I hate a parade

It always amazes me when fellow conservatives get really pissy about dumb shit, which encompasses most social issues. If you believe in limited government, it seems rather self-evident that that you want to limit the power of the state over the individual. By almost any metric, social conservatives fail that test. They want the state regulating all manner of personal proclivities.

While so-cons have always struck me as Gladys Kravitz-types, who usually don't know very much about the very important subjects of economics and foreign policy, I generally tolerated them in the interest of a "big tent." In fairness, I was also pretty confident that their agenda wouldn't hold up in court even if they could elect enough politicians to legislate it. Is that a cynical attitude? Sure it is. Welcome to politics.

The "movement" lost me forever in 2005, when the U.S Republican Party banded together and forced Congress to involve itself in the farcical effort to get Terri Schiavo on the starting line-up of the Miami Dolphins. That betrayed the fact these people don't even believe their own rhetoric about state and local control, the rule of law and traditional marriage rights. It was the single most glaring example of statist, big government activism that I had ever seen. They essentially tried to get the federal government to overrule a dozen local courts of competent jurisdiction and over 4,000 years of family law and tradition in some misguided notion of what they thought Jesus would do. And Bill Frist, as it happens, couldn't raise the dead.

That they did this at the very same time that they advocated a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as the only way to "protect traditional marriage" provided me with the insight that I could never take these people seriously again. Of course, I might have been able to overlook the Schiavo case had the GOP not also created huge deficits and engaged in unwinnable wars. And because the "movement" almost universally supported them in doing these things, I wanted no further part of the movement. Intellectual consistency is more important to me than political circle jerks. And you know what? I much prefer not having a "team."

While I support conservative politicians on an individual basis, I hold them to a much higher standard than I do anyone else. One tends to do that when one has been burned enough times. And if that leads to the election of liberals, so what? If nothing else, at least liberals are honest about their love of big government. Unlike the vast majority of political bloggers, I'd rather not justify the behaviour of assholes just because we share a favorite colour. There are few things that I really think are actually beneath me, but that's one of them.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to Toronto's Gay Pride Parade. Movement conservatives have always had their panties in a knot about Pride. There's something about a few thousand screaming queens dressed as Cher that rubs them the wrong way. Of course, the movement is wrong on that count. Screaming queens dressed as Cher are hilarious, and if the government insists on helping special interest groups fuck up traffic, it may as well do so in the most entertaining way possible. It turns out that most of the city agreed with me and for years efforts to defund it sputtered out without anyone really noticing that they had even started.

Almost magically, a group calling itself Queers Against Israeli Apartheid started showing up at Pride. Their outrageous and ridiculous political beliefs gave the modern right the pretext it was always looking for to get rid of the parade once and for all. Having said that, I think that the fact that anyone takes the Middle East policy views of a guy in assless pants seriously is the funniest thing I've ever heard. But wrapping your love of the Jews around your distaste of homos is pretty clever. I'll concede that. That's taking care of two birds with one stone, a rarity in politics, which is pretty well known for being populated with amateurish half-wits.

Much is being made of Mayor Rob Ford's decision to stay away from next weekend's Pride Parade. Instead, he's going to his cottage in Muskoka, where they presumably take a more liberal view of things like impaired driving and domestic disturbances.

The knives that are out for Mr. Ford have nothing to do with this particular decision, though. The exaltation of homosexuality is second only to the reverence paid to unfettered abortion as a litmus test for political correctness amongst our cognitive and cultural elites. Rob Ford’s sin is that he does not believe in mixing politics with sexuality pride. Rob Ford is not a homophobe, but nor on the other hand does he think it is any particular honour to be homosexual. Many Canadians not schooled in the catechism of gender correctness agree with him.

His shameful rap sheet includes the fact that he did not march in the parade while he was a councilor — that’s ten whole years of not marching — and he has even had the temerity to argue against using city money for this (or any other) special-interest parade. It is too bad that certain members of the gay community reflexively take a zero sum attitude to any politician’s perceived lack of support. This incident is instructive. Francisco Alvarez, co-chair of Pride Toronto, said Mr. Ford’s absence is a missed opportunity to “strengthen his connection with the LGBT community,” and added rather ominously, that “if he never comes, well, I guess we can draw conclusions about that.”

