Rub a Dub Dub, Three Thieves in a Tub

Check out these three crooks. It's Rick "Pick Up Pennsylvania School Tax Dollars for my Virginia resident children" Santorum, Bill "Blind Trust Means I Didn't See Them, Not Didn't Know About Them" Frist, and Trent "Segregation Is A Proud Tradition" Lott.

I'm not sure if they're watching Frist debut his new hand puppet show, or if they're declaring that with Alito on the bench they'll finally be able to reverse these pesky instances of judicial activism like Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education.

While it's true that Republicans (and a particularly virulent brand of Republicanism) control all three branches of government today, the recent unanimous Senate vote and House voice vote to honor civil rights icon Rosa Parks this week signals that the so-called "Conservative" movement recognizes an overplayed hand: a few years ago a snarling Trent Lott, buoyed by his backers at the Council of Conservative Citizens, would have ripped into Parks as a Communist dupe, and the now-indicted Tom DeLay would have done the same. At least now they've been cowed into crocodile tears, even if they continue to work toward the consolidation of power behind the scenes.

It bears repeating: Conservative ideology is always a rearguard action against social progress. Women's rights have advanced despite conservative attacks; minority rights have advanced despite conservative attacks; science has advanced despite conservative attacks. Trust me...100 years from now we'll all be laughing about the Kansas State Board of Education.

Halloween, Halloween.

That was good Halloweening last night. We handed out some candy for a little bit then headed out ourselves to the block party at Lanier Place, where they close the street off and many of the houses present some elaborate decorations (although I will say that this year it seemed fewer residents went overboard). Then we came home, handed out candy until about 8:30 p.m., shut off the lights and put the kids to bed. Our son is too little to care really about digging through the candy he received -- in another year or two he'll be accounting for every little "fun size" (read miniscule) piece of candy he gets, but this year he was more interested in handing out candy to trick or treaters than getting candy.

Even with lights out, we still received visitors through 9:30 p.m. At least most of them were in costume. Last year we had lots of teenagers showing up wearing jeans and t-shirts and carrying Safeway bags. Real effort there. My favorites though are the parents who are good and liquored up when they take their kids around the neighborhood looking for candy -- and the parents have their own bag, too.

Countersignature Contra Krauthammer

The notion that Charles Krauthammer is a few donuts short of a dozen isn't exactly earth-shattering to anyone who's managed to wade through his tortured reasoning in the last ten years. However, his column last Saturday provides another excellent example of his spiteful bitterness and pure disconnect from reality. It's really a tragedy that the Washington Post continues to carry this lunatic. In fact, I continually try to figure out why this reject from rationality is given print space.

Having been lead cheerleader in the pundit corps for Bush's failed empire-building adventure in Iraq, Krauthammer's feeling a little let down by the turn of events...after all, his leader declared "Mission Accomplished" a few years ago and here we are bogged down in that thing Bush swore on the campaign trail in 2000 he wouldn't do: nationbuilding. And to all the jackasses out there who think "9/11 changed everything," you haven't been paying attention. Let me repeat for those a few standard deviations below 100 IQ: There is no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. Just like there's no connection between men with moustaches and Hitler.

Anyway, Krauthammer, defensive as his worldview crumbles around him, is ostensibly writing a column about the latest defector from the Republican/Neoconservative/Pax Americana camp, Brent Scowcroft. Of course, so many rats are jumping ship, Krauthammer could take his pick of target. The interesting thing, however, is that Krauthammer, like that dying villain who still reaches for his gun to take some measure of revenge against his vanquisher, begins his column with an aside that would only be included for nastiness and spite:

Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement -- most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire -- a new spokesman is needed.

Where to begin with this guy's problems? First, Cindy Sheehan has not been a disaster for the antiwar movement -- to the contrary, Sheehan's cross-country trek united an antiwar movement that had been fervent but fragmented, and her journey culminated in a tremendous showing of solidarity on September 24, 2005, in Washington, D.C. Maybe Krauthammer slept through that antiwar rally that saw between 100,000 and 300,000 people converge on the Mall.

