I Wonder What Rick Perry's Been Up To ...

I'm disappointed that I used all my best one-liners on Texas governor and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry last night. This is because I just saw the most amazing piece of tape and just realized that he really deserves a post of his own, even though he has zero chance of being the nominee.

First, I want to make a point I wanted to include in last night's essay, but left out so it wouldn't take six months to read.  I have a real bug up my ass about sitting office-holders, especially executives, running for one office while holding another. I'm not as aggravated when legislators do it because they're a dime a dozen. The United States Senate, for example, didn't run any better or worse without Barack Obama and John McCain there.

But executives, like governors, are different. They are the seat of power in their states. If you look at recent presidential elections with incumbent governors running, you learn something shocking. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush spent twelve and eighteen months out their respective states to campaign for their parties nomination and the presidency. That means that they spent upwards of half of their final terms not doing their fucking jobs. Sure, Clinton would go home to suffocate a retard,* which would be illegal today, so that a sex or draft scandal might go away, but more often than not, he was out of Arkansas. And that goes double for Bush.

If the Tea Party gets their much-sought after Constitutional Convention, they gain at least a little respect from me by passing an amendment specifically prohibiting sitting governors from running for president. You could theoretically take the Tenth Amendment position that the states could pass such a law, but can you think of a single governor that would sign it?

As you all know, my dream candidate this year was Mitch Daniels, the incumbent governor of Indiana. But I would have hoped that he would resign his office at the moment that he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, and I would have forcefully criticized him if he didn't. It seems to me to be intellectually inconsistent to piss and moan and Obama golfing - which Republicans never did about the second President Bush setting a record for vacation days - while supporting a governor that is out his state for months at a time.

Let's assume that Perry's candidacy is anything other than a painkiller-induced hallucination and he actually won the nomination. By election day, Governor Perry would have spent a full fifteen months out of Texas during a truly ruinous economic period. Sure, I hold Perry in special contempt because I think that he's a moron and a fucking murderer, but I also support the general principle. You can't run as an executive if you're busy not being an executive because you're running for another office. Two recent presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, seemed to do well as former governors. Mitt Romney will probably be nominated five years and a half years after leaving his only elected executive office with a 43% approval rating.

But that's not what I want to write about this morning, Rick Perry's stellar ignorance of almost everything is. Just looka this, teenagers.

 

How fucking great is that? It's abundantly clear that Perry has no idea that he knows what he's talking about, so he veers into talking points and accusations of "gotcha questions" toward a guy who sounds like he retired from the Albanian military in 1976 and is highly unlikely to be a mole from the hated New York Times.

For the unititaed Lawrence v. Texas, is an important test of just how "small government" you are. Most Republicans and busybody religious types fail the test in ways that only astronomers can properly measure. If, for example, you think that limited government should act as a butt-plug, you should probably see a psychiatrist.

Lawrence overturned the hilariously named 1986 ruling of Bowers v. Hardwick. In both Bowers and Lawrence, police entered a private domicile without a warrant and arrested homos for doing what homos do in their private domiciles, that being fucking (in Lawrence ) and sucking (in Bowers.) In the ironically nicknamed Whizzer White's majority ruling in Bowers, the right of sexual privacy extended only to procreative sex. That being the case, the state had the right to throw you in the can for ass or face fucking, be you gay or straight. I think it was wrong, but you can at least make a coherent argument in defense of Bowers.

By the time Lawrence came before the Court, the state laws had radically changed. 11 of the 13 states impacted by Bowers had changed their sodomy laws, specifically allowing for straight cocksucking and ass-fucking, but denying it to gays. That's a straight Fourteenth Amendment equal protection case that you can't argue against without being slack-jawed. The Lawrence minority specifically said that the states could pass a law allowing a given activity for one social group while criminalizing it for others, in direct defiance of both the spirit and the letter of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Do the facts in Lawrence fly in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment? It's almost legally and logically impossible to argue that they don't. The facts also make a pretty persuasive Fourth Amendment case, too. So what are you left with?

Look, I'd respect the opponents of the Lawrence decision if they just came out and said that they oppose it because God Hates Fags. But they won't. Perversely, they won't argue the legal or constitutional merits of their position either, mostly because they're silly. Instead, they argue on ridiculous grounds like "societal impact", "incest" and "bestiality" - what I like to call the "Santorum Default Position." They ignore the long-held conservative belief that the law and the Constitution mean what they say, or they don't.

Lawrence, unlike Bowers, wasn't about cocksucking or buttfucking as a general proposition. It was very narrowly about gay cocksucking and buttfucking, since the state in question had legalized it for straights, as had most others where the law was applicable. And you just can't do that, which is, in large part, where my support for gay marriage comes from.

If you take the Santorum Default Position, you pretty much deserve to have your name publicly associated with ass-lube and feces, This is because you aren't arguing the Tenth or Fourteenth Amendments, you're just saying that God Hates Fags without actually having the balls to say so. Fuck you because you're stupid and dishonest.

I wouldn't interfere with your silly little superstitions by saying that you have to like gays. I certainly wouldn't use an instrument as fearsome as the law to do any such thing. As a conservative, all I want is the government to leave people the fuck alone when it comes to private behaviour that doesn't hurt anybody else.

By the way, the terms "Family values" and "the 99%" can be pretty much be used interchangeably when it comes to government action. And "upholding family values" is mentioned as a function of the federal government in the Constitution exactly as often as "providing universal health care" is. Look at the United States Postal Service and the war in Iraq. Do you really want the folks who produced those defending your family values? Because I can pretty much assure you that it won't end well.

But Perry very clumsily just ignores that very question because he has no idea what Lawrence even is. Amd it's even more impressive when you consider that he was governor at the time the state went all the way to Supreme Court to argue and lose. Moreover, this wasn't a case about some obscure administrative law that was thrown out. Homosex tends to generate a certain amount of  unavoidable attention in the U.S.

So Governor Perry did what Governor Perry always does, he gave an answer that was 100% fucking gibberish. But Christ, it's fun to watch. More candidates should run on an opiate rush and the pure, environmentally-friendly body wave of stupidity.


*Whenever I suppose that the 42nd president might be doing something good for mankind, I think of the last moments of Ricky Ray Rector to remember that Clinton is an irredeemable abomination of a human being. Rick Perry, who probably executed a factually innocent man and then knowingly covered it up, is even worse. Specifically because of the actions of craven motherfuckers like Clinton and Perry, I now oppose the death penalty, except in military cases in a volunteer army.

A Presidential Election Prediction

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A Christmas Card From From Tom Waits

Tom Waits "Silent Night / Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis" from Austin City Limits on Vimeo.

It Hath Come!



And so hath I! Christ, I'm handsome!

Hitch 62: 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night and we're all a little worse off for his loss. He was 62 years old.

When I started writing regularly nearly a decade ago, I knew that the exercise would be an exploration of my own outrage and contempt toward virtually everything. That being the case, I chose as models the two writers who best expressed those feelings, Hunter Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom were very much alive in the spring of 2003.

Of the two, Hitchens was a better writer for longer. Though legendary, Thompson was only truly incandescent between 1970 and 1979. Afterward, he became a truly erratic writer. The genius would pop up from time to time - the best example of which is his 1994 eulogy of Richard Nixon -  but, more often than not, he wrote like a Hunter Thompson impersonator. You could see him trying to top his own past and failing. It was almost tragic to watch, and most likely the reason he ultimately killed himself. Not only was football season over, as his suicide note said, it had been for a good long time.

