? where the fuck do blowhards like chretian and mandela (and daschle for that matter) get off? i swear to god i hope somebody in the state dept. is keeping a list. oh what's that mandela? you need foreign aid? ratty-ass ex-terrorist sez what?
there's an existing u.n. resolution. saddam is IGNORING it. he has for 9 years.
does the u.n. back up it's resolutions with anything other than more resolutions? they don't realize it (or maybe they do), but this is their last and only chance to put up or become completely irrelevant.
are u.s. interests at stake here or aren't they? iraq is not threatening china fer chrissakes. stand up people.
do we need to wait until he test fires an icbm across continental europe and puts a crater in the south of france? would that be enough proof for you there biden?
i'm sick of the oil argument. going to war with iraq is about oil. supporting israel is about oil. refusing the kyoto treaty is about oil. dick cheney is about oil. if somebody says this about oil one more time, i'm gonna light a can of oil under their ass.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
one last rant and i'll give up this boorish war-mongering. i don't want a war. other folks have said it better. here's my rant:
it already is a war. the choice was made last september. and not by us.
they aren't criminals to be prosecuted by our justice system. they are our sworn enemy who want nothing more than our destruction. they didn't rob the corner store or kill their ex-girlfriend. they fucking slaughtered 3,000 people as a comma in a paragraph of a screed they've been writing with the blood of thousands of innocents all over the world.
i don't really care what the rest of the arab world thinks. if they all agreed we should invade egypt would that make it ok? the rest of the arab world thinks that the only viable democracy in the region should be annihilated. wtf do we care what they think? it's like the people who thought pakistan wouldn't let us invade afghanistan. remember them? 1 phone call by colin powell and a 1.7 billion dollar imf loan and they rolled over like lambs. hell, musharif fired half his pro-Taliban generals just to shut them up.
if not us, who?
that's it. i'm done.
nice debugging of chomsky's latest tripe. in case anyone was wondering, i did actually try to read chomsky in college. and despite being completely confused about his little black box theory of language, i used to think he was a fairly harmless linguist who brought some small light to that distant study. now i think he's an annoying boron who gets quoted by psuedo-liberals to underscore how hip it is to hate bush.
Sunday, September 08, 2002
excerpts from an excellent article:
And all of them seem to assume that America will continue to sit back and take it, like the good global citizen that America has tried to be in the last 60 years of defeating Fascism, Nazism, Communism and helping spread more wealth and more freedom to more people in more places than ever in human history.
They are wrong. The real effect of Sept. 11 is that American patience and tolerance for its global critics, most of whom do rather well out of America's benign hegemony, seems just about exhausted. And however it was that Osama bin Laden expected what he has called "the American Empire" to react to his murderous assault, if indeed he thought that far ahead, he seems not to have calculated that America might react by tearing up the old rule book of international affairs.
But then the Europeans seem deaf to American arguments, whether over Iraq, or the reliability of Yasser Arafat as a peace partner or anything else. They brush aside Washington's cogent criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol as a cosmetic exercise that does not include the real pollution threats of the 21st century, the fast-growing and energy-hungry demographic giants of China and India. The Europeans were deaf to American appeals that an exception be made in the land mine treaty for the South Korean border, where fewer mines would require more troops to protect it. Only grudgingly did the Europeans accept that America as the only credible global policeman might have a unique difficulty with an International Criminal Court, after the Europeans had rejected a reasonable American compromise to submit cases to the UN Security Council.
"When the Europeans demand some sort of veto over American actions, or want us to subordinate our national interest to a UN mandate, they forget that we do not think their track record is too good," a senior U.S. diplomat said recently in private. "The Europeans told us they could win the Balkans wars all on their own. Wrong. They told us that the Russians would never accept National Missile Defense. Wrong. They said the Russians would never swallow NATO enlargement. Wrong. They told us 20 years ago that détente was the way to deal with what we foolishly called the Evil Empire. Wrong again. They complain about our Farm Bill when they are the world's biggest subsidizers of their agriculture. The Europeans are not just wrong; they are also hypocrites. They are wrong on Kyoto, wrong on Arafat, wrong on Iraq -- so why should we take seriously a single word they say?"
more web debunking (for the arch-liberal inside of you)
it turns out sweden is poorer than mississippi.
michael moore cooked his statistics. hmmmmm. imagine that.
begging for money could be profitable.
Thursday, September 05, 2002
yes, yes i've been watching all the 9/11 specials and filling myself with plenty of bathos and pathos and fear and hatred. yes, yes nobody wants to talk about it except for the dozen or so celebrities i'd like to shoot between the eyes for their pomposity and gaul. for all their suggesting it's our fault and for the media sychophants who let them. i'll never buy another goddamn steve earle album again. and norman mailer can go fuck himself for saying we deserved it. just like jane fonda going to those POW camps with her little rice hat. nice to see you jane. thanks for dropping in and giving us your privileged views.
i went in search of some of the pictures of the families that were on those planes. there's one of a little girl named christine hanson. she was 2 years old. her family was flying to disneyworld. and here those bastards made damn sure that her last moments on this earth were full of screams and blood and her parents holding her tiny hands and whispering that everything will be alright . then she was fire and dust and ash. i'm imagining my two sons on that plane. and me. and my wife. and i'm thinking that in my heart i will never forget. nor should i.
it is a war. we can admit it or not.
Monday, September 02, 2002
favorite labor day quote:
"unions: the folks who brought you the weekend."
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