Something Wicked This Way Retires

The animated show, American Dad, had a good take on Karl Rove. He is shown as a dark lord, dressed in scarlet robes, his face partially covered, and with a bat on his shoulder. In real life, he looks like an accountant who spends too much time at the bakery. But he definitely has inspired fear and loathing. Winning the first election wasn’t too difficult since the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush, but winning the second election was pretty amazing, even with the voting irregularities in Ohio.

His work in the Whitehouse has been one of embarrassing mistakes, all of them politically motivated. The Plame affair and the attorney fiasco most certainly came from his egg-shaped head. The only decent thing he came up with was the immigration reform, and he couldn't pull together his Republican lackeys to pass that one.

Like the administration that he helped spawn, Rove is full of illusions. He told Paul Gigot that he believes everything will turn out all right, as if he controls fate:

"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."

Looking ahead, he adds, "Iraq will be in a better place" as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, "we'll see in the battle over FISA" -- the wiretapping of foreign terrorists -- "a fissure in the Democratic Party." Also in the fall, "the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage," helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.

As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."

Actually I agree with him that Clinton will be nominated. I think it will be her against Romney. And Rove might be right about her being flawed. She comes across as a little cold on camera, but she is getting better. If she even gets a smidgen of the empathy that her husband emanates, she’ll be our first woman president. But trying to guess the election is a fool’s game.

And as for the rest of Rove’s predictions, my God, man, let me know when the space shuttle lands. Rove may have an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, but he doesn’t know anything about Iraq. That country will end up with us leaving and a bloody civil war happening, and all our troops will have died in vain. Bush will go down as one of our worst presidents, and Rove will be a footnote in the book of shame. And the GOP brand name is all over spending, mostly with Haliburton contracts and Ted Steven’s bridge to nowhere.

Rove’s biggest mark is the one-issue wedge. Gay marriage, abortion, terrorism, and let’s not forget racism (Anybody remember the accusation that McCain had an illegitimate black child?). This served Rove well, but now, not so much:

If some of Mr. Rove’s signature achievements have been eagerly imitated, others — including an emphasis on turning out Republican base voters by focusing on polarizing issues like same-sex marriage — have been discredited by polls suggesting that the base is shrinking in Mr. Bush’s second term.

I hope this is true. If literature teaches us anything, it’s that the world does not revolve around single issues. I am astounded people will vote for inept politicians because they spout platitudes about religion. A lamb may symbolize Jesus, but you don’t have to be a sheep, placidly following your preacher. The people in the bible belt have more children serving in Iraq and are hit harder by tax cuts for the rich, but will still drop their vote so a gay guy can’t have the same rights as them. It boggles the mind.

But I guess it’ll come down to the next presidential elections. If the Republican’s win, it will show the American people have a high tolerance for mediocrity and corruption. But there’s an optimist inside of me that says the Karl Roves of the world will soon be in the dustbin.

Spy In the House of Duh!

Do you remember how the black and white spies in Mad Magazine’s "Spy vs. Spy" were both incompetent? Sometimes the black spy would win and sometimes the white spy would win, but they both seemed a little dim…and mostly dead.

According to a new book out right now, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, the CIA was/is as incompetent as…well…the Whitehouse these days. Check out this excerpt from the NY Times book review:

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.

Okay, so the C.I.A. pretty much missed the boat on every major global political event since its inception. I imagine being a spy is not easy, but you would think at least with how rich our country is that we could have bribed our way into some knowledge. The Soviets bribed that good Catholic, C.I.A. case officer Aldrich Ames into giving up ten agents who were then executed; you would think that we could have done the same.

But perhaps we should look no further than the leadership. Our country certainly has been lead downwards by G.W. and Cheney. The C.I.A. is not any different:

In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

This would be amusing if so many people hadn’t died because of their lies and incompetence. I think America does need information. What hinders us is our xenophobia. Our education rarely bothers to teach us about other cultures, and we’re lucky if learn Spanish, much less Russian, Arabic, or Farsi. Our own President barely knows anything outside of Washington and Texas. Arrogance and firepower can only take you so far. Even our own army kicks out translators for being gay. How inept can we be? Apparently a lot:

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”

It’s moving beyond insult right into stupidity.