Hitch was consistently brilliant for decades. If anything, he got better as he got older in ways that Hunter never could. While he never produced anything as immediately classic as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", Christopher Hitchens was a better writer than almost anyone else for thirty years.

Where Thompson's written expressions of indignation were rhetorically violent, Hitchens' were outstandingly elegant without being foppish, a curse of most British writers. Thompson's outrage was energizing while Hitchens' was almost narcotic. His turn of phrase was so beautiful that you almost didn't notice the anger that drove it. And that, my friends, is art. Like Hunter Thompson, Christopher Hitchens turned something as terribly pedestrian and dreary as journalism into something literary and beautiful to read for it's own sake. The only other political journalist I can think of that turns cynicism into something akin to poetry the way Hitchens did is George Will.



I've made the proud ignorance of the Republican Party something of a religious text here for nearly four years. I've referenced it over and over again in this space, without knowing that Hitchens said it first on Hardball with Chris Matthews 11 years ago before yesterday. As Rick Perry would say, "Oops."

Here's the full quote;

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

As was true of Bobby Kennedy, when Christopher Hitchens hated you, you stayed hated. His best books, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger were all moral condemnations of their subjects and all far more eloquent by several degrees than anything else written on the subjects of his scorn.

Even God His own Self wasn't spared the wrath of Hitchen's typewriter. His 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything posited that most of mankind's evil is sanctioned in our holy books, in one way or another. And the truth of that is almost inescapable. You can argue whether the good religion produces outweighs the evil it condones, but you cannot reasonably argue that said evil isn't textually sanctioned and, in some cases, actually demanded.

I was raised Catholic, so there are few things that I love more than precious (mostly, but not always, liberal) Catholics who feel that feel that the One True Church is "misguided" in believing that things like divorce, homosexuality and abortion are abominations and mortal sins, while maintaining that they are "good Catholics."

If you're one of those folks, you're a hypocritical asshole and should probably suffer any number of biblical fates for several deadly sins, not the least of which being pride.

The Church isn't a grassroots organization like ACORN, for Christsakes. Moreover, it never pretended to be a "bottom-up" democracy. Foundational beliefs like papal infallibility tend to undercut silly notions like that quite nicely.

The Church is their club, not yours, and their rules are law. To suggest that you can "reform" what even you believe is the Word of God - and is actually written in the text of the book - is more than a little presumptuous and definitive proof that you're simply bad at your religion. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that your religion disagrees with you, rather than you with it.

When I was twelve years old, I determined that the beliefs of the Church were dangerous and silly, so I refused confirmation and stopped considering myself a Catholic. As a matter of theological fact, liberal Catholics aren't Catholics, either, I'm just honest enough to say so. The Church was there long before I was born and will continue long after I'm dead. I merely choose not to prticipate in it's extraordinary silliness.

Under no circumstances would I associate myself with anyone running around Africa and telling the locals that AIDS was bad, but condoms were worse, so I quit. But I would never presume to say that Church's position wasn't biblically sanctioned because it is. I just happen to believe that the sanction is moronic and demonstrably lethal to the most vulnerable people on earth. If you believe that "God hates fags", you sure as shit better not have a tattoo while doing so because that just happens to be the next verse in Leviticus.

Essentially, that's what God is Not Great is about. If you wrap yourself in some supernatural, superstitious ceremony, you should also be called to account for the true - and sometimes breathtakingly so  - evil that's done in it's name. If the world was populated with rational adults, rather than overly tall children, that book would not have been as controversial as it was.

The facts are the facts. And the facts are that the Catholic Church didn't renounce the biblical interpretation that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ - the basis of 1,000 years of Christian-propagated pogroms - until Vatican II, seventeen years after the Holocaust ended. And, to my way of thinking, that's more than enough reason to renounce Christianity.

Of course, Hitchens wasn't without his own messianic impulses. He was fervent supporter of the idea of regime change, particularly in Iraq. While I was - mistakenly - at the time, as well, Hitchens and I differed on the entire  point of the war. He strongly advocated Bush's disastrously wrong "democracy agenda", which argued that you can maintain Iraq as a cohesive country while enhancing regional stability under the will of the people. It should be pretty clear by now that you can't.

His position was eminently justifiable as an ethical matter. He morally identified with the plight of the Kurds., who are the world's largest minority without their own country. For Hitchens, it was a matter of loyalty to leftist comrades against what he rightly called "a pornographic regime." But he never, to my knowledge, shared their aspirations for a national homeland.

And that's where his case falls apart. There is no reason to believe that the Kurds will ever abandon their desire for a state, but any declaration of independence will result in a catastrophic war with Arab Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, some of whose territory would be a part of such a state. And unlike Kosovo, there is no international guarantor that can protect such a fledgling nation from immediate destruction.

Having said that, you can't help but admire the passion that Hitchens brought to the issue, particularly when you consider the personal and professional friendships his stance cost him on the political left. He was unwavering in what he believed was right, and that couldn't have been easy.

On the other hand, he did popularize the term "Islamofascism", which I've had a number of things to say about. It is the one instance I can think of where Hitchens carelessly throws words together, contrary to their diametrically opposing meanings. Like "progressive conservative" or "revolutionary conservative", "Islamofascism" is an oxymoron and well beneath the linguistic standards of a titan of the language that Christopher Hitchens was.  Being an Islamofascist is not unlike being a "pro-abortion Catholic", a ridiculous contruct on it's face and not something to be taken seriously.

One can't truly appreciate Christopher Hitchens without exploring the way he conducted the last 18 months of his life. Instead of engaging on a maudlin celebration of his own mortality, Hitchens instead used his esophageal cancer as a point of intellectual exploration, especially in his Vanity Fair column. If you read anything today, it should be "Topic of Cancer" and  his most recent essay "Trial of the Will."

It was on the topic of his own mortal illness that he truly broke through a journalist, and produced some of his most beautiful writing.  There was no sentimentality or self-pity in those columns, particularly "Trial of the Will", published just a week before his death. It was an intellectual and philosophical exploration on what it is to die, written by someone who was in the process of doing just that. "Tuesdays With Morrie" it wasn't.

Christopher Hitchens explored his own death with the same courage and valour that he lived his life. It didn't matter if you agreed with him or not because he was smarter than you are and would argue circles around you. Even when he was wrong, he could make a persuasive case that he right. That isn't normally the job of a journalist, but it is the raison d'etre of a writer.

Hitchens on Bill Clinton



Hitchens on Mother Teresa



Hitchens on the Tea Party



Hitchens on Jesus and the Exodus



Hitchens on 60 Minutes

"Reminds Me of Childhood Memories"

I don't tend to talk about my childhood much, mostly because I've spent decades repressing it. This is because I hate children even more than I hate myself.

Children are short, smelly and can't hold their fucking liquor. Christ, I'm not fully convinced that males under six feet tall are even human, which should tell you all you need to know about my feelings towards kids. I'd be completely comfortable if the voting age was raised to thirty-five and everyone under twenty was subject to being fired out cannons during wartime.

Whenever I'm forced to remember that I was once like that I feel like going Hemingway. I therefore tend to stuff my childhood into the same tiny ball of rage deep inside of me that makes me the world-famous blogger that I've become.

