THE BEST WAY TO WATCH DOWNTON ABBEY.

Saves a lot of wasted time and trouble.








And yes, we agree with Benadryl Cuddlepups (in an unguarded moment, since "clarified") that the close of Series 2 (which we watched out of sheer morbid curiosity) was "sentimental, clichéd, and effing atrocious".

Speaking of Beenabroad Cameacropper, when absolutely everything SUCKS, as it does just now and will for the next, oh, four years, it is so TOTALLY time for THIS! (Can you hardly wait??????)




Bring on fantasy.      Reality reeks.

Bring on the stealth Catholic novel.      Reality....could change?

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse for the Obama campaign....

Greta Van Susteren interviews ALASKA 'FIRST DUDE' TODD PALIN -- and -- DAMN! the guy can talk!!!!

DAMN!

If this is what constitutes a high school education in Alaska, then good for you Alaska. Todd Palin is charming, chatty, well-spoken, good vocab, ready to engage and answer at length. Not a rube, not a hillbilly, not a red-flannel-shirted red-state red-neck, not a duh-h-h-h, yup, nope, fer shure, land'o'goshen ma'am, ah couldn't rightly say, gun-totin', beer-swillin' MORON.

NOT, NOT, NOT!

DAMN!

This is not what was supposed to happen. How dare he?! He's an accomplished, natural, reflective man, as worldly-wise as he needs to be, and perfectly presentable when it comes time to meet those Heads of State Charlie Gibson is so concerned about impressing.

Damn, double damn, with an extra helping of damn on the side!




SPEAKING OF SARAHS

Like, I so TOTALLY KNEW that Dr. Sara Tancredi on FOX's Prison Break was SO NOT DEAD, even when Linc was supposed to have found her HEAD in a box -- I just KNEW this couldn't be the end of the barely budding affair between her and Michael. (Actress Sarah Wayne Callies was preggers and took a season off. Nice to see her back in one piece.)

Duly noted: Domenic Purcell is now getting first billing in the credits,


ahead of Wentworth Miller. This probably has something to do with contract haggles, Domenic perhaps feeling that he had a more pivotal role than his second billing would indicate, especially since he stopped being the guy off someplace on death row, only heard from in passing, as he was during season one.


Glad the show is back. I hardly watch any TV entertainment shows with regularity (news junkie that I am), but for some reason I'm hooked on two of the most brutally violent ones, Prison Break and CSI:NY. Downright kinky sometimes (the shows, that is -- me, not so much). But I like the characters, and the writing is good (CSI not so good sometimes). And of course, I'm always happy to support the work of troop-supporter and Iraqi-kid benefactor Gary Sinise.

Rock on, Detective.
Semper Fi.

LOTS OF SERIOUS DIRT to shovel today

but time is short this a.m., so I'll just proffer THIS, because Republicans have a sense of humor.

You just gotta laugh -- I mean, you GOTTA.



[hat-tip: RealClearPolitics]


Fey -- she's da BOMB. Brilliant.

And in the movie of the same name,
the part of SARAH PALIN
will be played by TINA FEY:

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD....

Hear that munching sound? The world's termites and maggots are busily nibbling away at the edges of mankind's well-being -- pretty much as we left things when we headed off for more pleasant horizons:





Yeah, I know everybody on the web is using it, but it's kind of irresistable:


Bring the good old bugle, boys,
we'll sing another song
Sing it with a spirit that
will start the world along
Sing it as we used to sing it, 50,000 strong
While we were marching through Georgia.

Chorus
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from [Ossetia] to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia.

I do recall feeling my gag reflex way back when George Bush looked into Vlad the Impaler Putin's eyes and saw a good soul, or whatever the heck it was. What misgivings I had about John McCain have receded proportionally upon hearing about his other [besides the Surge] moment of prescience:

While it's all looking very bleak, at least we can see a glimmer of hope in the powerful words of Georgian President Saakashvili. Perennial genial lightweight Glenn Beck seems to have developed a rapport with the Saak-man, and let him rip for an hour on a recent show. (a Youtube 3-parter)





MEGA-CHURCHER WARREN HOSTS A
PORPOISE-DRIVEN DEBATE

Normally I have nothing but suspicion toward mega-church enterprises, but California's Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren seems benign enough, and I'm told that his mega-selling book A Purpose-Driven Life is not without substance.

So Warren invited the two presumptive presidential nominees to separate but equal public interviews on matters of faith and principle. Each was to have the opportunity to answer the same questions without knowledge of how the other responded.

I didn't watch it. Frankly, I'm not all that interested in the faith-related musings of either candidate -- McCain seems a nice enough guy with a nominal attachment to some Protestant community, but I would characterize his mode of expression as pretty much the stuff of the American secular religion: God not particularly distinguished from Country. Obama's religious associations, no matter how much he tries to distance himself from them, are throughly repugnant, and I could never consider anything he has to say on matters theological or spiritual to be anything but tainted and twisted at the root.