In other words, if a politician is there, he is a friend to the gays. If he doesn’t march, he isn’t neutral in his feelings about gays; he must be a homophobe. Mr. Ford’s instincts were absolutely right when he argued against funding the Pride parade. Undoubtedly he will be asked to walk in the next Slutwalk parade. I doubt that Mr. Ford thinks that a woman’s right to dress and act like women whose business it is to arouse lust and get paid for satisfying it is a cause worth giving up a weekend in Muskoka. Or giving up a single precious moment doing anything else for. But you can be sure that if he is asked and refuses, he will be castigated by women’s groups as a sexist.

Those are interesting points, I suppose. But Ms. Kay overlooks the fact that this is an electioneering stunt, every bit as much as it would have been if Ford had gone. Politicians are famous for showing up at identity-based nonsense events because they want the votes of those of that particular identity group. Go figure.

But the argument can also be made that not making an appearance is a pitch for the votes of those opposed to a certain identity group. You used to see a lot of that in the American South. If you know anything at all about the politics of this city, you know that there's very little danger of Rob Ford winning the gay vote anytime soon. And if there was, I can guarantee you that he'd be there, his family and Canada Day be damned. And he'd likely be wearing a dog collar and a "Bear Nation" t-shirt.

But by not going, he can appeal to people who have an issue with sodomy, and that's what this is. It's base politics. It plays to people too partisan or too stupid to know otherwise, which is exactly why it'll work. If you think that there weren't endless staff meetings about Hizzoner "just going to the cottage with his family," you might actually be a moron.

As I've already mentioned, I'm a small-government cat and I think that it's only business is to make the goddamned trains run on time and to make sure that getting from point a to point b isn't any more of a nightmare than it already is. Maybe put a bad guy in handcuffs every now and then. It certainly doesn't, in my opinion, have any business extolling the virtues of any identity group, particularly when it costs a fortune and fucks up traffic.

If you want to amputate your cock in a quest to be more like Judy Garland, I'm all for it, although I will lose a certain degree of respect for you for wanting my support in the first friggin' place. I support you precisely because I don't care what you do all that much, so long as it doesn't make getting to work any more of a pain in the ass than it already is. And you know what? The goddamned government shouldn't care, either. These are trying times, and what you do with your babymaker should be the least of anyone's concerns.

Government is, after all, nothing more than career bureaucrats and hack politicians. Do you really want them making value judgements about what you are, either positive or negative? I sure as shit don't. If having Rob fucking Ford huckersting all over your party makes you feel any more or less special about yourself, I would suggest that you reevaluate your priorities. Try planning a house party this weekend. Then invite the government over. Let's see how much fun you wind up having. Although, in Ford's case, results may vary, particularly when the cops show up. My mayor has, after all, been in the back of a police cruiser more frequently than all five members of the Sex Pistols combined.

And this isn't just about Pride to me. I feel that way about everybody and their infernal fucking parades. The Irish, the Caribbean community, Santa Claus, the Race for the Cure, all of 'em. And that goes double for sports shit. Some grown men win a child's game and you want the government to pay for your party? Fuck you and get off of the goddamn road before someone runs your dumb ass over.

My blanket opinion is that the government shouldn't give them a dime and should keep them off of the fucking streets. There are lots of parks in Toronto, some of which are truly massive, and if the community in question is so fond of itself, it can fucking well foot the bill. And don't give me that "tourism" bullshit. If your event is so fucking terrific, people will travel here for it irrespective of whether electioneering shitheels like Rob Ford, David Miller, Mel Lastman or Barbara Hall give it their worthless personal seal of approval.