However, from time to time, external forces bring memories from my shorter days surface, sometimes even refreshing ones. This occurred most recently on Tuesday.

It started out innocently enough. I was checking my e-mail at work and I received a notification that startled me. I was being followed on Twitter by something called LesbianAssWorship.Net (or @LesAssWorship to you uncouth swine.) That's when it all came rushing back.

I think I was five years old. Maybe six. And it was a holiday when it was cold outside, so it was either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Whatever it was, we were having turkey. Anyhow, we were sitting around the holiday dinner table and I guess I looked a little sad. Life, you see, was out to get me even then and I was even worse at hiding my disdain than I am today.

Suddenly, my elderly grandmother pounded her fist on the dinner table, causing a turkey leg to fly off the serving plate and into my lap, and holler "Nothing soothes a crisis of the spirit like Lesbian Ass Worship! Nothing!"

It didn't stop there, either. She went on and on for almost an hour. According to her, straight men could worship lesbian ass, too.  It was almost like hearing Stephen Hawking expound upon theoretical physics. There was just no arguing with the fucking woman. She was crazed in ways that I had only previously seen in National Geographic. And there was no shortage of crazy in my grandmother on a normal day.

Finally, my father fired a tranquilizer dart directly into her neck and the peace of my home was restored. Even today everybody in my family referes to it as "That strange and horrible night that grandma went nuts about ass-eating."

As deeply and darkly strange as that evening was. I still can't say that she was actually wrong. As an adult, one of my sexual heroes was the grand dame of lesbian porn, Janine Lindemulder, from whom a learned a great deal about tonguing a lady from both the front and the back. And every women I've ever been with considers me something of a sexual MacArthur. and that night, over thirty-five years ago, was an enormous gateway in my becoming the man I am today.

Who knew that Twitter could be so rewarding?

It Hath Arrived! Thoughts on Lindsay Lohan and Playboy

I'm of the considered opinion that everybody should have a friend like Elisson. The man is an outstanding blogger, single-handedly popularized the 100 word story and is a world renowned expert on all things cheese-related. In a world almost entirely without heroes, Elisson stands alone .. except when he's holding up my own personal Jesus, Velociman. I'm honoured and pleased that Elisson has ever bothered to read my nonsense, let alone say the extraordinarily nice things about it in public that he has.

Having said that, there are things that can tear even the closest friendships asunder. Like when Elisson commented that  Lindsay Lohan's titties looked "awfully saggy." I was enraged for months, almost to the point of violence. But I came to understand that the whole point of friendship is overlooking the things that divide you, like how metaphysically wrong your friends may be about certain things.

Look, the rap on LiLo for years has been that she has big fake udders. Not that I give a shit. I think that implants age better than the real thing, and the science is with me on that.. But if a lady chooses to get implants, she should endeavour to get them with just the right amount of sag, lest she wind up looking like a fucking cartoon.That's just common sense, people.

But what if her ginormous jugs are, as I suspect, real? The fact that a 25 year old starlet looks like a 42 year old MILF (albeit the hottest one this side of Julia Ann) says something important to me, specifically that she knows how to live! I learned while still in the crib that old women who look young are never to be trusted, but that young women who look old before their time should always be treasured for the ability to please a man. Verily, they know it all, teenagers. They've lived in ways that most of you never will.

Most of you by now understand that I feel a special kinship with La Lohan. With our shared love of vodka, cocaine and vehicular mishaps that can easily be blamed on a black kid, how can I not? That's just the way love works, as any well-adjusted adult will tell you. I know that Paula Abdul used to sing about opposites attracting, but how well did her marriage to Emilio Fucking Estevez work out, huh? And because Lindsay and I are medically incapable of being each other's liver donor, that's enough to make us perfect together! I really have thought this through, folks. She's the Nancy Reagan to my Ronnie, the Nancy Spungen to my ... Oh, I guess I should re-think that one, huh? If memory serves, that love story didn't end particularly well.

That being said, I wasn't as excited as you probably thought I would be about Lindsay appearing in next month's issue of Playboy. Don't get me wrong, the prospect of seeing her naked always makes my testicles rattle like Jerome Green's maracas on those great Bo Diddley records, but Playboy is just the wrong forum for it.

After all, who in the fuck does Playboy, anymore? I actually do read Playboy for the articles, which is a terrible thing to say about pornography! A titty mag should never be a literary journal, and that's exactly what Playboy has always aspired to be.

To remain relevant, I posit that Lindsay needs to be edgy in something other than a criminal justice-related way. And Playboy just hasn't been edgy since the early 1970s. That's why I always thought that she would be far better off appearing in her altogethers in a magazine like Black Tail. Fans of irony everywhere would love her for it.

As absolutely everyone on earth expected it would, Lindsay's spread (so to speak) has leaked online. I'd post the pictures myself but two things get in the way of my doing so. First, I can't post nudity because far too many of you crazy bastards read this dopey blog at work. I'm just not funny enough for anyone to lose their job over it. Second, I understand that Playboy is highly litigious and I've had quite enough of twisted old cunts threatening to sue me over utter fucking nonsense for the time being. It's rather exhausting.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't offer my thoughts on the pictorial, wouldn't I?

A number of blogs have insulted LiLo over her apparent lack of areola of any kind. I on the other hand find it novel and really quite endearing. There's a lot to said for tiny nipples on huge knockers, and if you need a giant bullseye on a titty to know where your teeth are supposed to go, you probably need to mature as a lover. And most of the bloggers who make that criticism are probably too far advanced in their faggotry to convince otherwise, anyhow.

As is true with areolas, pasty-skinned, redheads shouldn't have public hair. I'm pretty sure that's in the Bible. Probably in Leviticus. But you won't know if Lohan does from the Playboy pictures, which is a goddamned shame. When you know more about a given girl's twat from paparazzi pictures of her getting out of a car than you do from Playboy, that tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of modern mainstream pornography. No friggin' wonder the Hefner family wants to take the company private again. The stock must be fucking worthless. And if it isn't, it should be!

Forget about Miss Lindsay's intimate grooming habits for a second. La Lohan is said to have been paid a million dollars for these pictures. And it's not like her career trajectory is going up these days. She's about where Robert Downey, Jr. was a decade ago, uninsurable and under the constant threat of immediate incarceration. For a million dollars, we should all be able to visually inspect her for cervical cancer! This is a dire economy and modesty is just not acceptable marketing. Who doesn't know that?

I'm always amazed that what a gorgeous ass Lindsay has. So fixated are we on her majestic mammaries that we too often overlook what the other side of her has to offer. It's tragic that's it just sitting there, ignored, when it should be desired, bitten, licked and fucked endlessly. And a dynamic little dumper it is. If nothing else, the Playboy shoot does give it some attention, albeit far from enough.

I also know from some experience that pasty-skinned natural redheaded girls have the prettiest assholes that you're ever going to see in your entire life. They're just the pinkest little things in all of creation. But don't go to Playboy to learn this. No, those useless pricks just had to go waste a perfectly good teachable moment that could have brought humanity a little closer together. Take it from me, if you've never seen a redhead's rectum, I implore you to so at the earliest opportunity. You'll thank me for it. They're tasty, too!

