Archive Listing
January 23, 2009 - January 16, 2009

Thursday, March 13, 2008

THE GOSPEL OF JEFFREY. With all the back and forth in the Democratic campaign over the past few days, people are losing their perspective and getting things wrong. Specifically, they're being swept up in the amount of ink being lavished on individual events and failing to see the difference between a grenade and a bunker-buster. Today, Glenn Reynolds (who also made an erroneous snap judgment of his own this morning) cited The Anchoress as a wise perspective on what's going on:


Her point seems to be that we are at fault if we experience any kind of emotional response to the exchange of revelations between opposing campaigns. This time, The Anchoress is wrong.

So is the lede of the USA Today piece linked by HotAir.com.


What could be...? USA Today is wrong.

And Glenn Reynolds offered the following post, reproduced here word for word:


Glenn Reynolds is wrong. However they surfaced -- which was inevitable despite The Anchoress's uncharacteristically irrelevant concern with how they surfaced -- the video excerpts from the sermons of Jeremiah Wright are the only significant revelation that occurred this week. (Ferraro's faux-pas will be as insignificant as she is in two weeks time.) They are also fatal to Obama's chances of winning the presidency. They are probably equally fatal to Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the presidency. It's up to the Democrat Party to figure out how to deal with the catastrophe, but catastrophe it is, and there are multiple reasons why.

Everyone has been bending over backwards to give Obama the benefit of every doubt, including all Democrats, the fawning MSM, and the many many conservatives who would also like to enter a post-racial era of politics. That's the prime reason for The Anchoress's rare lapse of good judgment. Citizens in the electorate who perceive, emotionally or intellectually, that they are conceived of as "the enemy" by a presidential candidate can't be accused of "not making any sense" if they suddenly become intensely skeptical of that candidate. They have every right -- an infinitely greater right, in fact, than any candidate for the highest office in the land has to an unlimited benefit of the doubt about the sincerity of his rhetoric. The candidate's prime mission is to convince voters that he (or she) is not serving some narrow slice of the electorate at the expense of all others. If he fails to do this, he has not earned the office. Period.

For a variety of reasons, we all know very little about Barack Obama. His life has been much like his campaign persona, featuring some point of contact for all people. If you're poor and black, he at least is black. If you're white and highly educated, he at least is highly educated. If you're a struggling single mother, he at least was raised by a single mother. If you're a Catholic or a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Baptist, he at least belongs to a nominally Christian church. If you're anybody who believes in the American Dream, he is at least, regardless of policy differences, a living embodiment of the American Dream. He has a finger in every pie. His speeches have been analogous. He wants things to be better. He wants less rancorous partisanship. He wants less conflict between America and the rest of the world. And he asserts his confidence, ever so believably, that all these utopian goals can be achieved because he is all of us, in one way or another.

But we don't know very much about him because the part of him to which any of us can relate is only a sliver. Hardly any of us had a white American college professor for a mother and a Kenyan muslim for a father. Hardly any of us spent large chunks of our youth living in non-European foreign countries. Hardly any of us went to the Harvard Law School. Hardly anyone in American history has been propelled to the summit of national politics with such frighteningly scant experience. He is the promising stranger who seems too good to be true. But he is a stranger, even to the 91 percent of genuine African-Americans who support him knowing that he shares none of their ancestry of slavery. And he is too good to be true.

The truth is, he is none of us. Which is absolutely fine for any individual citizen of the United States. But not for someone who aspires to be president of the United States. Ultimately, we all require some connection that goes beyond lofty phrases in speeches read off a teleprompter. The damage that will simmer and ultimately explode out of the Jeremiah Wright association is that Obama is a phony, no matter how he chooses to respond. Whether he defends his racist, anti-American pastor of 20 years or repudiates him with extreme prejudice. In his heart of hearts Obama understands nothing and no one, because he has never belonged anywhere or truly participated in anything. Which is why he has consistently gone overboard in trying to belong everywhere he's ever been. In the process, he has initiated a chain reaction that will do in his party, his rivals, the people he claims to want to serve, and himself.

