The Gray Maxim

Where's Your Mandate Now?

2006-11-08T07:49:00.000-05:00

A spot of tea for the victors!

I can't wait to hear Bush solemnly retract his assertion that his 2004 election was a "mandate" for his paleolithic social policies and imperialistic foreign agenda, and grudgingly acknowledge that his "political capital" that he "earned" from that election has long since been spent.

I gotta admit, I don't like some of these Democrats (most of them, actually, sparing a small handful of the good ones, like John Conyers, for whom I have one message: IMPEACH HIM!), but what I did enjoy (and will continue to enjoy throughout the day) was watching so many corrupt Republican politicians get shot down in glorious, beautiful flames - it was like watching the Northern Lights, friends.

But it's not all celebration. I have some fears for this new Democratic Congress. These are, for the most part, the very same Democrats who voted to authorize George Bush with the ability to declare war in 2002. And while most of them now regret it (presumably because of the growing public opposition to the war), I can't help but question their judgment. Most of them describe themselves as "moderate" or even "conservative" Democrats - this is a trend we should be very wary of, comrades.
We must not put too much faith in these people. Even though they're better than Republicans - if only by nature of the fact that they're not Republicans - they are still politicians, and there's no such thing as an honest politician. I think everyone can agree on that.

So, our job becomes clear: we must do what we can to keep them honest and make sure they keep Bush in check, and if it comes time that they aren't doing their job, I hope we'll remember what happened last time we voted Republican, and instead elect Green candidates in '08!
*End pipe dream*

But for now, we bask in the revelry following the defeat of one of the most corrupt, regressive legislative branches in American history - and, just maybe, the beginning of the end of the Republican reign of pro-business, anti-personal freedom, anti-woman, anti-homosexual, pro-fundamentalist idiocy.

A Short Comment on Terrorism

2006-11-03T18:20:00.000-05:00

I normally don't reduce myself to name-calling, but I get really sick of pundits' outrage at people like Cindy Sheehan calling George Bush a terrorist.

So let's examine why such a name is not only justified, it's pretty much mandatory, unless we'd rather ourselves be hypocrites than our president be a "terrorist."

The USA PATRIOT Act defines "domestic terrorism" as any act intended to:
a. intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
b. influence the policies of a government through intimidation or coercion; or
c. affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

Now it's easy to take media-friendly despots like Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Il and call them terrorists because they fit one or all of those definitions. And that would be fair and accurate.

But oh, how it can hurt to take that very same light and shine it on ourselves. It must be done, though, if we have even the vaguest delusions of objectivity.

Look at George Bush's actions in Iraq and say with a straight face that he was not attempting to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction. Even if you agree with the thing, that's what he was doing, there's not much denying it. If you really believe he wanted to make Iraq a democracy, then you must also believe that the way he did so was through military action - or, to put it a harsher but equally accurate way, through mass destruction.

Look at George Bush's statement to the nations of the U.N. that they are "either with us or against us in the War on Terror," and tell me he wasn't trying to influence the policies of a government through intimidation or coercion (well, multiple governments).

And as for intimidating a citizenry, well, most would say that it would be cheap and debatable (not debatable on any level of legitimacy, but that's seldom stopped any debate) to say that he used the threat of WMDs to intimidate the country into supporting a war, but Bush also used the threat of imminent collapse to frighten the citizenry into supporting Social Security "reform" (newspeak for "privatization"), and the threat of terrorist attacks to intimidate the civilian population into voting Republican in '06 ("It sounds like they [Democrats] think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we're attacked again." - Bush in a speech in California, October 2006).

Bush fits not just one of the criteria for the definition of "domestic terrorist" that he himself approved, but all criteria. Ergo, by our nation's own definition of "terrorist," George W. Bush is a terrorist.

QED.

STFU.

Shame

2006-10-27T14:04:00.000-05:00

One of the most fundamental characteristics of the human psyche is the conscience. The conscience is what causes us to feel regret, remorse, or shame, when we do or say wrong. It causes us to reexamine our behavior, perhaps reverse our wrongdoing, and helps us maintain our moral compass. Michael J. Fox, an actor who rose to fame in the 80's with his roles films such as Teen Wolf and the Back to the Future series, recently made a campaign commercial in support of Democratic Senate hopeful Claire McCaskill. His reason for doing so was McCaskill's support of stem-cell research. Fox, who is afflicted with Parkinson's Disease, has supported numerous politicians who he believes will help in the fight for stem-cell research. In his most recent outing, however, he found himself under accusations of fraud from Rush Limbaugh, a radio personality famous for his virulent denial of most tenants of science and rationality, including the capability of smoking to cause cancer, the existence of global warming, and the idea that new species evolve from existing ones through a process of natural selection (and he's also known for his love of Oxycontin, another story for another day).

In order to understand the debate, however, it's important to understand the issues in question, a seemingly obvious strategy which Rush naturally overlooked.
Stem-cells are, in essence, generic cells which can, through cell division, differentiate into specific cell types which can then form organs. Their interest in the science world lies in their ability to adopt a cell specialization and replenish specialized cells.
The controversy arises in the form of embryonic stem-cell research. The right wing has been so effective in injecting its Christian followers with a reflexive, sheeplike condemnation of any scientific procedure involving the words "embryo" or "fetus," that this entirely rational proposal is met with actual resistance.
Research of this type does require the destruction of an embryo, however, what those who seek to gain politically from this issue fail to tell their supporters is that most of the embryos used in stem-cell research are donated and, if not used for research, will be destroyed or maintained indefinitely. In other words, they ain't going anywhere.
These embryos could be used to save countless thousands of lives, or they can go to waste. Very few issues in life are this simple.

If you'd like to better understand Limbaugh's mindset, however, I advise you ignore all of that, and shed any sense of decency which may have kept you up to this point from openly taunting the handicapped. Recently, Rush had this to say about Fox's commercial:

This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication, or he's acting, one of the two.

I recommend watching this footage of Rush's broadcast that day. Hearing Rush make fun of another person's disability is one thing, but actually seeing him imitate Fox's involuntary muscular actions is truly appalling. I would say the obvious, but predicting that Rush has finally hit rock bottom is sorta like predicting that Keith Richards is going to die "this year." People have been doing it for as long as I've been alive and they'll just never learn.
Later in the show, Limbaugh, apparently realizing he might have overstepped his boundaries with his earlier comments, gave a very reluctant and very cheap apology, saying, ""I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act, especially since people are telling me they have seen him this way on other interviews and in other television appearances," before returning to several reiterations of the new Michael J. Fox talking-point, saying that the Democrats are exploiting Fox's illness, etc etc.

Characteristically, Limbaugh omitted a few interesting bits of information. One of these is, as the Washington Post points out, Fox's movements are not caused by going off his medication, rather, they are a result of taking it.
It's also very curious that, 2 years ago, Fox made a very similar commercial for Republican senator Arlen Specter, with the very same message, and yet Rush was strangely silent. I swear, If I didn't know that all partisan rancor in American politics was the vile machination of Democrats, something like that might make me sit down and think.

But this is Rush. Rush lies, from time to time. Rush makes mistakes (though rarely corrects them), Rush has problems, Rush has feelings (primarily feelings of prejudice, but, I mean... Those are feelings).
Yes, he fits nearly every single one of the requirements; one could say that Rush is almost human.
The only thing that's missing is the thing that makes us apologize when we lie about other people's illnesses. It's one of the main things that separates us from the apes from which Rush does not believe we evolved.
Shame.

It's All About Perspective

2006-05-23T14:10:00.000-05:00

A few recent epiphanies of mine have yielded a new understanding of what I think might be two of the most critical problems in American political discourse. One of the main problems in political discourse is that the right wing has successfully twisted and mutilated the mainstream political spectrum, by simple redefinition. What was once known as moderate is now known as the far left. What was once known as the far right is now merely the right, and the actual far left is not acknowledged.

This is something that's been getting some play among the blogosphere and the bookosphere - being the only media remaining in which the actual left isn't totally excluded. There are, however, two peculiarities of our unique political climate that haven't been getting quite the same attention (except for the occasional Daily Show joke). One of them I'll discuss now:

It's something I have dubbed, in a particularly coarse attempt at creativity, Underdog Syndrome. It's easy to explain, and even easier to observe. Underdog Syndrome is the tendency of a group that is and, let's face it, always has been in power, to attempt to portray itself as somehow downtrodden, oppressed, and subjugated. And it has, in recent years, become a leading hallmark of the right wing.
It's not difficult to see why they would want to use it, either. People like to get together and root for the underdog. The sympathies of the average person rarely lie with those in corridors of power. Underdog Syndrome is conservatives' attempt to have their cake and eat it too; they have the power that allows them to dominate everything from the media to the government, and now they also want that special brand of scrappy, ragtag charm that can only come from a destitute rebel fighting for the right to have his say.