The Lohan pictures are about as good as you would expect them to be. She's a remarkably well-built girl, especially when you consider her now legendary extracurricular activities. My only problem is that Playboy didn't fully exploit her current financial woes to give us the full-airport-cavity-search that we truly deserve. As celebrity exploitation, they're wonderful. But as pornography, they're a huge disappointment. I jerk off to hotter things than this twice before dawn every day. I just can't lie to you.

For these pictures to be considered truly epic, they would have had to have been shot by Paul Little. Sure, we can all do without the urine and vomit that ultimately sent the erstwhile Mr. Hardcore to the federal pokey, but the shots would have at least been interesting. The man really could wield a specula like no other.

Of course that shouldn't be taken to mean that I don't have a giant erection looking at Lindsay Lohan naked. Because I do.

Am I sharing too much?

Black snake moan: Sad dispatches from the Cain train

You know, I was just starting to admire Herman Cain and then this happens.

It wasn't always so. For most of the year, I thought that Mr. Cain was a dick and emblematic of everything that's wrong with politics. Not only was everything that he knew wrong, he couldn't have been more smug about it. More importantly, the nickname that he gave his economic plan had the disquieting tendency of making Schindler's List sound like a friggin' sitcom.

While everything he said was silly in ways that learned adults have trouble comprehending, I still grew to respect Herman Cain. More specifically, I grew to respect his penis.

Lookee, say what you will about the man, but he managed to be married, carry on a thirteen-year long affair and have no fewer than four sexual harassees, all the while lobbying his ass off. What energy!  I ask you, how can you not admire the dedication it takes to put your wang in so many strange places?

Of course, that's ultimately what sunk his jokey presidential campaign. No self-respecting Republican would be caught cheating on his wife with adult women. If it were meth addled teenage boys that were the object of ol' Herm's affections, he'd probably have won the nomination by acclimation, but it wasn't to be. This is what happens when novices get into politics.

I will say one thing about the Cain train. As their sad and strange campaign ground to a fucking dead stop, it did become pretty expert in the very identity politics that Republicans used to mock. Cain, his idiot blogosphere cheerleaders, and the ghouls at Fox News never failed to point out that the candidate was black, which they imply was the source of his recent misery. Granted, they had some practice, having spent the last three years passionately displaying the genitals of both Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann whenever one of them said anything impossibly dumb. The GOP really has come a long way from making gender-based jokes about Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno, haven't they?

The persecution complex of these fucking people is nothing less than phenomenal. The way that modern conservatives - very few of whom are actually conservative in a traditional sense, or under the dictionary definition of the word - play identity politics almost brings a tear to your eye. I'm pretty sure that's ultimately why Barney Frank is retiring. When even the most revolutionary Republicans can't go before a television camera without being a whimpering cocksucker and asking why everybody keeps picking on them, his work is pretty much done. It seems like only twenty years ago that conservative thinkers were publishing innumerable books condemning "the culture of victimhood", a number of which I read.  Now they actually define that culture . Progress!

There is a distinction, however. Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann rarely play the race card themselves. They let white males - which sort of includes Ann Coulter - do it for them.

Lest you think the Pizza Train is going off track, be schooled, teenagers!

In suspending his candidacy, as opposed to saying that he was quitting the race or ending his bid, Mr. Cain maintained his ability to accept money to pay for his campaign so far and to finance the new venture that he called his Plan B: to travel the country promoting his tax and foreign policy plans. If Mr. Cain had decided to formally close his campaign organization, he would not be able to use donations that may come in. 

Let's see, Cain is shutting down shop in all but name, so that folks can continue donating money to what's billing itself as a presidential campaign, although the head of said campaign is no longer seeking the presidency. Shifty and devious, just like a ... Republican.

Having said that, I agree that he should "travel the country promoting his tax and foreign policy plans." Especially his foreign policy plans, since they're so thoroughly thought out.





People really need to hear this, and Herman Cain is just the kind of cat to tell you. Plus, he'll try to fuck you. Just don't tell his wife, okay?

People of British Columbia: Go Fuck Yourselves!

Sometimes people wonder why I seem to hate democracy so much. In actual fact, it isn't democracy that I hate so much as it is people. Despite living in an age where more information is available to more people than at any other time in human history, most people are not only getting deliberately dumber, they seem so fucking proud of it. Anyone who has been following the Republican primaries has probably noticed this. And since you can't really have a democracy without people, my faith in the institution is more than somewhat undermined.

The triumph of ignorance is probably best exemplified by the recent Resurrection of populism in our body politic. Populism has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of how governmental systems work, and is therefore crass, deplorable and should be destroyed every time it rears its misshapen goddamned head.

Populism is predicated on the idea that we live in a pure democracy, which no one does. Western nation states universally live under one form or another of representative government, which means that we elect people to make decisions for us and get the fuck out their way for about four years. Populists think that we live in an Athenian democracy, where everybody gets to vote on everything, or that we even should.

The fact is that we don't and we shouldn't. Moreover, Athenian democracy wasn't all that and a bag of chips. As a matter of fact, "only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens", thereby restricting the franchise to about 20% of the population. I'll grant you that this did weed out the retards and reprobates who currently determine our  fate, but it was hardly the perfect picture of "the people's voice" that populist morons try to paint for you.

You know what you get when you let everyone vote on everything? California is fucking what! Conservatives like to paint California as a horribly liberal place. It really isn't. It's just a perfect representation of self-interested human stupidity, which populism enables. When given the choice, folks will always vote themselves free shit, while retarding their ability to pay for it. Do that long enough, and you wind up being California. Or Greece. Or Italy. Or the United States of America.

Which brings me to British Columbia.

One thing you need to know about Canada is that we have a federal sales tax, the GST, which was introduced in 1991. Since then, no fewer than five federal governments have been trying to entice the provinces to merge their sales taxes with the GST.

A couple of years ago, the Harper Government (which I think that I'm now legally obligated to call it) struck harmonization agreements with Ontario and B.C. Because harmonization extends the reach of provincial taxes, Ontarians were furious for about twenty minutes, but Ontarians are only ever furious about anything for about twenty minutes.

The hillbillies in B.C stayed mad. For the most part, this had a lot to do with being governed by Gordon Campbell, who, despite being massively unpopular, governed for a full decade when he wasn't being arrested for drunk driving in foreign countries. He was able to do this because he lacked any real opposition, the provincial NDP having imploded years earlier and the Conservative party not existing there at all. When his approval numbers fell beneath even Jerry Sandusky's, he got the fuck out of Dodge and fled to Limeyland. Campbell was succeeded by talk-radio host and professional nobody, Christy Clark.

Clark, for reasons that escape anyone with even the slightest understanding of how life works, allowed the HST issue go before the people in a referendum. She supposedly thought that people would enthusiastically vote to expand their own tax liability. Guess how well that went?

There was a small catch. Ottawa isn't exactly stupid. When the deals with Ontario and British Columbia were sealed, the provinces got a ton of money, roughly $4 billion and $1.6 billion respectively. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, who at the time was also about as popular as kidfucking, gave it away to taxpayers as a way to successfully bribe himself into reelection. The Campbell and Clark governments just spent it on horseshit.

Harper's dimwitted finance minister, Jim Flaherty, in perhaps the only smart thing he's ever done, included a clause in the Ontario and B.C agreements that said if either province fucked with tax structure in any way in the first two years, he got his money back.

Is Premier Clark proposing to do the responsible thing and live up to the agreement her government signed? Fuck, no!