He seems to present a forest of contradictions. His classmates at Harvard Law School, including his close associates at the Harvard Law Review, seem to remember him as a great guy, tolerant, friendly, and fair. Yet he chooses to be a member of a church that foments a continuous and deeply counter-productive racial rage. He forms a friendship with an over-privileged Vietnam-era radical terrorist whose knowledge of how to play "the system" is so advanced that he can cop a plea for bombing the U.S. Capitol and emerge from prison into a professorship without ever expressing a moment's remorse. Yet he marries a middle-class African-American woman who has had every conceivable advantage and who now, on the verge of becoming First Lady of the nation, publicly voices a churlish disrespect not only for her country but for white people. men generally, and even the husband who has opened up the golden path to power. He prospers politically through a murky relationship with a Chicago operator who has relationships with multiple dubious moneymen from the Wahabbi middle east that have benefited him politcally and personally. Yet he slams his female presidential rival for releasing a photo of him in muslim dress and objects to the speaking out loud of his own middle name.

Who is Barack Obama? There is only one thread of consistency in all these contradictions -- his distance from everyone in his life, save possibly the mother he chose to ignore in an autobiography focused on his distant, abandoning father. Barack Obama is whoever he happens to be around, whoever the emotionally strong people in his life choose to surround him with, whoever it serves him to be at the moment.

The argument is being made that Obama must hate America because he went to Jeremiah Wright's church, got married there, had his children baptized there, and contributed $20K to it in 2006. That's wrong, too. It's Michelle Obama who hates America, who believes the vile propaganda of yet anothe rich, phony, one-church Pope, who wanted to be married in a Farrakhan-esque cult denomination, and have her children baptized there. Obama was just reflecting her wishes because she was authentic African-American and he was merely determined to belong. She knows this. That's why she can barely conceal her contempt for him.

There is no Barack Obama. Everyone who meets him makes up their own version of him. He is an outstanding orator becaue he has learned to read the desire of those around him about who they want him to be and then to reflect and fulfill that desire. It has worked for him every step of the way until now. Be the ball? He is the words he says. When he says them. That's his whole identity, the wave of affirmation that flows back from the crowd when he has been a clear enough mirror.

He has been too many things to too many different people. But all those people expect to see what they're expecting to see every time, and it's no longer possible in the simultaneous pressures of a presidential campaign. Even he doesn't know how different he is from venue to venue and person to person. That's why he doesn't know how to recognize the urgency of repudiating Jeremiah Wright in absolute and unforgiving terms. There's a part of him that believes in the AIDS conspiracy, just as there's a part of him that believes in the fundamental decency of all the guilty liberals who admired and promoted him at the Harvard Business School.

All of this could possibly be overcome if he had any feel for the deep diversity of the American electorate. But he doesn't. From first to last, he's always been an outsider. He doesn't understand at all -- and neither does USA Today's eager young reporter -- that African-Americans have been on a deadly collision course with feminists since the mid-seventies. These two apparent and frequently avowed allies have been competing for the same finite pool of extra privileges all along, and because there are more women and more of the women are white, it is the feminists who have done more to slow the de-racialization of America than any other force. The feminists' anti-male propaganda has inevitably done far more damage to African-American males and their role in families than it has done to white men. The feminists' gradual achievement of female hegemony over child ownership, child-rearing, and abortion decisions has done more to destroy the black family and promote the epidemic of children born out of wedlock than any conspiracy Jeremiah Wright could ever dream up. The resistance -- in the virulent form of hip-hop hatred of women -- has made racism and sexism into the two supposedly allied causes that were destined to go finally and horribly to war with one another.