When You're a Lez, You're a Lez All the Way

A murky little gob of hate and horniness drives right-wing religious nuts, especially when it comes to lesbians. You would think here in the United States, we would let people be who they are, let them breathe free if they’re not hurting anyone, but that little prickly white-hot spasm cooks the religious kook’s hypothalamuses into telling pathetic lies and starting frivolous court cases.

I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly. Who needs to when Stephen Colbert does such a better job of O’Reilly-ing? But he had Rod Wheeler, a supposed security expert, tell a tale of lesbian gangs. It’s been quoted in all sorts of newspapers and blogs but the allegations bear repeating in nifty bullet points:

* The gays are recruiting kids as young as 10 years old to join their gay gangs and perform—you guessed it—gay sex acts

* There are 150 lesbian gangs in the Washington DC area alone.

* It’s all over America

* The girl gangs carry pink nine-millimeter Glocks

Of course, these allegations are false—complete and utter lies on the no spin zone. The Southern Poverty Law Center debunks the damned lies here.

In other gay panic news, a dickhead in the Bay Area tried to get the courts to block Dykes on Bikes to use that moniker. He stated that the word dykes is “disparaging to men and is scandalous and immoral.” Scandalous? Who made you the arbiter of words?

The court told him that being a man, it’s none of his business:

Someone opposing a trademark has to show "a reasonable basis for a belief that he would be damaged," the court said in a 3-0 decision. McDermott, being a man, couldn't be harmed by a group's decision to call itself "dykes," the panel wrote.

I wonder how much eye rolling went on in the courtroom. Here are some of the wingnut’s arguments from the pleading:

In the arguments he filed with the patent office and in court, he stated his opposition to any trademark for a group associated with the annual Dyke March, which he called “the Annual Illegal San Francisco Dyke Hate Riot.”…He said he and all men are subject to criminal attacks and civil right violations during the march, and that the word dyke is associated with a “deep obsessive hatred of men and the male gender.”

Actually a Dyke Hate Riot sounds like a rockin’ dance party, don’t it? Obviously, this guy has never been to the pride parade. Men are not subject to criminal attacks, maybe catty remarks, maybe suggestive leers, and perhaps a goosing, but not a criminal attack, and certainly not from the dykes on bikes. They’re doing all they can to keep those bikes upright while traveling 10 miles per hour.

So there’s an obvious searing hatred that drives these sub humans, but there also salaciousness too. Either it’s impotent rage because they feel left out or they secretly want to watch the dykes and their bikes and their Glocks. They may claim they do it for the common good, for the morals, but in the end it’s that little Johnson urging them to do God’s work. If only they would just wank it away.

Deaf Dumb and Blind and They Suck at Pinball

Let’s get the obvious out of the way—the Bush administration has been one of the top worst administrations our young country has lived through. Nixon, at least, improved relations with China. The Bush administration has put its religious right-wing ideology before truth, before logic, and before the needs of the American public. Every day, the news tells us another story of how these imbeciles have made our country worse off.

The latest is another attack on science by these chunderheads. Let’s let the lede tell the story:

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

I didn’t blink when I read this. No surprise really. They have their own version of reality and have no qualms on forcing it on the rest of us, facts be damned. The usual topics were verboten by the cursed Bushies: stem cells, contraception, sex education, second-hand smoke, global warming. And, as usual, there are moments of mirth at the audacity of the dimwits:

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.

I hope Carmona added Bush’s name as a non sequitur at the end of every page to show how retarded the order is: “So, in conclusion, Americans need to have less trans-fat in their diet…oh yes and Bush Bush Bush.”

Here is another jaw dropper:

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name…“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The prominent family is the Kennedy family. You couldn’t make the Bush administration look worse if you tried. Don’t help the handicapped; the Kennedys help them, and we hate the Kennedys. So much for Christian values. So much for compassionate conservatism. But those titles were all oxymorons anyway.

The Whitehouse hack has to say something, so they do their usual doublespeak:

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said…“It’s disappointing to us,” Ms. Lawrimore said, “if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation.”

He failed? He failed to stand up to you I guess. How do these hacks sleep at night? I don’t know which is worse, that they have to lie publicly or they believe in the disinformation they try so desperately to spin.