The B.C. government is exchanging ideas with the Harper government on ways to ease the province’s burden in paying back the $1.6-billion advance it received from Ottawa to establish the Harmonized Sales Tax in 2010, Premier Christy Clark said Wednesday.

Clark, who spent Tuesday in Ottawa meeting with Conservative politicians on various federal-provincial issues, said her government is floating several payback options.

Clark said her government has suggested that B.C. receive some credit for the more than two and a half years the HST will be in place before it is dismantled.

Turns out that B.C is over $3 billion in the hole, and can't afford to just pay back Ottawa, like it is obligated to do.

To which I say, "Tough shit! Give back the fucking money, you dumb cunts! Do it NOW!" You got the money all at once, pay it back all at once, you dipshits.

Here's my issue. Once you let one dickhead province renege on a deal because it isn't prom-queen fucking popular, you're left with no choice but to let them all do it. And then you're left with no government at all.

Besides which, people need to know that their idiotic opinions have costs, if they think that they can be governed by them. The stupid goddamned B.C HST referendum chipped away at the very idea that a duly elected government can be held accountable for anything at all.

That might sound like a middling point, but imagine that you're an international baker, or just hold bonds on that province's debt. Are you going to go out of your way to extend credit to crazy cocksuckers that renege on deals on a fucking whimsy and expect no consequences to arise from it?

Fuck each and every person in British Columbia. I hope that those dumb motherfuckers are forced to pay higher taxes at goddamned gunpoint to pay back Ottawa immediately, not that I expect Harper and Flaherty to have the balls to do it. They might be the biggest fiscal cowards and ward-heeling motherfuckers that this country has ever shit out. I suspect that they'll both gladly let Christy Clark peg them infinitely if they think that they can get a few Vancouver seats in the next election out of it.

Those crazy bastards need to be taught that, in the words of the great Dr. Hunter Thompson, if you buy the ticket, you take the fucking ride. And if Harper doesn't do it, I hope to Christ that the financial markets do.

The funniest part about this who fiasco is that the same stupid pricks who voted against the HST in B.C also voted for Harper in the federal election three months earlier.

And you people expect me to take popular democracy seriously?

Some Girls Live in Texas '78

In pretty much every sense of the word, the Rolling Stones were at a crossroads in 1978. After three grindingly mediocre albums (1973's Goats Head Soup, 1974's It's Only Rock n' Roll and 1976's Black and Blue, all of which admittedly had a few great songs on them, as even the worst Stones records tend to), they were widely derided by the emerging punk movement as bloated comic charactures of what masterpieces like Exile on Main St, railed against.

Worse, the punks weren't exactly wrong. The Rolling Stones had become complacent and decadent in the ugliest sense of the word. Largely because Keith Richards' increasing heroin addiction and the fact that the band now lived in different countries, the spent the period from 1972 to '78 coasting on their reputations.

It didn't help that their live shows kept adding musicians like Billy Preston, Ollie Brown and progressively larger horn sections. The Stones brought the Vegas "revue" pheonmoenon to rock that finally collapsed under its own weight on Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion tour, which seemed to have horns, keyboards, chick singers, a massuse, three dwarves and a charterd accountant on stage with Axl, Slash and Duff. And that nearly bankrupted GN'R, which is why that fucking tour seemed to go on forever, and ultimately destroyed the band.

Then there was Keef's misunderstand with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police over the 22 grams of heroin that they found on his person in Toronto's Habour Castle Hilton in March of 1977, which threatened the very existence of the Rolling Stones.

22 grams is a lot of smack to have on you at any given time, especially if you're only supposed to be in town for less than a week. The Mounties developed an interesting theory around this; that zillonaire rock star Keith Richards made music as a hobby, but his real passion was selling junk. They charged him with possession with intent to distribute, which carries a sentence of seven years to life in Canada.

In doing so, they overlooked  the fact that even the dumbest junkie musicians aren't that dumb. Even though they need to get high, they obviously can't afford to be caught with smack at a border crossing. So they get other people to do it for them. Because the potential for one source getting nabbed was so great, folks like Keef would have multiple supplies coming to him in a city. However, sometimes none of the sources would get nabbed, which is what basically happened at the Harbour Castle.

If the Rolling Stones were broken up by Canuck justice, they were threatened with irrelevence by groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. It was under these clouds that the Stones decamped for Paris to record what would become their "New York" album, Some Girls.

With the exception of the incomparable Sugar Blue on harmonica, "guest musicians" were almost completely absent from the Some Girls sessions.  It was the five Stones, along with regular keyboardists Ian Stewart and ex-Faces Ian McLagan, and that was pretty much it. Having said that, Sugar Blue is impossibly good, and should've joined the Stones full time. The harmonica he plays, especially on "Miss You" sounds almost nothing like a harmonica, which is a pretty rudimentary instrument. Sugar's parts are played live with a saxophone to this day.

The Stones always had a weird dynamic with guest musicians. Instead of the guests complimenting the band, the band tended to support the guests. If you listen to Black and Blue - with standout exceptions like "Hand of Fate" - it sounded more like a Billy Preston album of the era than a proper Stones album. And that's not necessarily bad. Billy Preston was fucking dynamite in the 70's. But it wasn't really the Rolling Stones. That's also true of "It's Only Rock n' Roll" with is structurally David Bowie meets the Faces, which makes sense since Bowie and Ron Wood wrote it with Mick Jagger. Keith Richards doesn't even play on the recorded version of the song.

Some Girls was destined to be the last great album of great "new" Rolling Stones songs (1981's Tattoo You was almost as good, but it was mostly a hodgpodge of outtakes from Goats Head Soup through 1980's Emotional Rescue sessions. Jagger finished and cleaned up Tattoo You pretty much on his own in the studio.) Unlike every subsequent record of new songs, there isn't a bad fucking tune on Some Girls. Sure, some of them are better than others, but none of them actually suck. The Stones hadn't done that since Exile on Main St., and they'd never do it again.

Last week, the Stones decided to cash in on Some Girls yet again. To understand this, you need to understand the peculiar business position the Rolling Stones are in. In 1971, they started their own record company, which would license their albums to a major distributor, but the Stones own the masters. That means if you sign the Rolling Stones, you don't just get the next three records that no one but me will buy. You get everything from Sticky Fingers onward, and the Stones catalogue still sells a fuck-ton of units in an era where no one is dumb enough to actually pay for music.That's why there have been at least three "remastered" editions of those records in the last 25 years.

Maybe later in the week I'll write about the reissue, which is way better than last years reissue of Exile. The hidden treasure this week is the brand-spanking-fucking new Some Girls Live in Texas '78 BluRay and DVD. Unlike last year's home video release of the 1974 movie of the '72 Exile tour, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones - which is well worth picking up - Some Girls Live in Texas has never before been seen by the public.

And Live in Texas, 78 is rocks the gawdamn casbah, teenagers. From 1989's Steel Wheels tours - which comprises most of the band's live concert home video releases (there have been five, six if you include Martin Scorcesse's feature film, Shine a Light) onward, there were almost as many people on stage as there were in the audience. Of them all, the only one that comes close is the Paris theatre show on the Four Flicks box set, and that's because so many rare and cool songs and covers  were on it) comes close. Because Jagger was so concerned with recreating the records on stage from '89 forward, he ressurected the "Stones Revue" idea of the '75 tour, but more bloated and without anyone as fucking hip as Billy Preston with them. Live in Texas '78 is just the five Stones, with Stewart and McLagan on keys.