There are plenty of examples of this mentality in today's political climate. Some of the most prevalent examples - the kind that are really shameless, and just painful to watch - come from Christianity. For the sake of perspective, Christianity has over 2 billion adherents and is the largest religion in the world. In America, roughly 80 percent of the population is Christian. With the exception of about 4, all of our presidents have been Christians. Christians overwhelmingly dominate Congress and the Supreme Court. As of 1999, 51% of Americans say they would not vote for a well-qualified atheist if one ran for office [1].
Despite all this power, some Christians (not all, of course), for some reason, have the strange idea that they're on the receiving end of one of greatest miscarriages of justice in history: oppression at the hands of an invisible secular majority.

I'm sure we all remember the holiday specials of The O'Reilly Factor in which he railed against the evils of the "War on Christmas," where Christmas faced such powerful foes as private businesses who chose to change "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays" so as not to lose the patronage of that 20% of the country who doesn't allege to follow the teachings of Christ. I will agree with Bill on one thing: that any real meaning or spirit of Christmas - religious or otherwise - has been sucked up in a vortex of rabid consumerism. Although I think this is more a fault of Bill's beloved capitalism than any armies of secular humanists storming the doors of Bastille de Christianisme (in fact, if one were to look at it from the angle that capitalism has done more to damage Christmas than liberalism - and that the upper echelons of corporate America are the brooding grounds for a large concentration of conservatism - and that pundits don't seem to mention anything about capitalism in their tirades about the War on Christmas - one could make the argument that the War on Christmas is actually being waged by the right).
The War on Christmas is not something new. The John Birch Society wrote a pamphlet in 1959 about the Red conspiracy to destroy Christmas. Notorious anti-semite Henry Ford also mentioned it in his publication, "The International Jew:" "It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they [Jews] preach and practice."
Scaremongering has always had a pattern. The names may change - throughought the years, the fear of Jews and Communists seems to have diminished, giving rise to a new one-size-fits-all boogeyman: secular humanists; however, the idea remains the same: scare the stupid people so they'll give you what you want [2]. For the record, Christmas remains the only religious holiday that is federally recognized.

I've trailed a bit from the main topic, but the point is, the War on Christmas is no more real now than it was when it was "waged" by Communists or Jews.

Nor is the much larger and more dastardly "War on Christianity."

In describing this war, it seems many myths are being dusted off and repeated. Myths such as the fact that "separation of church and state" is not mentioned in the Constitution. Myths that really no longer deserve dignified, thoughtful response. So I'll instead respond to such myths by reminding the public that all people who believe such things are bed-wetting doody heads.

One of the most interesting examples is a recent conference called "The War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006," hosted by Rick Scarborough. Among the persecuted who attended were former House majority leader and Christ-figure Tom DeLay, and the usual lineup of Phyllis Schlaflys, Gary Bauers, and Alan Keyeses (?).
One Jewish speaker, Michael Horowitz, noted that "You guys [Christians] have become the Jews of the 21st century."

I'll digress now, so that the shamelessness of that statement can fully sink in. Also, I want to give the younger readers time to look up a 7-part series of newsreels called Why We Fight. Hey kids, be sure to pay extra close attention to part 2!

Talkin' Un-American

2006-01-31T22:06:00.000-05:00

Republicans like to talk about what is un-American. From the top of the ladder on down, president to pundit, they all seem to have a bizarre fixation with trying to define "American" and "un-American." Those of you who follow current issues might have heard through the grape vine that President Bush has authorized wiretaps of Americans. The President, his press secretary, his ever-anxious lapdogs in the craft of right-wing punditry, all seem to have the same excuse: it's his Constitutional right to do so, and if you disagree you must want the terrorists to win.

This is nothing new. Once again, we the people are traitors if we question the president's authority. It's also nothing new that they lied. The Constitution doesn't give him the right to wiretap without a warrant. In fact, it explicitly says the opposite. I'm not going to insult your intelligence by quoting the fourth amendment, but for those who aren't familiar with the Constitution (like Bush, apparently), the short version is that you can't invade someone's privacy, or get a warrant to invade someone's privacy, without probable cause.

"The enemy," they argue, "could attack at any time and we need the information on their plans as soon as possible. We don't have time to get a warrant!" Ahh, what a sensible conclusion.
Too bad somebody already thought of it. That's why the president has 72 hours after he begins surveillance to obtain a warrant.

Those of you who watched the State of the Union, which just ended about 30 minutes ago saw a more nuanced defense of the wiretapping (or, if you prefer Rove's linguistic retooling of the phrase to neuter it of any negative meaning, "terrorist surveillance program"): that Bush is just doing what presidents before him have done. The exact line was:

Previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have.

Notice he doesn't mention which presidents? I can think of one:

Of course, that won't happen here. We live in different times; where there was an independent media during Nixon's time, there is just a mass of corporate subsidiaries who transcribe talking points. If Bush hasn't been impeached for...

The Bush Administration's ties to Enron and Ken Lay
The massive pre-9/11 intelligence failure which included the President not reading memos with titles like "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US"
The Abu Gharib prisoner torture scandal
The search for WMDs that has yielded nothing and has thus far claimed tens of thousands of lives

... Then he can pretty much do anything with no checks on his authority whatsoever, and certainly wiretaps are the least of our worries as a people.

But back to the original topic: what is un-American? Well, I think it's a stupid term, personally. To me it's an utterly meaningless brand word, the kind of word politicians use to coax that kneejerk response out of the masses of the ignorant.
But I'll play ball.

The right says that the opponents of the president's wiretapping authority, by even debating this issue, are giving the terrorists too much information about our activities. Un-American, they say. Now, let's assume for a moment that un-American actually means something. What would that something be? I would think it would be anything that goes against the founding principles of America.

So, with that in mind, I'm thinking that those who would be willing to sell out our essential freedoms and liberties to get themselves that needle fix of security would be the ones who are un-American.
Of course, like I said, I'm just playing along with the right-wing here, I don't really care about American and un-American. I just think that if you're going to play the game, you should at least play it right.

O'Reichly, Bush, and the GOP Usher in a Golden Age of Hypocrisy

2005-11-12T08:04:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the rise of the Republican juggernaut to its full hideous strength earlier in 2005, hypocrisy has seen one of its biggest years in the spotlight since Tricky Dick accused communists of being traitors to America. And Americans have actually noticed this, too, leaving Bush grasping at the sort of mid-thirty percent approval ratings Tricky Dick himself might've grabbed for to keep away from the Roaring Twenties (which, by the way, the new, trickier Dick is down below that).

Briefly, I'd like to talk about Bush's statements made yesterday about the War in Iraq, which were, to be sure, hypocrisy of such an unfathomable level that the word "hypocrisy" seems hardly fit to describe it, giving me want to invent a new word, knowing that I lack the linguistic skills to do so. Then, I'd like to spend some time on Bill O'Reilly's statements made last night in response to San Franciscans voting against some O'Reilly-favored measures, which were hypocrisy of such an exceedingly unfathomable level that if I had invented that new word for "hypocrisy," it would hardly be fit to describe this level of hypocrisy.

During his annual Veteran's Day speech, in which it is customary that the President honor United States veterans, Bush decided this would be an appropriate time to attack critics of his war. Viciously, he did so. Here's a choice quote:

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.

Now, what I noticed the first time I read that quote, and what I later found Senate Democrats characteristically failed to point out, is that "rewriting history" is exactly what Bush and his administration did in the actual run-up to the war! It's a documented fact! See for yourself.

Here's the truth:

The report, the 15th released by the commission staff, concluded, 'We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States.'

And here's the George Bush revised version of the truth:

Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. And an al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.

I suppose I'll digress here. Of course, there are other examples, largest of which is the rewriting of the piece of history that said that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (by the way, I'd like to take a tick here give mad props to the Rotten Library - subsidiary of the famous Rotten.com; it is, surprisingly, an extremely helpful source of information, and I recommend you check out the section on Iraq WMDs for more on Bush's rewriting of history).

Intermission before we move onto the real shocker, Bill O'Reilly...

Okay, here's the story.
Yesterday, Bill O'Reilly was pissed. San Franciscans had not only voted for a ban on gun ownership, they had voted against allowing military recruiters on public school campuses. O'Reilly fumed at the treasonous voting habits of the Castro-loving San Franciscans:

Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead.

Suggesting that because San Franciscans voted against something O'Reilly wanted, San Francisco should secede from the United States? The typical O'Reilly bullshit. Utterly banal. Familiar territory. Not the kind of thing that would prepare a casual listener for the following journey into the surreal:

And if al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco.

Bill O'Reilly is soft on terrorism? Now that's kinda weird, but we expect Bill to change his principles every now and then to whatever best panders to the right wing. O'Reilly's downward spiral to partisan madness climaxes:

You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

Wow. Wow. I think this might top the shocking revelation made a couple of months ago that Bill Bennett is a racist prick.

Now, as you may know, Bill O'Reilly has something of a history of labeling leftists as "un-American" or "traitorous." As an example, take Arianna Huffington. Here's what he had to say about her book Fanatics and Fools and her comrades on the left:

You can understand how people like me and maybe a lot of people watching think you are a loony lefty when your book, 'Fanatics & Fools,' which I like the title, but I hope you are not in that group, is endorsed by the following: Molly Ivins; Bill Maher, Bill Moyers; and Larry David. Why don't you get Che Guevara on that, oh, he's dead. How about Fidel Castro? Come on, they are the far left fringe. That's who you're hanging with, Arianna.