Not one dime of public money for any it. Whether you're thickest necked Argo fan in all of Christendom, a dude who literally bathes in cum, a chick who digs Christmas, or just some Ukrainian; I don't begrudge you your childish horseshit, I just want want you to pony up the cash for it and keep it the fuck out of my way while I'm trying to get to where I'm going. I'm really not a difficult cat to get along with that way. Money's tight and traffic is shitty enough. The government should be paving a road or educating a goddamned kid. This fucking city could use more than a little of both lately.

It's really too bad that more "conservatives" don't feel that way because it exposes the very real truth that they just think that fags are icky. It further demonstrates that we - who spend a good deal of our day complaining that the government can't even deliver the fucking mail - secretly think that it should be making value judgements on our lives, so long as they're the moral judgements that we approve of. It seems as though that we're all for some socialism, so long as it suits our personal tastes and religious and ethnic habits.

This is just another example of both sides wanting the government to pat them on their precious heads and tell them that they're the favorite child. But that isn't what the government is supposed to do. And that's how everybody in this debate is rapidly infantilizing themselves.

The gays learned this week that political pats on the head are fleeting things. The same government that gave you a cookie last year can take it away next year. And it can happen to anyone else. What endlessly infuriates me is that nobody seems to get that the taxpayer shouldn't be in the fucking snack business at all.

I'd also point out that the Barbara Kay displays the almost awesome ignorance that you always see in the sexually uptight. Sluts are decidedly not "women whose business it is to arouse lust and get paid for satisfying it." Women who get paid for it are whores. Sluts do it for fun and should be treasured by all of us. If anyone deserves a fucking parade, it's them.

Link lovingly stolen from Five Feet of Fury. For another view, check out Life With a Parasite

Kiss me on the bus

Because I stupidly thought I could get through life based on nothing but my rapier wit, rugged good looks and enormous fucking cock, I take public transportation a lot. That's why you should never listen to your heart or follow your childhood dreams, kids. They'll lie to you every time and lead you to ruin. Stay in school!

Having said that, I don't just ride the rocket because I'm a professional loser, although that has a lot to do with it. Toronto happens to be an impossible city to drive in. It was designed to accommodate maybe a half million people comfortably and now almost three million call it home, with another million and change commuting in every day. I could probably walk the 20 miles to work faster than I could drive it - and my cock is easier to park downtown than even a hatchback, although my formidably thick wang is bigger.

Anyhow, spending three hours a day on the TTC makes me feel something that liberal shitheads would probably call racism. But being the worldly type that I am, I recognize it for it is, a special blend of misanthropy and xenophobia.

You see, I've come to view my commute as special. It's "me time" whereupon I can focus solely on just how much I detest everything that my life has become. I find it prepares me for the next eight hours, that I know I'll spend praying for the giant coronary that finally finishes me off. Sometimes my internal monologue includes me practicing Redd Foxx's classic "I'm coming, Elizabeth!" line until I feel it's perfect, but mostly I just listen to Kevin Smith's 600 podcasts and ruminate.

The very last thing I need during those desperate hours is bizarre cultural spectacles that creep everybody the fuck out. This is Me Time, Asshole!

Case in point, I was coming home on the subway today from what was a truly hateful week at work, and I just wanted to listen to my Adam Corolla podcast and be left the fuck alone. I'm a pretty easy guy to please that way, I know. I hear it a lot. It was early enough in the day that the train wasn't the shitstorm of chaos and awful smells that it becomes just half an hour later and I was pleased with my ability to manipulate my staff into coming in early so that I could flee. I was as close to peace with myself as I get.

It was not to last long. A gentleman of Pakistani extraction decided to sit across the aisle from me. He was in his late forties or early fifties and wearing a golf cap and shirt, a spring jacket and chinos, all of which were equally creased and rumpled. It was actually a pretty impressive sartorial display, and I'm a guy who own a "Richard Nixon Athletic Department" t-shirt that I remain as proud of as the day I bought it in 1998.

He wasn't all that interested in me, but that wouldn't matter in mere seconds. And that's where shit gets creepy and weird.

