The Whitewashed Tomb That Is Mike Huckabee

There was a noise offstage while Mike Huckabee was speaking to the National Rifle Association this week. "That was Barack Obama," Huckabee said. "He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he — he dove for the floor."

"I'm not sure Senator Obama or Senator Clinton really get it," the Reverend Huckabee said.

Mark Twain's Rules for Funeral Etiquette

Do not criticize the person in whose honor the entertainment is given.

Make no remarks about his equipment. If the handles are plated, it is best to seem to not observe it.

If the odor of the flowers is too oppressive for your comfort, remember that they were not brought there for you, and that the person for whom they were brought suffers no inconvenience from their presence.

Listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can command, to the official statement of the character and history of the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places, do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being distributed.

If the official hopes expressed concerning the person in whose honor the entertainment is given are known by you to be oversized, let it pass -- do not interrupt.

At the moving passages, be moved -- but only according to the degree of your intimacy with the parties giving the entertainment, or with the party in whose honor the entertainment is given. Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief. Where the occasion is military, the emotions should be graded according to military rank, the highest officer present taking precedence in emotional violence, and the rest modifying their feelings according to their position in the service.

Do not bring your dog.

If I Were a Carpenter, and You Were a Bag Lady

The most disgusting act of treachery against labor today must be the Brotherhood of Carpenters' practice of hiring homeless people to man picket lines instead of union members. Apparently their members can't be bothered; it's cheaper and more "convenient" to hire a desperate man at $8.00 an hour than ask a $20.00 an hour carpenter to walk his own damn line. And "the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is supposedly the only national union to crawl so low, but you can bet this will used as a canard against unions by every anti-labor lickspittle from here to Canarsie.

Taking advantage of the poor is a job for management, not labor. A dirty little sliver of rationalization tells me that the street people working the picket line could really use the $8.00, and who's to begrudge them any pittance--? But that's the line of sophistry that lets the apologists of capitalism excuse the Mexican border factories, and the hypocritical exploitation of illegal immigrants on this side of the border, and the insult of a $5.85 minimum wage.

They best not come to my neighborhood; our homeless people are organized. It seems to be the American consensus that anyone dumb enough to fall under the wheels of the system probably deserves what happens to them, and geeking for the Carpenters is a better gig for the homeless than scrounging for bottle deposits. Thus shit is transmuted to sugar. But before I concede, and smile and wink at such a crime against the soul, let my bones turn to dust with Joe Hill's, and mix with the sawdust, and choke the sanctimonious throats of the too-proud to picket members of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters.

But Don't Take It Out In Public Or They'll Throw You In the Dock

Katie Rees, defrocked Miss Nevada: “I challenge those individuals to look back on their pasts and not find something they did to humiliate themselves or that they deeply regret—especially during their teenage years. I am very embarrassed by the situation. Regardless, such a brief and distant lapse in judgment does not warrant my loss of the title I worked so hard to achieve. I want to thank my family, true friends, and God, who have already forgiven me. I can only hope that the public will be as kind.”

The saddest thing about our culture is that she has apparently retreated into God Forgiving Her (for what? being young?) instead of celebrating the spirit of Carnival. So long as no one was hurt, infected, or injured in a drunken car crash, who the fuck cares? Having lived a full life, I can report to those of you knitting at home that young women will drink too much and bare too much and young men will sneak a peek. Is the Miss Nevada pageant pretending that their donkey parade ISN'T about sexual displays by young women? The young men in the crowd appear to be age-appropriate; would her father rather have a great moralist like Donald Trump squinting at her decolletage?

The photos are not to my taste but I'm more disgusted by the virginal American media pretending to be offended. This is the new scarlet letter: a society that winks at merchants of death and worships ruthless wealth but suddenly cannot countenance a bare bum. Nevada, for God's sweet sake?

Oh, I see. She didn't display her tatas and coochie within socially defined parameters. Does this foofaraw remind anyone of the ancients' fearful suppression of the Dionysian cults?

I'm wasting my breath being frustrated by the things the mainstream media wastes its breath over.

Who Will Ann Coulter Call If She Needs Bail?