The Surgeon General is a tough job. Former SGs testified that both Democratic and Republican administrations tried to influence them. I soured on Clinton when he fired Joycelyn Elders for stating that masturbation could be useful way to prevent risky sexual behaviors. Elders was simply agreeing with a statement and she was correct anyway; it is a good way. But right-wingers and religious fanatics screamed bloody murder. Clinton wussed out and asked for her resignation.

What’s most disturbing is the Bushies have no understanding of science at all:

[Carmona] described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said…“And I said to myself, ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science,’ ” he said. “I was never invited back.”

Once the science was explained to them and it didn’t back up their narrow beliefs, they just ignored their top doctor. And the litany of bone-headed manipulations goes on and on. Here’s their stupidity on tobacco:

Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government’s nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. Dr. Carmona testified anyway.

On stem cells:

“I was told to stand down and not speak about it,” he said. “It was removed from my speeches.”

On contraceptives:

“However there was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to preach abstinence only, but I felt that was scientifically incorrect,” he said.

On prison health care:

Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said…“For us, the science was pretty easy,” he said. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them.” He added, “This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”

But the Busies don’t care about the public. They are like Freud’s Id; they only see what will gratify their ideological needs. So very pathetic. The man the Bushies want to replace Carmona with is Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., a religious right-winger, who will tow the line on any issue the administration wants. God save us.

I’m usually wrong about America’s voting habits, but I’ll be very surprised if the Republicans are not kicked out en masse in the next elections. If not, then all the surgeon generals in the world couldn’t help us.

We Need Quality! Send In the Nuge!

Rupert Murdoch, media mogul, evil genius, right-wing propagandist, is the highest bidder for Dow Jones and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is upset over this because of Murdoch’s meddling and obsequiousness towards China. They fear Murdoch will ruin one of the best newspapers in the world. And they are right. Murdoch has a history of turning his news outlets into propaganda machines. They spew faux-populist crap and call it fair and balanced. Murdoch also bends over backwards not to insult totalitarian China, killing book deals that criticize China’s repressive government all in the name of China’s currency: yuan.

Now the reporting of the WSJ is excellent. Their news section is one of the finest in the world. The opinion section is shite. Ayn Randian belief in unregulated markets and knee-jerk conservative values rule the opinion pages. While the supposedly liberal bastion New York Times has conservative pundits such as David Brooks, the WSJ opinion section has no such balance. And apparently they don’t care much about facts or logic. As long as you bleat their ideology, they will print your ravings.

Case in point: the Nuge. Ted Nugent, has-been rocker, famous for being drug free and his love of hunting, wrote an editorial slamming the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Why would the stuffy staff of the WSJ call upon the Nuge to write an editorial is beyond me. Perhaps they love all those paeans to pussy that Nugent wrote, such as “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.” And the Nuge delivers on the hysterical prose:

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

Actually I think they were turned off by the Vietnam war, the repression and unhappiness of their parents and what a complete lie the American Dream is, unless your Scooter Libby. He then bemoans the death of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin due to drugs. I can’t argue with that. And then he casually drops a lie:

Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

Morrison’s death remains a bit of a mystery because no autopsy was done on it. He certainly was no stranger to drugs, but more than likely, Morrison died due to his enormous drinking habit, and although alcohol is a drug, hippies for the most part rejected alcohol. Mama Cass died from a heart attack brought on by obesity, a true American, Midwest, American-Values problem. (No, she didn’t choke on a ham sandwich.) Also, the term liberal deniers make it sound like someone denying liberals, but clear grammar and logic is not the Nuge’s forte.

Then he gives a powerful description of what he went through in those turbulent times:

I literally had to step over stoned, drooling fans, band mates, concert promoters and staff to pursue my musical American Dream throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember. In utter frustration I was even forced to punch my way through violent dopers on occasion.

I love this image: Terrible Ted punching his way through a zombie force of drooling drugged out hippies. Say Ted, didn’t you sing “The stakes are high and so am I” in your song, “Free For All”? Oh I see, you can exploit drug use in your songs but you didn’t use them.