More importantly, the Some Girls tour was the last time the Rolling Stones exclusively played arenas and theatres. Forever afterward, they played your local enormodome. While the Stones are better at it than almost anyone else, pretty much all rock music sucks in a sports stadium, especially outdoor stadiums. And domes are even worse. When a band plays outside, the music goes everywhere but your ears. And when there's there's a steel dome involved, it bounces all over the fucking place.

Worse still, when you play in a place for 30,000 to 120,000 assholes, you had goddamned well better play the 22 songs that everybody hears on the radio 13 times a day. And God help you if you play too many songs from your new record.

Some Girls Live in Texas, '78 doesn't do that. This show had seven (then) new songs - ('When The Whip Comes Down',   'Beast Of Burden',  'Miss You',  'Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)',  'Shattered' ,'Respectable' and 'Far Away Eyes')  in a row. The only band I know of that's done that lately with a new record was the Foo Fighters, and they only did it in clubs before Wasting Light was released. I'll grant you that the Stones haven't made an album with that many great new songs to play in a row subsequent to Some Girls - after all, no one's chanting for, say, a suite from Dirty Work or Undercover - but it's a ballsy move, nonetheless.

What stands out on Live in Texas is the paucity of the "Greatest Hits." Yes, "Honky Tonk Woman", "Tumbling Dice", "Happy", "Brown Sugar" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash" are all here, and "Miss You" and "Beast of Burden" eould later become part of "The Big 22", but there's no "(I Can't No) Satisfaction", "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Street Fighting Man" to be found here. In fact only two orignial songs pre-date Exile on Main St., which would be unthinkable for the Stones to do now.

Instead you get two Chuck Berry covers - and you just can't go wrong with a Chuck Berry song - the brilliant "Star Star" from Goats Head Soup and the classic Robert Johnson blues "Love in Vain."

If you want a giant "hits" set, Some Girls Live in Texas, 78 likely isn't for you. Nor are you going to get all of the fucking fireworks, fire and confetti that the Stones have employed since '89. There isn't even a giant video screen behind the band. But if makes you feel better, Mick does spend a good deal of the show in a douchey red leather disco cap, a punk t-shirt with an obscured swaatika, and really odd pants and shoes. That's about all the spectacle you're going to get.

But if you want to see a fantastic band fighting for their fucking lives, then you have to buy Some Girls Live in Texas, 78.



Editor's note: The audio on the actual Live in Texas Bluray/DVD/BitTorrent is much, much louder than it is on the YouTube clip above.

Gadaffi's dead. Now deal with the consequences

My thoughts Kevin Mooney's extra-stupid article on Moammar Gaddafi and Oliver North last night reminded me of something that I've been meaning to write for about a month and never got around to. I'm exceptionally lazy and pretty drunk most of the time. You can deal. Or not.

As you've probably figured out by now, I'm of the opinion that American foreign policy since 1993 is more like something you'd find in Penn State's showers than the product of a deliberative process engaged in by smart people. It is every bit as much the embodiment of a "if it feels good, do it" philosophy as your average gang-bang is. In neither instance does anyone consider the consequence of a specific action until it's too late.

That's certainly true of the three men that followed George H.W Bush into the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush thought that they could use NATO to surround Russia, and that the Kremlin wouldn't mind all that much. Both thought that they could carve new countries out of Yugoslavia where none had existed since the 12th century. Then there's Iraq, which I believe will become history's most epic clusterfuck in the next decade or so.

The Obama administration's Libya policy is a microcosm of all that bad thinking that is U.S foreign policy in recent years. The overthrow and subsequent murder of international fashion icon, Moammar Gadaffi, will have consequences that are easy to see, but everybody chooses to ignore.

Don't get me wrong. I celebrated the man's death. I'm of the considered opinion that any head of state that dresses like Michael Jackson and acts like Prince probably should have his corpse dragged through the fucking streets. Having said that, I will miss his legion of chick bodyguards and busty Ukrainian nurses more than words can say. The man had a legendary libido that so closely resembles my own that I can't help but feel a certain kinship with him.

Be that as it may, I believe that NATO's intervention in Libya, like the American invasion of Iraq, is going to create almost metaphysical problems in the conduct of foreign policy.

As we're already seeing, the Libyan people aren't all that interested in democracy. If they are, they have an interesting way of showing it, what with the flying of the al-Qeada flag over the Bengazhi courthouse, and all. In any event, I think the rhetorical focus on freedom is utterly inconsistent with America's post-World War II conduct of foreign policy, anyhow.Yes, the rhetoric was there, but the deeds almost never aligned with it.

If you're not sure what I mean by that, ask Mohamad Mossaddegh, Jacabo Arbenz and Salvador Allende: all three of whom were products of the democratic process, and were deposed by contemporary of future American client tyrants. That the Iranian, Guatemalan and Chilean people suffered for decades afterwards was hardly a secret, it's just that 10 U.S presidents and the American people didn't give a fuck. People tend to forget this, but despots that were later painted with Washington's famous "Hitler brush", like Manuel Noreiga and Saddam Hussein, were at one time or another useful tools of U.S policy in their respective regions. Until they weren't. And then they became "like Hitler."

I've never really gotten into this before, but I oppose the International Criminal Court, the concept of universial jurisdiction, and the American process of trying foreign nationals in Lower Manhattan for crimes that were committed in places that no one in Lower Manhattan can find on a map.

The reasons for my opposition are pretty simple. If it is determined that a dictator must go, it's always best to let him flee into exile in some shitty place like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and sometimes France. It worked for Idi Amin, and that motherfucker actually ate people.

However, if you take exile off of the table, which the ICC, universial jurisdiction, and American criminal trials do, you leave said despot with no other choice than to stage a murderous "last stand" which will almost certainly kill untold numbers of innocent people.

And here's a neat fact. Dictators tend to pay attention to one another's fates. You only need to fuck over a scumbag like Charles Taylor on a safe haven deal once before you ensure that there's never going to be another such agreement. In reneging on a deal with a monster, you practically guarantee that the next monster will chance a seige of Berlin-style last stand, thereby killing more civilians than you otherwise hope to save.

Poorly thought out policy always creates unintended - if utterly predictable - consequences. When you invade Iraq for WMD that it doesn't have, you necessarily teach Iran that they probably won't be invaded if they actually demonstrate that they have WMD. Although he probably didn't intend it to happen that way, the second President Bush did more to further weapons proliferation than even A.Q Khan. Dr. Khan only supplied the weapons. President Bush created the strategic imperative for phychopathic regimes to obtain them. If you doubt me, ask yourself a simple question: "What would you do if you were Iran or North Korea in the wake of the Iraq invasion?" The answers really shouldn't surprise you, if you aren't a half-wit.

The comical demise of Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar Gaddafi, esquire, also taught the evil men of the world another valuable lesson: that being America's new buddy doesn't pay.

After 2003, Gaddafi did everything that Washington wanted to. He abandoned his almost satirical nuclear program. He accepted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing and paid restitution to the families. And not only did he renounce terrorism, it is widely believed that he tortured suspected terrorists for the United States as part of their "extraordinary rendition" program.

The picture to the right should give you a pretty good idea where playing ball with the United States got him.