I leave you now with a question to ponder. Which is more un-American:

Writing a book endorsed by Molly Ivins and Bill Moyers, or
Inviting a radical anti-American terrorist group to destroy a major American city?

The Cheney Cash-In Crasstravaganza!

2005-09-03T19:25:00.000-05:00

Already, it's underway!

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.

KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees.

Read it here!

The Red Death

2005-09-02T19:24:00.000-05:00

President Prospero has failed us, once again.

His cohorts in this calamitous display of callousness are the bourgeioisie who comprise the bloated, overfed plutocracy that is our United States government. They stood by and all but welcomed Lady Katrina to do her worst to the city of New Orleans.
Bush even learned to play the gee-tar! He summoned to his presence his hale and lighthearted friends, and strummed a song of apathy the whole country could hear.

But sadly, it's not quite that simple. This isn't just a Republican screw-up. It's the whole goddamned system that's at fault.

We focus too much on expanding our empire, so we have no national guard.

We focus too much on the rich, so impoverished New Orleans didn't get the help it needed.

We focus too much on meaningless issues like banning flag-burning and preventing video game violence, so we don't have time to focus on preventing real-life violence.

What we are witnessing is twofold. One part, the wrath of Mother Nature, which we can all agree on.

The other part is the byproduct of a system where the officials are participants in a cutthroat competition for power, one that consumes all the time they should be spending on ensuring the safety and wellbeing of their subjects. A system where the politicians don't care about the people and the people themselves are so numb to this fact that they no longer care who they have representing them.
Oh, and don't be surprised if some of our wonderful corporations decide to do a little price gouging in the weeks and months to come. Afterall, this sure would be a nice excuse to raise gas prices a bit. Our system is almost absolutely capitalist, and we not only allow our aristocrats who control the natural resources to predatorily take advantage of citizens in their time of need, we encourage it!

I'd like to say I think that reform within this existing system would solve the problem, but I just don't know.
I suppose we'll never know if we don't try.

A Modest Proposal: Scientific Matrixism

2005-08-21T00:17:00.000-05:00

By now we're all well acquainted with American fundamentalist Christianity, and its impact on public schools. Countless evangelist preachers have been pushing for a theory known as "intelligent design" - a science-ish sounding euphemism for "The Bible" - to be taught alongside evolution, subtly implying to impressionable young minds that the two theories share an equal scientific basis, which they most certainly do not.

The "intelligent design" argument goes like this:
The world is far too complex to have formed spontaneously from nothing. It had to have a guiding hand, a "divine creator," if you will. Of course, it's not hard to figure out what deity "divine creator" alludes to, and therein lies the purpose of "intelligent design:" forcing The Bible into heretofore secular institutions of learning. But most of them insist that they don't mind evolution being taught, they just want I.D. taught as well, so that children can see "both sides" of the issue, so they can make an informed decision. This is the way Bush phrased the argument for intelligent design, and his view echoes that of millions (this just wouldn't be a normal post if I didn't include a cheapshot on the president, would it?). Forget that evolution is backed by overwhelming evidence, continuous study and experimentation of the bulk of the past two centuries, plain common sense, and the endorsement of the vast majority of the scientific community ("the people who know what they're talking about"). And intelligent design's factual basis?

One piece of literature.

And let me just say that, while most alleged liberals don't agree that intelligent design should be taught in school, I most certainly do. I am completely in favor of giving kids all sides of the issues. I use the word "all" because what intelligent design proponents have selfishly failed to consider is that there may be more than two sides to such a complex issue. If we're going teach the theory evolution, then make time for another theory, then why can't we make time for a third theory on top of that? That seems fair to me.
And I know exactly what that third theory should be:

The Matrix Theory. I am pleased to be the first of many to be enlightened to the truths contained therein.

The Matrix Theory is quite simple: the world, as we know it, is merely a grand illusion orchestrated by a master race of super-intelligent machines who harvest humans as a source of energy, and use a computer program called The Matrix to create a simulated reality to keep the human race docile and complacent; hence, all that we percieve and have accepted as true is nothing more than a hollow lie.
The factual basis for The Matrix Theory?

One piece of literature (and all derivative works). My theory has the exact same evidence as the theory of intelligent design - and on top of that, it's far more interesting and it's got the box office numbers to prove it! Kids will love to learn about the trials and tribulations of Neo - of His Sermons, perhaps some of them spoken on a Mount - and His bravery in sacrificing Himself for the greater good. Not to mention all the cool CG effects and bitchin' fight scenes.

If intelligent design is going to be taught as if it were equal to evolution, then there's absolutely no reason that Scientific Matrixism shouldn't be taught as well (like how I changed the title of my theory midstream? I've got all the bases covered).
So, Mr. Bush, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and all the other great crusaders of intelligent design - don't have a double-standard. If you're going to push so hard for I.D., push equally for Scientific Matrixism as well.
Because the world is far too complex to have formed spontaneously from nothing. It had to have been created... By MACHINES!!!

Cindy the Dove

2005-08-13T14:17:00.000-05:00

I'd like to send some kudos out to Cindy Sheehan, the mother of deceased Iraq soldier Casey Sheehan who I'm sure you've all heard is staging a protest outside of Bush's ivory Texas tower to demand that he speak to her and explain WHY her son died, for her dedication and commitment to the pro-peace message; she understands the importance of this better than anyone else, I guarantee.
The media has been quite excited about the event, giving interviews with Cindy and her cohorts, reporting on the happenings, and, in the case of the O'Reillys and Hannitys, trying to find a suitable angle for discrediting her. Some of you may be wondering why the media has reported so well while other war protests, such as the millions of peace-lovers worldwide who marched in February of 2003, in a desperate attempt to stop the war, were given somewhat fleeting coverage. While it's true that the magnitude of this was arguably the single largest mass protest in history (Link), the magnitude of its coverage in the American press was somewhere between a woman giving birth to septuplets and an attractive young white girl being kidnapped.

It's actually very simple: Cindy lends a friendly, down-to-earth, reasonable face to the peace movement. She's very easy to identify with: there are millions of parents out there, and I'd be willing to bet that not many of them want their children being murdered in a foreign country while the man who sent him enjoys multiple month-long vacations on his Crawford ranch. Bush is a political Mr. Magoo when you get right down to it. He's obviously clueless and mentally shortsighted; he just mindlessly meanders from one place to the next, leaving a path of disaster in his wake but always emerging unscathed.

Excuse me. Back to the point: Cindy isn't a "radical leftist" like Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy; she's merely a concerned parent, and that's something extremely easy to relate to, even if you don't agree with her. Well, in truth she might be a radical, but that's unimportant in this context. Speaking superficially (which is all the American media ever does), she doesn't seem radical, and that's what counts. Even the Bush people realize this, and as a result have had to handle her a little more delicately than they would the average anti-war protester. While it normally would be acceptable for the Bush administration to nonchalantly dismiss war opponents as nutty liberals, George has actually said publically that he "sympathizes" with Mrs. Sheehan, though he disagrees with her.
Even Bill O'Reilly has softened, if ever so slightly. Normally he would accuse protesters who have gotten this much press coverage of being communists who hold an irrational hatred of their country and the very freedom it allows them to exercise. But O'Reilly has stuck to his promise to treat her with respect and dignity, merely accusing her of being a delirious puppet of communists who hold an irrational hatred of their country and the very freedom it allows them to exercise.
As sad as it is, this is a major step in the right direction for Bill O'Reilly.

I hope Cindy never gets to speak with George Bush. It will only serve to emphasize that he has so negligible a case for Iraq that he can't even justify it to a grieving middle-aged suburban mother.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

2005-07-20T18:20:00.000-05:00

If my oft-random whims permit, I'll do a dissection of Bush's Supreme Court nominee at some point.

But right now I'd just like to mention quickly that his timing is suspiciously good for Karl Rove, who, as you may remember is currently under investigation for being involved in a crime, and a treasonous one at that. A major announcement like this one is sure to distract the country from the fact that the White House is harboring a criminal. The plan seems to be to draw the press (which, I have to admit that the press has thus far done a very good job taking it to Scott McClellan thus far; here's hoping they keep at him) away from Rove and onto Bush's new controversial lightning rod, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

The thing that infuriates me most about this method is, if I've learned anything from 2000-2004, it'll work like a charm. Scandal after scandal after scandal, from Bush's spending almost half of his first 8 months in office on vacation, to the Bush White House's intimate involvement with Enron, to the non-existent weapons of mass destruction that will kill all of us, to the CIA report describing the best-case scenario for Iraq as "tenuous stability," and the worst case as, "civil war," to the Downing Street Memo, and now Karl Rove violating the law, Bush has learned from his mentors the way to run a true Teflon presidency; his diversionary tactics, I must concede, are impressive in their dastardly effectiveness.

The Plame Game

2005-07-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Before I begin this week's thrill ride through the vastly corrupted American political scene, I'd just like to point out that CNN sucks. Yes, I know, they're part of the mainstream American media which itself is a massive amalgamation of soulless, corporate-owned suckitude, but CNN I've always thought of as a "lesser evil" (which seems to be all there is in politics anymore); it turns out, it sort of is, but not quite to the extent I had originally considered it.

