Author: Adam (Page 10 of 224)

“Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that even He could not eat it?”

-Homer Simpson

To Joe Lieberman, who said this (amongst other gum-flapping) Friday at the Rumsfeld hearings on the Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq:

LIEBERMAN: Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

LIEBERMAN: And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.

Thanks, Joe, for doing the work of the Bush administration yet again by conflating 9/11 and Iraq for the 3,440th time. Plus, you tossed in the “at least we’re somewhat better than the terrorists!” line too. Oh and one more little thing about Iraq, Joe: *we* invaded *them,* remember? Your WMT Golden Weasel is in the mail.

——————-

The prison torture story, which continues to widen and deepen, has had me seeing red all week. I’m so angry with an administration that considers the Geneva Convention “legalisms,” and a right-wing that can muster up 40 times the outrage over a cartoon than they can over actual torture, that I can barely see straight.

I watched a little of the hearings Friday, but I couldn’t stand the aforementioned gum-flapping of all involved, so I turned it off. Boiling it down, there are two questions that need to be asked and answered here.

1. Who’s responsible for these actions?
2. What are you going to do about it?

Neither of those questions has been even partially answered, as far as I can tell. Of course Rumsfeld won’t go, because that would be a tacit admission by the Bush team that their whole war strategy was a mistake. And we all know how these guys do with acknowledging responsibility.

But as a nation, we need to not let this go through a few news cycles and disappear, like every other scandal in this administration. We deserve better, and the only way we’re going to get it is to demand answers – and action.

“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.”

-George Orwell

Well I’m back. How have you been? What’s been going on? It feels good to be back. There are some changes around here, and I’ll go through them quickly.

–Tweaked design. Several people have bemoaned the white text on black, so I flipped it. It’s also sort of a streamlined look, especially because not everything on the old site is included (yet).

–No online comments. A controversial decision, but one I feel good about, at least for now. You can always e-mail me a comment about a specific post, and you can read the past comments. Despite recent events around here, there’s a lot of good stuff still in the comments.

–Categories. I had categories on the old site, but I never used them. Several people have asked to see, for example, only the movie reviews. Now you can – just click on a category name to see only those posts. I don’t have a lot of the past entries categorized, but I’m working on it. When you choose a category, it’s listed at the top of the page so you know what you’re looking at. Click on “all” under the category list to go back to seeing everything at once.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s coming back here after my three-month hiatus. There’s lots of stuff I want to add (links, favorite posts, photo galleries, other articles), but I didn’t want to wait until everything was done to launch. If I did that, I’d never be back.

E-mail me at any time about anything. I love to hear from you.

Well, here goes.

It’s no secret that I’m a big Jennifer Garner fan. I even wrote what amounts to “Alias” fan fiction (or is it parody?) back in the day. So I was looking forward to Garner’s update of “Big.”

Now here’s where you expect me to say, what a letdown, right? But the funny thing is, I really enjoyed myself. Garner is sweet and funny, and proves she can carry a movie easily. There’s a little too much teen girl wish fulfillment, especially at the end, but they also avoid falling into about 2,178 holes that are possible in a story like this.

One of my favorite parts was the casting of a pudgy, goofy, awkward kid as the 13-year-old counterpart of Mark Ruffalo. Any movie that says that kid can grow up to be Mark Ruffalo, a man I would happily watch read the phone book for two hours, is OK in my book.

Another great thing is the real chemistry between Ruffalo and Garner, something that can make or break a romantic comedy. They’ve got it.

This movie was fluffy and wispy and girly. And I liked it. Sue me. 🙂

Lots has already been said about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who gave up a multi-million-dollar career to become an Army Ranger, fighting in Afghanistan where he was killed.

But one thing that hasn’t been said a lot is the despicable nature of the right, willing to use this man’s death as a rallying cry for a horrible war. They attack the Nightline “Fallen” program as propaganda, but can’t resist parading Tillman around like a poster boy, complete with tearful elegies and junior-high-level poetry to a man they never met. That sickens me.