I needn't have worried, since at his most reflective he declared one of the defining public policy issues of the modern age to be both theologically and scientifically "above his pay grade." Unfortunately the cool dude from Illinois didn't seem to grasp that big public policy issues have a way of insisting that we craft some kind of legal "specificity" to best keep peace and order in society, and THAT, Mr. Obama, is within the presidential and legislative pay grades -- the buck stops in the District of Columbia.

Obama's attempt at sudden (and thoroughly implausible) humility in the face of a great moral question has only succeeded in keeping alive a hot-button political issue which the feminist left thought it had successfully aborted (as 'twere), thereby resuscitating the appalling Obama record on the fate of infants accidentally born alive after an attempted abortion. For the sake of their mothers' theoretical womb-autonomy, Mr. Obama has supported the legalized manslaughter of the stubbornly alive newborn. And he has stood virtually alone, even among liberal Democrats, on this issue -- a rather distasteful variation on his status as "The One."

So if Nat Hentoff's characterization of Obama as "the Infanticide Candidate" a few months back hasn't quite stuck in the public mind, the pot has now been duly stirred by the Obamessiah's own pitifully clumsy evasiveness at the Saddleback forum. Obama's voting record on Born Alive Infant Protection and Partial Birth Abortion is the scummy bathwater he was hoping would get thrown out with the baby, but he seems to have accomplished yet another pratfall while treading in his own oil-slick.

God love him -- the gift that keeps on giving! Thanks to Mr. Obama's verbal contortionism, Rich Lowry at National Review is writing this, Paul Kengor at Political Mavens is writing this, and Kyle-Ann Shiver at American Thinker is writing this. Hey, Barry, thanks for the memory.

Obama's Saddleback performance was so poor that his campaign is now circulating far-fetched stories of McCain having access to both the questions and his rival's answers ahead of time -- because, as NBC's Andrea Mitchell observed, "he seemed so well prepared."

He was, Andrea.

FOUR YEARS AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY,
TWENTY-TWO YEARS IN THE MILITARY,
FIVE+ YEARS IN THE HANOI HILTON,
AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE U.S. SENATE
WILL DO THAT FOR YOU.

Not to mention having a moderately well-developed set of principles -- translation: you've figured out what the important stuff is, and have pretty much decided what you think about it.

Helps a lot in answering questions, Andrea. Helps you sound prepared.

NBC: still Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puff. (There, I said it.)


WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!

That explains the close competition between American and Chinese female gymnasts, at what has turned out to be a pretty good Olympics hosted by Merry Maoists. Heck, the smog has cleared so much you can see across the street!

Still a bit foggy in record-keeping for the "Birthday Girls" however. The gymnastic coaches tell us that there are definite advantages to pulling off the required stunts when you've got a team of "pixies" as one called them. Last November's Xinhua Newspaper listed [now gold-medal winner] He Kexin as a promising "little girl" of 13 years old. By this summer her birthdate had jumped into the Way-
Back Machine and landed at January 1st (phew!) 1992.

Since the women[?]'s individual uneven bars gold medal was a numerical tie that had to be broken [by restoring dropped lowest scores and averaging to the thousandth of a point], it was of course pretty galling for grown woman almost-19-year-old American Nastia Liuken,to lose to overnight 16-year-old He Kexin. Hey, folks, that's why we call 'em Chi-Coms!

I'm with Jon Stewart on this one (colourful language alert!).




[Maybe if we keep kneeling down nobody will notice how teeny we are.]



Trying to look older than we really are: isn't that doing a reverse triple Pelosi in the tuck position?

AT LONG LAST

Olympic-sized kudos to Canada's Ian Millar, 61-year-old king of the mounted.


He's won so many compe- titions and been in so many Olympics (eight) I had not realized that he had no Olympic medal to show for it. The Canadian team won their silver, the first national medal in 40 years.

Sad that Millar could not share this long-awaited prize with his wife and pardner, Lynn, who died last year, after working by his side at the equestrian arts for more than three decades. The long and lanky horseman, with his seemingly perpetually sunny face, dedicated his medal to the angel he knew was riding with him.

Millar's long-time mount, the aptly-named Big Ben, didn't live to share the moment either. Strange that the magnificently huge horse never brought Millar Olympic glory -- though now that he's dead and isn't here to defend himself, we are given to understand that he could be a bit distracted by all the adulation and tended toward overconfidence!... Well, we can forgive him a little vanity.

Ben's friend In Style has carried Millar to glory at last -- extra measure of oats, please.

FRACK!!!!!

WE'RE BACK!

Sunday, 6 a.m. here:

Sunday, 6 p.m. (7:30 in Newfoundland) here:

ACK.

[P.S. If it's not frackin' obvious, number 1 son has now got us hooked on Battlestar Gallactica]

THIS WAR

Number One Son shipped out for Iraq Saturday October 20.






Words fail me.

Fortunately the Psalmist doesn’t have that problem:

…[4] he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.
[5] You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day,
[6] nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
[7] A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand; but it will not come near you...
[10] no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.
[11] For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways.
[12] On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.