Regardless of how the campaign war turns out, both sides have been crippled. Obama cannot win because there is no one inside the gauzy, unreal image to battle through the contradictions to a mandate based on character rather than a mosaic of sliver identities. His white vote will shrivel as ordinary Americans discover they can't determine where his allegiance lies, unless it's to himself only. Women will sit on their hands because they've seen enough of the slick young operator who waltzes in at the last moment and swipes the opportunity from the deserving veteran female (and being half-white doesn't help him in this respect). But Hillary can't win, either, because of the one-drop rule. Even though Obama is not and never was an African-American, he has always been black enough to benefit from the superannuated slave culture that forgives every corruption and hypocrisy in those who have any claim on being black. If Hillary is the nominee, African-Americans will stay home in significant numbers. Unlike Jeremiah Wright, John McCain is the irascible uncle we'd go to for help in a pinch, not hide from because of the revolver he keeps in a cigar box.

At the end of the day, Reverend Wright is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the poison in the well. Like Moses, he can never accompany his chosen ones to the promised land When his people finally learn to stop following his like, they will find what they seek, as if by magic. But for now, the horse he groomed for them is scratched at the gate.

If you think we're wrong, you do not yet understand the power of YouTube.


It will "never stop, never stop, never stop..."


UPDATE. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link. I owe him an apology. When he didn't link this post quickly enough to suit me, I sent him a cranky email. InstaPunk's customary arrogance is a persona that's a useful tool on a satirical website but has no place in other kinds of correspondence. Glenn has proved he's a fairer man than I am. We'll see if I can do better in future.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

BRITABUSE. All right. I admit it. The headline was the whole motivation for the post. All that's left is a review by one Nicholas Shakespeare of a book on terrorists by his fellow Brit, Michael Burleigh. I know I should end the entry right now with a link to the book review in question, but I'm a stubborn cuss, and I can't help looking for some meaning to justify the grandiloquence of my headline. My apologies [Leave. Go. Get the hell out of here. I have absolutely NOTHING to say today that's worth reading]. Still here? Damn.

At least I'm not blogging about Eliot Spitzer. That's probably why you're still reading. Nothing is more boring than Eliot Spitzer. Not even Nicholas Shakespeare. And truthfully (???), the review does illuminate the profound death wish of the Brit intellectual caste. They are all so absent emotion that one could cut their throats and their final gurgled words would be a critique of your technique. Here are some excerpts from the review:

Michael Burleigh's theme: the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists - the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation" with their crusade to realise "a world that almost nobody wants", all in the hope of an afterlife featuring 72 virgins and rivers foaming with honey and beer...

Burleigh has read and travelled enough to express an impeccable contempt for the "theoretical gobbledygook" of the IRA or the "stunningly tedious" ideology of the New Left, while sharing the bemusement of the kidnapped German industrialist Hans Schleyer "at the incredible ignorance his captors [the Red Army Faction] demonstrated about the higher workings of the German economy"...

Meinhof's co-revolutionary Andreas Baader embodies many of the resentful and narcissistic traits that Burleigh identifies in his subjects: sour, lazy nobodies, ugly, of febrile imagination and indifferent talent, who can only become somebody by blowing others, inevitably persons more talented and intelligent, up....

Burleigh parades an arsenal of facts, and the cumulative effect is undeniable. Only with his claim that the tactic of terror "never amounted to more than an irritant", and was not crucial in forcing colonial powers to leave Palestine and Algeria, not to mention acceding to power in Ireland and South Africa, do I depart from his thesis....

Burleigh shares in his prose style something of the pitiless monotone with which his targets engage with the world. He finds little room for levity in over 500 pages, except where his keenness to be up to date gets the better of him. He has his finger on the pulse, but his foot on the pedal....

Blood & Rage is in all sorts of ways an outstanding book; it is also fuelled by the manic energy and focus of someone accelerating a truckload of intellectual high-explosives into the gates of a "stunningly" credulous soft-liberal establishment, composed of "colluding" human rights lawyers and "celebrity useful idiots" such as Tariq Ali, whom Burleigh witheringly chastises for having "progressively marginalised high intellectual endeavour" while at the same time conspiring to convert cosmopolitan London into the Islamic haven of "Londonistan"...

