Fabiana at Foreign Affairs Blog sums up the Bush/Kerry dymanic in the best, most succinct way I can think of:

Like Bush is nothing without Osama bin Laden, Kerry is nothing without Bush.

You'll laugh, then you'll cry

On treason:

It’s all the rage these days! In fact you may be a traitor and not even know it! Well a lotta traitors start off not even tryin to be traitors, it is just that easy to do! Treason isn't just providin aid an comfort to the enemy. It's providin not-aid an discomfort to America. Treason is hurting America's feelings.Now you may think "oh well Fafnir America's a big country it can take care a itself" but in fact it is very sensitive. When you say its mom's ugly or criticize its foreign policy or kick sand on its face at the beach it is just as hurt as if you'd sold its state secrets. Like every emotional young superpower America needs love and care from its citizens. We've put together a brief guide to treason so you can understand it a little better.

Q: Which of the following is treason?
1. Not wishing the President a happy birthday even when he is clearly wearing a party hat and a "Kiss The Birthday Boy" shirt
2. Questioning the progress, purpose, or justification of the Iraq war
3. Providing material aid to a hostile enemy of the United States
4. Telling America "Hey America yo mama's so fat by the time she bends over it's Daylight Savings Time."

Answer: All of them are treason but number four is the worst treason of all on account of America is real sensitive about the fatness of its mama.

Who else has deep feelings of insecurity when social?

Jeepers Creepers...

Richard Cohen, telling gay men to straighten up their lifestyles, so to speak. As Miami is the AIDS epicenter, it's doubly relevant - and shameful that a heterosexual had to be the one wagging his finger.

Fun blog.

And it only took them 35 years to realize that.

From NYT:

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel will abandon a decades-old policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen, accepting an army panel's assessment that the practice does not deter attacks and should be stopped, the military said Thursday.

I love that Israel still claims the practice as its "legal right," which prompts the question, what doesn't Israel claim as its legal right?

A tidbit of wisdom by Christopher Hitchens that I wanted to share with you all. From a lecture on Thomas Paine:

By the way, every time I hear people saying there won't be a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq, I want to say, “None of my Iraqi or Kurdish friends own any slaves,” so perhaps there won't be, at that.

Show me! Show you!

The three things that made my day:

1. Dowd on our future Prez...
2. The solution we all saw coming for "the SS thing..."
3. Kikkoman revised...

Let's give it up for Ebonics Poet Laureate!

Hands down the funniest newsbite I've read all year! Even more hilarious than anything that annoying Gannon guy ever uttered! Whatchu say Amiri? Say it aint so:

What kind of sleaza is Condoleezza?

One mo time!

What kind of sleaza is Condoleezza?

Sounds like the new Demmie rallying cry...

Gannon for Prez?

Let's give it up for massive left-wing investigators!

“The Gannon ‘scandal’ would be laughable, were it not for the fact that Gannon’s personal privacy has been invaded and his mother, in her 70s, had to endure harassing telephone calls from those on the political left,” said Accuracy in Media (AIM) Editor Cliff Kincaid. “The campaign demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left.”

No, no, Cliff. The reason this is laughable is because of the 70 year old mother! You Reppies have no sense of humor...

And about that "mean-spirited nature of the political left" thing: Who is it that's trying to ban gay marriage, again? Oh hush, now, you patriot, you....

Hitch vs. Hitch

Got this nifty little item from Toddsgirl. She compares and contrasts the new film Hitch and ye Trotskyist of yore, Christopher Hitchens.

—Hitch favors democracy in Iraq and has been a staunch defender of Shiite Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi.
—Hitch star Will Smith was once the "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," suggesting he is a Royalist.

Christopher Hitchen's soon to be published treatise on black America, Doggy Style: America's Unseemly Fascination With All Things Shizzle, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Drop It Like It's Hot, comes out on the first day of the month following March...

Oh Darwin, Where Art Thou?

Found this Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) quote on William Gibson's blog. You know what I thought when I first read that? It's about damn time I begin production on my The O.C. rip-off emo-dramedy, tentatively titled My So-Called Copernicus.

And because no mention of lesbians shall go unnoticed, here's another quote from our favorite nerf-herding troglodyte:

Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?" —Rep. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)

Please, raise your hand (your other hand) if you are thinking about the issue...

Where's Deep Thought when you need it?

Well, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything seems to be...52.

Broken Heart Syndrome...

Is this the real reason Adam never divorced Eve? And if it's true, why aint Michael Moore pushing up daisies? Matter of fact, why didn't I expire in the third grade? Paging Dr. Phil...

Where were you while we were getting high?

Well, obviously not in North Korea, Iran, or Israel...

What's wrong with silly love songs?

Normally not a Paul fan, despite my guarded respect for some of the rather barmy confections scattered on limp albums, I dug up an out of print obscurity from 1986 called "Press to Play" and enjoyed it - guardedly. Here's the review I published in Stylus magazine.

Now's the time for bloggers to read Stylus often if they already aren't. It features some of the most enthusiastic music and film writing on the web. And we're damn better than Pitchfork.

What is Ouch, Mr. Trebek?

Upon reading this news item, I instantly ransacked the nether boulevards of my cranium for fun facts involving torture, Cuba, and the American way. I quickly jotted them all down and took them to my local FOX NEWS affiliate and presented them with a jovial way to pilfer the wacky idea those darn Brits beat us to.

Needless to say, I am now a millionaire and hooking up with Paris Hilton... in France.

2004 Pazz & Jop Poll

The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll, which compiles the top 10 albums and singles from more than 700 critics (and to which I contributed), is up. Rather predictably, Kanye West's "The College Dropout" and Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" won Best Album and Single, respectively.