---Psalm 91 [ 90 for us Papists -- but it's the Soldier's Psalm, and that designation doesn't work so well if you alter the numbering, as explained here.]

Flyboy is now blogging from the Sandbox as Cincinnatus at ThermopylaeUSA.
As always, a good read.


THAT WAR


It is hard to predict how many generations and/or conflagrations are yet to pass before our society (i.e., what we call the West) no longer knows instinctively which war is meant by the words “THE war.”

For now, for us, “THE war” is still World War II, so Ken Burns’ recent seven-part documentary needed no other title.

Based on Burns’ reputation as America’s best living TRUE documentary film-maker (as opposed to the relentlessly ballyhooed but
reekingly FAKE documen-tarians, Michael Moore and Al Gore), the series was predicted to be his greatest work yet, focusing narrowly on a handful of people in just four smallish towns from the four winds of the contiguous United States: Waterbury, Connecticut to the east; Luverne, Minnesota to the north; Mobile, Alabama to the south; and Sacramento, California to the west.

The approach was deeply personal and poignant, never pretending to comprehend the full sweep of history or the panorama of the war. While it is perhaps unfair to criticize him for not making the film that others might wish he had made, it is fair comment to wonder about the ultimate worth of a documentary (however truthful) so limited in its perspective as to convey a defective understanding of historic moment which is the genesis of the story being told.

“The War” had genuine human interest at any given moment, but as a whole there was an unexpected and peculiar tedium creeping over it. And despite Burns’ claim that he was trying to tell stories that were true to the people and their time, untainted by present events and military (mis)adventures now in the making, one couldn’t shake the feeling that the material had been selected and shaped by the film-maker’s own strong opposition to war in Iraq.








This is not to say that there was any reason to question the truth of each veteran’s experience and his memory of it. But the sum of the parts had an overriding sadness and a sense of regret (regret!) that simply defy what most people of sound mind consider to be THE lesson of the Second World War: THAT THE CIVILIZED WORLD HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO FIGHT IT, AND THAT THE VICTORY WAS WORTH EVERY SACRIFICE ENDURED.

This sadness, and the regret, were the substance of honest reflections from one or two veterans (most notably and, frankly, most irritatingly, from Sam Hynes of Minnesota), whose stories made up the threads of the narrative. But for most of these men, no matter how wretched their suffering, it is difficult to believe that the most powerful impression they would want the viewer to come away with is one of regret. I don’t buy it.

Burns’ manages his material so as to suggest that, for the average soldier, no rationale for beating back the naked aggression of a fascist power ever made itself obvious to him until he saw for himself the concentration camps of Europe, or experienced the sadism of a Japanese prison commandant. I don’t buy that either. These citizen soldiers were not all simple, parochial, and ignorant of the consequences of letting tyranny prevail and gobble up continents. They weren’t all in a state of disconnection between the horrors of their own battlefields and the larger consequences for the world if their mission failed. Sorry-- I don’t buy it.

Oddly (and, I suspect, unintentionally on Burns’s part), the view from within the tunnel of the veterans' experience of the war in the Pacific gradually made the best case I have ever heard for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan.

I have always struggled with that event. I do believe that the full scope of consequences of the bomb over the long, LONG term (such as radiation-related disease, deformity, and death, decades after the event) were probably unknown at the time, but there was never any doubt about the short-term catastrophe that the bomb would unleash. And arguments based on projected loss of life due to invasion vs. bombing have always been problematic. However, “The War” presented in searing clarity what may have been the determinative factor in the decision to bring hostilities in the Pacific to their quick and terrible end: the singularly crazed appetite of the Japanese for wholesale suicide.

Even in our modern society, in which an overt suicidal impulse has gained “respectability” through the euthanasia movement, and a more subtle cultural suicide of plummeting birthrates drifts toward irreversibility, still we can scratch our heads at Japan’s long history as a suicide culture. The honourable self-disembowelling of Sepuku is now the stuff of legend, but its logical offspring persist in Japan to this day, in the country’s disastrous abortion and birth-rate demographics and, more literally, in such incidents as the recent spate of group suicides arranged among strangers via the internet.






Civilian and military prisoners of war—men, women, the elderly, and the infants—who endured the sadism and racism of their Japanese captors knew that within this hierarchy human life was worthless. Soldiers, sailors, and Marines who confronted human waves of outgunned Japanese armies and masses of kami-kaze pilots in the “floating chrysanthemum” attacks, and who witnessed the forced or voluntary mass cliff-jumping suicides of cornered Japanese civilians, knew that they were fighting an enemy who would feel honour-bound to keep killing until there was no one left to kill or be killed.

Whatever the other arguments may be about the morality of any particular kind of weapon, or of the choice of targets, there seems to be no question that the crushing bombs of August 1945 spared both Allied and Japanese lives in the hundreds of thousands, compared to the certain costs of an invasion of Japan.