And it seems being stone cold sober means you get to print lies with the imprinteur of the WSJ:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

Did you get that, folks? Hippies smoking rag weed cause divorce, kids leaving school, drug use, abortion, STDs, crime, more government and taxes. Where are these statistics, Ted? I’m guessing he pulled them out of his ass. All these things have risen along with our population. Not to mention these things existed well before the 1960s. Why do conservatives look to the past with rose-colored glasses? I’d also like to point out we’ve had more conservative leadership since the 1960s then liberal, and I think the government has more power then the hippies of Haight Street.

He goes on:

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco--a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless--to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

Shopping carts to the homeless? Those crazy, Godless San Franciscans! Room temperature? You would think a hunter could come up with a better metaphor than that for death. God knows, he has caused a whole lot of death. Then Nugent ends his piece:

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.

If your clean and sober lifestyle lead to the formation of your shit-sucking band, Damn Yankees then pass the joint, Ted. And WSJ, don’t worry about Murdoch buying your paper. If the Nuge is your idea of high journalistic standards, Rupert can only make things better.

What's Another Word for Evil?

The strongest asset a conservative has is his or her blind loyalty to their leaders. This also is their Achilles heel because Bush and Cheney’s incompetence will surely cost them the next election. Cheney doesn’t have to worry about elections anymore. He has stated that he will not run for President. I don’t see him relinquishing power though. Kissinger once said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Looking at that grim turtle of a man, one can see that Kissinger needed all the power just to get laid.

But I see Cheney as completely sexless. The man has no joi de vivre, just an obsession with power. Power for him means no checks and balances, complete secrecy. You just have to trust him. Of course, his track record is shit. The Iraq war is a catastrophe. Cheney has lied every step of the way. He has ignored Geneva Conventions and brought back torture. He has pushed for spying on Americans. In short, he is the worst politician our country has, with no one willing to stop him.

I had a boss who was friends with Dick Cheney. The boss was completely removed from reality. He came into work, but really didn’t do any work. Mostly he treated the place as a fiefdom. And at the weekly meeting he would regale us with his wisdom. Now, I do the same thing with my blog, but you can surf to another site with a click of the mouse button. My co-workers and I had to endure his pointless pontificating.

He talked about his dinners with Cheney with obvious pride, oblivious to his employees rolling their eyes. A couple of years after I left that job, I went to a party that they had also been invited to. At some point I got into a discussion with the wife who screamed at me, “You don’t know what you are talking about! He is a brilliant man!” She then told me, Cheney would be vindicated and there was some stuff that she knew but couldn’t talk about, et cetera, et cetera. She was the epitome of conservative loyalty: unquestioning, quick to anger, deceitful and completely nuts.

Our government was built with a solid base with the checks and balances. And although Cheney has done his best to dismantle it, luckily, his and Bush’s incompetence has hindered them somewhat. There is a possibility that Cheney will do a power grab when his time is up, but thanks to his demoralization of the military, he will not have the muscle to back it up. I know that sounds paranoid, but I could not have believed way back when they were elected what they have wrought in the years they have been in power. Let’s just say I will heave a big sigh of relief when they are booted out.

Butterfly on a Wheel

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Won't Somebody Think of the Children?

Every once in a while, sanity prevails. Americans are pretty hypocritical about many things, but at the top of the list is sexuality. And a subset of that is language about sexuality. To me words are just words, but to the F.C.C., words can cause everlasting damage. Obscenity by its very nature is subjective. It supposedly can't be defined, but the authorities know what it is when they see or hear it. But a U.S. Court of Appeals, said to Bush's F.C.C.—and I paraphrase—"Fuck you, buddy."

The opening paragraph of the New York Times article says it best:

"If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts."

Both fuckwads have uttered swear words or "fleeting obscenities." So why do television networks have to pay $325,000 when Bono (a good Catholic by the way) or Cher utters a swear word? The Bush administration feel they are above the law, of course, but this time the courts grew some balls and said no.

The F.C.C. hack gave his rebuttle:

“I completely disagree with the court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families,” he said. “The court says the commission is ‘divorced from reality.’ It is the New York court, not the commission, that is divorced from reality.”

