Never Assume

Here in Kalamazoo, back in January, my friends were divided between Kucinich, Edwards, and Obama-- not a single Clinton supporter, though none of them had anything "against" Clinton. She was simply second or third choice, all of us preferring other candidates for reasons that had nothing to do with gender or "hating Hillary".

Back then, I felt a little sorry for her. I had questions about her electability-- she was going into this with at least a third of the country despising her, not just distrusting her, and I thought the Hillary-haters, however misguided, were too big an obstacle. It was clear that the Republicans were slavering for a chance to run against Hillary.

Her parsing of words, dismissal of the obvious, and squirming around the rules have only made things worse. Now I'm a Hillary hater, too. This kind of self-destruction by a candidate is more complex than simple irony. I don't even know what to call it.

The Clintons and Leiberman

Friends are puzzled that Bill Clinton would stump for Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut. The Clintons-- althought I prefer them to the current regime-- have always been DNRs, or Damn Near Republicans. Bill's charm and the repulsiveness of the competition blinds a lot of people to that fact.
I personally like the guy, but politically both Clintons ought to have their asses kicked from here to Harry Truman for their compromises-- excerpt that the American fascists on the right are so much worse. i just hate to see Clinton enabling the Republican enbablers like Leiberman, who was a mistake as a VP nomination and is a mistake today.
Clinton, i imagine, would answer that high principles don't do you much good if you can't get elected, but there's a line where the price you pay in compromise is not equal to the return, and both Bill and Hillary have crossed that line more than once. That happens when you confuse your own re-election with your political goals.
What "achievement" of the Clinton years was so great that it was worth the compromises with Wall Street, with the military industrial complex? None. They produced a heath care plan that was unreadable and impossible to pass. They diddled with Bin Laden and never quite "went all the way" in the hunt out of political concerns.
The blinders of nostalgia and the horrors of the current administration have obscured what a compromiser and placater Bill Clinton actually was-- perhaps acting out his "child of an alcoholic" role just as much as Bush acts out his "dry, mean drunk" on the world stage. I fear the Clintons will be remembered for selfishness and ambition more than principle.

COMMONPLACE BOOK, Excerpts of Interest for the last half of March

“Every surviving white person in New Orleans has been airlifted directly to the secret warehouse where all television media is produced. They were only allowed to leave when they mustered up the sadness to cry in front of Katie Couric, who managed to find an insightful anecdote about her children for every single story. Those who refused to laugh at her tales were ushered into Star Jones' dressing room, where they were promptly eaten alive while the T-Rex noise from "Jurassic Park" played in the background to set the mood.” --- The "Something Awful" website
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“I ran into a gray eminence from the Bush era I knew the other day in an airport, and he said that what most offended him about Bush II is the naked incompetence. ‘You may disagree with Republicans, but you always had to recognize that they knew what they were doing,’ he said. ‘I keep going back to that intelligence memo of August 2001, that said that terrorists had plans to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. The president read it, and he didn't even call a staff meeting to discuss it. That is lack of attention of a high order.’” --Unknown, quoted by Garrison Keillor in the Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2006
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Unknown author, commenting on Walter Shapiro’s “pimping” for Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances:
“God save us!...I would like to see us all just stop talking about her once and for all—there is no there there. All of this makes me want to just leave this compromised rotting hulk of a political party, but then again the chance to vote against yet another fearful, overly-careful, scripted, too-far-right, blown dry, mealy mouthed, cowardly, survival-conscious, too-quick-to-compromise, insulated, wooden, tone deaf, egotistical, unprincipled, retrograde, well-connected, born-to-lose, lawyerly, wimpy, lead from behind, squirmy, all around crap primary candidate like Hillary may keep me from reregistering until after the primaries!”
-- quoted by ‘punaise’ on HaloScan.com
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-- "Dial B for Blog" on the film adaptation of "Fantastic Four"
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Patricia Relf Hanavan on pirates and the Republican doctrine of preemptive war: “Saw this line as I was re-reading Treasure Island and thought it seemed vaguely familiar. It's the pirate Israel Hands speaking (p. 175 in my book--in ch. 26):
‘Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views--amen, so be it.’"
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“We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.” -- Celine
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Joke forwarded by DeeAnn:
President Bush recently went to a primary school in Macon,
Georgia, to talk about the world. After his talk, he asked if the children
had any questions. One little boy put up his hand, and the president
asked him his name.
"Kenneth."
"And what is your question, Kenneth?"
"I have three questions:
1) Whatever happened to the weapons of mass destruction?
2)Why did you give a tax break to the super wealthy?
3) Did you steal votes to win both elections?"
Just then the bell rang for recess. President Bush informed the
children that they would continue after recess.
When they resumed, the President said, "OK, where were we? Oh,
that's right, question time. Who has a question?"
A different little boy put his hand up. Bush pointed him out and
asked him his name.
"Larry."
"And what is your question, Larry?"
"I have five questions:
1) Whatever happened to the weapons of mass destruction?
2) Why did you give a tax break to the super wealthy?
3) Did you steal votes to win both elections?
4) Why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early?
5) What happened to Kenneth?"