The Pacific theatre of World War II is far less well-understood than that of Europe, and even as I was underwhelmed with Ken Burns’ “The War,” I was grateful for its equal concentration on both theatres, and the stark portrait of the tentacles of Japanese conquest in the Pacific. Japan and Germany were a perfect marriage of racist madness in quest of world domination. Had they triumphed in their ambitions, the two empires would very likely have turned on and eaten each other, probably on a battlefield carpeted with Chinese corpses.

Ken Burns has described the subject of his latest documentary as something quite different from “The Good War” that it has so often been called. In fact he did his level best to counter that image-- but I don’t think he succeeded. The most revisionist of his veteran spokesmen, the aforementioned Sam Hynes of Minnesota, flew over a hundred bombing missions at Okinawa, for which he must be given due credit and honour (and lots of it). But of all the voices in “The War,” Mr. Hynes probably served the shortest time in active combat, that being several months in mid-1945. (I consider those like Glenn Frazier, imprisoned for four years, to have been in combat every minute of every day.)

His tone throughout the series was, not to put too fine a point on it, that of a classic “bleeding heart.” At one point he talked about going on a close-in bombing raid and taking out a building. “There may have been people in there. I may have killed some people. I hope I didn’t…” Then why were you there, sir? Was the building going to kill you? Or capture children in the Philippines? Or behead Chinese men and gut their pregnant wives? No, people were going to do that—Japanese people—the enemy. So don’t be such a retrospective weenie, Professor Hynes, just to keep your street-cred in the halls of Princeton.

In other interviews Hynes was prepared to call World War II a “just war”—but (clinging to the street-cred again) it was, in his opinion, “the last just war.”

I think it was the last just war that we went into with national belief in it being the right thing to do," said Hynes, 83, of Princeton, N.J…"We had been attacked by an enemy force. Roosevelt spoke to us all on the radio, told us this is the day that would live in infamy. Congress met and declared war. We did it right. We didn't just creep into war on false pretenses and say, 'Here we are at war.' It was the last war that everybody understood was just.

Yes, read it (not very well-hidden) between the lines: “Bush’s war was crept into without the same justification.” Oh really? No attack by an enemy? No day of infamy? No congressional approval? With all due respect, Professor Hynes (and much is due), your memories of both long ago and last week are being filtered through ideology, and I suspect that much of the PBS audience for this documentary figured that out.

Burns’ decision to confine himself to four American any-towns has met with criticism, mostly because the concept seems to have left him short of interesting material as well as broader perspective. However, in my view he failed to make use even of the material likely to have been available from these four towns. Where were the women, taking up the slack in factories or learning to be tractor mechanics, to cite just one example? His most prominent female voice was that of Katherine Phillips, who was utterly charming but unquestionably upper class.

Other than those whose role in the film was to be part of the “oppressed minority” contingent, we heard little from those on the home front who were left to scrabble for their next meal in the absence of their bread-winners. The few dozen principal voices that weave the fabric of this story fall somewhat short of representing a cross-section of regular folks. They are not all the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, offering up long-suppressed accounts of the harrowing experiences no one else can understand. This small group seems disproportionately weighted towards professionals—lawyers, businessmen, professors, some of whom have published accounts of what they did in the war. Burns did not really live up to his own ambition to view the war through the eyes of the American "Everyman."

[Interestingly, the man made famous by Burns's "Civil War" epic, Major Sullivan Ballou, was similarly atypical. While the viewer may have had the impression that Sullivan was an ordinary and surprisingly articulate man, in fact his beautiful letter to his wife Sarah was the work of a Rhode Island politician and lawyer, with an educational pedigree parallelling that of the most prominent modern political families, the Kennedys and Bushes. And, like the grimmest letter highlighted in "The War"-- that of Quentin Aanenson to his fiancée-- Ballou's now famous letter was never mailed.]

Critics of “The War” have also bemoaned the repetitious use of still photos of certain landmarks in the four towns, like the movie theatres. While there was something a little ho-hum about returning to the same framework time and again, I was more irritated by repetitions in the slices of stock combat footage used. The re-use of certain bits of "kaboom" footage made the viewer too aware that at any given moment the pictures in view may have nothing whatever to do with the scene being described by the narrator.

I'm sure there are many battles and incidents for which there is no photographic record, so the temptation to fill in with representative pictures is powerful. But the impulse to illustrate every single incident referenced in the film with some clip or other had the effect of undermining its authenticity, and causing it to drift into mere visual distraction. (This probably made the film longer too. Not a plus-- it was plenty long, thank you).

During the pre-broadcast publicity blitz, Ken Burns was often heard to say that this film was to be the story of selected individuals from selected places, and “if you weren’t in this war or waiting anxiously for someone that you love to come back from the war, you’re not in our film.” He noted that there would be no retrospective commentators, even of the caliber of the esteemed Shelby Foote who had given the historian’s view of “The Civil War.”