Nice touch about the families. Won't someone think of the children? I also like how he noted that the court was from New York. That's conservative code for Eastern liberal elites. I'm always amazed how people can do the most amoral things and then get heated up over words like cock, cunt and shit. It's as if they can accept the bad stuff they do, if they don't use words deemed offensive. It's also worth noting that words like nigger, faggot, chink, and the like are not deemed obscene only rude. You can be racist but not sexual or scatological.

Of course, like most moral controversies, the swear words are a distraction for the real problem: media monopolies. Bush's F.C.C. has been gutting regulations and now there is no local radio. Here in S.F. we are lucky enough to be a big market, so our D.J.s are local and talk about local issues. But smaller towns or even cities listen to D.J.s who aren't even in their own state. Music genres are rapidly expanding, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the radio. No wonder internet radio is so popular.

Strangely enough I believe that swear words should keep their power to shock, but not through fines. I'm sure the F.C.C. will take this to the conservative Supreme Court and the networks will lose. And in the end we'll all lose, although we'll keep on swearing. Fucking A, yes we will.

So Ann Coulter and a Priest Walk Into a Gay Bar...

I'd like to think that comedy and politics are like oil and water, but that's not a correct similie. Comedians have always found a rich vein of comedy in politics. But politicos are not funny. Watching a politician interviewed on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report is fun because you're seeing professional comedians riff during an interview. But while the politician is trying to spin or look good to younger viewers, they mostly look uncomfortable. You might get lucky and see a politico brought down a peg or two if Stewart of Colbert are in a devilish mood, but it's nothing illuminating.

President Bush cracks jokes all the time; there are just not funny. At all. Most of the time, his jokes are surreal, having no apparent reference. But those folks at his extremely-inclusive rallies laugh like he was a sharpest wit in the room. Here's one quotation:

"I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That's a pretty cool first name, isn't it, Mayo. Pass the Mayo."

I think people laugh because he is the POTUS. Have you ever laughed at your boss' joke and then walked away wondering why you laughed? There is an inborn need to please your superiors, which means laughing at unfunny jokes. If Bush was a stranger at a barbeque and made a joke like that he would be met with an awkward silence.

Comedy definitely does not mix with ideology. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter say they are making jokes, but to have insults rise above pettiness, they have to be funny. Calling someone a femi-nazi or a fag isn't really funny for anyone over twelve. Playing on someone's fear and hate doesn't make for wit. The picture above comes from a right-wing tee-shirt company. Nuke the Moon? Tee-shirt jokes, like bumper stickers are not that funny.

And it's not just the right-wing either. I once spent a dull night watching a left-wing feminist comedy troop. Not funny. At all. You have to be a comedian before any ideology. I think Jon Stewart senses this; when his audience clearly hates the right-wing blowhard, he keeps them in line, avoiding easy jokes that his lefty audience would love. He senses that once you give yourself to ideology it becomes funny only to the true believers, and even then they are laughing out of hate and not true humor. Colbert turns ideology on its ear with his spot-on satire, but his show's heart is pure comedy rather than scathing left-wing anger.

What is funny is the picture of the models the tee-shirt company uses to sell their wares. I'm guessing they are the daughters of the owner. They are blonde, blue-eyed, and holding weapons. They're like little Ann Coulters before they start starving themselves. The weapons they are holding is a Joycean epiphany, a little detail that illuminates the weird mix of fear, paranoia, violence and Aryan sex appeal that the right cling too. Keep those weapons handy, kids; the crazed, multi-kulti, gay socialists want to take you away and make you bake pot cookies for Medea Benjamin’s presidential campaign.

It's an American Dream...Includes Indians Too

The 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love is upon us, and the retrospective articles are appearing. Joel Selvin is writing a series of articles for the SF Chronicle. Selvin is a good journalist, and although it's hard to capture the zeitgeist of that time within the confines of a newspaper article, he does a good job. The Summer of Love was centered on the Haight neighborhood. It occurred one year before I was born, so all I have is the memory of the folks who were there. But I see what's become of the Haight, and I know modern hippies. Time has not been kind to either.