Fortunately, Tillman’s brother Rich injected a little humanity during Pat’s memorial service.

“Pat isn’t with God,” he said. “He’s fucking dead. He wasn’t religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he’s fucking dead.”

Rich Tillman was talking about people imposing their religious beliefs on the service. But he could have easily been talking about the right-wing’s willingness to use his brother’s death for “They killed *one of us*!” propaganda.

Pat Tillman deserves better than that, especially in death.

I actually went to two “teen” movies in one week – the second was “Mean Girls,” starring Lindsay Lohan of “Freaky Friday” and “The Parent Trap” and written by Tina Fey, the first ever female head writer on Saturday Night Live and an incredibly cool person.

It was definitely entertaining, although I don’t think teen girls will find it worth sitting through. The humor is idiosyncratic and adult, and often I was the only one laughing at Fey’s slyly mocking humor. And toward the end it appears to lose its way, sort of becoming an “Afterschool Special” on self-esteem in spite of itself. Still, it’s hard not to like a movie that names its disaffected outcast teen girl character “Janis Ian.”

One thing that’s definitely noticeable to everyone in the audience is the…shall we say….development of 17-year-old Lohan. As we were leaving the theater, one of my companions said something about Lohan’s performance, and in my classic style, I said all too loudly, “And what about the giant knockers on that girl!” This outburst caused a group of teenage girls, no doubt waiting for the next show of the same movie, to regard me with disgust.

I’m sure those girls *should* regard me with disgust – just not for the reasons they think.

Since I’ve been gone from words mean things, I’ve been banned from two right-wing weblogs: Dean Esmay and Mrs. du Toit.

In some ways I’m sad about this. Going on those sites and calling them on their outrageous statements was a sort of “Fight Club”-esque therapy for me, and I don’t have that anymore. (The links above are to the specific threads where I was finally banned, after they ran out of right-wing talking points to bludgeon me with.) But they’ve proved themselves to be such hate-filled ideologues that maybe it’s best to leave them to congratulate each other on their superior moral fiber and rock-solid patriotism.

One of the things that began to get my goat was the epithet “moonbat” (also “barking moonbat” and “raving moonbat” and others) for anyone to the left of Bill O’Reilly. The Dean Esmay thread where I was finally banned, in fact, dealt with that very subject.

So I’ve decided to coin my own term for those xenophobic, warmongering, violence-addicted, reactionary, Bush-worshipping, anti-gay members of the rabid right currently dominating political discourse in this country: crapweasels. A common specific would be “neocon crapweasel.”

I feel this word exactly captures both their motives and the effect they have on anyone with an ounce of common sense within their shouting distance. And as a word person from way back, I’m pleased with it. I’ve even made it a category on this new site, so you can get my crapweasel updates whenever you want.

Feel free to use “crapweasel” as you see fit.

Boy, just when you decide to take a break, all kinds of stuff pops up (San Francisco, Mel Gibson, Rod Paige (! fire his ass), Average Joe 2, etc. etc.) that is eminently worth writing about. Well, such is life.

Andy suggested that I have a notify list for people who want to know when (if?) I get started again. So if you’d like to be on the list, e-mail me. Thanks.

In the meantime, I’m moving to a new web host, clearing my head, and making some changes to ‘words mean things.’ Not big things. Preview: tweaked design, categories, no comments. And hopefully less self-censorship.

This has been percolating for a while. I’ve decided to take a break from writing this site. For how long, I don’t know. My reasons are complex, and I don’t know that even I understand them well enough to explain. All I can say is, it’s just not fun at this point.

I want to thank everyone sincerely who comes by here to read my insane ramblings. You all mean more to me than I can express. I’m hoping that if I take some time off, I can come back with the enthusiasm and ideas that seem to be lacking now.

I’d love it if you’d patronize the people on my links list, and I’m going to be updating and tweaking it in the next few days – it’s been a while since I’ve done that.

Be good. I’ll see you soon, I hope.