What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
(and remember, you can always e-mail me if you love or loathe anything you're about to read)...


   Thursday, June 30, 2005

   GAYPOCALYPSE!

What an incredible couple of days, as Canada and now Spain have ratified full marriage rights for gay men and lesbians. I feel so incredibly happy at these signs of hope, progress and rationality in the world.

But not everyone is so happy. Roman Catholic Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family (whew!) says that gay marriage is "a crime which represents the destruction of the world."

Wow! Batten down the hatches, it's Armageddon! Here's what we'll see in the next few days, thanks to Canada and Spain:

-- four riders awkwardly steering their horses through city traffic
-- oceans turning to blood, completely confusing the sharks
-- asteroids striking the earth (just as they killed those heathen dinosaurs) but, at least one of them is destroyed by Bruce Willis and a rag-tag batch of oil-refinery workers
-- Harry Belafonte singing Caribbean songs (oh wait, sorry, that's calypso)
-- the Rapture, in which fundamentalist believers are literally lifted up to heaven, leaving free stuff for the rest of us!
-- an uprising of plague-zombies with only Charlton Heston to stop them
-- human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together -- mass hysteria!

Labels: Canada

I went with about nine friends (!) to see "Batman Begins" in Imax last night. A great time was had by all.

In short, the movie's a bit too long and somewhat flat -- lacking the curlique delights of Tim Burton's vision -- but nevertheless, in its straightforward way, the movie rocks. The director loves the character, Christian Bale is completely perfect and the other big-league actors are all fantastic (though poor Scientology-hostage Katie Holmes is woefully miscast). I didn't love it as much as I hoped to but it's a terrific summer movie all the same. It's great to have this character back!

Labels: comic books, homo-a-go-go, movies

...Andrew Sullivan is beginning to track just how many times Dick Cheney and his White House staff predict the end of the Iraq insurgency. I thought I'd join in the fun with my own little timeline:

"I think [the US] may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time. The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
-- Vice-President Dick Cheney, May 31, 2005

"They will do everything they can to disrupt the process up to those elections in January because they know that once you've got a democratically elected government in place that has legitimacy in the eyes of the people of Iraq, they're out of business. That will be the end of the insurgency."
-- Vice-President Dick Cheney, October 28, 2004

The insurgency is "a symptom of the success that we're having here in Iraq...I think it's that success which is driving the current situation, because there are those extremists that don't want that success."
-- Air Force General Richard B. Myers, April 15, 2004

"Tuesday marks one month to the day of the capture of Saddam Hussein, humiliated and feeble, and Bush aides insist these are the death throes of the insurgency."
-- Newsweek, January 19, 2004

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react."
-- President George W. Bush, October 27, 2003

"We [the White House] did not expect it [the Iraqi resistance] would be quite this intense this long."
-- Secretary of State Colin Powell, October 26, 2003

"There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on."
-- George W. Bush, July 2, 2003

Fun game, no? And we'll get to keep playing for a long time to come -- Cheney promised this week that the Iraq conflict will end sometime during President Bush's second term, which ends in January 2009. Bring 'em on!

Labels: George W Bush

Eugene Mirman is a stand-up comic in New York, probably the last guy a right-wing Christian telemarketing company should be cold-calling. Like thousands of Americans, he received a series of telephone calls urging him to switch to a "Christian-based telephone carrier" out of Oklahoma but, unlike thousands of Americans, he taped the calls and posted them on his website. There's three hilariously creepy exchanges that typically start like this:

Operator: Did you press 1 to oppose same sex marriages?

Mr. Mirman: Oh, I pressed it, yes.

Operator: Okay, that's great to hear. And are you against same sex marriages?

Mr. Mirman: Well, I want to destroy it, yes.

Operator: Okay. That's great to hear... -

Mr. Mirman: Like the fist of God we will smash them!

Operator: Exactly.

Labels: religion

Given the mayfly attention span of the media, I thought all this "Deep Throat" business would have come and gone by now. As Jon Stewart warned, "You might want to brace yourself for this -- Deep Throat is a guy you've never heard of!" I figured the anticlimactic revelation of FBI number two Mark Felt would be a gentle topic of discussion for a day or two but, oddly, I'd forgotten how entirely insane the political climate in America is right now.

Everyone's favourite loon, Pat Buchanan, immediately made the talk show rounds, branding Felt a "traitor" who "lied and lied and lied for years because he was ashamed of what he did, and what he did was to help destroy an enormously popular president..." Enormously popular? At the time, Nixon had approval ratings higher than Reagan or the Bushes, true, but the truth of his criminal activity has to count for something, no?

Actor/professor Ben Stein ("Bueller? Bueller?"), a former speechwriter for Nixon, carries on this hagiography by ridiculously asking, "Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible?"

Well sure we can, Ben, since we're bright enough to listen to the tapes he made of most of his conversations, like this one with Bob Haldeman, discussing the Brookings Institution:

NIXON: "They have a lot of material. I want--the way I want that handled Bob is get it over. I want Brooking. Just break in. Break in and take it out. You understand."

HALDEMAN: "Yeah. But you have to get somebody to do it."

NIXON: "Well, you--that’s what I’m just telling you. Now don’t discuss it here. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them out."

HALDEMAN: "I don’t have any problem with breaking in."

NIXON: "Just go in and take them. Go in around 8 or 9 o’clock. That’s right. You go in and inspect and clean it out."

Stein insists that Nixon "was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton -- a lying, conniving peacemaker. That is Nixon's kharma." This is a deeply weird argument since, last time I checked, drug addicts and seducers were nowhere near as harmful as burglers and warmongers.

'Warmongers' being the key word in all this. I think a lot of this attempt to rehash 30-year-old arguments or rehabilitate the image of Richard Nixon stems from the liar Stein conveniently omits from his list. The fact is that examining the lies of the Nixon White House (that led to burglary) can only lead to noticing the lies of the current one (that led to war) and that just won't do. So Nixon must be made a hero, his informant a villain -- a genocidal one, no less:

So, this is the great boast of the enemies of Richard Nixon, including Mark Felt: they made the conditions necessary for the Cambodian genocide. If there is such a thing as kharma, if there is such a thing as justice in this life of the next, Mark Felt has bought himself the worst future of any man on this earth.

In Ben Stein's world, Mark Felt should've kept quiet about Nixon so that Pol Pot wouldn't have killed millions. Such neat backwards logic. No blame for Nixon engineering crimes requiring such whistle-blowing.

This, then, is the supposed 'moral' of Deep Throat: if you're aware of terrible people committing terrible acts for terrible reasons (*cough*1600soldiersdead*cough*), don't say a thing, traitor! You might undo the possible future of blue skies, candy and puppies their dark deeds will create. Stick with the devil you know...