Al Qa'eda's chief military spokesman in Europe puts it best: "You love life and we love death." If there are no flies on Burleigh, there are plenty on the moribund dogmas of those he dissects. [emphasis added]

An academic subject, terrorism. Really. Something to pass the time when no one else wants to discuss something important, like the unutterably depressing brilliance of Graham Greene novels. So here we have the passionless reviewing the passionless and noting passionlessness as a stylistic fault.

You know, the Brits are just fucking DONE.

Maybe I should have blogged about Eliot Spitzer. Even he is more intriguing than Brit intellectuals.

Sorry.

BRIZONI! Where the HELL are you when we need you?!

Monday, March 10, 2008

ELABORATION. The other day I made a passing reference to basketball as the "worst team sport played in America." I feel I should qualify and explain that statement. The qualification is that strictly as a game, basketball isn't nearly as awful as soccer. But basketball is still more immediately worse for Americans. That explanation takes a little longer, and it's a two parter. There are things I hate about the game itself, and then there's stuff beyond that. I'll tackle them in order.

The Game Itself

1. Five on the Court

The fewer the players, the more likely it is that one player can utterly dominate a team, for better or worse -- and mostly for worse. Basketball's concept of the Big Man represents more of a distortion of the team concept than anything else in true team sports. A Wilt Chamberlain or a Michael Jordan has more specific gravity on a squad than any all-pro quarterback, all-star power hitter, or ace pitcher. Even an over-hyped national hero like David Beckham is only one of fifteen on an incomprehensibly larger field of play. Which brings me to my next objection.

2. The Court

It's so small that it could be, and has been, outgrown by the sheer size of the players. A football field is still long enough that no quarterback can pass from one end zone to another. The geometry of a baseball field is still so perfectly neutral that a small man can smack a single through the gap between short and second, drive a triple into the gap between left and center field, or even lay down a bunt hit between the pitcher and the catcher. And hockey, the second most constricted major team sport, retains more separation between the fans and the players, thanks to the boards and the plexiglass wall that protects spectators from the puck and, mostly, from player aggression. None of these structural constraints still exists in basketball. Quite ordinary players can execute the slam-dunk that was never dreamed of by the game's founder, who thought the ten-foot height of the net was an equalizer, not an incentve for seeking out seven-foot anomalies as if they were great athletes. And, yes, there are still tiny dynamos like Alan Iverson, but even their greatness is no longer a function of team play, but of their unique ability to navigate a small giant-filled space all alone, like a broken-field runner in a dense forest of sequoias.

3. The Court

No, it's not a misprint. The basketball court is not a playing field. It's a theater. That's why basketball coaches are scrutinized and critiqued as if they were themselves players. They affect costumes, they stalk and pace and gesture and vocalize like actors on Broadway, and generally speaking, they are performers of a sort that would be unthinkable in baseball, football, hockey AND soccer. An obvious additional implication is that when the coach is a theatrical perfomer, his players are more than mere athletes. They, too, become -- at least to some extent -- actors, closer to WWE wrestlers than to, say, NFL prima donnas like Terrell Owens, who confines his antics to the times outside the whistles that start and end playing time.

4. The Court

If the court is so small that it's inevitably jammed with oversized perfomers, what chance do the referees have to be effective? There's no way they can be distant enough from the action to get good angles on who did what to whom. In fact, they're forced to compete with the players for the approval of the audience, and so they call their calls with more authority than accuracy. They also understand the rules of performance better than the refs in any other sport. It's more important to be quick and dramatic than correct. It's more important that the audience enjoy the show than that the rules of the game be enforced in a context where the rules are simply inadequate to the momentum of the game. That's why no NBA player is ever called for "walking," which is endemic and ludicrously unenforced. The result: the most critical rules in the game -- fouls, charging, goal-tending, and technical fouls -- are changing the results of games without any justifying percentage of accuracy. The refs have made basketball, at all levels of the sport, into roller-derby.