Again, I hoisted a drink in toasting Gaddafi's inglorious passing. And it was a drink of such size and depth that only true heroes can really appreciate it. I imbibed it, fell down and giggled my goddamned ass off when I found out that ol' Muammar was murdered like a fucking rat.

But, in the grand scheme of things, my opinions don't matter all that much, do they? The opinions that you should really strive to influence are those of folks like Bashir al-Assad, Islam Karimov or Pakistan's ISI. And I just don't see how they view Gadaffi's fate after becoming part of the "family of nations" as being in their self-interest. Do you figure that Omar al-Bashir is pulling the fingernails out of more of America's enemies, or fewer of them, after being indicted by the ICC?

Sure, Moammar made cool friends. Barack Obama shook his hand. Paul Martin and Hillary Clinton came to visit. He comissioned "Black Rose of the Desert" in a failed attempt to get into Condolezza Rice's pants. Tony Blair cut him in on a few business deals. But none of that stopped him from ultimately being found in a fucking sewer and shot in the head. And that, teenagers, is the kind of thing that the West's other unsavoury allies - and they are many, for they are legion - tend to take notice of.

Most Americans like to believe that their foreign policy is based 100% on morality and freedom, almost entirely the product of candy, unicorns and angel farts. But Americans are hardly regarded as the world's most dilligent readers, are they?

I think that the LIbyan people are going to hate us for getting into bed with Gaddafi to the extent that we did, and our secret little friends with the dirty histories are going to take note of just how quickly we threw Moammar over the side when shit got ugly.

We're playing both sides of a sucker's game, and I figure that it's going to end about as well for us as it did for the banks when they did the same thing in the subprime mortage scheme. Just because Gadaffi was a megalomanical idiot doesn't mean that we should presuppose that all of our savage playmates are. We should start to understand our animals have their own self-interests that they're all keenly aware of.

You don't get halfway into bed with evil because eventually evil is going to make you sleep on the couch, and the victim's of evil aren't ever going to give you credit for your attempt to keep one foot on the fucking floor while you were still in the boudoir.

Andrew Brietbart's Big Peace and the "Fuck Me Jesus" Broad on Sepulveda Boulevard: Equally Credible

The above is a pretty funny video and I recommend it to you all. But I didn't just post it because it's hilarious. There is a larger point here. Specifically, if you read an Andrew Brietbart blog expecting anything even remotely approaching the truth in history or politics, you may as well be straddling the hood a fucking Datsun on Sepulveda Boulevard yourself. All of the "Big" blogs are like dating sites for people who shouldn't be allowed out of their homes without electronic monitoring. If, however, you enjoy having your stupidity force-fed to you, I can't recommend the House of Brietbart more highly. You'll feel at home there.

I bring this up because I read the most remarkably dumb fucking thing I think I've ever seen on Brietbart's Big Peace this week. It's an "article" - and I use the term loosely - by some yutz named Kevin Mooney called "Oliver North’s ’80s Counter-Terrorism Efforts vs. Gaddafi Instructive to Post-9/11 Era." The headline alone nearly made me shit myself with laughter.

As much as I like to think that I excel at encapsulating stupidity for you folks here, I just can't do it this time. There's just too much of it. You really need to read the whole piece for yourselves.

Mr. Mooney spends a great deal of post drawing on the mitigating evidence from Colonel North's 1989 criminal trial. Oddly, he spends no time at all detailing what North was actually on trial for. Which is usually a pretty god clue that the guy that you're dealing with is a liar, a scumbag, an idiot, or a special bundle of all three. Pretty much all Mooney says about the trial is that the charges against Ollie were either dismissed or overturned on appeal.

The report of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh is pretty enlightening on why some of the charges against North were dropped;

"North was indicted in March 1988 on 16 Iran/contra charges, along with Poindexter, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim in a 23-count indictment. After the cases were severed and the central conspiracy charges were dropped due to classified-information problems, North stood trial beginning in February 1989 on 12 counts.

I'm a weird guy in thinking that you can't claim to vindicated if you aren't tried because the government doesn't allow the evidence against you to be heard. You'd be surprised how often that stance keeps me from getting laid. Really you would.

Yet North still managed to get himself convicted of three counts:  Aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding and altering official documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity from former National Security Advisor Richard) Secord. The "illegal gratuity" in question was a security fence around his home, the proceeds of which were diversions from the Contra payments, which were themselves diverted from the Iranian arms sales.

Colonel North's convictions were reversed for the simple reason that he was given transactional immunity by the Select Joint Committee investigating Iran-Contra. That immunity made it almost impossible, given North's televised - and immunized - testimony before Congress, to prosecute him criminally. Walsh should've resigned the second North's immunity was granted by Congress because it destroyed any number of Iran-Contra prosecutions.

But let's be clear about one thing. Oliver North wasn't vindicated on a single fucking thing. He got off on numerous technicalities. From a factual perspective, the good Colonel is no different than a rapist who was acquitted because it was dark outside that night. Actually, that's not true. Most rapists don't admit to, and try to justify, their crimes on national television.

Mooney never comes right out and says what the "counter-terrorism strategy" in Iran-Contra actually was. And you know what? I wouldn't either, because it was phenomenally goddamn silly.

In the 80s, a dozen or so Americans were being held by Iranian-supported terrorist groups in Beirut. President Reagan then decided to negotiate with the sponsors of that terrorism, Iran. He did this by having North sell them weapons - through Dick Secord, John Poindexter, and North - through, of all countries, Israel. This was being done while Reagan was also extending financial assistance to the country that Iran was at war with, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Oh, and Iran-Contra was illegal from top to bottom. Because President Reagan only signed a back-dated presidential "finding" and never informed the relevant congressional authorities of the Iran arms sales, he was in violation of the National Security Act of 1947. The Contra diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales - and the administrations solicitation of funds for the Contras from several foreign countries - violated the Boland Amendment, which specifically prohibited such horseplay under color of law.

Iran-Contra was as criminal, if not more so, than even Watergate. Reagan should have been impeached just for the things that he admitted to, such as trading arms for hostages through a third country without notifying Congress, and backdating intelligence findings. Can you imagine the outcry from Brietbart's legion of Big Shithead blogs if, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama tried anything like Iran-Contra?

Besides, The arms diversion, and the subsequent Fence That Ollie Built, are things that the President specifically denied any knowledge of. Not only did Reagan deny it on television to the American, but he denied it under oath.

Remember, it was the Reagan administration themselves that threw North under the bus, and Nancy Reagan herself condemned him - specifically by calling him a fucking liar in public - during his 1994 Senate race.

Kevin Mooney's deliberate (and extremely poorly executed) obfuscation did succeed i what I believe in what I think it's purpose was - making the heads of smart people hurt.

But even there I have a remedy! Fantastic tits!

Those fucking things are a damned near perfect and always make me feel better in all the places that count. It is my hope That I'll soon be promoting a website where you'll be seeing a whole lot more of those magnificent milkbags. I love them and the Two Feet of Terror that they belong to, if only because they always clear my head of the shitheadery that people like Kevin Mooney put out there,

That's why Miss J is a much better hero than Oliver North.

The Ballad of Lonesome Jack

Whenever some Republican shitheel tells you that they want to change the way Washington works, you should kick him directly in the calls and laugh as he hits the ground. The fact is that they had their chance to do that between 1995 and 2007. And you know what they did? They made Washington work for them. Y'know, when they weren't out trolling for some homosex.