Yet Burns still employed the sonorous voice-over of a narrator, one who was hardly objective. At one point he comments that the war "brought out the best and the worst of a generation and blended the two so that at times they became indistinguishable." This observation is controversial at best, denigrates the citizen soldiers, and is an editorial intrusion of the sort the film-maker himself has characterized as inappropriate to his project.

Negative criticism of “The War” was admittedly countered by much high praise, but at the end of the day it is fair to say that the audience was not only disappointed, it was disappointing— PBS released some initial figures for first-night audience numbers which turned out to be inflated by as much as 100%. (See here, here, and here.) Burns has one land-mark documentary monument to American socio-military history under his belt—“The Civil War”. It seems clear now that he does not have two. There was much that was of interest—moving, instructive, revealing—in “The War.” But this is a historical chapter which not only merits a vast panoramic treatment, its essential truths are ill-served by anything less—and Ken Burns’ “The War” is so much less than it should have been.


Rock-blogging from Newfoundland again.

Home soon, and back to our irregularly scheduled programme.

AND NOW BACK TO WHAT'S REALLY IMPORTANT....

TONIGHT:

PRISON BREAK RETURNS!

While "24" has been re-running itself into a tizz, P-Break has been in quiet retirement, and we can only imagine the outrages visited upon the persons of heroes and villains alike in the legendary third-world Panama prison.

Welcome back, rewind the tape, and LET'S ALL BREAK OUT OF PRISON AGAIN!

ALSO ON THE TUBE, STARTING SEPTEMBER 23:

Ken Burns' new documentary series,
THE WAR

...to be seen on PBS in seven instalments (4 during week one, 3 the following week). The series covers the World War II experiences of real soldiers from four ordinary American towns. It's all documentary -- no armchair commentators allowed-- if you weren't there, you don't get to talk. (There is voice-over by actors, but it uses only the words of veterans no longer here to speak for themselves.) I'm especially anxious to see whose stories get told from Waterbury, Connecticut, home of one branch of my forebears, some of whom I know were veterans.

Burns considers this his best work ever, and though he may have seen this work within a personal context of opposition to the war in Iraq, it is hard to imagine that it will be anything other than a work of authenticity and integrity. I intend to give it a go.

Hope it is not in any way impeded by the fact that, over 14 broadcast hours, it apparently includes four instances of three of George Carlin's "words you can't say on television," which the broadcast standards folks are feeling uncomfortable with. Can you believe it? While skanky women are having "Sex in the City" in every location and position imaginable, and unsupervised children are watching music videos about pimps and ho's, somebody's worried about the men who saved the world saying two F's, one S, and an ***hole. PU-H-H-L-L-E-E-EZE!!!!!

All I can say, is F*** that, you dumbs*** broadcasting ***holes.

There-- now let's move on.

LAST "AFFIRMATIVE ACTION" COMIC STANDING

Wednesday Night Slaughter – GERRY DEE goes down on Last comic Standing.

Unbelievable.

Top Ten Comedic Themes of Stand-Up Artist
Lavell Crawford:

#10 – I’m fat.

#9 – I’m black.

#8 – I’m fat

#7 – I’m black.

#6 – I’m fat, black, and horny.

#5 –TBA

#4 – TBA

#3 – TBA

#2 – TBA

#1 – I’m stumped-- I think I’ll use the last joke I heard and do a lame spin-off of it.

By far the most original and funniest man in the competition, Gerry Dee was up against the unoriginal but moderately funny John Reep and the totally unfunny, often incomprehensible, blue-mouthed and boring Lavell Crawford, whose survival even into the Last Five category was inexplicable.

Inexplicably, Gerry Dee went down to shocking defeat.

I have watched maybe three or four episodes of Last Comic Standing, and it is the only “reality show” I have ever watched. (No, wait, I did watch the final episode of the first season of Survivor just to see what everyone was talking about. Yawn.)

I soon concluded that the results were probably fixed, because that was the only explanation for the continued success of Crawford, whose material was dumb, and increasingly badly delivered. He had to be the Affirmative Action Retention, but the talented guy (that's Gerry) was sure to win because he was the only person worth investing the $250K and the performance deal in. Would a network really throw their money away on a bomb act like Crawford, even if he got the popular vote?

Apparently the answer is “yes”—and now the only explanation for the success of Crawford is that the show ISN’T fixed—the producers are enslaved to the stupidity and gutter tastes of hoi polloi.

This is sad. However, surely the exposure brought by the LCS competition will translate into some big gigs and forward career motion for Gerry. So all is not for nought.

What's really sad is that Crawford represents the kind of Shuck'n'Jive, Steppin' Fetchit, watermelon-coon-shuffle black clown that most decent African-Americans hoped had been banished forever decades ago. That this low-rent stereotype still appeals to anybody, worse yet that it appeals to the audience for BET, is truly depressing.

Wait for it: the O.J. jury weighs in -- next week Lavell beats Reep.

WHAT TO WATCH, OH WHAT TO WATCH?