I've been frequenting CNN.com for a while now, partially to supplement my regular news source, the superior BBC News, with the propagandist American news-outlet spin on the stories of the day, and partially as an ongoing experiment comparing the tone of a respectable news source and a pitiful "infotainment" one. The findings of this experiment thus far are summarized in today's MS Paint masterpiece. My gift to you: "The Subtle Difference Between CNN and Legitimate News," or, "A Blatant Ripoff of Every Political Cartoon in Existence."

Now onto this week's top story: CIA agent Valerie Plame. Was her identity leaked to the press by senior Bush strategist Karl Rove? That seems to be where the signs are pointing. The rumors began to drizzle lightly two years ago, when the Plame's name first hit the press and was further bolstered by Robert Novak. Rove was reportedly asked several times about the matter, and he had this to say:

I didn't know her name and didn't leak her name. This is at the Justice Department. I'm confident that the U.S. Attorney, the prosecutor who's involved in looking at this is going to do a very thorough job of doing a very substantial and conclusive investigation.

Scott McClellan, in 2003, denied Karl Rove's involvement in the leak in that ambiguous "not really honest but not quite a lie either" way that the Bush White House has become notorious for.

Q On the Robert Novak-Joseph Wilson situation, Novak reported earlier this year -- quoting -- "anonymous government sources" telling him that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Now, this is apparently a federal offense, to burn the cover a CIA operative. Wilson now believes that the person who did this was Karl Rove. He's quoted from a speech last month as saying, "At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Did Karl Rove tell that --

MR. McCLELLAN: I haven't heard that. That's just totally ridiculous. But we've already addressed this issue. If I could find out who anonymous people were, I would. I just said, it's totally ridiculous.

Q But did Karl Rove do it?

MR. McCLELLAN: I said, it's totally ridiculous.

Also that year, Scott said that, if anyone within the administration had leaked Plame's identity, that person would be fired!

Q Scott, the President just expressed his desire to get to the bottom of this CIA leak issue. And he said he wanted to hold accountable whoever was responsible --

MR. McCLELLAN: Absolutely.

Q -- responsible for this. But can you confirm that the President would fire anyone on his staff found to have leaked classified information?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think I made that very clear last week. The topic came up, and I said that if anyone in this administration was responsible for the leaking of classified information, they would no longer work in this administration [emphasis mine]. This is a very serious matter. The President made it very clear just a short time ago in the East Room, and he has always said that leaking of classified information is a serious matter. And that's why he wants to get to the bottom of this. And the sooner we get to the bottom of it, the better.

Two New York Times reporters, Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller, were held in contempt of court for refusing to disclose their sources on the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent. Cooper was able to evade a prison sentence, but Miller was sentenced and is still in prison for refusing to name her sources. With this, the rumors began to pour down in torrents.

Newsweek ran a report on the story that was rather vague; it said that two lawyers had identified Rove as Cooper's source, but that Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said that Karl was merely interviewed for the article and declined to say whether or not he was a source.

McClellan held a press conference early this week that turned vicious when the subject of Karl Rove's involvement in the Plame case was brought to question. He refused to comment, saying that the White House had decided not to discuss the matter while it was under investigation. He also refused to comment on why he discussed the matter earlier, while it was under investigation, yet refused to in this particular instance.

It appears that we will be experiencing a drought of denials in the coming weeks, as Robert Luskin has confirmed to Newsweek that Karl Rove was Cooper's secret source.

And so ends all debate on this topic. I'm sure we'll be seeing all the hardcore conservatives conceding that Rove was guilty. I also expect to see old Karl put on trial, found guilty, removed from his position, and imprisoned for violating the law. I also expect a thorough investigation to determine if President Bush gave him the authorization to do such a thing or had any knowledge of the leak; and, if found guilty, I expect that Bush will be impeached. I surely don't expect any of the conservative punditoids like my fellow bloggers over at RedState.org to try to defend Rove with an onslaught of strawman arguments that are desinged for the sole purpose of dodging the issue that knowingly disclosing the identities of undercover CIA agents is illegal, period.

(edit: 10:03 AM: touched up picture a bit)

Jingoistic Slogans, Now in Convenient Skyscraper Form

2005-06-29T19:35:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the WTC is going to be replaced by...

THE FREEDOM TOWER!

What better way to unnecessarily deify our great nation than with a really large building? That George Pataki is a hero! There's no more patriotic way of supporting our country than spending taxpayer money on a massive, meaningless monument that is, by its very design, an enormous pile of propaganda.

Standing at 1,776 feet (to symbolize the year that marked the end of England's tea-taxing rampage and the beginning of our own military-taxing rampage), propaganda analyists agree that this may literally be the biggest piece of bullshit in the history of American nationalism.

This building really does piss me off. Not because I don't want a memorial to 9/11. I'd have no problem with a modest memento of some sort. Not because I don't want the WTC rebuilt either. But because this is a memorial that has been perverted into a sickening union of genuine tragedy and frothing patriotism, just to get Pataki a few "political points" (if I may use a term that is most commonly used by people who are, themselves, seeking political points).

I don't like this idea at all, I think it screams "chauvinism," I think it would be much better with a less flamboyant design.

Genuine Draft

2005-06-08T00:05:00.000-05:00

This is something I penned during the election. It has an obsolete pro-Kerry thing at the end, but for the most part it's still pretty appropriate:

"No, we're not going -- we don't need the draft." - George W. Bush, August 10, 2004
"I don't foresee a situation in which we'd want to go back to the draft." - Dick Cheney, September 17, 2004
"It's absolutely false that anyone in this administration is considering reinstituting the draft." - Donald Rumsfeld, September 23, 2004

Well, that all sounds reassuring, but one thing we've learned about the Bush administration over these past 4 years is that they have a tendency to say things that... well, to put it very lightly, are somewhat misleading. Anytime it's in the Bush camp's best interest, you can count on hearing a unique blend of outright whoppers and skillfully crafted half-truths (a highly damnable lie-substitute) - very similar to the above statements [emphasis mine unless otherwise noted]:

· "We know that [Saddam Hussein] is a man who has chemical weapons... " - George W. Bush, November 2, 2002

· The truth? "Journalists have visited the alleged chemical weapons site in Kurdish-held northern Iraq... But they saw no obvious evidence of chemical weapons production." - BBC News, "Journalists visit 'chemical weapons site'" - February 12, 2003

· "We know for a fact there are weapons there." - Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, January 9, 2003

· The truth? "Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes." - CNN, "Report: No WMD Stockpiles in Iraq" - October 7, 2004

· We found the weapons of mass destruction" - George W. Bush, May 29, 2003 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/interview5.html)

· The truth? "U.S. President George W. Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction..." - Smartmoney.com, "Bush Admits No Iraq WMDs" (apparently, the Bush people know a thing or two that the rest of us don't about finding things that don't exist)

· "We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner." - George W. Bush, February 8, 2003

· The truth? "The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no 'collaborative relationship' between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq." - Washington Post, "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" - June 17, 2004

· "[M]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended." - George W. Bush, May 1, 2003, standing afront a sign reading, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED."

· The truth? "Since Mr. Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1, 115 U.S. soldiers have been killed by hostile fire — more than died in combat before the speech." - CBS News, "'Mission Accomplished' Whodunit" - October 29, 2003

· "By far, the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum." - George W. Bush, [Date unknown]

· The truth? Faireconomy.org writes in the article, "Shifty Tax Cuts: How They Move the Tax Burden off the Rich and onto Everyone Else" (http://www.faireconomy.org/Taxes/HTMLReports/Shifty_Tax_Cuts.html), that the Bush administration enacted federal tax cuts that delivered about $197 billion to the wealthiest 1% of Americans for the fiscal years of 2002-2004. British periodical The Independent writes in their article, "Bush by the Numbers" that, when fully phased in, Bush's tax cuts will go 39% to the upper 1% of Americans. So unless the "bottom end of the spectrum" is the lower 99% of Americans (rendering the phrase meaningless, for all practical purposes), this is a bald-faced lie.

· "We do not anticipate requesting supplemental funding during '04." - George W. Bush, February 2, 2004

·The truth? Bush says it all: "I am requesting that Congress establish a $25 billion contingency reserve fund for the coming fiscal year to meet all commitments to our troops and to make sure we succeed in these critical fronts in the war on terror." - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040505-8.html, "Statement by the President"

Are they telling the truth this time? Or are we just hearing more lies?

Our lives aren't worth the risk. Vote John Kerry.

"Did Felt serve his country or betray it in the Watergate scandal?"

2005-06-03T16:56:00.000-05:00

The title of a video over a CNN.com that there's no reason to link because you'd probably have to pay to watch it anyway.

I think I've got a better question:

Does the media actually have us second-guessing the biggest political scandal in America in the past century? Are we supposed to think it "wasn't all that bad" now?