Complaining about about right-wing hypocrisy and the pecadilloes of public moralists is like complaining about the heat in July or the snow in winter. I am concerned here with what happens as they fall down the other side of the Wheel of Fortune.

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine had a niece who was just beginning a career in entertainment. My friend was concerned that "the little shit" should be careful whose hands she stepped on as she was climbing the career ladder, because she'd be needing them if she ever slipped and fell down. Despite the odds, her niece has made a living in the arts for the past twenty years; any failures were moderated by other triumphs. I've fallen out of touch, and never heard anything more about the niece's backstage behavior towards housekeeping staff and the spear carriers, but if her career collapses, I'm sure she has a place to sleep.

When I was a janitor, I knew more about the people whose offices and toilets I cleaned than they knew about me. Some I could have embraced as friends; there were others I wouldn't have pissed on if they were on fire.

Now Ann Coulter faces felony charges for voting fraud. There's always been an age discrepancy on her driver's license (unless she voted at the age of 16 in 1980), but now according to a Florida election official's incident report, she tried to vote in a precinct she wasn't registered for and then tried to vote twice in the same race, a no-no loaded with 5 years in prison and a fine. The part of me that feels a little sorry for Malvolio at the end of "Twelfth Night" says this can happen to anyone. I myself have a phobia against filling in forms. If a form requires that I attach other forms, I panic, hide the form under other forms, withdraw into a corner of the room and go into shock like an animal caught in a trap. ("Tharn", the rabbits called it in Watership Down.)

Let her fill in the forms and forget about it, I say. Arthur Anderson, the Palm Beach County elections supervisor, agrees: "We want to give her a chance. She needs to tell us where she really lives." Do as I do-- ask a friend or relative to talk her through the process, promise her a treat when it's done. This is why we pay other people to fill in our tax forms. I assume Miss Coulter became successful not for fame or better restaurants, but so that she could hire a secretary to handle the forms. If it all turns to shit for Miss Coulter, I'm curious to see who her friends turn out to be; she has made a career out of bashing people lower than herself, and they might be the only friends she has left. If she gets tossed into the tank, she might want to rethink her mockery of anti-apartheid activists, her call for a New McCarthyism, and "I think the government should be... engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport... and sending liberals to Guantanamo." All I'm saying is, if I were a Harvard professor or a liberal Supreme Court judge, and Ann Coulter had called for my murder, I'm damned if I'd chip in for her bail.

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals fessed up to buying amphetamines and three years of monthly "massages" from a gay prostitute. The circles I travel in would say "to each his taste" and shrug, except that the fellow is a prominent gay basher with a wife, five children, and a 14,000 member megachurch.

Republican Jim Gibbons in Nevada is having a very bad week including attempted rape, a $300 bar tab (oh, THAT'S only going to get more expensive), and millions in no-bid sweetheart contracts for friends. All of this could just be a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story, except this is a guy who screams about illegal immigration but hires an illegal for eleven years, then drinks for two hours with a 12-top, spends $300 and leaves a ten-dollar tip.

Republican Congressman Don Sherwood, a married, "family values" conservative paid $500,000 to his mistress if she would just shut up about the strangling incident until after the election.

When my own life hit a rock, it was instructive to find out which of my friends stayed true, while others dropped me as a bore and an inconvenience. One of my "closest" friends couldn't see me because he didn't want to miss Adrienne Barbeau's nude scene in "Swamp Thing". Ordinarily I would sympathize with this excuse, but damn, man, rent the video.

This was not long after he'd taken a management job and started dropping me for golf dates with new friends he openly described as people important to his career. "Le affaire Barbeau" involved an invitation to watch the film with the movers and shakers. None of them were at his funeral. Another friend-- that I might have judged in our first acquaintance as superficial, overly-concerned with bourgeois social propriety-- lent hundreds of dollars with a bohemian indifference as to when I paid it back. "Thus the whirligig of Time," Feste tells Malvolio, "brings on its revenges." We never learn what Malvolio did to Feste to inspire the feud between them; we do know Malvolio could not call upon his friends when he fell from grace because he had no friends.