Of course, the Summer of Love was a media construct that died even before it started. As a rule of thumb, if you are reading about a happening in the media, it's generally dead. Such is the nature of the hip and cool: ethereal wisps that fall apart in your hands. The earlier groovy folks of the pre-67 Haight were replaced by something much more American. Selvin puts it this way:

But they didn't turn out to be the literate beatniks and poetic artists who had come out earlier. These kids were squalid, ragged castoffs and, as they crowded the sidewalks of Haight Street night and day, they came to be known as street people.

Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead says in his own mixed-metaphor way, “We would come together for celebrations and stuff like that, and it was a lot of fun. But starting around June, the creativity of the scene was starting to be piled over by just having to batten down the hatches, bar your doors and windows 'cause there were speed freaks on the street.”

Good old speed. Invented by the Germans and beloved by certain Sci-Fi novelists to marathon sex tweakers. And it’s safe to say those speedy street people are still on the Haight. I’m sure the original tweaks are dead, but young ones take their place. They sit on the sidewalk with their dreadlocks and puppies and ragged army clothes asking for spare change, hitting on the yuppie chicks and generally smelling less than sweet. I can’t say they are hippies. They resemble Mad Max Thunderdome desert rats. None of the ideas of revolution and utopia sweep their minds.

The Haight itself is now one big shopping mall. You won’t find real hippies, but for a steep price you can dress like one. Don’t get me wrong, I like the street. It has nice bars and restaurants, and Milk has some good Hip Hop shows, but there is not much life in the place when the sun goes down and the shoppers leave.

And the hippies that I’ve known in my life don’t really follow the ideals of their elders. They are left-wing, but most of them are not active in politics. They are attracted to pot and music. You would hope for some laid back and passionate guys, literate beatniks and poetic artists, but instead you have neurotic stoners.

Maybe there never was the perfect ideal, only pale shadows, but the general ideas of the counterculture were great. Freedom and equality, love and forgiveness, art and sensuality are all ideals to live up to, but it takes more than a joint and a flowery shirt. If the Summer of Love teaches anything, it teaches that we keep trying for utopias, even if they crash like a tweaker after a three-day binge.

I Believe in Miracles...You Sexy Thing

In the May 7th, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, there is an article about a Brazilian writer named Paul Coelho. Apparently, He has sold a zillion books worldwide, including the Alchemist, soon to be a major motion picture. I have not read Coelho, but according to the article he writes allegorical stories that really push upbeat, new-age, mystical beliefs. Coelho also writes self-help books, naturally. And he is quoted on Starbucks coffee cups:

"'Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure. Never forget your Personal Legend. Never forget your Personal Dream....'"

I don't have anything against self-help epigrams. If they make you feel better, who am I to judge? But the belief in miracles is what I have a problem with. Obviously, I am an atheist. Although that doesn't mean I'm not spiritual. I just happen to believe in humanity, more specifically in humanity's art. And art not only accepts tragedy and the pointlessness of life, it also celebrates it as a part of the binary of living. Joy and laughter being the other side of the binary. What happens when you start to believe in miracles, in gods and demons, you give up logic and accountability. And two recent news stories illustrate this point.

A Vegan couple was sentenced to life in prison for killing their six-week old baby. They fed their baby according to their beliefs that humans should not use anything made by or from an animal. The baby was fed soy milk and apple juice. Apparently, mother's milk falls under food made by animals. Vegans that I have met look sallow and malnourished, so it's no surprise that a vegan diet would kill a child. The parents believed that their Spartan diet would sustain a baby: basically they believed in a miracle. Now they are living a nightmare.

Dick Cheney made a surprise visit to Iraq this week. He went there to jumpstart the progress in making a democracy flourish. Cheney's message to the Iraqis is, “We’ve all got challenges together. We’ve got to pull together. We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time." Now that should be on a Starbuck's cup.

Of course, the appearance of Cheney in Iraq will not trigger the miracle of peace and prosperity. If Cheney believes this, then he is more deluded than the Vegan couple. The whole administration believed in their Neocon miracle, but like most miracles, it was not to be. But once you state your belief in miracles it's hard to back down. You just keep hoping for something. In Cheney's case, he thinks legislation will bring together the Shiites, Sunnis, and the Kurds. Now that would be a true miracle.

The big difference between Cheney and the Vegan couple is Cheney has killed thousands of people with his deluded belief, while the Vegan couple killed one. They both should be imprisoned. But that would entail a miracle.