It'll be a tough choice -- there's the Republican Presidential Debate in Durham, New Hampshire, where even now the empty chairs


await the (5? 7? 4? 12?) candidates for the Republican nomination, who will be taking questions Wednesday night from FOXSnooze's Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, and Wendel Goler -- who are, as far as I can tell, just about the only tv journo's in the biz who are fit to do a respectable job of this.

Damned exciting stuff! Nevertheless, I expect I'll be watching......

LAST COMIC STANDING!


That's because we're down to the last four, one of whom is Gerry Dee, local (Toronto) boy who's made good, doing good clean hilarious story-telling, mostly about the old days when he was a teacher at a school which shall remain nameless, but was attended by



all of whom were, at one time or another, taught by the said Gerry Dee. [As, I think, was Ian Van Toch of happy memory (scroll down), who enjoyed a good joke better than just about anybody.]

So which will it be? Comedy? or Gerry Dee? (ha ha)

Watch the comedy "debate", or whatever you want-- but come 10:00 p.m. Wednesday, September 5:

Click here, VOTE EARLY, AND VOTE OFTEN (you can, you know)
for GERRY DEE to win the BIG PRIZE!

Words of Widsom from the Colberrrrre Reporrrrre
(Mrs. Coal-burt's little Stevie gives the Wag of the Finger to Australian Prime Minister John Howard): I must admit to being completely on side with both sides of the coin that Colbert is gleefully tossing around here. The sad comment on this sketch is that once upon a time Americans were prepared to stand tall against any foreign hatchet-job on any American whether or not we agreed with him/her, as part of the old doctrine of politics stopping at the water's edge.

In a transformation of political culture absolutely without precedent in the country's history, the American left has overwhelmingly discarded this principle-- not just tolerating, or encouraging, the trashing of their political opponents by any and all foreign voices-- they will even go so far as to join in the bash-and-trash chorus when visiting abroad, knifing their opposition in the back and tearing down their own country, to the gloating glee of both fickle allies and sworn enemies. Colbert strikes a patriotic chord in his smack-down of John Howard. As much as I agree with Howard's assessment of Obama's (and others') flagrantly stupid ideas about timetables for surrender, the smack-down feels sorta right. But it is a woeful, shameful comment on the politics of 2007 that there isn't a micro-particle of bipartisanship in Colbert's protective reflexes. Bush-bashing is a global competitive sport in which the American left is happy to take the laurels home.

Addendum:

Mr. Colbert might also want to contemplate the inconvenient truth that Mr. Howard's pugnacious pronouncement about the Obamacrats was not quite the presumptuous intrusion on America's domestic business as was implied. Part of the reason an Australian official takes it upon himself to comment on the positions of American political candidates is that he at least is aware [unlike so very many lefty Americans] that what happens in American electoral politics has implications for the entire world.

It matters to every living being whether the one remaining superpower is committed to fighting terrorism, or will opt to take the spectator's back seat while terrorists continue to attack innocents all around the globe-- as they have been doing for decades, in countries which are not and never have been friends of the American Republican party. There is a sense in which John Kerry's infamous "global test" actually has meaning-- on the question of whether America will choose isolationism and treat global terrorism as if it's someone else's problem until the next time it topples a tower in a Stateside metropolis-- and in that sense, it's a test the Democratic party is committed to failing.

Australia is a land mass of several hundred thousand more square miles than the United States, with a population equivalent to that of New York State. Their near neighbour Indonesia has the highest Muslim population in the world and since the 1960's has been home to an active terrorist movement (now tied to Al Qaeda and possibly the Indonesian military), one which made its first big news-splash on Christmas Eve of 2000, with bombs planted in 38 separate locations ASSOCIATED WITH CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. [The plot was discovered and only 18 bombs went off, killing 19 and injuring over 100.]

Australians have been looking over their shoulders at the Islamist threat since George Bush was getting C's at Yale. The Indonesian Christmas Eve attack was planned and executed during the Clinton administration-- Bush had been President-elect for a week and a half. In other words (newsflash!) George W. Bush did not invent Islamist terrorism. And, leftist ululating notwithstanding, Bush has probably done very little to make it worse-- he's just shoved it into the open. Coptic Christians have been butchered at Mass in Egypt (April 1997 -- Governor Bush is busy announcing 7th annual Sky Awareness Week in Texas); tourists have been taken hostage from a Malaysian beach by Philippines-based terrorists in speed-boats (April 2000 -- Bush still campaigning in Republican primaries). Further down the road, Christian girls go on being beheaded in Indonesia (October 2005); a priest here (Turkey) a nun there (Pakistan) get murdered by Islamists in the 2006 cartoon jihad -- and Bush's fingerprints are NOWHERE on this mess.

Who is making American foreign policy could be a life-and-death matter for Australia, and they are increasingly alone in recognizing this. So let's cut the little sawed-off wallaby some slack.

ISRAEL STILL INTACT

A good thing. Middle East strife makes you want to run down the highway between the cars yelling “Don’t fall asleep!!!” – even as the pod people do their work in back rooms everywhere.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR KATRINA……

Put that little pink candle on that notoriously “chocolate” cake, and blow it out with a category 3 (not 5) exhale—it’s one year since Hurricane Katrina whacked and soaked New Orleans.