There was this African girl who was maybe twenty years old in a hijab and immodestly tight jeans that caught his fancy in the next row of seats to his right. He expressed his interest in her by turning his portly frame so that he faced her, with his arm and leg over the seat immediately next to her. And he started pounding a beat on the back of the seat. An exotic beat. No good could come of this, thought I, trying as I was to listen to overly excitable Tea Party nativism and simplistic economics from a third-rate comedian and Andrew Brietbart.

Don't get me wrong, I would never condemn a man for ogling a girl less than half his age. I'm just not so fucking blatantly obvious about it. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'd know that I'm far too classy for that. I also strive not to make my carnal intentions known to women that wear symbols of religious piety, unless they're worn for clearly ironic reasons. Strippers with crucifix necklaces have been a favorite of mine since I was six.

Then, over the maybe three feet that separated them, he started singing to her. Loudly enough that I could hear it above my maxed-out iPod, which meant that everybody else in the car could hear it, too. And this cat was no Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I would've dug that and maybe jammed with him for a few bars.

Because he was singing in Urdu - which, again, I could hear and identify over a really loud Corolla podcast - I had know idea what he singing about. For all I know, it could have been a touching ballad about what a Jew-loving pig I am and how I should be slaughtered and my entrails left on the train tracks, but I don't think so. I wouldn't have necessarily disagreed with such a song, but that wasn't the vibe I was getting from it. The dude was trying to get his own bad self laid.

And he failed spectacularly. By the second verse, the object of his affection got the fuck up and hightailed it to the nearest exit. Where she remained for the next four stops. The best part? He went into a third verse. I felt horrible for this girl and started wondering how much damage my steel-toed boots could do on this asshole's skull. My initial estimate was somewhere in the neighborhood of "a lot."

As an aside, Africans traditionally understand about as much Urdu as your average Confederate soldier from the U.S civil war. But this girl knew that something devious, wrong and not in her best interests was afoot, as I suppose one does when a stranger starts melodically cooing to you in a tounge foreign to everyone in his immediate vicinity. His wardrobe did him no favors, either.

I tried giving her a sympathetic glance, but that was avoided on her side, what with my being an awkwardly tall white guy with a shaved head and all. I'm what you might call in an acquired taste in most communities, which is too bad, seeing as though I'm such a "people person."

It gets better. Our South Asian Hero didn't stop there. Once his One True Love turned away, he kept staring at the back of her covered head. And when she turned around, he waved at her and launched into a fucking fourth verse of his song! Or it might have been the bridge. Bridges are designed to get girls damp in drawers. Just ask Lemmy.

Now, I hardly consider myself an intellectual but everything I know wasn't learned from talk radio. I find that the best way to learn lessons is to ask questions. And the Pakistani on the subway was a Pandora's Box of queries.

As I mentioned earlier, this guy was even older than I am. And he had a confidence in his delivery that undermined the notion that this was the first time that he attempted this particular strategy of seduction. Singing to strangers in language that no one understands in public is something that I would think he had done a few times before. Then there was his particular manner of haute couture. I get the idea of loving an outfit so much that you live in it for weeks at a time, but in my experience, the ladies don't.

What I'm getting at is this must have worked for him before, and more than once. Men are famously creatures of habit and aren't given to sudden changes in their seductive technique.

Somehow, somewhere. some woman - probably a pious African woman, what with the creatures of habit of men, and all - heard this cat's mating song and lept right into his lap and cooed "You are from Rawalpindi, yes? Take me now, here in the subway! I need it! I need you! Only you! In the ass! Be my Daddy!"

Although it contradicts everything I know about the human condition and the female sexual psyche, it must have worked for him at least once. And that's why I hate humanity.

If you want to know why I hate myself, consider this: I just wrote 1,386 words describing an event that took less than ten minutes to actually happen. And I can almost guarantee you that this little essay isn't going to get me laid.

So who's the bigger loser, me or the obnoxious singing Pakistani? Is this how the TTC is supposed to be the Better Way? Does it it exist for me to find more reasons to hate myself? Is this why I pay my fucking taxes?

I should have killed myself when I was three.

