Month: September 2003 (Page 6 of 7)

I don’t hate the President. I loathe him. “Hate” might be reserved for people like Karl Rove, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It was really they who took advantage of a freaked-out country to push through their scary neocon agenda. Bush was just along for the ride, as usual.

If we can’t get rid of these guys next year, after all that’s happened, we’ll be in permanent trouble.

Cognitive Dissonance Quote of the Week

“Men shouldn’t feel like fags just because they want to have nice-looking bodies…Gay people are fighting the same kind of stereotyping that bodybuilders are: People have certain misconceptions about them just as they do about us. Well, I have absolutely no hang-ups about the fag business…”

-California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, in Oui Magazine, 1977 (by way of The Smoking Gun by way of John)

“Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?” Campaign Award

An Army of One – U.S. Army

“Sarge, I’d love to follow your orders, but I’m an ARMY OF ONE!”

Oliver

I don’t know Dean Allen. I don’t know his dog Oliver either, although I’ve fallen in love with him because of the many amazing photographs Dean has published on his site. And when I read tonight of Oliver’s life-threatening illness, my heart was absolutely in my throat.

Oliver’s OK. I breathe a sigh of relief, and marvel again at what the internet can do.

OK so let me get this straight. I’m a little thick sometimes, so it takes a while for me to understand stuff. The President said last night, among other things ($87 billion ring a bell?) that Iraq is now the “central front” on the war on terror. A country that was doing absolutely nothing to threaten us, that had no ties to Al-Qaida and no “weapons of mass destruction” to give to anyone; a country that we invaded without provocation, and now are struggling to contain/rebuild, is the central front on the war on terror?

I guess the war must be going pretty well then.

Medieval Word of the Day

flagon

Banana

At the same trip to Borders I wrote about below, I came upon a book by a person I’d never heard of, Banana Yoshimoto. I’ve decided that “Banana Yoshimoto” has surpassed “Babe Didrickson Zaharias” as my favorite name of all time.

One thing I didn’t mention about the Vegas trip was, my brother and sister-in-law wore words mean things shirts at one point, much to my embarrassment/pleasure. My friend Paul also bought one. It’s a trend sweeping the nation! I would think it was a cute picture, if it wasn’t of me.

Both John and Lisa have posted their answers to my interview questions. Read and be enlightened.

“People love being told what they already know.”

-P.J. O’Rourke, in The Onion

I’ll freely admit that I read Al Franken’s latest book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” for much the same reason that righties read Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity: we both like to have our existing worldview legitimized. The difference with Franken, I think, is

a) he’s actually funny, and
b) he actually does his research.

I didn’t learn much from Franken’s book I didn’t already know, especially after all the pre-publication stories about Bill O’Reilly’s “We won two Peabodys” thing. But as a progressive waiting patiently for the pendulum to swing the other way, it was a damn entertaining diversion.