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“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are very unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such.” – Republican activist Grover Norquist on the current crop of Democrats
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“This is blues made for humming along, stomping your foot, feeling righteous in the face of oppression and expressing gratitude to your baby for greasing your skillet.”
-- Charles M. Young reviewing the music of Guy Davis*
• (Yes, this is skeptical me telling you that Guy Davis is the real thing. His version of “Goin’ Down Slow” had me hollering back at the radio.)
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“(Republican Congressional candidate Howard) Kaloogian posted a photo from "downtown Baghdad" showing how peaceful and calm things were there; bloggers investigated the photo and it was recognized as coming from a suburb of Istanbul -- something that could be proved by comparing it to web-based photo-albums showing the intersection and the surrounding area. In less than a day, it was over. "Jem6X" at the popular DailyKos blog confirmed the street scene was in Bakirkoy, a suburb of Istanbul, not Baghdad.” -- Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing

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“Here’s a thumbnail sketch [of Fredric Jameson’s thought]: Culture is above all the expression of history and its class struggles, its bouts of false consciousness and thwarted or poisoned revelations, coded into what we might nowadays call memes. Jameson identifies these “ideologemes” and “mythemes” and with great ingenuity examines the degree to which each epoch characterizes itself unconsciously by these cultural elements and their contraries (which are mutually exclusive, like life and death) and their contradictions (embattled inconsistencies or lapses).”
-- Damien Broderick in his Locus review of Frederic Jameson’s “Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions”
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” --Voltaire

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See Also:
Saint Patrick's Day: "He was like a murderer annoyed at being called a shoplifter", End of April: "I've had far more sex than I've had fights on water towers against guys with super powers", February: ""WHICH GOD DAMNED IDIOTS CHOSE KAINE TO DO THE REBUTTAL?", Commonplace Book:January, December

SOME DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS BEHIND THE CARTOON WAR

So far, only the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and some French smartasses have gotten the Danish cartoon story right: It seems that the cleric who first protested the cartoons in Denmark then reprinted them in a flyer that was distributed throughout the Muslim world... and he sort of, um, added a few even MORE offensive cartoons to juice up his case against the Danish newspaper.



The Americans, from Bill Clinton to Bush, have gone all mealy-mouthed and scold the newspapers to be more responsible. Coming from those two, "responsibility" is like Messalina calling for chastity. Apparently it's okay to order an air strike that kills hundreds of innocents in order to miss one terrorist target, but if your little ink spills piss somebody off, we never heard of you. Thanks for your strong defense of the Four Freedoms, guys. Vladimir Putin, known affectionately to the Russian mobsters as "KGB Lite", a man whose soul President Bush has gazed into, is first and always a true friend of censorship: "Any provocation in this area is absolutely unacceptable. One should think 100 times before publishing anything, doing anything or drawing anything." Shit, I'd never get ANYTHING done.

But Lor' bless 'em, the French satiric weekly 'Charlie Hebdo' reprinted all 12, along with a new cartoon on the cover entitled "Mohammed stressed out by the fundamentalists" showing the prophet holding his head in his hands uttering the words "It's hard to be loved by fools."

Phillipe Val, the editor of 'Charlie Hebdo', told the BBC: "Of course there has to be tolerance, there has to be respect to any community and any religious believers. But it is very much important for our whole society to show that we have firm principles on which democracy stands. This is an inviolable question of principle here in the land of Voltaire and Zola. We are willing to appear before the courts if some think the drawings go too far, but we are certainly not willing to give way to the desires of religious extremists."