Just another dick: Sympathy for Weiner

The summer of 2001 personified a journalistic phenomenon that I like to call "Shark Week." You see, things of importance are famous for not happening over the summer. Governments around the world largely roll up the carpets and go on vacation, and that's about two-thirds of the news, right there.

This feeds into a another trick of modern journalism - scaring the fuck out of everyone. If you've watched a week of TV news over the last thirty years, I can guarantee you that you've seen at least one story along the lines of "How Your Cock Ring Can Kill You: A Special Investigation." When nothing is happening, the networks need ratings, so the convince you that you're going to meet your Creator in the most ridiculous way imaginable.

It doesn't worry me, however, because cock rings are redundant. If anything is going to kill me, it's the fact that it takes me forever to cum, when I cum at all. It turns out that thirty-five years of compulsive, punishing masturbation wasn't as good of an idea as it seemed when I was six. But that's why I write this blog, to teach the children about the things that can really fuck up their lives.

I call this Shark Week because in 2001, there were zillions of stories of about three people getting getting eaten by sharks. So for three months, the cable news networks contrived to persuade the American populace that everyone was in danger of being eaten by a shark, even if you lived in Nebraska. For good measure, they heavily implied that those God-fearing citizens that didn't fall victim to Jaws would be fucked to death by Congressman Gary Condit. Then September rolled around and there was that thing about Arabs and airplanes in New York City. Maybe you heard about it.

Well, when the news about Anthony Weiner plastering his penis all over Twitter, I knew that Shark Week had come early this year. More importantly, I knew that Shark Week had taken on new and hilarious proportions of stupidity. I say that because there is no shortage of important stuff ging on right now. Pakistan and Afghanistan are both accelerating their descent into chaos and the United States is now officially out of money.

In any sane country, those would be big stories. But this is America we're talking about, and the normal rules don't apply there anymore. Here's an interesting contrast. Last night, I went out and bought Eisenhower 1956: The President's Year of Crisis--Suez and the Brink of War by David A. Nichols. In that book, you learn how the president suffered a massive heart attack and contended with the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt - which could have sparked a nuclear war - during an election year. Mostly left out of the book is the Soviet invasion of Hungary during the campaign. 

Compare that to this week's Modern American Catastrophe ... a mid-level Democrat's cock showing up on the Internet. Look, I believe that the debt ceiling vote is every bit as important today as the Suez Crisis was a half-century ago. If the United States defaults on its debt - or even gives serious clues that it might - no one will take it seriously again.   Every Republican retard on Earth is running around screaming about Pakistan being a banana republic with nukes, while ignoring that America could very well be one by fucking Christmas.

You haven't heard much about that this past week because it was smothered in Weiner's pheromones.

Liberals, meanwhile, are stroking their goddamn beards and wondering if this is some kind of nefarious Republican plot to humiliate them with das Weiner wang at the expense of the issues. This goes to show just how smoking-hot stupid and weak liberals are. As if the fact that the story originated with Andrew Breitbart wasn't enough to convince them.

Breitbart is a blogger and bloggers, with very rare exceptions, shouldn't be taken seriously. Christ, I include myself in that. After all, what do you friggin' people really know about me anyway? For all any of you know, I could be in the hip pocket of any number of special interests. And you know what? That's true of all bloggers. I personally know of a couple who have been paid off to write a certain story a certain way. I'm not, but there's no way that you can know that other than by knowing or trusting me. I think I've made it clear by the way I write that I'm not connected to any corporation, political part or special interest, but there's no way that you can know that for certain.

Partisans lie on the Internet. Go figure. And Andrew Breitbart has a worse record of, shall we say, selective editing, than most. Okay, I'll be honest, the guy is a fucking scumbag and everybody that works for him should burn in Hell.

The fact is that virtually every partisan of any standing is lying and is probably being paid to lie. . The sooner you understand that, the better off you'll be. It also explains a lot of the highly selective outrage out there this week. Exposure of the Weiner schvanz has led to uniform calls for his resignation by Republicans, but that wasn't true of senators John Ensign and David Vitter, both of whom had engaged in more tawdry - and hilarious - conduct.