I envision a day when Guantanamo Bay is packed with every gay, liberal, homeless, black, lesbian Harvard graduate, Arab, elite intellectual, cock-sucking, muff diving, dope smoking, Communist, Socialist, titty baring, Muslim, French, porn-loving, wine-drinking, Bush-hating, flip-flopping, anti-Semitic, Times reading, rap-singing, terrorist-sympathizing lawyer in the country. In that post-apocalyptic America, Ann Coulter is about to be groped by Jim Gibbons and there's no one left alive to answer her 911 call but Alan Dershowitz. And Dershowitz can't come because he's barricaded himself in the bathroom to escape the zombie of Roy Cohn.

No wonder Jesus hung out with the publicans and sinners; they were more humane than the moralists. Now if we could just get Lloyd Dobson to Shut The Fuck Up Already about everyone else's spiritual growth, and worry about his own...

I OPEN A SECOND FRONT IN THE CULTURE WARS

The premise of an op-ed essay I'm writing: The right blames liberalism for our culture's decadence, while in reality that decadence is caused by the same free market capitalism that the right claims to embrace.
One of our local stations-- professing right-wing, conservative, "family friendly" values-- broadcasts "Jerry Springer" without regard for its effect on our culture and gives us "Survivor" updates as part of the morning news.
If radio, television and advertising are steeped in vulgarity-- with reruns of smarmy sitcoms and cop show murders, originally meant for adult audiences but now shown during "family friendly") hours-- that vulgarity is NOT foisted on children because of careless liberals, but because of advertising revenues. The logic of capitalism insists that it must be so: maximize profit, no matter the consequences.
A cursory examination will show that the Bible Belt and Mountain"red-states" have higher rates of divorce, alcoholism, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, spousal abuse and general brutishness than all us liberal sinners in the blue states. The pharisees and puritans are attacking the wrong targets when they pretend to have moral superiority and its time their libels are rebuked and scourged into oblivion.

Readings: Commonplace Book for October, 2006

“The moderates will vote for the extremist. "Moderate," after all, is only an adjective; "Republican" is a noun. Chafee, Snowe, the whole lot of them, are moderate enablers of an extremist party.” ( Harold Meyerson)

***
“....The actual journalistic accomplishment in [Bob Woodward’s] “State of Denial” is less than grand. It took him three books to arrive at a conclusion thousands of basement-bound bloggers suggested years ago: that the Bush administration is composed of people who like war, don’t seem to be very good at it and have been known to turn the guns on each other. Such an epiphany doesn’t seem to reflect a reporter who had rarefied access.... Given Mr. Woodward’s tendency to fill his books with kitchen-sink detail, he maintained that the seeds of dysfunction were there to see in his previous two books. But Mr. Woodward’s time spent living in the treetops seems to have blinded him to the fact that the forest below was on fire.” (David Carr)

***
Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are
under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much
damage as al Qaida; the nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by
a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit.”
(Keith Olbermann)

***
“[Punk] defined itself by trashing Led Zep, Pink Floyd et al."—but as much as punks hated hippies, their common romanticism proves them more alike than not. Cynicism is just optimism turned on its head, replacing a belief in the perfectibility of humankind with a certitude that everything sucks.”
(Thurston Moore)

***
“The trash-pickers, drug fiends, and unsuccored polysexual sensualists of Up Is Up embraced the darker side of the bohemian legacy, but some of their Left Coast contemporaries chose instead to extend Summer of Love optimism into the high-tech age by embracing libertarian entrepreneurship, as chronicled in Fred Turner's info-packed academic study From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Turner focuses on the career of Stewart Brand, a former Ken Kesey collaborator who started the Whole Earth Catalog, which, as the author notes, "bridged cybernetics and the back-to-the-land movement" by spreading the gospel of Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Weiner, melding hands-on pragmatism with lofty earth-changing goals. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," Brand wrote in one Catalog intro. In the 1980s, Brand translated this vision into new media with the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a pioneering online forum that incubated future dot-communists and Wired editors. Turner notes the earthy roots of terms like "virtual community" and "electronic frontier," which first appeared there, along with early arguments for the ethics of open-source technology; offline, Brand later refined his utopian social engineering with the high-powered boomtime Global Business Network. So by the 1990s, the idea of revolution had morphed from a political goal to a corporate strategy. On the East Coast, the underground expired, but out West, it simply apotheosized into the mainstream itself.”
(Ed Halter in The Village Voice)