The Other Stuff

All of these game weaknesses have combined to make basketball an American cultural disaster as well.

1. Basketball as fashion.

The goddamn spinnaker uniform (derived from oversized prison garb) is reason enough by itself to cease watching the games. Who wants to see them flapping down the court like Victorian whores in bloomers?

2. Basketball as cultural pied-piper.

The thuggery that has become common in interactions among coaches, players, and fans is disgusting. Too much jewelry. Too many gangster vehicles, specifically Cadillac Escalades. Too many gun and drug arrests. Too many incidents of player-fan violence. At least in professional wrestling, the violence is mostly rehearsed and fake. When Artest attacks a fan or Kobe Bryant (allegedly) rapes a, uh, fan, the violence is all too real and we're all diminished and degraded. Worse, we don't seem to be realizing that fact.

3. Basketball as Organizational Model.

Star basketball players don't have to learn how to lead, sacrifice, or get along with others. They just have to throw their weight around. They can get coaches fired, supporting players traded or benched, and they can get the law enforcement organizations in their vicinity to back off. Just the model kids need if they're going to be good husbands, successful fathers, productive citizens, and efficient business partners. In fact, if you wanted to teach a kid how to be the worst possible member of a community, what better example could you proffer him than a lavishly admired basketball player in college or the pros?

4. Basketball as the African-American Dream.

Like everyone else, I've enjoyed movies like Coach Carter and Glory Road. But I HATE the overwhelming fixation on basketball in the African-American community. It is not and will never be the way out of poverty and deprivation. The stars who made the movies weren't basketball players at Duke or the Lakers. Basketball teams are tiny, and the number of people who can ever hope to compete successfully at the NBA, college, or high school level is correspondingly small. It doesn't matter at all in the global demographics of the situation that a successful basketball player can get a college scholarship based on his abilities. No matter how good he (or she) is, the chances of a college basketball player graduating with a degree are very slim, and much much much worse than that is the fact that the thousands of hours devoted to basketball by youngsters would be far better spent learning math, science, English, art, and history. The feel-good movies that are supposed to demonstrate the reality of American opportunity are, in fact, cruel vandals of opportunity.

Every time I see a movie featuring middle or upper-middle class African-Americans where suit-and-tied Dad goes out to shoot a few hoops with his sports-obsessed son, I want to shoot up the screen with a shotgun. The truth is, basketball just might be the worst thing that ever happened to African-Americans in this country, even worse than slavery itself. Why?

As I pointed out above, it's NOT a team sport;. it's a star sport. Which leads to egomaniacal and narcissistic behavior that we've seen repeatedly from NBA millionaires who should be role models but are the opposite instead.

Basketball is also peculiarly conducive to making individuals feel like better athletes than they are. It's got a pernicious "one-thing" practice delusion, meaning that you and a basketball and a net can practice all alone in a way that you won't find in any other team sport except hockey, which -- thank God -- is still mostly played by Canadians and New Englanders. It's possible to practice and practice and pactice and ultimately convince yourself that you're a great basketball player because you can sink shots from anywhere on the court. (Otherwise, we wouldn't have the scourge of all those 5' 3" nerds who want to play us one-on-one at the YMCA). But it's a lie. You don't become Michael Jordan or Wilt Chamberlain or Kobe Bryant or LeBron James by practicing obsessively. You start out as one of those spectacularly gifted guys and refine your skills through practice and gifted one-on-one coaching. On the other hand, the same degree of devotion and persistence -- even without the million-dollar coach -- can make you a businessman, an entrepreneur, an attorney, an adminstrator, or -- if you pay as much attention to class as to B-ball -- a doctor.

4. That Ghetto-Chain Net.

I hate this image more than anything above. To me, basketball is the perpetuation of slavery. The odds of basketball freeing anyone from poverty are as bad as counting on the lottery to win a fortune. Seeing a chain instead of a net is like seeing another nail in a continent-wide coffin.