Wait – I tell a lie, as the Brits say—it’s one year since the wind and waves. But it’s one year less a couple of days since the water actually entered the city. [Remember the revealing photo essay by a young Nicaraguan resident named Alvaro R. Morales Villa? here It showed that the areas which eventually flooded were in fact wet, but navigable by cars and pedestrians, for 48 hours after the storm hit.]

At Jewish World Review Rich Lowry channels Eliot glumly while assessing the wet muck in the corners of the Bush second term, for which New Orleans is the municipal metaphor. Read it and weep.

Then New Orleans native and pillar of southern Catholic broadcasting, Raymond Arroyo of EWTN, chimes in with an equally dismal assessment of the situation on the all-too-spongy ground.

Important Katrina factoid: there were 350,000 cars abandoned in New Orleans and ruined by the flood. That means 350,000 people had transportation out of town, for themselves and family or friends, and they CHOSE NOT TO TAKE IT. Nobody abandoned them—they just abandoned any semblance of human common sense.

Damn that George Bush!—how did he get to them and convince them to do that?

And damn that American Military-Industrial complex that made it possible for the United States Coast Guard to rescue tens of thousands of people, one and two at a time, starting on Day One of the storm. (check out Jordan’s TOTALLY AWESOME COAST GUARD KATRINA VIDEO HERE-- and more info here)

And who was the Commander-in-Chief of the Coast Guard, the only government agency that did everything right on August 29, 2005 (despite its unfortunate placement as part of the hapless Department o’ Homeland Security)?: George W. Bush. Damn that bastard.

Car footnote: since New Orleans mayor Ray “Schoolbus” Nagin forgot to mandate that all the car owners evacuate the city before it was too late, he could at least have put some cash in the city’s coffers by selling the wrecked cars to “the largest auto crusher east of the Rockies”, K&L Auto Crushers of Tyler, Texas, which “offered to pay the City of New Orleans $100.00 per vehicle, 'as is, where is'… They agreed to bring in 5 to 10 portable crushers, work 6 days per week and complete the job in 15 weeks.”

But Ray said NO--“Mother PLEASE! I’d rather do it MYSELF!!!” (Honk if you’re old enough to remember that commercial.) So New Orleans lost both the chance to get the car debris cleared away quickly by a private company, and the millions of dollars in revenue that company would have paid for the scrap. The city took on the expense itself, a project which is expected to cost New Orleans $23,000,000. (Full story at Snopes.com)

In April of 2006 Nagin was re-elected Mayor, winning a run-off election with 52% of 114,000 votes. Apparently waste, incompetence, and criminal negligence don’t count for much with New Orleans voters when they’re spending other Americans’ money.

It’s too bad that the federal government’s response to Katrina continues to be less than stellar, because that’s a legitimate news story-- one that gives the media a chance to neglect the bigger story of Louisianna politicians’ heinous stupidity and corruption, not to mention the "Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not" story of how many Americans are prepared to swallow the most idiotic and hateful conspiracy theories about the causes of the disaster-- including niche film director Spike Lee's manifestly dishonest HBO "documentary"-- Free Republic's money quote regarding Lee's pompously titled When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts:

Perhaps most sad is that in four hours Lee has nothing positive to say about America and Americans. No mention is made of the $700 million from private citizens and churches that were committed in the first few days of the tragedy. No mention is made of the thousands of homes across the nation that welcomed evacuees. No mention is made of the tens of thousands who have successfully rebuilt their lives.

Spike Lee clearly has little affection for the country that gives him free expression and has made him wealthy. He has produced a self-indulgent, deceitful and exploitive film about a tragedy. His message will give poor blacks more reasons to feel powerless, to feel lost, to feel that others bear responsibility for their lives, to hate, and to stay poor.

For a coupla government-handout bucks they could buy a magazine, or hit an internet café, and read the truth, as exhaustively reported by Popular Mechanics here. It just saves SO much time and B.S.

Amazing Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not footnote:
Rumor has it that Hurricane Katrina also hit other parts of Louisianna, as well as Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida-- and that there may actually have been some damage done there. Wow! Talk about coincidence! Do I smell a story here?

PENNSYLVANIA POLITICS: DUMP MURTHA DEPT.

Pennsylvania Congressman, champion backroom pork-bareller, slanderer and armament-scammer of the U.S. military, honorary nancy-boy to leftist hate-screeching chickwaffe Code Pink, and Abscam unindicted co-conspirator John Murtha [spit*spit] will be running this fall against not only his own resumé of shame but also against hot-looking County Comissioner Diana Irey. She had this to say about her conversations with wounded Iraq War veterans at Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital (where Murtha’s Code Pink girlfriends have harassed vets’ families with mock coffins and attack signs from the street outside):

…the stories go on and on, about how encouraging the troops were to me in my effort. One of them – he was a speaking to a number of soldiers around him, when I was thanking him – “Ma’am, you don’t need to thank us. You just go beat him for us.” That is a motivation that will be on my mind 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until I defeat Mr. Murtha on election day.