***
“I’m sure my mom will be proud. You work hard making independent films for fourteen years and you get voted best breasts.” (Scarlett Johansson)

***
“Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary—these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.
“I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.” (Molly Ivins)

***
(from Pat and Bill)
POLL: MAJORITY OF AMERICANS FEAR BEING INSTANT-MESSAGED BY A REPUBLICAN
".... When asked to name their number one fear, 8% said "losing my job to outsourcing," 10% said "not being able to afford to fill up my car with gas," 14% said "North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il blowing up the world with a nuclear weapon," while a whopping 65% said "being instant-messaged by a horny Republican." ... "If you hear your child start to use phrases like 'tax cut,' 'stay the course,' or 'family values,' those are danger signs that he has been chatting with a horny Republican."
(The Borowitz Report)

***
“Speaking of the psychology underlying the Christian right ... My current pet hobby-horse/hypothesis to explain human behaviour is that most of us don't subjectively feel our age internally: we're children or adolescents role-playing our way through adulthood, with greater or lesser degrees of success, guided by the experience we've picked up from observing other people. That is, we do what we're expected to do by those around us, even when it doesn't feel right. And folks who are compelled to conform to the expectations their family and friends and neighbours impose resent the hell out of the imagery all around them of people who aren't conforming. ("Why are they allowed to behave that way when I'm stuck here earning bread for my family?")
“It takes a certain amount of self-confidence to strike out for your own, and fire-and-brimstone religions promising all the answers in return for conforming to the one true lifestyle don't give their followers self-confidence; rather, they try to instil a neurotic dependency on the behavioural/ideological safety-blanket, which is not the same thing at all.”
(post by unknown British person, please advise, at Making Light)

***
“[Chicago is] Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." (Nelson Algren)

***
"Sir Francis Drake's gold pocket calculator.
Hewlett-Pakenham Modell 1. Sir Francis Walsingham had a few of them built for "especial agentes." It could take sun sightings, record dead Spaniards to a perhaps optimistic six digits, and had a Vigenère lattice engraved on the inner lid. Drake's is said to have been later set with a Nicholas Hilliard miniature of "A Comely Ladye of Cheapside," and a concealable cheating device for "I'm From Devon and I Don't Know This Game," a popular quayside entertainment of the day."
...

"President Bush announced today that he was displaying the coloration of a monarch only to avoid being eaten by birds. No intentional deception was involved.
In related news, Tony Blair denied that he had turreted eyes and a long, sticky tongue, after snatching a fly that was circling the Deputy Minister for "Coupling."

(Casual blog entries to friends by John M. Ford)

***
“My only relationship to the Sheikh’s case and his cause was as his lawyer. Throughout all the events, I believed I was acting as I should, as his lawyer. I violated my SAMS affiliation in that I permitted him to communicate publicly and these statements if misused may have allowed others to further their goals. These goals were not mine.
I am not a traitor... I did not intentionally enter into any plot or conspiracy to aid a terrorist organization. I inadvertently allowed those with other agendas to corrupt the most precious and inviolate basis of our profession—the attorney-client relationship...
Many who have written to you on my behalf, have characterized my actions as mistakes or lapses of judgment. I would add that I was also naïve in the sense that I was overly optimistic about what I could and should accomplish as the Sheik’s lawyer, and I was careless.”
(Lynne F. Stewart)

***
“I wanted to write a book [Pride of Baghdad] from a non-combatant's perspective, and talk about war from the civilian point-of-view. It's really difficult for Americans to sympathize with "the other," and I wanted to cross that culture gap. Emotionally, we're maybe not able to feel for [Iraqi civilians] the way we can feel for talking animals. So I was looking to exploit our universal sympathy with animals to tell a story about the suffering of Iraqi civilians.
“It's weird. You can threaten and kill a baby in a movie, but put a dog in jeopardy and people will walk out. You make a more immediate connection to a giraffe than a person. It sounds psychotic, that you can feel more for an animal than a human. “
(Brian K. Vaughan)