If you ever have some free time and the inclination to be completely disgusted with the GOP, I suggest that you do some reading on then- House whip Tom DeLay's K Street Project.

The K Street Project was DeLay's effort to take the axis of campaign politics, government and lobbying that the Democrats had perfected over several decades and replace it with a more Republican-inclined one. DeLay and the GOP majority wasn't interested in reforming shit, and anyone that actually believed that they were is an abject idiot and should be drowned for their own good.

It should be pointed out that Newt Gingrich, who is adorably delusional enough to think that he can be elected president next year, presided over the entire mess.

It was from the cesspool of the K Street Project that the felonious two-legged beast Jack Abramoff rose. Abramoff's life and career warrants some study, as well, and I can't recommend Alex Gibney's 2010 documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money to you enough. It's as good a primer into how the world of big-time world lobbying works as you're likely to find.

Of course, everybody still likes to pretend that the savage saga of Casino Jack is the exception to the rule because if they admitted the truth, practically everyone currently involved in politics would not only go right to fucking jail, they'd very likely be deported to Angola afterwards. Instead, only Abramoff, a few of his assistants and a hapless Ohio hick like Bob Ney did.

The fact is there's really no other way that the story could have ended. Jack's single biggest sin was that he took what happens in government every day to such cartoon villain levels that he couldn't avoid being called out. But, in the end, Abramoff is a pretty accurate reflection of how the entire twisted industry is supposed to work.

Because the insolent twats in politics, lobbying and the media actually believe that you're stupid, they want you to believe that the problem is money, rather than influence. And if you actually are stupid, you'll believe them. Granted, you'll be ignoring the fact that money is nothing more than an instrument of influence and not influence itself, but everyone will feel better for your inability to think independently.

The fact is that you can pass all the campaign finance reforms in the world and never actually address the problem. Sure, you'll feel better for the effort, mostly because you're not especially bright, but you'll effectively be treating cancer with lollipops.

Repeat after me: "Money. Is. Not. The Problem." Don't believe me? Let's ask Jack, who - for all of his celebrated faults - is something of an expert on the issue. Luckily, he discussed it on 60 Minutes last weekend.



Let's look at the key parts of the segment, shall we

Abramoff: When we would become friendly with an office and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, "You know, when you're done working on the Hill, we'd very much like you to consider coming to work for us." Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to 'em, that was it. We owned them. And what does that mean? Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they're gonna do. And not only that, they're gonna think of things we can't think of to do.

Neil Volz: Jack Abramoff could sweet talk a dog off a meat truck, that's how persuasive he was.

Neil Volz was one of the staffers Abramoff was talking about. He was chief of staff to Congressman Bob Ney, who as chairman of the House Administration Committee had considerable power to dispense favors. Abramoff targeted Volz and offered him a job.

Stahl: You're the chief of staff of a powerful congressman. And Jack owns you and you haven't even left working for the congressman.

Volz: I have the distinct memory of, you know, negotiating with Jack at a hockey game. So we're, you know, just a few rows back. The crowd's goin' crazy. And Jack and I are havin' a business conversation. And, you know, I'm-- I'm wrestlin' with how much I think I should get paid. And then five minutes later we're-- he's askin' me questions about some clients of his.

Stahl: When you look back was that the corrupting moment?

Volz: I think we were guilty of engaging in a corrupt relationship. So there were several corrupting moments. There isn't just one moment. There were many.

That, teenagers, is how influence works. At the end of the day, campaign finance reform isn't going to ever address that. Neither will the silly little nibbling around the edges that constitutes lobbying reform. Lesley Stahl's fake outrage and Abamoff's Hallmark card contrition aside, the system is working exactly the way it was designed to.

Here in Canada, the Harper Conservatives are congratulating themselves over their useless lobbying reforms and Canada's scumbag lobbyists are indignant over same. But all those reforms do is keep currently registered lobbyists out of election campaigns, which is effectively meaningless. They don't prohibit campaign or government staffs - or even politicians themselves - from future lobbying. And that's the only thing that's going to work.

Again, from Abramoff on 60 Minutes;

He says the most important thing that needs to be done is to prohibit members of Congress and their staff from ever becoming lobbyists in Washington.

Abramoff: If you make the choice to serve the public, public service, then serve the public, not yourself. When you're done, go home. Washington's a dangerous place. Don't hang around.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, that will sound oddly familiar to you, if only because that's exactly what I've been saying - almost word for word - for years now.

Now, sleazy politically-connected zillionaire lobbyists are going to (or already have) respond to these points by saying "But that's not me, or even most lobbyists. We work on behalf of charities, hospitals, orphanages and shit." Which doesn't make a lick of fucking difference. Furthermore, that argument rests on the premise that you're a moron.

It doesn't matter who a former politician or their staffers lobby for. In relation to the lobbying itself's corrupting effect on the system, there's no difference between Doctors Without Borders, Big Tobacco or even NAMBLA. Who the client is couldn't be more immaterial. The industry itself, as currently constituted and regulated, is an open invitation to abuse by some of the worst fucking people on earth.

Don't look to bloggers to even talk about it all that much. The bloggers who aren't actually retarded, addicted to simplistic talking points, or both (which is most of them) are already in somebody's hip pocket, or very much want to be. Some either want to be political staffers or lobbyists. Others just want influence with one or both. That's why they always talk about who's lobbying for whom, and never the way the lobbying industry itself is structured. If you make it a partisan issue, you neutralize the issue itself. 99% of the bloggers who are actually smart enough to understand how the system is fucked are either already part of it or are actively trying to be.

Think Lesley Stahl is going to do a giant expose? Think again. I'm willing to bet that her bosses at Viacom hire multiple lobbying firms, all of which employ former politicians and their staffers. Look at the networks that produce the news, and then think of the corporations that own those networks. I'm actually surprised that 60 Minutes had the balls to close out the Abramoff profile the way they did. I thought that I was going to be the only person who said that in public for a very long time.

Lastly, don't expect politicians are going to do. Remember, they and their staffers are the ones that most directly benefit from the system as it is currently is. No amount of public outrage (which there never will be because the issue lacks sex appeal) is going to outweigh the self-interest of the political and lobbying classes. It just won't. But if you want to see just how futile it is, write your MP or Congressman. Let me know what they tell you, especially if they respond with anything other than derisive laughter.

However, soulless cyborgs like Stephen Harper will institute the most tepid and meaningless reforms from time to time, lobbyists will pretend to be outraged about them and everyone will think that something is being accomplished, when it isn't. And then folks will pretend to be outraged when Harper cronies Rahim Jaffer or Bruce Carson come out of the lobbying woodwork with pussy actually spilling out of their pockets. But most folks only ever pay attention to the pussy.

Lookee, it's easy to point fingers at Jack Abramoff, mostly because he had the monumentally bad judgement to wear a black hat to his sentencing hearing. But you have to understand that he only perfected a system that existed decades before he came to town, albeit so flamboyantly that you have to wonder if it wasn't fuelled entirely by hubris and crank. But as Abramoff himself tells us, no one is doing anything to prevent the next Jack Abramoff from twisting democracy into an unrecognizable husk of what it's supposed to be.

And no one really cares, which just proves that there's a little Jack Abramoff in all over us.