Push comes to shove, these little cartoons are drawing fire in a just cause. Muslim mobs are using violence and intimidation against anyone who criticizes Islam, especially those who suggest that Islam embraces violence and intimidation. It took a couple hundred years for Christians to stop burning anyone who suggested that the Pope wasn't perfect. This may take a while longer; so long as Muslims view themselves as victims, they will feel justified in whatever atrocities they commit.

Something else is going unreported: someone is profiting from these riots. Can you say 'agent provocateur'? So long as the mobs are busy burning down Danish embassies, they're not thinking about what shitty governments they have in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran... If you don't like that scenario, then consider how much juice the imams are getting out of this: play ball with us, or we'll start a riot. Lastly, these hysterical screams for the blood of cartoonists will make the Americans and Israelis look reasonable by comparison. Thus the rioters and the politicians wash each others' hands. Everyone's a winner.

Except free thought, free speech, Danish tolerance, and a few mostly harmless ink-stained wretches.

UPDATE from the AP: Charlie-Hebdo sold out all 160,000 copies with the cartoons, 60,000 more than usual. France Soir, a daily, ran the drawings and sold 40 percent more-- "leading a battle for freedom of the press", their spokeswoman says, perhaps not cynically. Wouldn't it be funny if this insanity makes some hair sprout on the chest of the media? Wouldn't it be something if cartoonists rediscover their power to afflict the comfortable and ridicule villainy in the spirit of Hogarth and Goya, Daumier, Ben Shawn, George Grosz and Lautrec? Who are these monsters, that would turn cartoonists' ink into blood?

COMMONPLACE BOOK, RANDOM EXCERPTS for JANUARY

"No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have," W.S. Gilbert once said of an old friend, "and I think he is a dirty little beast."

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"I’m in total disagreement with her [Hillary Clinton] on Iraq. It all has to do, in my judgment, with the post-Vietnam image the Democrats got of being weak on defense. So they all had to prove their muscularity by voting for this [Iraq war] resolution. I think this was all wrong. We are a republic. We are not an empire. And this is an imperial policy."
-- Gary Hart in New York Times Magazine, 1/8/06

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Now independently wealthy, Jeremy Bentham made the most of his independence. He moved into a house in Westminster once occupied by poet John Milton. There he became something of a recluse and an eccentric. He named his teapot "Dickey," his walking-sticks "Dapple" and "Dobbin," and his cat "The Reverend Dr. John Langhorne.”

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“For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
".... What we need is what the ancient Israelites called "hocma" - the science of the heart, the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you." -- Bill Moyers

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Unretouched photos from Engrish dot com, a website that specializes in
very bad translations found in Asian advertising.


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"I’ve worked with nearly fifty graduate students, and I feel confident saying that not a single one has possessed Derek’s raw talent, his courage, or his willingness to write about the scary stuff that most people refuse to look in the eye. It’s safe to call Derek a "dark" writer. His stories are relentless and terrifying, despite the fact that he writes about the mundane — about manual labor and emotional exhaustion and bad relationships and the like. He’s an innovator, a sorcerer with a sentence and a writer with a vision. In short, he’s not what MFA programs are looking for." – David Hollander on a rejected MFA applicant

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Well, the future hasn't quite turned out as Orwell feared, but it's pretty damn close. The British police have more than enough powers to make life very difficult for you if you choose to disagree with Mr. Blair. A woman was arrested in Downing Street recently for reading out the names of the Iraqi war dead; this was justified under the terms of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. And on the other side of the pond, Cousin George is busy phone-tapping everyone who thinks he's a fool; an exercise which should keep him busy for some time.
-- Michael Allen, “Grumpy Old Bookman” (blog)

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From “A Man for All seasons” by Robert Bolt:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.
Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it?
Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.

Cardinal Wolsey: You're a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint... With a little common sense you could have made a statesman.

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From The Onion:
PHOENIX, AZ—Ignoring the fact that they live in the middle of a God-forsaken alkali desert, residents continue to demand more water for their parched lawns and bleached-out swimming pools.
1/17/06 1:43 PM

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"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." --Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), investigating the National Security Agency, 1975.

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A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
--“How to Tell a True War Story,” by Tim O’Brien, in The Things They Carried
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From an interview in GamePro magazine with the developers of the game “Saint’s Row”:

GamePro: Let's say I want to be a pimp. Do I have to go and find pimp-specific missions?

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"Super-apes are never a bad idea. I want that phrase on my gravestone." – “Dave’s Long Box” (blog)

See Also Commonplace Book for December, Commonplace Book 1