***
“Occasionally, a student would write an essay answer [for nationally standardized tests like the MEAP] that would exhibit more intelligence than any other essay answer I’d seen, but more often than not, the essay would be subversive in some way, questioning the essay question itself while illuminating some truly great points. But here were essays (finally!) with souls behind them — not just some student who’d been trained how to write "the good essay." Sadly, though, these essays generally received three points out of six because they fell into the "convoluted" category. The "good essays" — by "good" I mean formulaic, boring, and teachable — generally received six points.” (John McNally)

***
“If [John McCain] can manage to combine America's tribal pride, its yearning for some sort of spiritual meaning and its fear of the other and put together an inspirational, nationalistic message (along with his pre-fab image as a straight-talking "reformer") he could be very hard to beat --- and very, very dangerous. He's a warmongering hawk, don't ever forget it. The only real difference between him and Bush on these matters is that he's willing to attend the funerals of the dead. (Digby’s Hullabaloo

***
I hear the RePubs are planning to actually run this [Ticking Bin Laden ] ad (at the cost of who knows how much loot) this Sunday during the national news. If you happen to see it then, giggling and pointing is appropriate. If anyone asks you what’s so funny, you can explain that Bush shut down the CIA office that was looking for bin Laden.
(Jim McDonald)

***
“...[India] has to sustain nearly twenty percent of the earth’s population with four per cent of its water. China has less water than Canada—and forty times as many people.” (Michael Specter in The New Yorker, October 23rd, 2006)

***
"Some men are male-oriented. While they are boys, because they are chips off the male block, they love men and enjoy lying with men and being embraced by men; those are the best of boys and lads, because they are the most manly in their nature. When they're grown men, they are lovers of young men. Do you want me to prove it? Look, these are the only kind of boys who grow up to be politicians." (Aristophanes, in Plato's Symposium)

Put Not Your Faith in Foley

Yeah, I see him over there: that shivering yellow dog with a hopeful look on his face and the tip of his tail wagging. No matter how many times he's been kicked, he keeps inching forward, hoping that this time he'll get a handout instead of a kick and a cross word.

No, wait-- that's not a kicked dog, that's a Democrat.

I am not optimistic about the coming election. The conventional blather seems to think that the Foley scandal will discourage the Republican base, but I think the press is sniffing its own butt on this one and mistaking consensus for wisdom. A more realistic poll described on NPR this week shows that Christian conservatives have no intention of crossing over to the Democrats. They see Foley as an abberation, not a symptom. Yes, Hastert and the leadership fumbled the ball-- okay, bad choice of words there-- but the Republican Party still holds its own-- another regrettable phrase-- when it comes-- um-- to what the Christian Right really cares about:
Other People's Abortions, Other People's Dicks, and Making a Big Show of What a Good Christian You Are.

If the events of the past SIX YEARS won't make them change their vote, why would this relatively bloodless scandal have any effect? I'm willing to be proved wrong, but polls don't always match the people that actually show up to vote on a rainy day, and who needs votes when you've got Dielbold?

A old Washington joke describes an incumbent as a shoo-in "unless he's caught with a dead girl or a live boy." The media is all over the Foley story like wasps to sugar water, but this scandal is NOT an October gift to Democrats. It is a blessing in disguise for the Republican party, a freakshow distraction from far more substantial problems.

Abramoff Follies, Two: Demons DeLayed

Abramoff's circus was filled with former employees of the amoral Tom DeLay. According to DCEIVER at Wonkette, the house of cards began to fall when Mike Scanlon (DeLay alumni) was caught flaming it up with an attractive manicurist by his main squeeze Emily Miller (DeLay alumni), who in a rit of fealous jage dropped a dime on Scanlon, who then dropped a dime on Abramoff, who then...

***
It's been clear for some time that Thomas "I AM the federal government" DeLay is mad as a hatter. This is an incredibly powerful politician who could say things like: "it's never been proven that air toxins are hazardous to people". This is the man who said, in a debate on raising the minimum wage: "Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist." And don't forget DeLay's explanation for not serving in Vietnam: "So many minority youths had volunteered that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself."

