Five Before Chaos

You’d think I dropped off the face of the earth, no? Hectic time, brain is about as useful as a rutabaga right now. Serves me right, as I watched Oliver Stone’s three and a half hour “Nixon” last night. Not bad, if you can deal with the ever-present Stone conspiracy theories. Anthony Hopkins, although not a dead-ringer for Tricky Dick, did a fine job of  it. When I saw the scene where Nixon went to the Lincoln Memorial in the wee hours of the morning and actually talked with some protesters, I thought it was a Stone dramatic fabrication, but lo-and-behold, it actually happened:

Before dawn the next morning, Nixon impulsively wakened his valet and set off with a clutch of Secret Service men for the Lincoln Memorial, where he talked for an hour with a group of drowsy but astonished demonstrators. His discussion rambled over the sights of the world that he had seen — Mexico City, the Moscow ballet, the cities of India. When the conversation turned to the war, Nixon told the students: “I know you think we are a bunch of so and so’s.” He said to them, the President recalled Chamberlain was the greatest man living and that Winston Churchill was a madman. It was not until years later that I realized that Churchill was right.” He confessed afterwards: “I doubt if that got over.”

Whoda thunk? Anyways, hopefully you’ll get some more of me next week, but in the meantime, I leave you this to reflect upon over the weekend:

Tremayne at Open Left has a blurb on the ongoing right wingnut meltdown. Empty heads are exploding everywhere. It’s amazing how goddamn afraid conservatives are of, well, just about everything:

Fear of communism

Fear of black people voting

Fear of women in the workplace

Fear of hippies

Fear of people having sex

Fear of gay people

Fear of immigrants

Fear of people not speaking English

Fear of baggy pants

Fear of gays in the military

Fear of big government

Fear of their handguns being taken

Fear of terrorism

Fear of the thought of gay people having sex

Fear of gay people getting married

And now, fear of the “most dangerous man ever to occupy the Whitehouse.”

One glaring omission: fear of intellect and free thought.

Ooooga-booga! It’s funny with the whole impending Gitmo closing, a common cry of the pantscrappers is that somehow that when we bring these so-called “terrorists” to the U.S. for due process and the like, that somehow they’re a threat, as though they’re gonna pull a Castor Poe and go all ConAir, breaking out en route and unleashing all sorts of horrors on an unsuspecting public. The actuality of the situation is they’ll be chained and under armed guard right from Gitmo to Leavenworth or wherever else they end up. The really funny thing is that for a group of tough-talking/warmongering folks, they sure do seem like a bunch of wusses, no?

Have a good weekend. Skiing will happen… again.

Ok, you just can’t make this shit up… unless, of course, you work for American International Pictures, the studio responsible for many, many fine and not-so-fine grindhouse flicks. “It seemed like a good idea at the time… the white bigot was dying and the black soul brother needed more time to prove his innocence… so they transplanted the white head onto the black body!” Stuff like this is why I love these films… Truly craptacular.

Whew, had a scare moment this a.m., as I came here and got the “please install WordPress screen”, which subsequently drained the color from my face. THanks to the whizzes at Bluehost’s tech support, it’s all set. Somehow got a corrupted database.

Between skiing, studying and usual weekend mild-to-moderate partying, I’ve been sort of out of the loop in regards to the Inauguration festivities well underway, apparently, as our socialist senator form VT would say, they’re “YOOOJ!”. I do think the inaugural festivities are a tad overblown, but I’m going to give the whole thing a pass, simply for the reason that I don’t remember a time in my life that I remember so many Americans actually really excited about something not inherently evil (such as bombing brown people, etc. ). So let ‘em have their fun. And for you on the outer reaches of the political spectrum, whether left or right, if you’d deny the significance of this thing, no other way to say it: you’re a dick.

I haven’t really watched any of the Bush farewell stuff, as I dont’ give a rat’s ass what that clueless fucktard has to say about anything. Bush leaving office is akin to the whole world taking a big shit they’ve been holding in for 8 years. It certainly does feel good to poop.

… is out. I usually don’t go for these end of the year list things, but the Beast’s spares no one, and is pretty spot on. And like I reported on last year, the best one is #43…you (well, not you FBC readers, of course… everyone else):

43. You

Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Hillary lost because of sexism, when it’s actually because she’s just a bad liar. You think Iraq is better off now than before we invaded, and don’t understand why they’re so ungrateful. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehoods and resent enlightenment. You think the fact that 43% of whites could stomach voting for an incredibly charismatic and eloquent light-skinned black guy who was raised by white people means racism is over. You think progressive taxation is socialism. 1 in 100 of you are in jail, and you think it should be more. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.

Exhibit A: You’re more upset by Miley Cyrus’s glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.

Sentence: Invaded and occupied by Canada; all military units busy overseas without enough fuel to get back.

You can read the whole list here. More skiing this weekend, yay!

The Rude One says goodbye to The Worst President Evah:

There’s one final myth about this President that the Rude Pundit would like to put to rest: George W. Bush is not a man you would want to have a beer with. No, not because if you saw him in a bar, you’d react like you had gone on the sex offender registry in Dallas and discovering that a guy who fucked babies in his basement was now living in the downstairs apartment. It’s that, despite any feints at finding him charming, he is not, in his soul, a kind or decent person.

Often times it seems that the braindead nonsense you hear from the Rapture-ready™ crowd makes Catholics look sane by comparison. Yeah, they still have the zombie Jesus thing going on, as well as a lot of other ridiculousness that is specifically Catholic, such as the existence of the Pope, the virgin birth (how many other women use that excuse when cheating?), original sin, etc. To its credit, it’s at least acknowledged evolution, but it’s still in the dark ages in regards to sex and many other things. Ultimately, it’s just another variation on the same fairytale bullshit, with the major difference being that it used to run much of the known back in the day, and killed a lot of brown people, too.

Now, I was born a Catholic. And everytime I go off on one of my atheistic ramblings to my mother, she expresses sorrow that she “didn’t take me to church more.”. Taking me to church was what had a lot to do with being an atheist in the first place (well, that and reading about dinosaurs, which first gave me the idea that somebody was full of shit). One truly doesn’t grasp the ridiculousness of it all until they witness it first hand. I suppose if I had been brought up in a fundie church, it would have been different, as I would have been begging social services to take me away, as my parents were subjecting me to huge amounts of seriously delusional and irrationally acting people on a regular basis, with their idiotic glossolalia gibberish, bad modern music, and eyes-closed-hands wavin’ in the air like a lady giving a good ride. With Catholicism, it’s more like zombies. The music sucks, the people get up and down and mindlessly recite tons of garbage, some of it of the demeaning “Lord, I am not worthy” nonsense. I guess it’s just basically a more downer way of believing in the same fairy tales.

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-26 -27.3 -28 degrees outside right now… Is that cold?