They also committed actual crimes. Ensign violated lobbying laws and Vitter solicited a madam who later committed suicide to avoid going to prison because they wanted to get their dicks wet. This week's GOP narrative is that Ensign resigned, which is true, but ignores the fact that it took two fucking years for him to do so, and there weren't that many Republicans calling for him to do so. Nevada, you see, is an increasingly competitive state.

It's pretty easy to say that Larry Craig should go because Democrats are extinct in Idaho, therefore the chances of losing that seat are practically nil. But if Craig was the junior senator from, say, New Mexico, I guarantee you that he'd still be in office. Republican outrage tends to be geographical, rather than moral. It should also be pointed out that they're, for the most part, bitter queens and Sarah Palin is their Judy Garland.

Bill Maher has has said that Republican men love Palin because they want to fuck her. But Bill Maher is wrong about a lot of things. No, they  just want to be that fabulous, interchanging diamond cross and star of David pendants and being almost stupendously wrong about matters historical without consequence. And they love cock. Just ask Mark Foley.

Look, I'm not going to lie to you. I've sent pictures of my majestic wang to all kinds of women over the years. Why else would Al Gore have invented the Internet if not for that? The only difference is that I haven't gifted anyone with the visage of my wholly beautiful cock that didn't ask for it first, I am, after all, a gentleman and a true conservative. Also, Twitter didn't exist then.

More importantly, I actually went on to have sexual relations with a good percentage of the ladies who saw my beautiful, beautiful putz via e-mail. I'm just really special that way.

And that's where this week's Weiner fixation takes on a truly magnificent turn. You see, the congressman somehow felt it necessary to apologize to Bill Clinton for the broads that didn't blow him.

If, like me, you consider the Starr Report something like the Holy Grail, and the most romantic tale of all, you see the awkwardness in such an apology. We know that that the 42nd president of the United States finished the overwhelming percentage of his oral encounters with "that woman" by jerking off into the sink, as she knelt there, sad and horrified that he wouldn't give his biological deposit to her. . The one time that he did, it wound up before a Grand Jury and the United States Congress.

Clinton waited nine months and had to go to fucking Ireland before he personally apologized to Monica Lewinsky. And that was after his people savaged her as a psychopathic, cumslut stalker in public for almost a year.

Modern Republican orthodoxy is a philospohical mess of brazen lies and incomprehensible stupidity. If you spend any time at all studying the facts that underlie their narrative, you might very well cause the universe to collapse onto itself. The entire ideological construct rests on a foundation of ignorance and duplicity that almost defy the laws of fucking physics. Were he alive today, I can't imagine that Ike would do anything other than want to kill these assholes just as surely as he killed the Nazis or Tail gunner Joe McCarthy.

But because people like Anthony Weiner will always feel it necessary to apologize to Bill Clinton, the GOP will always win. They might lose the White House, but they'll always win the narrative, which is more important.

Welcome to Shark Week.


Video extremely NSFW

Because she is a girl

I work in downtown Toronto. There are any number of hipster idiots and yuppie cocksuckers there. Frankly, it's a minor miracle that I haven't killed myself like I should've when I was three yet. The sight of such people repulses me in ways that almost equals how I repulse myself.
Thankfully, it's really summertime and Toronto's zillions of hot chicks are scantily clad. That makes me forget how I lust for my own death, if only for a moment. Except of course when it doesn't.

Anyhow, there's this PR-charity-giant pain in the ass campaign here in the city called Because I am a Girl.You've likely seen their ads on the subway. If you haven't, you're probably a better person for it.

Because I am a Girl strives to educate us all on the importance of teaching girls to read and not mutilating their genitals and stuff. Oddly enough, their method of education  involves gathering in packs on the sidewalk and annoying the fuck out of everyone that crosses their path. Far be it from me to tell a charity how to conduct their business, but it seems self-evident that if you want to stop, say, the genital mutilation of girls, it might be the better part of wisdom to not have girls fucking with everybody's lunch hour. People who work for a living are generally under lots of stress. Just sayin'.