An alternate explanation-- one I favor-- is that Tom DeLay is demonically possessed. (See Robert Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy", collected in "Assignment in Eternity" for more information.) It is a source of wonder that the man has stayed in office longer than a week. The Texans I know have never voted for DeLay, and DeLay's skill at gerrymandering can only explain so much. It may be that Texans keep re-electing DeLay because they think he's funny, without realizing how damaging he is to the body politic. This is a state that still hasn't done the math on drunk driving, guns and fatalities, in a nation that thinks daytime TV will build responsible citizens.

Why oh why didn't we keep Texas out of the Union when we had the chance? Felt sorry for Sam Houston I suppose, and it all went for naught, since Houston died abandoned and disdained by his fellow Texans.

Jonathon Alter tells this story from 1995:
"I had heard a rumor about him (DeLay) that I figured could not possibly be true. The rumor was that after the GOP took control of the House that year, DeLay had begun keeping a little black book with the names of Washington lobbyists who wanted to come see him. If the lobbyists were not Republicans and contributors to his power base, they didn't get into "the people's House." DeLay not only confirmed the story, he showed me the book. His time was limited, DeLay explained with a genial smile. Why should he open his door to people who were not on the team?"

A Mr. Blunt looks to have the votes for replacing DeLay. Local swineherds are advised to keep their piggies away from cliffs for the next couple of weeks.

See Also: Vaudeville Part One, Masters of Morality, Don't Question Me, Popular Self Delusion, et alia

Abramoff and Scanlon: There’s Nothing Like Vaudeville, Part One

It’s a gray wet Wednesday, and everyone in DC is scrambling to give away the “gifts” they took from Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon.
It seems that Abramoff has copped a plea, is naming names, and that has everyone as nervous as a whore in church.
We have to find our laughter where we can, and some was provided in a C-SPAN rerun of John McCain and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee from June 22, 2005.
It seems that the venal Abramoff and the wretched Scanlon were setting up fake corporations to launder the $66 million they scammed from Indian tribes. How low do you have to be to cheat an Indian tribe??? Here a friend of Scanlon’s explains how he became“director of a internationally respected think tank” :

MCCAIN: Mr. Grosh, you and Mr. Mann were designated as directors of the AIC, which was described in its own Web site as a, quote, "international think tank." It's a very interesting on its Web site. It's described as -- "The American International Center is a public policy research foundation founded in 2001 under the high-power directorship of David A. Grosh and Brian J. Mann.”
.... Mr. Grosh, I will begin with you. What did the AIC do?

GROSH: I was only involved maybe five months -- four or five months. The whole time I was involved, we rented the first floor of a house and installed some computers.

**** (omitted for length: Brian J. Mann invokes his Fifth Amendment rights not to answer.)

MCCAIN: Mr. Grosh, did you give Mr. Scanlon permission to put your name up on the AIC Web site?

GROSH: On the Web site, no.

MCCAIN: Did you give Mr. Scanlon permission to hold you out as a director for the AIC?

GROSH: Yes.
....

MCCAIN: Mr. Grosh, did the AIC conduct any board meetings?

GROSH: I recall one.

MCCAIN: And how long did that last?

GROSH: Fifteen minutes.

MCCAIN: Do you recall any business that was discussed at these board meetings?

GROSH: Off the top of my head, no. I'm sure we discussed something -- not to be glib.

MCCAIN: Mr. Mann, I think it says when these meetings took place, the extent of your role in the AIC at that time was cleaning the downstairs office space. Is that correct? [Mann repeatedly refuses to answer as is his right under the Fifth Amendment.] ....

MCCAIN: ... As far as you are concerned, Mr. Grosh, was this basically another Scanlon entity?

GROSH: Well, legally, no. It was Mr. Mann and -- he was calling the shots, sure.

MCCAIN: So were you really surprised when all this information started coming out that you were a director of a internationally respected think tank?

GROSH: Surprised, not really. The reason I got out of it when I found out it involved the federal government, Indian tribes and gambling, I knew that it was headed down the wrong way.