The question is almost as absurd as asking whether Nixon served his country or betrayed it in the Watergate Scandal. The answer, obviously, is that yes, W. Mark Felt, aka. "Deepthroat," did the right thing in telling someone what was going on in the White House. Otherwise, that crook Nixon might've stayed put for the duration of his term. Who knows what horrible things that Checkers-loving bastard might've done if he'd had four years to do it?
I also don't think Gerald Ford got enough flak for pardoning him. He probably would've gotten a lax sentence anyway; he should've served his time like any of his "fellow Americans" would have if they'd done something wrong.

If the media has any semblence of a soul today that hasn't yet been purchased by Time Warner, Disney, the News Corporation, Viacom, or General Electric, it could very easily do the same thing it did with Nixon, to President Bush.
They've got a plethora of scandals that have been all-but-completely-proven to choose from, so they can even pick their favorite. Or, if they want to bag some extra ratings, they can present all of the scandals and let the public pick their favorite! How's that for "We Report, You Decide?"

The Contrary

2005-06-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

I saw this over at one of my favorite websites, Something Awful, and found it unnervingly applicable to what I was saying earlier:

Go to any Livejournal and you'll find some drooling, pasty-faced idiot bitching about how close minded Christians are and how they are dumb and he is smart and blah blah blah Christians suck. Well here's a shocker for you Chancy: fundamentalists in EVERY religion stink. There is no monopoly on ignorance held by fundie Christians, it's equally spread over every country, every language, every set of beliefs. The only difference is that Christians do it in your own backyard, therefore making it some unspeakable crime against your big fat open mind.

Link. I think they have psychic powers over there.

Here's Some Rambling

2005-06-01T02:37:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to think about God.

Part of me thinks that believing in God is more of an excuse than anything. We all know that humans like to think they're more important than they really are (see: sun & all planets revolve around us). God belief answers this desire in many ways. The idea that we were created by an omniscient force that values us higher than any of his other creations is quite self-aggrandizing.

As far as where we came from, where the planet and where the universe came from, it's much less embarrasing for one to say, "It's God," than it is for one to say, "I don't know;" it's also much easier to say, "It's God," than it is to actually figure it out. I keep reminding myself that God isn't necessarily represented by people and maybe these sorts of things don't reflect on him. It's hard to say whether or not that's true though.

Maybe God does exist. Maybe the Bible is true. I don't know.
Or maybe there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, but not one the way we think of it. Maybe that which created us isn't the "father figure" we present it as - something that loves us, cares about us, wants us to do well, wants to keep us from doing bad things. Maybe we're just dolls in someone else's playset; ants in someone else's farm. He doesn't really care about us; he just sort of made us.

Or maybe none of that's right. The only thing I can really know for sure is that I can never know for sure.

It's been said that actions speak louder than words.

When the religious people look back at history, they'll see all sorts of times they've been wrong because they put too much faith in something they can't see. All the way from the Romans and their gods of thunder and water, to the Catholics and their flat-earth fallacies. I'm not saying that they're always wrong, but religious people should be wary of what they assert, wary of going against science and logic unless they're absolutely sure what they say is true.

Yet their silence is deafening.

And now my rambling is over and I'm right back where I started, only more pretentious. Yay for me.

Correction:

2005-05-21T16:17:00.000-05:00

Looks like Newsweek doesn't have egg on its face afterall:

One document released indicates that a soldier at an internment facility in Iraq "wrongfully display[ed] the symbolic of the 'Star of David,'" threatened a detainee, and was "very disrespectful in gestures, which in turn insulted the Arabs that were present at the time." This latest document supports detainees' accounts that American soldiers routinely used religious symbols to degrade and humiliate them. In a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Human Rights First against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one Iraqi detainee charged that soldiers taunted him by having a military dog pick up the Koran in its mouth. Another Iraqi detainee claimed that soldiers threw the Koran on the floor and stepped on it. In addition, in a set of documents released by the FBI in response to the ACLU's FOIA in December, a Guantánamo detainee alleged that a guard told him he beat him because the guard was a Christian and the detainee was a Muslim.

More on that story from our hardline liberal comrades at the ACLU. If Newsweek wasn't exactly dead-on in their particular account, at the very least they were on the right track.

Double Your Standards, Double Your Fun

2005-05-16T23:20:00.000-05:00

[Editor's note: my sincerest apologies for the title of this post]

The Newsweek thing. Newsweek claimed that the Koran was being desecrated by American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay, then later retracted the statement. This was a serious mistake.

And ohhh, how the right has loved this story. The lukewarm influence of this shitty weekly magazine has suddenly become an overwhelmingly powerful cog in the conservative distortion machine. Not only have the pundits latched onto this as evidence of the Great American Liberal Bias in the media (not to be confused with the Great American Conservative Bias in the American government); just take a look at what Scott McClellan, apparently showcasing his skills in pure, unfettered irony, had to say about the story:

[the story was] based on a single anonymous source who could not personally substantiate the allegation that was made.

Huh. A single anonymous source who could not personally substantiate the allegation that was made.

The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives.

Oh my God McClellan. Something tells me that Newsweek hasn't been the quite harbinger of doom that the White House has. It might not be in Mr. McClellan's best interest to be the to call Newsweek's kettle black.

The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.

Trying to damage America's reputation abroad at this point would like trying to burn a heap of ashes.

I quote Britain's International Institute for Strategic Studies' survival summaries: "America is divided at home and bitterly resented abroad." This was Winter 2004.

Unprecedented?

2005-04-29T13:12:00.000-05:00

If he were alive today, I'm sure Mr. Abe Fortas would have a few words to share with us about unprecedented judicial filibusters.

When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced his retirement in June 1968, Johnson nominated Fortas to replace Warren as Chief Justice. However, Fortas' confirmation by the United States Senate was in trouble. He had accepted $15,000 for speaking engagements at the American University law school. While not illegal, it raised much criticism about the court's insulation from private interests. When the nomination set off an unprecedented Republican filibuster, Fortas withdrew his name from consideration [emphasis mine].

Will this "unprecedented" doozy crafted by Frist and the fundamentalist right spin its way into the hearts and minds of the American public? It certainly doesn't look that way.

Fight [Rhetorical] Fire with [Rhetorical] Fire

2005-04-29T12:24:00.000-05:00

First of all, what my opponent wants you to forget is that he voted to authorize the use of force and now says it's the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place.

I don't see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. What message does that send our troops? What message does that send to our allies? What message does that send the Iraqis?

-- George W. Bush, 2004 Presidential Debate

There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.

-- John R. Bolton, Citizens for Global Solutions, 1994

How can you represent the USA in the United Nations if you say wrong organization, wrong time, wrong place? What George Bush wants you to forget is that this is a man who said that the United States is the only force that can lead the international community. And now he wants to represent my country as ambassador to the very bureaucracy that he wants dissolved?

So, let me get this straight: it's okay to lead a governing body that you're very critical of, unless that governing body is the United States. Carlin's American Double-Standard rings from every shore even today.

"And you're ugly, too."

2005-04-16T14:24:00.000-05:00

This is kinda stupid, but chuckle-worthy:

Bush Gets Low Marks for Sex Appeal

DeLaying Social Progress

2005-04-08T16:52:00.000-05:00

No doubt most of you are familiar with Tom DeLay, the current Speaker of the House. More than any other current Republican leader outside the White House, he is beginning to embody more and more the qualities that led to the rise, unruly corruption, and subsequent fall of such icons of indecency as Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and, more recently, Newt Gingrich.

Like his predecessors, he has elevated undetected political dishonesty and shocking misuse of power to a science, undertaking such blatant abuses of authority as giving his wife and daughter more than $500,000 via his PACs. Or the time he cleverly evaded a Texas law forbidding corporate contributions to political campaigns by having a Texas political action committe accept corporate contributions and funnel them directly to him. Or the time he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee for attempting to bribe a fellow House member. Or the other time that year he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee for soliciting donations from a company called Westar Energy just before the Energy Bill, with which Westar had a few disagreements, was to be presented before the House. Or the third time he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee for using the Federal Aviation Administration to track down a private plane he thought was carrying Democratic legislators, also in the same year (postscript: 2 of these admonishments occurred within 6 days of one another).

And so on, and so on, and so on.

In addition to the venality that's sure to have left McCarthy grinning in his grave, DeLay seems to have written up his Contract with America, saying that the judiciary has "run amok," and calling on Republican-controlled Congress to regulate the judicial system. According to DeLay:

The response of the legislative branch has mostly been to complain. There is another way, ladies and gentlemen, and that is to reassert our constitutional authority over the courts.

The way things work in America is, there are three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. There is a system in this country in which any of the branches may "check" on any other branch, in order to maintain the "balance" of power. This system is called "checks and balances." In essence, it keeps one branch of government, say, just to pull an example off the top of my head, the legislative, from becoming too big for its britches and trying to control both itself and another branch of government... The judicial, for instance.

Mr. DeLay apparently skipped alot during 6th grade government class, or else he would've learned that the legislative system can't just "branch out" and dictate another stem of our government whenever it does something Tom DeLay doesn't like (or claims not to like to please his radical right-wing constituents).

