Friday Morning Web
Gloria Feldt Retires Her Coat Hanger: The beleagured lady is retiring. Anybody interesting in sparring with Operation Rescue Institutional Misogyny? Here's a job opening...
SA's Photoshop Phriday:
Anachronistic hooey.
World O' Crap has the skinny on Bush's harem of paid third-tier pundits. How long before the Republicans out Jon Stewart as being owned by the DNC?
Norbizness has identified the newest operative for the White House's Ministry of Truth. No wonder K-Lo noticed Bush's renewed enthusiasm for press conferences.
There might be more, but I'm feeling lazy today...
An Aimless Rant About a Mystery
As the wingnuts, bigots, neocons and other protofascists continue squeezing my country the way Senate Republicans squeeze Joe Lieberman's balls, I'm just learning, at age 27, as a California, Boxer-voting liberal to love guns. Like most sane human beings (cf., Charlton Heston) I was born and remained for a large part of my childhood, gunshy. By now, however, I'm a crack-shot with a 30.06 at 70 yards, and while I suffer a slight case of "lazy wrist" with the .45, it's only a matter of time...In a nutshell, I've hopelessly fallen for the Zell Miller interpretation of the 2nd amendment. As my marksmanship skills improve, I'm actually beginning to enjoy myself. But I want nothing to do with the attendant "culture."
Now, I am a carnivore, and as such, have nothing against fair chase hunting. That is to say, I have nothing against other people doing it. My least favorite chore, next to folding whites, is grocery shopping. I like to spend the least amount of time possible doing it. And to me, hunting is nothing more than a grueling, time-wasting, hopelessly outmoded, wretchedly tiresome form of grocery shopping. If I want meat, I go to the store. If I want an outdoor experience, I trudge (lightly) through Mendocino, take pictures, collect bugs, and in general do a whole lot of nothing; that, to me is so much more enriching than hefting a buttload of artillery, sitting stock still in one place for hours on end, and, if I'm lucky, lugging a 200lbs. carcass through swarms of yellowjackets in the middle of nowhere. Despite what certain game evangelists might have you believe, hunting doesn't make me squeamish, just horribly, horribly bored.
Certainly, it doesn't get me orgasmic, as it seems to the men and occasional women of Outdoor Life. Take a video camera apparently manufactured in the mid-90s, and use it to record an armed, pudgy, middle-aged, camoflauge-draped white guy sporting a goatee and a cornpone accent chuffing up and down the wind-scraped hills of some hellish wasteland in search of that perfect 4-point whitetail. Now edit out 100% of the near misses, 10% of the tedium, and be sure to get a good long scene of the triumphant hunter crowing and all but spewing manchowder in his skidmarked, size 46 Fruit of the Looms.
That, in a paragraph, is your typical half-hour of Outdoor Life programming. How this seething pit of jingoism, delusions of persecution (many hosts continue to play on right-wing fears of black helicopter-flying, blue-helmet wearing gun-snatchers), and retarded commercials for military recruitment and shit no one in his right mind would ever need constitutes entertainment will, I fear, be forever beyond me.
Gonzales is teh l4m3!!!
Today: Senate votes on Gonzales's confirmation as AG
Yes, he'll be confirmed. I'm resigned to this. But here we go...
I have noble reasons for opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the post of Attorney General -- reasons I share with and have been articulated by far better bloggers and columnists than I. So let me start by offering one the of the more petty reasons I personally oppose his nomination: The right-wing fucks on Powerline, the Corner, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic and elsewhere who argue for torture aren't so much concerned whether it works (it doesn't), whether it'll save lives (it wouldn't -- and even if it did, the lives it would most likely save wouldn't be ones they care about anyway, i.e. blue-state and foreign lives. Anyway, it wouldn't), or whether it's right or wrong. No. The people who want to have a civil, reasoned discussion about whether we should engage in torture or not when we shouldn't have one, want us to do this because they FUCKING GET OFF ON IT. It gives them major emotional wood just to envision some lantern-jawed, whitebread all-American Hero twisting the thumbscrews on and sticking the chemical lightsticks in some filthy raghead dune coon. And my morality and sense of justice and patriotism aside, anything we can do to keep protofascists from getting their jollies is all right by me.
Anyway...
I love my country. I love it because I clearly see that, for all its faults, it is more than a name, a song, a flag, and a spot on the map. It is even more than the gray solemn mists that drift among the ancient behemoths of Muir Woods at golden dawn, more than the the rough, muscled eddies that sweep down the grand, muddy Mississippi. It is the nearest this world has seen to the realization of the revolutionary Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality and justice for all.
The only place torture has is in the thwarting of our perpetual quest to achieve those ideals. Those who argue for adding torture to our armory say it's necessary to fighting this war on terrorism. I submit that doing so, and deploying that odious tool, signals our defeat. We have lost, and whoever we claim to be fighting has won. Because at that point, we'll have nothing left worth defending. We're left defending nothing more than a magnetic flag and an old English drinking song with updated lyrics.
UPDATE: Now with more linkiness!
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