My libertarian leanings prevent me from seeking the abolition of basketball. But if we were to abolish basketball -- or if the people who claim to be trying to help African-Americans contrived to ban basketball -- the single biggest imprisoning illusion in the country would be vanguished and millions upon millions of kids would be suddenly freed to divert their energies to productive pursuits like learning, academic accomplishment, economic achievement, family creation, scientific curiosity. mathematical precision, and too many other good things to list.


I HATE basketball. I especially hate the squeegee sounds their thousand-dollar sneakers make on hardwood. Like fingernails on a blackboard. But, then, I know what fingernails on a blackboard sound like. I must be one of those white-boy geeks.

Friday, March 07, 2008

MANHOOD. They're coming for us, gents. While you've been watching the NFL and NASCAR and Jessica Alba's tush, they've been talking the womenfolk and the hyper-educated nerds into a new social contract. If you thought what you've overheard about the Global Warming scare was just the adrenalin rush people who don't care about sports use to get excited about something, you were wrong. They've massed along all our borders, and they're about to hit us from all sides. The scariest part is the women. They think the Obama dude is sexy because he does hours of foreplay from the pulpit and his wife has more balls and attitude than he does. They love him to death. Here's how the weeny Protein Wisdom explains the peculiar photo above:


The nerds don't know anything about Ford tractors. They don't know that the front-end "bullet" is hardly sexy without a big boost from fancy computer software:


And they don't know that they're not looking at the future, but at a long defunct and drearily decrepit past:


What you don't understand is that all this talk about hope and change is really their hope that they can change us and everything we care about. They want to make life about being slow and careful and obedient and submissive. They want to take our cars away and replace them with this:


Worse, we have traitors in our midst. Even guys who care about cars are all tangled up in female fashion bullshit. For example, there's a guy pretending to be on our side who posted this:


Nice, huh. But get a load of what he said:


I'm sure he prefers 21st Century, eco-correct fashion like this:


Whereas, I'd trade that SUV queen-saint of CSI Miami any day of the week for the understandably screwed up, confused and betrayed hellions of Miami Vice, pink tee-shirts and all. How about you?

Just so you know. They want to take it ALL away. Here are the things they now deem as vile as child pornography. If you didn't know this before, you do now. You have no more excuse. Click and look at what you will be condemned and persecuted for. (btw, if you don't know how YouTube works, you can get a full-screen version by clicking on the extreme right-hand icon of this control bar:

.

Got it?

Now behold the new version of evil, male, anti-social, anti-planet neanderthalism:

Freedom

Justice.

Anticipation.

Aspiration.

Seditious Fun.

The first step is to reduce us to this -- nostalgic shadows of our former selves:

The Twilight Ride.

The end game is to replace our lively and unpredictable lust for life with the inert monoliths that symbolize the masculinity of tyrants and dictators. The more their statues look like viagra-style erections, the more dead the people under them are and the less they're allowed to do. Think of it as cock and no balls. Fossilized virility. Just like that dead Ford tractor above (and the testicle-free bozo sitting on it). That's what they really want us to be. It's their ideal.




Is it time to maybe start paying attention, you distracted bastards? Time to start reminding the fairer and duller among us that it ain't the meat but the motion?

Do what you want. If you can't see it, I'm pretty much done with you. All of you.

DEATH BY INCHES. No matter who wins, Obama or Hillary will wage a war of attrition against personal freedom, disguised as a war against general danger. Think of it as a wolf in golden retriever's clothing. They're so smart, and they want so much to help us, they can't not go all out to protect us from ourselves. God save us from their love.

But we the people are as responsible for our personal, individual freedom as the government is. National defense we habitually leave entirely to the government to manage. The Democrats seem to believe that the only actual fighting-and-killing offensive they can sanction in the whole War on Terror is against one man: Osama bin Laden.