In a conference called "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," DeLay admonished the judiciary for a long list of abuses of authority (...) , such as upholding Roe v. Wade:

Legislatures for too long have in effect washed our hands on controversial issues from abortion to religious expression to racial prejudice, leaving them to judges who we then excoriate for legislating from the bench. This era of constitutional cowardice must end.

I'm just waiting for his Watergate.

It's interesting that the Republican Party controls the Senate, House, and Presidency yet are consistently able to present themselves as the David battling a tyrannical liberal Goliath.

I think the conference's organizer, Dr. Rick Scarborough, put it best:

Right now they are ruling as an oligarchy. They are the kings of the land.

Though, ironically, he was referring to the judicial branch.

EA Press Release: Mar. 29, 2005

2005-04-02T20:58:00.000-05:00

Dear Gaming Public,

Hi, how are you all doing? Enjoying Madden 2005? Oh, what's that, you say? You preferred NFL 2K5? Well, guess you won't have to worry about that next year. You see, we've got an exclusive license with the NFL. EA Games and the NFL are the big boys in town now. If Sega tries to make an NFL 2K6, they'll be sued for all they're worth... Twice!
How is this good for you, the gamer, you might be asking? Reduces the number of games to buy every football season! Choices are too confusing. We know how much gamers hate variety, and we also know how much we hate competition. Now we've pleased both parties.

No need to thank us.

You might think that we'd be content with the NFL contract and the mad phat bling bling we be rakin' thereof. Oh, sorry, forgot we're a video game company and not a hip-hop group there for a second. We do that from time to time, like when we called the second game in the NBA Street series "NBA Street Vol. 2." Or when we made a wrestling game featuring Def Jam rappers who, at the time, we thought were some of our "tightest niggaz." It turns out that we are a bunch of pasty white guys who had never actually met a black person until we had to motion capture them for our games.

Our sincerest apologies.

As I was saying, you might think that the egregiously large sums of money that we will be simultaneously making and of which we will be depriving other companies a share due to our NFL deal might satisfy our savage lust for cash.
You'd be wrong.

We're already hard at work on similar deals with the NBA, the NHL, MLB, NASCAR, PGA, and the Canadian Curling Association (you can never be too sure). But there's one license we're really excited about. We believe that, more than any other license we could obtain, this one will be the true coup d'etat of our competitors.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are finalizing a deal that will give Electronic Arts an exclusive license to create video games based in any way on the basic principle of "competition."

One might be wondering how we were able to ascertain an exclusive license on such a broad and vague concept. Well, let's just say it's really amazing what campaign contributions can do for a struggling business these days.

Included in this license is not only every single sport known to mankind, but also virtually all games of any kind, and any games based on war, such as Warcraft, Starcraft, and Age of Empires, all of which are now property of Electronic Arts.

All future games featuring our exclusive property will be subject to a royalty fee of 94% of the profit made from the game, plus the net worth of the company during its most profitable fiscal year, cubed.

Also included in this license is the work of philosophers who explored & advanced the concept of "competition." Expect to see a game based on Sun Tzu's The Art of War sometime next year.

Thanks for your time,
Larry Probst
CEO
Electronic Arts

EA Games: Challenge Everything, Provided You Can Foot the Unwieldy Royalty Fee for Doing So

Patch Abuse

2005-03-20T23:52:00.000-05:00

(Note: the first game-related post! Hallelujah!)

If I'm ever ruler of the world, I'm going to institute strict laws against "Patch Abuse." Patch Abuse is the tendency of lazy, worthless programmers (mostly those who work for EA) to release beta-quality, shovelware products to meet deadlines and secure revenue, and then gradually make the game playable via a series of obscenely large patches, hoping everyone will forget about those 3 months that the game was completely unplayable. That's not why patches exist. Patches exist to rectify minor bugs in programs that slip by beta-testers, not to pass the beta-testing process onto the buying public.

Patch abuse will be punishable by each member of the development team being shot in one (1) nut of my choosing.

I Suck at Art...

2005-03-20T16:25:00.000-05:00

flatearth_thumb
Originally uploaded by Swifty LeZar.

But you'll look at my drawings anyway.

This is something I churned out in MS Paint in about 5 minutes.
It was inspired by "A Message to the Flat Earth Society" by Kaddisfly, who, by the way, you can check out here.

Best Party Ever!

2005-03-18T22:54:00.000-05:00

The question of what political party to which I declare membership has arisen numerous times in the past. Since I was a member of the now-disbanded Young Democrat's Society at school, I thought it easier to just say I was a Democrat, but to be honest, I'm not a big fan of the Democrats. It gets complicated because I haven't registered to vote since I'm not old enough; but if I were to register today I'd register as an independent.

I don't like either of the two chief political parties; Republicans because they're evil and not ashamed to admit it, Democrats because they're somewhat less evil yet are afraid to admit it. I wish John Kerry had won the '04, I like him better than most Democrats, but still, we could do better.

The Greens are a great bunch, but let's face it, without Ralph Nader, they can't do much.

The Communists don't have a chance and never will thanks to years of demagogic demonization at the hands of American tory terror-mongers. Besides, they're too idealistic anyway.

I would join the Libertarian Party, but I thought it would be something of a contradiction to their philosophy. I mean, if the Libertarian Party can't stand on its own two feet without my support, it should just go shrivel up and die somewhere.

Then I began to think; why join a party with other members? If I'm the only member of the party, that means I get to set the party platform. I get to align it with what I believe perfectly. I am the Party.
But... There's still a problem there. It's much easier to join an existing party than to develop a new one. It's hard to develop a reputation for a party.
I needed to find a party with an existing reputation but no existing members.

So, to that end, I announce that I am the last survivng member of the United States Whig Party! A party with a rich legacy and a hundred-plus-year membership drought! The party platform is now - irrespective of what it was - pro-choice, anti-war, pro-gay marriage, anti-globalization, strictly secular, anti-Bush privatization frenzy, pro-maximum wage, anti-slavery, pro-Union!

Whig Party: Because Everybody Else Sucks

While I'm Thinking of It: My Stance on Abortion

2005-03-14T22:35:00.000-05:00

Since the monumental 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, abortion has been one of the chief controversies in America. It has divided America into two factions: pro-life and pro-choice.
At the time, most Americans supported the Court's decision. Now, after an entire generation being raised under the vociferous propaganda of the pro-life movement, the tide has turned (edit: the majority still holds Roe v. Wade to be the right decision, but only a slight majority - [1]) and the right to choose an abortion is being threatened like never before. Evidence of this is in Bush's passage of the "partial-birth abortion" ban. Like so many other conservative initiatives, the ban oversimplifies the issue. For one thing, there is no such thing as a "partial-birth abortion." They made it up.
The actual procedure is called "intact dilation and extraction" (D&X). It is used in less than one half of one percent of all abortions. However, the bill is deliberately worded vaguely so that it may apply to many different kinds of abortions.

First of all, a practical reason not to outlaw abortion that both groups can agree on: in the 1950s, the days of the famous "coathanger in the back of a hotel room" procedure, abortions were about as common as they are now. This proves that outlawing abortion will not reduce the number of abortions; it will just make them harder to get.

However, many would be surprised to know that there isn't much difference between "pro-life" and "pro-choice." More surprising may be that "pro-life" doesn't actually exist.
To this day, nobody has been able satisfactorily to justify to me how anyone can call himself "pro-life" when he supports the death penalty and war - the two most anti-life institutions in this or any other society.

That having been said, the only true difference between "pro-life" and pro-choice is where the choice falls. Pro-choicers believe the choice should fall with the woman. To any objective observer, this is the most logical approach. The pregnant woman is more intimately involved with her situation and ergo better qualified than any other person on Earth to decide whether or not she has an abortion.

Pro-lifers believe that the choice should fall in the hands of politicians. You may remember politicians as one of the most immoral, unprincipled, dishonest, shortsighted, benighted groups of people in the history of civilization. Some of them would take a baby out in the street and shoot it in the head if they thought they'd gain a few approval points by it.
Not only that, but politicians are not prepared in any way to make such a momentous decision for every single woman in America. Imagine the arrogance that must be required for a politician to be pro-life. To believe that he understands - better than the women who are pregnant - every single scenario under which a pregnancy can occur, and that he is prepared - once again, better than the mothers of the children - to make the best decision. When you consider that the vast majority of politicians are also men, this arrogance evolves into downright chauvenism.

The truth is, none of the politicians know better than the women intimiately involved with their individual situations. However they do generally realize that they don't know. Unfortunately, they also realize that they can get more votes if they pretend they do know.

First it was, "No abortions EVER! It's a SIN!"
Then they realized that this was far too simple to be practical. Next it was, "No abortions EVER unless the mother of the child's life is threatened."
Some on the pro-life camp amended it a third time. Then it was, "No abortions EVER unless the mother of the child's life is threatened, or she has been raped."
Some then changed it again; conventional pro-life wisdom now dictates: "No abortions EVER unless the mother of the child's life is threatened, or she has been raped, or she is a victim of incest."

Why don't we step back, admit that we just don't understand, and let the mother decide?

Jeff Gannon: Exposed in a Washington Minute

2005-02-26T23:37:00.000-05:00

If you haven't heard about the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert story, you're in for a treat. Or rather, I am, because it fascinates me and I love telling about it.