I spend a good deal of my day staring out the window. I find that it helps me properly strew in my own hate. As I age, I find that my contempt has been entirely too focused, and I've ignored far too many other things that are deserving of my loathing, such as the things that happen right outside of my window.

The Because I am a Girl folks had been in front of the giant Yuppie Fucking Mountaineering Outlet across the street for a couple of weeks now, unintentionally making a pretty solid case for violence against women.  They wave dramatically at passers-by and try to engage in the fake-cheeriness and most people ignore them. But they Don't Stop. They call after the people who just ignored them as they continue on their merry way.

Keep in my mind that no one's more against female genital mutilation and illiteracy more than I am, and I started reconsidering my opinions after a few days of watching this. And because Jesus exists only to kick me in the balls, it was only a matter of time before they showed up directly outside my window.

There was a dramatically gay Chinese guy, a morbidly obese butch dyke and Her, an Indian girl with a body so banging that it reaffirmed that Jesus exists only to kick me in the balls. She was tiny, but seemingly couldn't move at all without her shapely titties jiggling. And she had a beautiful, nay, a magnificent ass that spoke to me in a secret language that only I could I understand. Seeing it was a profoundly spiritual experience. I actually wept a little inside, in the forlorn hope that I could be a better man.

And you know what? I was! It was almost magical. Sure, I still despise virtually everything about being me, and I only got more miserable as the day continued. But there was something different about it. Something I couldn't immediately identify.

Hours later, on the subway, I found myself between a super cute Indian girl who works for the Hospital for Sick Kids with a dramatically plunging neckline on her dress that barely concealed the biggest jugs I've ever seen on such a tiny woman, and someone who looked suspiciously like Raymi's mom, who tents my trousers like few other MILFs. Verily, she has it going on. Ordinarily, such a combination would have me spewing my goo in ways that could potentially derail the train. It's happened before and, God help us all, it could happen again.

But today was no ordinary day. Oh, no. All I could think about was that Indian chick from Because I am a Girl. Sure, I mostly thought about how I would sodomize her and stuff, but I thought about doing it very tenderly.

And that, I think, is how you know when it's love.

Mr. Secretary: Lawrence Eagleburger, 1930-2011

I've always been interested in people with long government careers, particularly in foreign policy. I consider myself something of a student of history and am fascinated with anyone who took part in so much of it. One of the most impressive things about Richard Nixon is that he met every major geopolitical figure of the second half of the twentieth century, except Stalin. For those reasons, I plan on re-reading and write about Robert Gates' 1997 memoir From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War soon.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who died this morning after a brief illness, was such a historical figure, although a little-known one. He held the office of secretary for a mere five months, after James Baker resigned to lead the first President Bush's unsuccessful re-election effort.

My feelings about the first Bush administration are hardly a secret. George H.W Bush was, in my opinion, the last adult in the White House, by which I mean that he dealt with the world as it was, as opposed to some visionary construct of what he wished that it was. In this, I also believe that he was the last real foreign policy conservative in the Republican party.

Everything subsequent to the Bush foreign policy is nothing less than unfettered Wilsonianism, which goes a long way in explaining why the United States has been constantly deployed in combat operations somewhere in the world for twenty years now, the fiscal effects of which are just now being felt.

If you want to know why Bush is my favorite of modern presidents, along with Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon, all you need do think is think of what didn't happen in 1989, but very easily could have with another president in office. A major world power, the Soviet Union, declined and fell without massive, unstoppable bloodshed, an almost unprecedented event in human history.

It's impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush having the restraint to not engage in a break-dancing spectacle on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, which would have caused Gorbachev and the Moscow Politburo to become even more repressive in what remained of the Soviet empire. Moscow would probably have ultimately failed, but millions of people could have been killed in the process. A potential civil war in a nuclear country is something best avoided, a fact that escapes most modern "conservatives."  In granting Gorbachev his dignity, he created the conditions that allowed for a peaceful, virtually bloodless collapse.

