Crotch of Fury

Let me get my Weiner, I mean, get the Weiner stuff out of my literary TVO. My quill is 40% hard hitting commentary, 15% disgust over the cultural vortex we live in, about 25% Family Guy references, and the rest is pretty much that windy sound they play when you see tumbleweed fly by in those old westerns. The fact that people who wear Che T-Shirts and stick a Darwin decal on their Prius annoy me, but at the same time, I can watch back-to-back episodes of Family Guy all evening either makes me a closet quasi-libertarian or it gives me street cred with my liberal readers who come for a laugh then get pissed off at me because they lack the language skills to call me out. Anyway, where was I? Oh the ignoble end of the mighty Weiner.

Just about every major news outlet has sucked the air out of the punchlines with bylines like "Pelosi to Ask House to Probe Weiner" and the New York Post's zinger "Weiner Roast." As we go to print, disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner is in rehab, slowly coming to the "turgid" realization that you can't take pictures of your junior member of congress, send them out to every gal who tweets you, and still expect to keep your job. Yeah, yeah, I know all the claptrap about how your personal life is your own business, but if you're doing it on the company's dime, and "doin' it" means sending nasty Facebook messages and snapshots to 17 year old girls, well, there shouldn't be any ethical discussions about the status of your employment.

Spare me the usual "they all do it." They don't. He torpedoed his new, pregnant bride (who is an up-and-comer at the State Department) with his cavalcade of depravity, and he is now under investigation because of the age of some of these girls. Now this is becoming a possible criminal matter, not to mention the terse letter he's going to get from his HR department - and that's the least of his worries. His wife's boss is Hillary Clinton. She can turn people to glass just by staring at them.

It's become the "riguour" to say that your weekly pants-off dance-off with your harem of barely legal mistresses should have zero impact on your job. Maybe I'm wet behind the ears, maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but maybe it's time we start expecting a little more from the men and woman who pick our pockets to make our country move, or in the case of this administration, come to a grinding halt. Everyone screws up, and I don't expect politicians to be paragons of virtue, but if you want to be a serial creep with teenage girls you lose the privilege of representing my interests in the hallowed halls of Congress.

We could debate nuance and at what point does behaviour A or B cross the line. You could make some sophomoric debating point about Jefferson and think you've ended the argument - but at the end of the day, Anthony Weiner didn't just cross the line, he moved it 5 miles south and ran it over with a tractor.

Sorry Tony. There's no way to wiggle or spin your way out of this one. Sit tight, though; CNN will probably give you Spitzer's time slot when his ratings start to tank.

Cordially

Joe

From the Archives - The Best of TSH by Request - Drag Me To Hell

The poster advertisement at the bus terminal shows a picture of a guy who looks as though he accidentally walked in on his roommate's hot girlfriend taking a shower, and has sprawled out on a plush comfortable couch, hands laced behind his head, just reliving the moment. The caption reads "Get Ready For Comfort". Poster guy has a laptop, an I-Pod, a stack of books, and what appears to be a rather large man-purse ready at his side. Must be nice.


Presently, I'm not feeling so much like poster dude. I feel like I'm sitting on Robert Byrd's skeleton, and there's about 6 inches of space seperating my neck from the broken cup holder precariously holding my scorching cup of coffee, which I am fairly certain will soon be gracing my twig and berries with 2nd degree burns.

"Get Ready For Comfort". I think "Get Ready For The Chiropractor" would be a slightly more honest assessment of what to expect after buying a ticket to ride the iron maiden on wheels.

I find myself in the present situation because I forgot an appointment 3 hours out of town that I had scheduled for today. Necessity and expedience has made quicker and more convenient forms of transportation inaccessible at present. These types of things happen to me quite frequently. Though the lovely Miss Claire continues to buy me beautiful leather bound day planners from Barnes and Noble every year, I persist in keeping track of all important engagements on miscellaneous scraps of paper that I randomly stuff in my wallet. You would think that a guy on is his way up the conservative-libertoid blogosphere ladder would have his s%$t together. You would be wrong.

We just passed a car with a New York license plate adorned with "Obama/Biden '08" and "War is not the Answer" bumper stickers. I quickly wrote "Obama is a wiener" on a scrap of paper to flash at them as we drove by, but thought better of it in honor of my credo that good manners are the glue that hold society together. The lady two rows in front of me appears to hold manners and decorum in much lower esteem than I do, as she seems quite fine with the fact that her 12 year old is wearing a crisp white t-shirt with the word F#$CK emblazoned in large black letters on the front. What's odd is that he appears to otherwise be a well mannered and immaculately groomed young man. He even held the door open for me to the coffee shop during our last stop. Not a trace of angst to be found for a kid making such a bold statement with his t-shirt. Maybe he's playing, as James Bowman might say, "a little pomo joke on us all".

I'll spare you the details of what I will only refer to as "the incident" that just happened in the tin box that is posing as a bathroom at the back of the bus. Push the bubble on a Trouble game board and watch the dice jump violently about inside the confined area. That would sum up the PG part of what just happened to me in the charming little rolling wash closet.