The Congressman claims to have a frightening acquaintance with Karl Rove’s private anatomy, having accused him of “sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big fat backside” while sending troops to Iraq, or some such non-sensequitur. (Excellent round-up of Murtha's mental ganglions here.) Last time I checked, Rove’s portfolio didn’t include troop deployment decisions. Whatever.

In a related intelligence failure, aerial reconnaissance photos have only turned up this clearly inadequate data on the size of Murtha’s own backside-- although both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense have recently, um, weighed in with reliable estimates of their own on the ass question. Or were they talking about some other anatomical feature? But I digress.













There’s lots of significant movement on the Murtha-Irey contest, with several citizens’ organizations being formed to garner support for Irey, much of it from outside the state (from as far away as Iraq, interestingly—from men and women in uniform). The founder of one such organization described her motivation thus:

I'm a parent of a deployed Iraqi Freedom Soldier, and nothing would give me greater joy than to have Murtha's "big fat backside" handed to him in November. That's why I started Murtha Must Go!!

(It appears that there is some classified intel about Murtha’s ass dimensions after all, to which the rest of us are not privy. COVER-UP !!!!!!!! )

Sidelight: There’s some dirt going around about Diana Irey’s husband’s business affairs, since he was involved in a contract to do Iraq reconstruction with a guy (referred to as “an arms dealer,” though the larger background on him shows this to be a part-slice of the truth), who was murdered in Iraq when he had the poor taste to point out to the Iraqi Defense Ministry that they were being ripped off.

Murtha has made another one of his “suggestions” (i.e., accusations without evidence) that his opponent is running against him so as to “benefit from the war.” I suppose this would make some sense, provided that taking over Jack Murtha’s office in Congress means that you can also take over his defense contractor connections, including his ability to funnel over $20,000,000 worth of business to defense companies represented by his lobbyist brother, Kit Murtha. I believe this episode constitutes an oversized old pot calling a perky little kettle black. Re: the murkiness of Murtha, this month’s American Spectator nails it.

That’s not to say that Robert Irey might not have his murky side too—I have no idea. The accusations are less an example of Murtha’s own corruption than of his infernal stupidity—he couldn’t possibly be in a less tenable position when attacking anybody for benefiting from war.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY UNIMPORTANT

Passed through Dallas this weekend and drove out into the environs, but there were no sightings of fugitive TV stars, thereabouts being where the cast of Fox TV’s PRISON BREAK re-assembled in June to shoot season 2. Lucky Wentworth Miller, as Michael Scofield, gets to wear civilian clothes, most of the time covering up the areas where we expect to see the famous all-over tattoo of the Fox River Penitentiary blueprint— thereby sparing himself the five-hour body-paint job necessary when he has to wear a t-shirt.

Everybody on the show acts like this tattoo is some kind of wonder of the world, which I suppose it once would have been, even among inmates. Those of us of baby-boom age remember being brought up to see tattoos as a mark of the ignorant underclass and perhaps criminal element of society—certainly people with short attention-spans and too much time on their hands, not to mention a kind of childish narcissism, shallowness, and self-dissatisfaction. (The prevalence of tattoos among the military was considered to fall pretty much under the “too much time on their hands” category, as well as being visible signs of their world travels and the easy access in distant foreign lands to what was thrillingly taboo back home.)

Somewhere along the way tattoos, like most other fashion trends born on society’s margins (like the white lipstick my father identified with prostitutes which was mass-marketed by Yardley to the Carnaby Street crowd), got mainstreamed.

David Brooks at the New York Times, [subscribers only] takes a good crack at this phenomenon, though with an equanimity I can’t quite share:

Today, fashion trends may originate on Death Row, but it takes about a week and a half for baggy jeans, tramp styles and tattoos to migrate from Death Row to Wal-Mart.

What you get is a culture of trompe l’oeil degeneracy… A cadre of fashion-forward types thought they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering that the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are… learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.

Well, hell, there goes my plan for a barbed wire bracelet... Actually, my instincts have been somewhat the opposite of those Brooks describes. I have consciously declined to get that fashionable second piercing in one ear-lobe that I was hankering for, because I felt like this would be going over to the dark side and risking being identified with the self-loathing sadist freakazoids who pierce themselves all over just to keep the public contemplating the joys of pain.

But let’s face it—in a world full of tattooed kids, with so many piercings up their ears they look like an old brass-tacked leather sofa, who would notice a second sparkle in my lobe?


Bottom line (complete with lines on your bottom…):

I’ve seen a hundred people in Toronto who make Scofield’s Prison Break tattoo look boring. (One of them was a Catholic seminarian, with Our Lady of Guadalupe and Michael the Archangel, among other things, all over him, in colour. He dropped out in the end—quelle surprise.) If the Scofield tattoo didn’t have Wentworth Miller’s head on top of it, nobody would notice it.