But if President Clinton should personally shoot bin Laden in the head during a "police-action" firefight in the first month of her administration, would that end terrorism? Would tens of millions of actively militant Muslims just... run out of steam? Would Chechnyan rebels stop eyeing elementary schools to take hostages (Oh, it was just the one time, and it's both jingoistic and racist to imply they'll do it again... Sorry. Didn't realize it was merely a fluke. I withdraw my previous slander.) Would the major Palestinian political parties cease hating Israel enough to stop attacking nightclubs and goddamn seminaries? Not bloody likely.

The attack on the seminary happened last night. Probably while you were watching the CSI rerun. (Damn that writers' strike, anyway.) It wasn't a simple organized massacre carried out by grubby malcontents. Hamas, the Palestinian party in power, has triumphantly claimed responsibility. Imagine if the National Action Party periodically launched attacks on schools, nightclubs, pizza parlors, and army bases in El Paso and San Antonio. (Hey, we'll give them Austin. They want to be punished, don't they?) Imagine if crowds all across Mexico cheered and celebrated when attacks on authentic parts of Texas were successfully carried out, smearing co-eds across the grave of Sam Houston in, well, a bloody jelly punctuated by severed heads. Does that give you some perspective? At all?

Or, if this is easier for you, imagine California's Republican Party -- led obviously by evangelical Christians and a few well groomed Mormons -- waged similar guerilla warfare throughout Baja. Imagine coupon-clipping soccer moms and Boston Pops patrons celebrating over the dismembered corpses of cheerleaders whose MySpace pages evinced excessive fondness for Obama, astrology, and Global Warming.

Here's the Awful Question: What will we do when our new president proves persistently committed to his/her humiliatingly doomed "Diplomacy on Terror" (Gee, for some reason they still want us dead. We were nice and everything, too)? Am I the only one looking for any excuse at all not to inaugurate the "Vigilante Foreign Policy"? Or is that starting to smell good to more than a handful of troglodyte Obama skeptics?

What will we do? What will you do? Anything?

Me, I'm pricing pistol-grip shotguns.

TGIF. It's not the Friday Follies, because nobody around here is dancing. Did you look at any of the news this morning? Is this what they mean by "March Madness"? I guess not. That's actually a reference to the worst team sport played in America. Apart from politics, that is.

Anyhow. With so much silliness going on, it's definitely not a day for serious essays or deep thoughts. I mean, who can talk about the gender-race showdown between Gloria Steinem and Michelle Obama over who's the most subjugated victim in the U.S. presidential race when the real race is being run in socially enlightened Amsterdam on stiletto heels?

Everywhere you look, there are new phony controversies. Did anyone really need Prince Charles to weigh in on Global Warming and decide for us which scientists are right and which are "sheer madness"? No doubt, such judgments were reached at a colloquium of well born Brits like this one.


And then there are the acts of individual animal cruelty which have become the basis for condemning whole groups of people. Is it really fair that because one golfer murdered one hawk, the mass media should be painting the entire PGA as sociopathic killers? Personally, I don't think so. I think they should be ashamed of themselves.

Even St. Patrick's Day has been dragged into the phony controversy trap. An Irish pub owner in Manhattan has banned the singing of Danny Boy just because the words to the Irish tune weren't written by an Irishman. He also says it's too sad. Oh really. Like the Irish have something against sad songs. Here's a version of Danny Boy everyone ought to be able to live with.



The French decided to top everybody by pretending they've just discovered that French women are sexual predators and French men are chickenshit wussies. Who on earth didn't already know that? There's documentary evidence from way back in 1992 below the fold, but it's fairly NSFW, so be warned.

If you're too good to look, see you next week.

P.S. btw, we DID warn you to keep an eye on Samantha Power. But do you ever listen...?

P.P.S. Our post about the cars we imprinted on at the age of 17 has drawn some breathtaking responses, which we've published photos of in an update. If you want to come clean yourselves, we'll continue to update the entry. It's highly therapeutic. And fun.

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