I just had to change buses. I wasn't aware that this particular form of travel had stop overs. My hopes were briefly buoyed when I noticed this appeared to be a shiny new vehicle; Maybe it would be filled with those big comfy seats with all kinds of room for laptops and I-Pods and leg stretching. Nope. It is indeed brand new, but the only modification appears to be an illustration on the near eye level cup holder warning that if the person if front of you suddenly decides to rapidly recline his seat, the coffee in your cup holder may cause a painful crotch incident.

In perspective, there are far worse things in this world than having to take a brief but uncomfortable bus ride - like making the mistake of reading a Maureen Dowd column with the false hope that the mean little shrew will put down her bile-filled pen and start being witty again...or listening to Vice President Biden trying to explain complex government policy by using arbitrary percentages to determine how successful they might be...or maybe even choosing to read an up and coming conservative blogger only to suffer through a long, rambling diatribe about his transportation prejudices.

Seriously though, I can't feel my ass anymore.

Cordially

Joe

Back in Business - Blogging by Numbers!!!

First off, I get it. The vlog was not the most popular item I've posted. It looks like I'm speaking from a dark cave in the mountainous regions of Pakistan, and because I was suffering from a nasty respiratory tract infection the day I posted it, I sounded like a Canadian version of the Taco Bell Chihuahua with throat cancer. Some kind readers have suggested that if I tweaked it a little here and there, it might be something they could get on board with, but the overall consensus is that it was bad. Not Vanilla Sky bad, but not the sort of quality my fans have come expect from the Hype. You've all said pretty clearly that you come here for the writing, and that's extremely humbling and flattering.

Many of you have been waiting for the "year in review" article I write each January. Unfortunately, it's not happening this year because I'm a lazy bastard I think it's a little late in the game at this point - unless of course, I take a cue from Charlie Sheen and declare it so late that I'm winning. It's now no secret that my mother was battling cancer for the last 14 months. She passed away April 19th, and my father, who never left her side, passed away unexpectedly a few weeks earlier, on March 28th. As you can imagine, my priorities were adjusted accordingly. The blog has been on a break, and it might be a slow year for the Hype, but TSH is not going anywhere, so please be patient and I'll be back up to speed at some point.

The Hype has never really been a "blog", in the traditional sense. Blogging is simply a means to an end - a format I use. I have always considered TSH to be a website. I don't like to cram scatter-shot opinions every day, the way Justice Sotomayor crams Pabst Blue Ribbon and dog-eared back issues of "The Public Interest" on Friday nights. There's lots of daily red meat on my facebook page, so feel free to "like me" if you want in on some of that sweet libertoid-conservative moonshine.

Let the Blogging by Numbers begin!!

1 - This morning I was scrolling through Google News to check out the disastrous OMB stats, when I noticed we are still being forced to suffer through the ranting of NPR's answer to Rooster Cogburn, Prima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnic. For my Canadian readers, NPR is America's answer to CBC radio, if CBC was twice as liberal and a third less boring. Most locals know Dupnic has a long a career of hogging the spotlight with his myopic left wing views on everything from immigration to the Tea Partiers, but ever since he grabbed the global media spotlight as the self-appointed National Discourse Referee in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, it seems he has no intentions of shutting up.

For those who may not recall, while Sherriff Dupnic was spending his time making the rounds on the national talk show circuit, his deputies were wasting the crucial first 48 hours of the investigation trying to find evidence to support his hypothesis that right wing talk radio and the conservative movement had somehow triggered Jarad Lee Loughner into committing the shooting spree that left six people dead and 13 injured. The media was quick to take the lead on this narrative, with Paul Krugman and Keith Olbermann blaming Sarah Palin and other conservatives for the massacre, even before the name of the shooter had been released. As we go to print, Krugman is still refusing to let go of his pet theory, proving once again that intelligence is not a prerequisite for winning the Nobel Prize in economics (can't remember who first made that joke, but please accept a hat tip).

Would it be nice to have more civility in public discourse? Of course, but claiming that increased awareness and passionate engagement in the political process incites mass murder is the cheapest and lowest form of treating the supposed illness some disingenuously claim they want to cure.

2 - YES WE CAN!! By 'we' I mean President Obama, and by 'can' I mean can drive the economy into the tank faster than you can say 'Sister Suzie Sittin' on a Stimulus'. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the housing market has tanked for the 57th consecutive month. 7 million Americans have joined the ranks of the jobless, with unemployment touching double digits, and the deficit sitting at 16.5 trillion dollars. The President campaigned on a plethora of feel good platitudes and olive leaf diplomacy, and handing him the Presidency brings to mind the famous P.J. O'Rourke quip about how handing over power and money to a politician is like handing car keys and whisky to a teenage boy. Obama is driving drunk with your money, and has wedged himself further into the "car in the ditch" metaphor he was so fond of using on the campaign trail.