Any objective observer can see that the White House has or at least should have extremely high standards when it comes to distributing press passes. Among the criteria should be a background in journalism, experience in journalism, honesty in journalism, and integrity in journalism. The Bush administration has a different approach to this, I'm sure, with the latter two being substituted with the much more convenient "brash partisanship in journalism." While not exactly honest, there's nothing unusual about this, as this administration has done far, far worse things and the public is hardly going to be pulled away from the television long enough to raise any commotion about it.

Exposition aside, a man "named" Jeff Gannon has [had] a White House press pass. At a recent press conference, he asked a question that raised a few eyebrows among bloggers on the left. The question was:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And Senator Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work – you've said you are going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

I doubt even Fox News would be so overt as to ask a question like that. For one thing, as several have pointed out, Harry Reid never made any such comment about "soup lines." The alleged quote originally came from that paragon of journalistic integrity, Rush Limbaugh.

Bloggers, having taken the place of investigative journalists (who, while maintaining their title, have abandoned both "investigation" and "journalism"), decided it was time to look into this "Gannon" fellow.

What they found was the kind of story that would make for a New York Times Bestseller.

Now, a reporter asking softball questions at a press conference, as I said, is nothing at all surprising.
But they dug a little deeper and found that the organization that Gannon was working for, Talon News, claimed to be non-partisan yet was owned by GOPUSA.com.

Deeper still they dug and struck the most interesting find thus far: it turns out that this "Gannon" chap was no "Gannon" at all. "Jeff Gannon" was an alias. His real name is James Guckert. Guckert claims that he changed his name because "Gannon" is easier to spell and pronounce. I've seen some pretty tough names to pronounce, but there's really nothing to "Guckert." If his name was something like, say, Zeigler, I could understand why he might change it to something easier to pronounce, but Guckert? Come on.

Well, at this point, they had enough to prove beyond reasonable that Gannon was a complete fraud. In addition to what the bloggers discovered, USA Today reported that Gannon's request for a Congressional press pass had been rejected on the grounds that Talon was not a legitimate news organization. Not only that, but Gannon's resume claimed that he was a "graduate of the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism." Turns out, this was a two-day seminar for "conservatives who want a career in journalism." (source: Wikipedia Entry - Jeff Gannon)

Despite having found the goldmine of incompetence, bloggers much more ambitious than I exhumed the murkiest recesses of Gannon's professional life. They found that "Gannon" had registered a number of domain names for his former businesses, including "Hotmilitarystud.com," "Malecorps.com," and "Workingboys.net."

His former occupation? You guessed it: gay prostitute.

I'd like to speak of this event anachronistically for a moment. It is 1998, and Bill Clinton is right in the heat of Monicagate. Bearing in mind how aggressively the media pursued what should have been a private issue between Clinton, Lewinsky, and their families, how do you think they would've responded had it been discovered that the Clinton administration had been allowing a gay prostitue using a pseudonym into the White House? I'm thinking that by the time they were through with the story, Clinton would be homeless due to the White House being burned to the ground for purification.

Apparently trying to reach China, DailyKos burrowed a little bit deeper and found footage from February 28, 2003 of Gannon at a press conference with Ari Fleischer, before Gannon had ever written a single article, before he had "graduated" from his two-day seminar, before Talon News even existed (but not before he retired from the escort business, funnily enough).

In summary, a gay prostitute using a fake name and representing a fake news organization who gained access to the White House presumably by having political connections was exposed as a fraud by people with Internet connections. Also verified was the utter dishonesty and maladroitness of the Bush administration. And to think, America had just cleaned the Iraqi blood off its rose-colored glasses, too.

Most amazing to me about this story is that all of this information has surfaced in just one month. The shortest month of the year even. It truly speaks for the efficiency and dedication of the blogging community, myself excluded. In a New York minute, a man who was nothing became an icon of dishonesty, shamlesness, incompetence, and cynical manipulation of America's free press.

(edits made at 9:10 AM, Feb. 27)

Fun Facts About the War on Terrorism!

2005-02-16T22:59:00.000-05:00

Well, Operation: Iraqi Freedom has been going on for over a year now, and now that our main reason for going to war has been proven completely false, Bush apologists have latched onto their last hope: we got rid of Saddam Hussein, liberated the Iraqi people. To me, it just demonstrates our arrogance: we think our standard of living is so good that everyone else should want to live the same way. How do we know that every single one of these people wanted to be freed from Saddam Hussein? We don't; I'm sure the thousands upon thousands who are dead thanks to our unneeded actions were probably happier before democracy came storming into their land with a loaded gun.

We honestly believe we're morally superior to the Iraqi people to the point where we can tell them how to live. How arrogant can we be? Then, when we mistreat and degrade a few prisoners, some of us actually have the audacity to say, "Well, they did worse to our boys, so they deserve what they got." What? We're the ones who have taken the moral highground by coming into another country and telling its inhabitants how to live, thus we should be setting the positive example.

Anywho, the argument usually goes like this:
"The war in Iraq was justified because we got rid of Saddam Hussein. Even though that wasn't our reason for going to war and we were all lied to, it was still justified. Think about it: he was a horrible dictator, he killed thousands - no - MILLIONS of people!"

But doesn't it strike you as kinda hypocritical of us to come down on one horrible dictator, considering the others we've supported throughout our illustrious history? Here are some examples you might have missed:

-- September 11, 1973: The United States aided General Augusto Pinochet in a revolt against Chile's democratically-elected President. It was successful. Augusto Pinochet was a horrible dictator who killed thousands. Also, look at that date: September 11. Look familiar?

-- Also in the 70s, and 80s I believe, we supported a little man from Cambodia named Pol Pot. Pol was extrememly fond of landmines; these could be found all over his country. But we supported him because we didn't like the Soviet Union, and he didn't either. You see, take it from America, two wrongs do make a right.

-- In the 80s, we secretly sold arms to Iran during an event called Iran-Contra, which was perpetrated by the Reagan Administration, but supposedly Reagan had no idea it was happening. Funnily enough, many of the people from the Reagan Administration are either current or past members of the Bush Administration, including, but not limited to: John Negroponte, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell.

-- In Iran in 1953, the CIA conducted a coup called "Operation Ajax," in which we overthrew the democratically-elected leader of Iran and replaced him with The Shah, a wonderful dictator who just hated civil liberties. He tortured people, violated their rights, and we stood by him all the way. This went on until 1979 when he was finally overthrown... But we knew just exactly what to do about that:

-- In the 80s, we supported an up-and-coming dictator named Saddam Hussein, in his war against the Iranian people. We provided him with weapons and intelligence. President Reagan even took the liberty of removing Iraq from the list of known terrorist countries, despite some flak from congress over the decision. We even knew that he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians, and the Kurds.

So you can see we've never had that much of a problem with genocidal dictators before.

But wait; there's more! We've also supported dictatorships in Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Bolivia, and many others! That's right, we've probably caused exponentially more terrorism than we've prevented. And hey, if you consider the fact that our actions against these countries probably inspired more than a few of the terrorists we're "at war with" now, we've caused even more than that!

On Ward Churchill

2005-02-10T15:52:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don't know who Ward Churchill is, he is a college professor/activist (read more about him here) who has written that the victims of 9/11 were not "innocent victims." I can agree with that to an extent.

The extent to which no one living in America would have been an innocent victim since we all pay taxes to a government which violates human rights on a regular basis (I'll get into some of this later). Many (not all, by any stretch of the imagination - making the attacks of 9/11 even more atrocious) of the people in the WTC worked for and held high positions in large corporations which independently violated human rights on top of all that. Now, I would never have the gall to say that these people "deserve" what they got - they most certainly did not; violence and murder only create more and more problems, and those who would perpetrate such violence as the attacks of September 11th deserve a swift punishment. But to say that these people - the ones who held high positions in large corporations that violated human rights abroad - were completely innocent victims of a crime born of nothing more complicated than pure evil would be, once again, ignoring the Gray Maxim.

I can understand how such views might enrage your average Bill O'Reilly if they were stated just a few days after the attacks. However, we should be far enough into the future now that we can form a cognitive retrospective of the attacks and the political context thereof. Maybe, just maybe, such an understanding can prevent future attacks.

No such luck here in uber-nationalistic America. America was the good guy, it was attacked by the bad guy. We were right, they were wrong, that's all there is to it. Same as Vietnam. Same as the Cold War entire. Black vs. White. So terribly simplistic. So terribly wrong.

Like anything else the right doesn't agree with, Churchill's statements have been met with accusations of treason and sedition for claiming that maybe America - in a rare moment of mild imperfection - might have done something that prompted the attacks of 9/11. Asking "Why do they hate us?" has always put a thorn in the nationalist's side - the response is usually either tragically uninformed ("they hate us because we're free") or hostile toward the questioner ("They hate America and you're just trying to cover for them. Why do you hate America?"). These are questions that need to be asked, however; if not for the sake of understanding why the enemy hates us and what we might possibly be able to do to prevent the existence of future enemies (besides blowing them all up), then merely to assuage the inquisitiveness of America's curious minds.