Second, Krauthammer makes the incredible assumption that Sheehan's prominence suggests she's leading the movement or that people are "following her." To be sure, some might be -- other women who have lost their children in Krauthammer's folly have joined Ms. Sheehan -- but Krauthammer confuses catalyst with leader, and attempts to diminish a movement through the perceived faults of an individual. Krauthammer just as easily could have labelled Michael Moore the "leader" of the antiwar movement, or Ramsey Clark (the head of International A.N.S.W.E.R., the organization that's been able to mobilize mass antiwar sentiment from a broad spectrum of the U.S.). The point is that Krauthammer remains clueless as to the nature of the opposition to the Iraq boondoggle -- it isn't about a cult of personality (unlike his dear leader, on the other hand...): it's about an administration that lied to goad the country into an ill-conceived and illegal war.

Should I go on? After thinking he's dismissed Sheehan -- and by the way it's becoming clearer every day that we are in Iraq for the neocons idea of empire -- Krauthammer turns his poorly adjusted sights on Brent Scowcroft. The Scowcroft-Krauthammer beef boils down to ruling class "intellectuals" basically arguing about the best way to pursue world domination. Krauthammer believes it is through bloody interventions in other countries (the British medical journal The Lancet now argues that 100,000 civilian Iraqi deaths is a good estimate, and is perhaps too low). Scowcroft believes it is through diplomacy and stability, even if you end up negotiating with mass murderers like Bush Hussein. So Krauthammer's critique of Scowcroft's policy contains grains of truth -- under Scowcroftian regimes, you get in bed with unsavory characters; yet Krauthammer somehow seems to think that such compromises means that his own gory conditions are justified. More unrealistically, he seems to think that he's not guilty of the same thing that he accuses Scowcroft of doing: making deals with devils to further your goals.

Bottom line: Krauthammer is a crank, who if he took the form of Andy Rooney and only complained about shoes and wet umbrellas would be harmless, but instead he dishes his hate and warmongering from prominent perches in the so-called liberal media. If ever there were an argument against a "liberal media," this crank could be exhibit A. But then again, so too could Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, George Will, Robert "Spymaster" Novak, Ann Coulter, Joe Scarborough, and the list goes on and on.

The Washington Post should just do the right thing and refuse to pay for this bitter failure's increasingly incoherent rants.

If this happens, I will be there.

CNN is reporting that Rosa Parks might lie in honor at the Capitol. According to the website:

The Senate approved a resolution Thursday allowing her remains to lie in honor in the Rotunda on Sunday and Monday "so that the citizens of the United States may pay their last respects to this great American." The House was expected to consider the resolution Friday.

It's a tremendous honor that I hope the House will follow through on and approve. 50 years ago such a concept would be entirely unimaginable. Hell, 25 years ago it would have been unimaginable. When it comes, progress is slow and never even.

I'm sure this news will bring all sorts of nasty comments from right-wing sites -- the Freepers will probably be reaching for their rifles -- proving once and again that some assholes haven't learned their lessons. I've said it before and I'll say it again: right wingers have fought women's equality, racial equality, class equality and they have -- in the end -- always lost. They are the rearguard for an always receding troglodytic mindset: annoying, but in the end, doomed.

If Parks does lie in honor at the Capitol, she'll be the first woman to do so. And it's only 2005.

I was too lazy to cook dinner last night.