****
MCCAIN: Tell me how this all began, Mr. Grosh. Were you friends with Mr. Scanlon or...

GROSH: Yes, I've known Mr. Scanlon since I was about 14.

MCCAIN: And what happened? He approached you in some way.

GROSH: Phone call.

MCCAIN: And said?

GROSH: Do you want to be head of an international corporation?

(LAUGHTER)

A hard one to turn down.

(LAUGHTER)

MCCAIN: And at the time, were you living in Rehoboth Beach?

GROSH: Yes, sir.

MCCAIN: And Mr. Scanlon then informed you that your home would be the headquarters or did you...

GROSH: Actually, at that point, no, there was no headquarters.

MCCAIN: Well, tell me -- could you tell me just the sequence of events that took place after that?

GROSH: I asked him what I had to do, and he said, "Nothing." So that sounded pretty good to me.

(LAUGHTER)

And then he -- I'm trying to think how it all happened. He came by. We spoke about it. And at the time, I was like, "Yes, sure," but not really taking it seriously.

And then he had me sign some papers and then we went to a -- I met him here in D.C. and we took over the bottom of the house I was living in.

MCCAIN: Did you receive compensation for this role?

GROSH: Yes.

MCCAIN: And your background -- is a very honorable one -- I understand as a lifeguard, is that correct?

GROSH: Among other things. I'm not a lifeguard anymore. No.

MCCAIN: And could you give us a little resume as some of your background.

GROSH: Right now, I'm a excavator -- machine operator, construction worker, mentor in pre-schools, bartender and typical beach employment.

MCCAIN: Thank you.

And do you remember the extent of the compensation that you received from Mr. Scanlon, roughly?

GROSH: No more than $2,000, $2,500.

MCCAIN: A month?

GROSH: No, total.

MCCAIN: Total.

Did Mr. Scanlon promise you any fringe benefits?

GROSH: Well, I don't know if this is related to the AIC. We went to a Washington Capitals-Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game.

****
Grosh’s opening statement was two sentences long: “I’m embarrassed and disgusted to be a part of this whole thing, The Lakota Indians have a word, washichu , which aptly describes all of us right now.”

Washichu, depending on whom you ask, either means “white man” or “he who steals all the fat.” Maybe both.

PERVERTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: Please Stop Worrying About Other Men's Penises!

I am waiting for a politician who will ask, "Who are these anti-gay marriage busybodies to be so concerned with other people's penises?" Most of us go through entire days, sometimes weeks, without thinking about other people's genitalia unless we want to have sex with them.

Let's start describing this obsession of the Republican Party, this penis fixation of Wildmon and Falwell and Dobson and crew as what it is: a fetish. Some fetishists obsess about high heel shoes, some about women's breasts (exclusively I mean), some about French maid costumes--
and Rick Santorum worries about other men's penises and what they might be doing with them RIGHT NOW and what that might be doing to America. Whatever crime, greed, cronyism, illiteracy, job loss, environmental neglect and "Growing Up Gotti" might be doing to America, it pales compared to the destructive power of same-sex marriage and genital contact between members of the same sex! (Does Santorum remind anyone else of Paul Lynde? Or Tony Nelson, with Jeannie running around the house and all he wants to do is spend time with Roger?)

In the small but diverse town where I grew up, surrounded by blue-collar heterosexualists, there was none of this perverse gay bashing. It was a truism of my boyhood, learned from my fathers and uncles and the old men in the truck stops and barber shops: heterosexual men who were secure in their own identity simply did not worry so much about homosexual men.

The few openly gay men in the community were no more eccentric than the Sunday painters or photography club. K. and E. were like eccentric uncles whose difference added to the community; their homosexuality was no more irksome than the peculiarities of the camera club or the Jaycees, and I remember hearing more complaints about the Jaycees. If small town gays gravitated to the local arts scene, theatre and architecture and interior design, that was simply because those worlds were more live and let live about their inhabitants.

Men who exhibited homosexual panic, who talked about “goddamn queers tried to rape me” and such, were sniffed at by the rest of the truck drivers as being worried for a reason. When my turn came at 19 to be propositioned by a gay man (I was young and pretty then), I politely declined with no one’s feelings or noses being hurt.