All of this, however, is not to say that Churchill's essay is not without a few holes; glancing over the essay, I see one sentence, for instance, makes the claim,

Nor were they "fanatics" devoted to "Islamic fundamentalism."

I take issue with this statement simply because, if my memory serves me correctly, one of Osama's demands was the destruction of Israel. If this was a cause that these people were willing to die for, then I would say they are most definitely fundamentalist fanatics.

That's just one example.
Overall, I have mixed feelings on the whole Churchill issue. It's important to understand the context of 9/11, but I think Ward oversteps the bounds between exposing the shades of gray and simply reversing the black and white in statements such as the above.

The Public Mind Is Safely Under Control

2005-02-07T16:51:00.000-05:00

Since the lessons in my English and history classes are always closely correlated - that is to say, in English we learn about the literature of a particular era, and in history we study the social and political climate of that era - as one can probably imagine, class discussions often take a turn to contemporary politics. One observation I've made in these discussion is that I can criticize the war in Iraq to my heart's content, and nobody seems to mind. Yet, if I criticize Bush directly, then people get offended.

As a budding young member of the American intelligentsia (*snicker*), my initial reaction to this finding was to wonder, "Why is that? Why is it that I can critique this president's central foreign policy initiative, the centerpiece of his entire administration - whether he wants to admit it or not - why is this an acceptable bone of contention, and yet the president himself is considered 'off-limits'?"

Then I began to think back to the election of 2004, and asking people around my school why they liked Bush. The answer, at least in retrospect, was almost always the same: he's pro-life and anti-gay marriage. Whenever I heard this, I was always compelled to mention that their opinion is at least half misinformed - Kerry doesn't support gay marriage either. Then I remembered that these people weren't old enough to vote anyway so I wasn't going to waste my breath and possibly get into a tedious debate about the evils of abortion and whatever other crazy fundamentalist garbage they might have been taught by their parents.
People, based on my observation (which admittedly is pretty small in scope), have done exactly what the Bush team want them to do: ignore the obvious disaster that was the Iraq war. Just pretend it never ever happened. Instead, focus on how evil abortion and fags are. In fact, I remember hearing one person say she liked Bush because he was pro-life, to which I responded, "You know, I'd be willing to bet that there are probably a few babies in Iraq" - the reseponse was "shut up." The person in question and I are friends, so it was a light-hearted "shut up" (I guess), but still, it just goes to show that propaganda really does work.

Bush has been such an effective propagandist that he has successfully absolved himself of any responsibility for the Iraq war. He's been able to pawn off the blame on his pawns - Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, etc etc. Luckily, there is pretty much a pawn for every disaster.

Imagine how differnet history would have been if Lyndon Johnson had had this same knack for manipulating the public mind. Of course, some of the variables have changed - the media, for instance, is much more timid than Johnson's media was, as now the vast majority of it is owned by about 5 different corporations. The public itself is probably also generally more susceptible to propaganda, less interested in politics, and more interested in religion and moral concerns.

O'Reilly and Coulter: Why Does Anyone Know Who They Are?

2005-02-07T08:45:00.000-05:00

MichaelMoore.com has posted two videos taken from the CBC, one reporting on Ann Coulter and one on Bill O'Reilly. The O'Reilly one is the most telling, but on the whole I like the Coulter one better because they caught her in the act of making shit up off the top of her head.

It really is amazing how these two achieved any level of fame at all... Well, okay, I can somewhat understand Ann Coulter, she is a pretty good writer, even if she doesn't at all use her gift in a productive way. Bill O'Reilly, however, has but one talent: yelling. Oh, and for some reason he's been pretty good at convincing people that he's a moderate. I guess that really is talent.

Observation: Brown v. Board of Education Overturned by Ignorant Majority

2005-02-06T22:20:00.000-05:00

I was in history class a few days ago, we were studying the civil rights movement. We were in the post-Civil War era, and examining in specific the landmark Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson (Wikipedia Entry: Plessy v. Ferguson), which concluded, in a nutshell, that the black man and the white man were "separate but equal."
Supposedly, this decision was effectively overturned almost 50 years later in a case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which ruled that racial segregation in public schools, while providing the "separate" part of the equation, was having a bit of trouble owning up to the "equal" part.

Fast forward to 2005...

History must love the sound of its own voice, because it has repeated itself once more.
We are faced with the same situation, only this time the segregation is based on sexuality instead of race, and the institution is marriage instead of public school.
Moderates such as John Kerry have provided a convenient solution to the gay marriage problem that protects the religious sanctity of marriage (which is a completely daft concept bred of disinformation from the Christian majority - but that's another story for another time) from homosexuality, while still providing homosexuals a chance at the same legal benefits as a "normal" couple: the civil union.
Now, this "civil union" idea is a peculiar beast because it echoes cacophoniously the seemingly-overturned decision to make separate schools for blacks and whites.
Sure enough, ask any apologist, and they'll tell you their justification for why civil unions should be considered in almost identical language to those who ruled in favor of "separation but equality" so many generations ago:
ChristianityToday.com reports that 20% of white evangelical Protestant agree to "... allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements with each other that would give them many of the same rights as married couples."

It's all playing out again. As we learned in the years between Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, "separate but equal" is something of an unrealistic goal... But apparently we're willing to go through all this again and learn the same damn lesson again, all in an effort to forestall homosexual equality for as long as possible.

A Day in the Life of a Liberal

2005-02-06T18:21:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning and the first thing that came to my mind was, "You know? It turns out I secretly HATE society! I hope everyone dies today!"

Then I went to check and see if the worst country in the entire world, America, was being threatened by any of my favorite terrorist organizations. Nothing so far. I'm thinking about sending some of my millions and millions of dollars that I claim not to have down to the Taliban.

Then I listened to 5 straight hours of NPR. I was pleased to discover that they were still as biased and liberal-America-hating as they were when I listened to them for 5 hours the day before.

Shortly thereafter, I sacrificed a virgin to Allah, because even though when it comes to issues like abortion and gay rights, I am a godless heathen, when it comes to issues like middle-eastern terrorism and the war in Iraq, I am a radical Islamic fundamentalist.

I went to a library in search of some radical left-wing material to read, but the library system had taken a cut in funding due to our governor's rampant love of prostitutes and expensive liquor which he buys with tax dollars, so I had to settle for Ann Coulter. I figured it would be good for a laugh. Well, I read one part of Slander and I put it down in disgust. It was her sentence, "Liberals can't just come out and say they want to take more of our money, kill babies, and discriminate on the basis of race," that put me over the edge. Outrageous! How did Ann get away with such blatant lies? I honestly couldn't believe anyone would make such a completely ludicrous and unfounded claim.

Well, just to prove her wrong, I cried out in the middle of the library:

"I want you all to know that Ann Coulter is a liar, and I intend to prove it. She says that liberals won't just come out and admit that they only want to take more of your money, kill babies, and discriminate on the basis of race. This is a completely outrageous thing to say. I am a liberal, and I openly admit that I want to take more of your money, kill your babies, and discriminate against you on the basis of race."

The rest of the library applauded my honesty and agreed with my sentiments, as they were all racist, money-grubbing, baby-killing liberals themselves.

Still fuming from Coulter's ridiculous claim that liberals won't admit to wanting to kill babies, but at the same time pleased with the library's response to my outburst, I went back to my car, a tiny compact car that runs on an alternative fuel source: aborted fetuses. I drove home, and, exhausted, fell right into bed, a grin on my face, happy to know that I had made the world a little bit worse.

Introduction

2005-02-06T12:43:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone, and welcome to The Gray Maxim! I won't get into the main content of the blog in this post, as I want it to be purely introductory.

First of all, this blog will probably be very political. I consider myself a liberal; a hardcore liberal if all you, the reader, have heard of liberalism is what's on American television. In the context of the world as a whole, I would probably be considered a moderate liberal. One of my strongest pet-peeves, as I hope to show in this blog, is the Bush administration. I consider them to be among the worst, most hypocritical, most corrupt administrations in American history.

So this blog will probably have some issues of the day viewed through the eyes of a "leftist;" if that offends you then either leave or post a comment. Then leave.

I have named this blog for what I believe is one of the most important principles in politics: the tried-and-true theory that if one looks deeply enough into virtually anything, he will find that it is neither absolutely good nor absolutely evil.
Americans like their politics presented strictly in black and white. One needs look no further than the War on Terror for an example of this. We have presented our terrorist opponents as a Lex Luthor-esque demonic plague ("Axis of Evil" -- "Legion of Doom" connection, anyone?) which America, the valiant heroes of freedom and democracy, are determined to vanquish.

If we would step away of this pathetic black and white Arcadia in which we live and examine things outside the blinders of "patriotism..." If only we would take The Gray Maxim to heart - we might find that our enemies have principles, just as we do. They are not absolutely evil, and we are not absolutely good. Perhaps this understanding can help us to understand our enemies, and we can use it to help us prevent such atrocities as 9/11 in the future.
As John Powers put it, "They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us."

However, this blog will not be entirely political. I'm hoping to do some music reviews, and video & computer game reviews, perhaps even a few movie reviews. I haven't quite decided yet.