Well, I did say that, despite my reservations, I would return to Busboys and Poets at some point. This time the family went for dinner, which as any check on their website would tell you, is reasonably priced. We got there around seven and the place was packed and there was a twenty minute wait for a table. The sci-fi writer Octavia Butler was giving a reading and signing books, so maybe that accounts for the crowd (or maybe the place is just always crowded on Thursday nights at seven p.m.). I'm not much of a science fiction fan myself or a fantasy fan -- the closest I come is that in my youth I read The Lord of the Rings about seven times, also the Chronicles of Narnia (well, some of them) and the Chronicles of Prydain (all of them). The academic sci-fi crowd likes to dress up the genre by calling it "speculative fiction," which allows for a bit more leeway in the field, since I think science fiction is often seen as dealing simply with alien invasions and space travel.

But as for the dinner last night...the food is simple and good. The pizzas are bigger than I expected -- more than enough for a child and possibly even big enough for two adults to split if they weren't really really hungry. Learning from my past mistake, I avoided ordering anything from the bar, although my wife ordered a beer -- a 6 dollar beer. Since when is a beer worth six dollars? And it was from the tap, which I prefer, but which generally is cheaper than bottled beer. I can't get over it. Six friggin dollars for about ten ounces of beer in a really nice looking glass -- sort of a modernized pilsener glass. I'm guessing you're paying to look at the really pretty glass. Right around the corner there's a liquor store where I could probably pick up a six pack of Mickey's Big Mouth for about 3.50, if they still make that stuff. Jesus, I'm cheap.

This Thanksgiving I'm heading straight up to the Pipe Room and I'm going to order five goddamn Molson drafts so I can spend six dollars right away like that.

Belated Congrats to Harold Pinter on the Nobel Prize

Sure it happened a few weeks back, but Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. I was happy at the time, because Pinter was one of my first experiences with post-WWII drama -- the others being Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill. The sparsity of Pinter's language was exhilarating -- he and Beckett pruned sentences to their core -- and a long way from the dense growth that Faulkner cultivated (which I also love). But I filed it away in the back of my mind until I came across this irritating quote from Christopher Hitchens, a man whose senses deserted him like the last drops from a bottle of scotch:

The award to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket. [Guardian]

First, the notion that anyone could consider Pinter hysterically anything is ridiculous. And as he's done so often in the last few years, Hitchens confuses critiques of the U.S. government's bungled attempts at empire building with "anti-American" attitudes. Hitchens apparently forgets the outpouring of support and solidarity across the world -- and especially in Europe -- when September 11 occurred -- and he also forgets that that support eroded because most of the world saw through the Bush adminstration's fraudulent attempt to make a dictator -- who'd been crippled by ten years of sanctions -- out to be the world's greatest threat since Adolf Hitler. Don't get me wrong: Hitchens is extremely witty and his critique of Henry Kissinger is devastating. However, in the past, he didn't confuse critiques of some abusers of power with affinity for other abusers of power -- with Iraq, though, he seems to be convinced that all those who opposed the U.S. violations of international law somehow condoned Saddam Hussein's regime (the closer truth is that Bush and Hussein have similar cavalier attitudes toward "international law").

Here's a sample of Pinter's "hysterical" opinions on the U.S. and Iraq (Hitchens is a leading cheerleader for the situational ethics of pre-emptive war):

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East”. But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well President Bush himself answered this question only the other day when he said “We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation”.

I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

Pinter is a persistent student of language, who -- like George Orwell before him -- understands the power of language not only to reveal but also to obfuscate. Pinter merely parses the language that these governments put in front of us and as he does in his own work, he seeks out the roots hidden under the foliage and the dirt. He is working with material provided him by miserable failures like George W. Bush, and if you are an observer of torturous linguistic phrases, Bush provides fertile soil.

14 innings? Are you kidding me?

I fell asleep last night listening to the World Series on the radio. I'd watched up through inning 12 on the television, but couldn't stick it out anymore. Tucked securely under several layers, I set the radio to sleep and figured the game would be over before the radio cut off. I made it through the 13th inning, but when they went to commercial, I went to sleep. So I missed the 14th and the game-winning home run by Geoff Blum.

Turns out my radio did shut off before the game ended, but I was already asleep.