Editor Robert Christgau's lead essay is rather good, but the Comments section showcases some rather impressive (and frequently vulgar) bits of informal criticism.

Look, Ma! It's a bird! It's a plane!

No, son. It's just the Hubble Telescope taking a suicidal plunge into the Earth's atmosphere....

Was it worth it?

Even the Bush administration's fiercest critics have to acknowledge yesterday's extraordinary results. In perhaps the most succinct defense of what the correct moral position for an anti-Bush supporter of the Iraq war to take, the New York Times' Michael Ignatieff writes in yesterday's magazine:

Liberals can't bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neoconservative bombast. Meanwhile, antiwar ideologues can't support the Iraqis because that would require admitting that positive outcomes can result from bad policies and worse intentions. Finally there are the ideological fools in the Arab world and even a few here at home who think the ''insurgents'' are fighting a just war against American imperialism. All this makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates. The right name for such people is fascists.

Feminism or Victorianism?

In his latest column, George Will posits that one of feminism's most onerous side effects is instilling a Victorian-style prissiness in its disciples. It's his response to the brouhaha that erupted when Harvard president Larry Summers had the temerity to suggest that men and women's brains might be different.

A word from John Adams

In these perilous times, when both the left and right adduces the Framers to justify this or that outrage, it's important to remember the famously, lovably inconsistent John Adams. This is one of my favorite quotes, excerpted from one of his last letters to Thomas Jefferson, addressing the impossibility of relying on the Bible as a first source:

Books that cannot bear examination certainly outght not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws...as long as they continue in force as laws the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity as I understand it is eternal and unchangeable and will bear examination forever but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients [italics mine], which I think will not bear examination and they ought to be separated.

It all depends on what the meaning of "humane" is

Andrew Sullivan lampoons our next attorney general Alberto Gonzalez's rather slippery definition of "humane treatment" in today's post:

So "humane" care can also mean near-drowning, use of electric shocks, beating to a pulp, hooding and rape - as long as the victim has shelter, food, clothing and medical care. Well, scratch the clothing. We keep our prisoners naked these days. And the medical care is often needed just to keep the prisoners from dying at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Alas, that didn't stop over thirty inmates across the war-theater from expiring in suspicious circumstances. Anyway, it's just a useful defnition of "compassionate conservatism." Pummel someone's head in and then hang him from the ceiling. Just give him a sandwich later.

Torture

In this Sunday's New York Review of Books, Andrew Sullivan presents his case against the Bush administration's tacit approval of culture. Part of the problem was a series of overlapping command structures (CIA, military intelligence, officers in charge at Guantanamo Bay) so confusing that it becomes to understand what, in essence, the administration wanted done to its prisoners (many of whom were innocent or at worst guilty of minor crimes). The issue puts those of us who supported the Iraq war and a robust prosecution of Islamic terrorism in a quandary.

Most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents - like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh - were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas. Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential to winning this war

With casual aplomb David Greenberg destroys C.A. Tripp's case for a bisexual Lincoln. More importantly, he questions why critics who should know better (Gore Vidal only the most notable) have accepted Tripp's mixture of speculation and reductiveness so willingly (I haven't even mentioned how awful most of Tripp's prose is. If you're going to write about Lincoln, your prose should at least attempt to rival one of our greatest stylists.).

It's possible that they don't want to align themselves with a position that could seem naive or, worse, anti-gay. Plenty of Lincoln scholars have stuffily refused even to entertain the possibility of Lincoln's bisexuality, either out of an ingrained homophobia or a misguided reverence that borders on idolatry.

American Booksellers Association protests Patriot Act

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in South Florida (as well as president of the American Booksellers Association), had a letter published in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, in which he questions the efficacy of the Patriot Act. He parses his words carefully, but he's pretty firm. (Full disclosure: I was a former employee of Books & Books).

Gore Vidal on Lincoln

Gore Vidal reviews C.A. Tripp's Lincoln biography, which posits that Lincoln was essentially a bisexual man. Vidal accepts the premise with an equanimity that seems out of character, and even quotes a passage of Tripp's leaden prose with nary a disapproving sniffle.

Why we fight

Just when the doubts return about the Iraq war, Christopher Hitchens comes along and gives one a boost.

Below even the bin Laden level, however, there are those who insist that they prefer death to life, and who really mean it. Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction. It's amazing how many people refuse to see this. They persist in saying that it's a protest against something, or a reaction to some injustice.

Sideways -- condescending and contemptuous

I suppose this is my way of trying to get people to go see Sideways for themselves, without listening to critical hyperbole (two critic friends already named it their favorite of the year). There's a great discussion going on at Slate's annual movie club. Great quote from Salon's Charles Taylor:

I don't know how you can watch the scene in Sideways where that fat waitress Church sleeps with has sex with her trucker husband without being bowled over by the contempt coming off the screen. A friend of mine gave the most generous reading of that sequence. He said he felt it showed the sexual openness of their marriage that the husband can respond to her infidelity as a turn-on. Believe me, if I thought the movie said that, I'd trumpet it, because American movies in general are so moralistic about sex. But for that reading to work you'd have to shoot these two people as something other than two more piles of debris in that trashed and trashy house. You'd have to get close to them, which is exactly what Payne, repelled by their fat, will not do.

Sideways -- The year's most overrated film?

In yesterday's New York Times, A.O. Scott takes Sideways to task for gratifying the desires of its audience, most of which, according to Scott, is composed of critics as nebbish-y as the Paul Giamatti character. I think it's overrated too, but for different reasons: director Alexander Payne can't resist pouring snide sauce when the emotional complexities begin to give him the heebies. That said, it's a well-observed film, and Virginia Madsen was a joy to watch.