My uncle’s concern baffled me. It would have seemed silly to have someone worry about me being seduced by our local gay theatre director. It seems silly now. How could a homosexual take my penis in his mouth unless I wanted to put it there? That would have been a poor substitute for the girls and women I had crushes on, who swirled around my adolescent brain in an unattainable hareem.

In panicky times like these, we must speak calm truth to hysterics. Anne M. Gobi, a Representative of Massachusetts, says,
"I haven't talked to any married heterosexual couples that have felt threatened by same-sex marriages."

Simply put, there aren’t enough hours in the day, what will all the other things I have to worry about. When clouds of the day part, when the demands of art and commerce are met, I selfishly start worrying about my own sex life. I'm not a patriot like Rick Santorum. Indeed, I hardly ever worry about other people's sex lives, excepting them as might intersect with mine.

It is time to confront public figures who espouse this kind of hatred against gay men and lesbians. The men and women who are born with an attraction to the same or rarely, both sexes, deserve to be left alone so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses. It is the Republican party and the so called Christian church that has been overrun by perverts.

Only three groups are so curious about unfamiliar genitals:

* Researchers and physicians, who have legitimate research questions;

* Pornographers, who entertain Americans to the hypocritical tune of $500 million to $1.8 billion dollars a year (the “$10 billion” often cited by crusaders and producers has been shown to be impossible);

* And Republican politicians and evangelical clergymen, who in a world of corruption, pain and ignorance can find nothing better to do their time.

WHO IS PAT ROBERTSON, THAT THOU ARE MINDFUL OF HIM? Mavens of Immoral Morality

It's a funny thing, the moral arbiter business. Chuck Colson was, by all reports, as rapacious a shitheel as any you could find in Washington today, but then he fell from on high, went to jail, found Jesus. I wish him luck. Funny, for all my sins of the flesh, I guess I knew even as a little kid that subverting the Constitution was a bad thing; Colson didn't know that until he was a grown man, and they had to whisk his sorry ass off to jail before he learned his civics lesson. Well, never mind, better late to the party than never arrive at all.

... But then this presumptuous ninny has the audacity to go on the radio and call other people immoral, while making great noises about his own virtue and love for the Lord? Like the Cheech and Chong Jesus Freak who "used to be messed up on drugs; now I'm all messed up on the Lord", Colson is the same nasty little shit he ever was. Once it was his duty to savage anyone who didn't love Richard Nixon; now the same energy is devoted to lashing at the enemies of the Lord. Who are the enemies of the Lord? Chuck Colson's gonna tell you. (Don't bother asking Jesus: just another Jewish liberal.)

Now we have William Bennett, compulsive gambler, verbal bully, education maven and again, a self-proclaimed moral arbiter and "editor" of "The Book of Virtues". My goodness these men are virtuous! They tell us so at every turn! Or rather, they tell us how much more sinful everyone else is. ... (Funny how he tells us what's wrong with our teachers but never actually gets down in the trenches with the foot soldiers trying to teach crack babies to read or telling a popular kid he still has to read the Constitution.)

Ah, Wild Bill: "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

To say the least; the paperwork must be horrendous. Let me simply ask that Bill do some homework: he can total up how much crime was committed by blacks over the last hundred years, and estimate the dollar cost in property loss, earning power of murder victims, and etc. Then he can total up the damages caused by the white power structure he belongs to: world wars, foreign assasinations, property damage, etc. Don't forget the cost of bottled water and the fish in Lake Michigan that can't be eaten by pregnant women anymore.

And Bill will whine: but those are not street crimes, but acts of policy in the name of the state, for Virtue, for Right, for Kate Smith and the Grand Old Flag. For Business, for General Motors for Henry Kissinger, for General Pinochet, in the name of whatever's good for the USA.

The moral audacity of these men! I stand in awe. Anne Coulter must have been binding the sores of lepers day and night in her college years, in order to attain the high moral ground where now she stands. Bill Frist, Tom DeLay, I tell you we are moral midgets next to them. And George W. Bush, a business wrecking alcoholic asshole for forty something years, yes, but a saint for twenty...?

"Heaven for climate, but Hell for society."