The same is true of the American response to the Tienanmen Square crackdown of the same year. The emerging neoconservative movement joined liberal Democrats in calling for harsh response against Beijing, or, perhaps worse, to have supported the democracy activists before or after the massacre in the square. Of course, that ignores completely the natural isolationationism of the Chinese to foreign interference, and would have not only destroyed Sino-American relations, it would have lead to an even broader and more brutal level of repression, perhaps even civil war if it had gone far enough.  

I'm not sure that Bush and Baker could have accomplished any of that without the able hand of Larry Eagleburger. While the former were spending their formative years making their fortunes in the oil fields and law firms of Texas, the latter was in the service of the Eisenhower and Kennedy State departments. In the 1960s, Bush was engaged in domestic issues and Baker was earning his wings as a political hand, while Eagleburger was one of Henry Kissinger's key deputies on the National Security Council Staff. When Bush and Baker were in political exile during the Carter years, Eagleburger was ambassador to Yugoslavia, experience that couldn't have been more helpful during that country's disintegration in the latter years of the Bush administration.

Lawrence Eagleburger, along with Bush himself, was an adherent of the Kissinger - Brent Scowcroft school of foreign policy realism, without which the United States could have faced catastrophe. That the Republican party as a whole has repudiated that legacy  in order to embrace the failed ghost of Woodrow Wilson is one of the three major reasons that I'm now incapable of taking the Republican party seriously. The GOP has been far too preoccupied rewriting the history of the Reagan administration to make it fit with their categorical lack of a coherent worldview to even think of what they'd do in office, except continue the second Bush's mostly disastrous reign of error.

Indeed, the only person left in American politics to even acknowledge the Bush-Baker-Scowcroft-Eagleburger (and later, Colin Powell) legacy is President Obama. Though deeply flawed, as we're seeing in Libya, I can at least recognize the Obama foreign policy historically and see where it is supposed to lead. No rational person can say the same about any of the major Republican challengers for president propose. They spend their days and nights imagining what their fantasy vision of Reagan would do, but fail to recognize that their vision is just that, a fantasy with no basis in history. In fact, Reagan ranks with Eisenhower and Carter for the fewest military deployments in post-war history.

I'd like to close with some of the tributes to Larry Eagleburger from The New York Times.

Bush called Eagleburger "one of the most capable and respected diplomats our foreign service ever produced, and I will be ever grateful for his wise, no-nonsense counsel during those four years of historic change in our world."

In a statement, Bush said that "during one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein began attacking Israel with Scud missiles trying cynically and cruelly to bait them into the conflict, we sent Larry to Israel to preserve our coalition. It was an inordinately complex and sensitive task, and his performance was nothing short of heroic."

Baker said Eagleburger "was a legend in the U.S. Foreign Service, a consummate professional who served his country expertly and with great dignity as a selfless diplomat." He said his former colleague was "superb at divining trouble and heading it off. That's why he became the first Foreign Service officer in history to rise to deputy secretary of state and later to secretary of state. Simply stated, Larry Eagleburger was as good as they come — loyal, hard-working and intelligent, a trifecta for an American diplomat."

(...)

"Larry believed in the strength of America's values, and he fought for them around the world," (Hillary) Clinton said Saturday. "He was outspoken, but always the consummate diplomat. Even in retirement, Larry remained a staunch advocate for the causes he believed in. He never stopped caring, contributing, and speaking out."

Obama called Eagleburger a statesman who "devoted his life to the security of our nation and to strengthening our ties with allies and partners."

Although I doubt that any recognizes it, the death of Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger comes at the worst possible time for both the Republican party and the United States. He still had a great deal to offer both.

But today is not the day to ponder that. We should instead thank him for is good and great contributions and honor his memory. And we should hope that more men like him are on the horizon.

Deep thoughts and profound impressions of the Anthony Weiner scandal

Mine's bigger. Moreover, I know it when I see it.

That is all.