3 - There's nothing I deplore more than junk science and left-wing media hysteria (except for people who say 'fuss-strated' instead of 'frustrated'). Combine the two and people usually start dying as a result of activism by affluent Western liberals who think third world poverty is better than American capitalism...just as long as they're not the ones living in squalor.

Over thirty years ago the restriction on the use of DDT - based on the faulty claim that it posed a risk to wildlife - contributed to the deaths of an estimated 20 million people from malaria. Five years after the ban on DDT was placed in Sri Lanka, cases of Malaria jumped from an astounding 17 in 1964 to an estimated 2,500,000 by 1969. When environmentalist Charles Worster was presented with the disastrous effects the restrictions were having on human life, he responded;

"So what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any."

While Japan was dealing with the aftermath of a wide scale disaster and recovery efforts were ongoing, the hemp soaked, Leary incarnates took to the streets with "No Nukes" signs. As Jonah and I pointed out at the time, no one was hurt or died in the infamous Three Mile Island accident that was often dragged out as a comparison. What type of power source has provided the most fatalities in the last decade? Eco-friendly Wind Farming! The global media focused so much attention on a nuclear Holocaust that never transpired, man power was diverted from rescue efforts where they were really needed. God rest their souls.

4 - There is no Joe - there is only Zuul.

5 - Osama Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes, and it was only a matter of time before sanctimonious liberal terrorist apologists would begin wagging their fingers at the victims of 9/11 for cheering the end of a man who caused so much death and destruction, and the disruption of American life to this day (if you've hopped on a plane recently, you probably got the full cavity shake down without the happy ending). There are reasonable arguments detailing why we should show restraint - many of my staunchly conservative readers have made very strong cases for just that. James Bowman pointed out, drawing from the lessons of the sinking of the Santiago by Captain Philip during the Spanish American war, that there is a solid case to be made for restraint, but none of those reasonable arguments are coming from the global left.

The most annoying of these arguments is the "how would Americans feel if Osama Bin Laden killed President Obama, and Arabs took to the street cheering with placards showing the President's body?" Please. First, Osama Bin Laden was not the President of any country. He was the leader of a terrorist organization living like a coward in the comfort of a villa in a Pakistani suburb. Secondly, radical Arabs make a weekly habit of showing the latest head they've lopped off on the Internet. Lastly, as the twin towers were crumbling to the ground, much of the Arab world erupted in a week long Islamic mardi gras. Restraint, harkening back to Bowman's point, is in keeping with the best traditions of the Western Honor culture. As for the complaints of liberals, they're nothing more than the usual boiler plate loathing of America they can't help from voicing.

6 - DON'T STIFLE MY CREATIVITY!!!

7 - My editor/wife/dominatrix would like to remind everyone that the 3rd annual Oslo Freedom Forum is underway, and the only game in town as far insightful commentary comes from the invaluable Jay Nordlinger over at NRO. It's must-read stuff, so head on over after you've forwarded the link to this blog piece to everyone you know and some you don't.

8 - Life is too short to read the Huffpo.

Cordially

Joe

Evangeline Leger - (Mom) - May 28th, 1932 - April 19th 2011

Evangeline “Nine” Leger


Bathurst – Mrs. Evangeline "Nine" Leger, 77, wife of the late Joseph Leger, of Bridge St. Bathurst, passed away on Tuesday (April 19, 2011) at the Chaleur Regional Hospital, Bathurst, following a lengthy illness.

Born in Bathurst, she was the daughter of the late Henri and Ida (Vienneau) Guignard.

She was a Head Nurse at the Nursery Department at the Chaleur Regional Hospital, Bathurst and was a member of the New Brunswick Retired Nurse’s Association.

She was pre-deceased by her husband, Joseph on March 28, 2011.

She is survived by: Two sons, Joseph Leger Jr. (Claire) of Moncton and Paul Leger (Angie Scribner) of Rothesay. One sister, Sr. Imelda Guignard, n.d.s.c., Dieppe. Four brothers, Gérard Guignard (late Anna) and Raoul Guignard (late Melva), all of Bathurst and Jean-Claude Guignard (Francine) of Richibucto Village, NB, Yvon Guignard (Joan) of Dunlop. Several nieces and nephews.

She was pre-deceased by brothers, Laurent, Patrice and a sister, Sr. Stella.

The body will rest after 2 p.m. Monday at Elhatton's Funeral Home (www.elhatton.com), Bathurst. Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Tuesday (April 26, 2011) at 11 a.m. from the Sacred Heart Cathedral, St. Andrew St., Bathurst. Visiting are Monday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 and Tuesday from 9 a.m. until time of Funeral. Donations in memory of Evangeline may be made to the Canadian Cancer Society or a favorite charity.

Joseph A Leger, April 17th, 1934 - March 28th, 2011

Bathurst - Joseph Leger, 76, of Bridge St. Bathurst, passed away on Monday (March 28, 2011) at the Chaleur Regional Hospital, Bathurst, after a brief illness.

Born in Bathurst, he was the son of the late Raymond and Evelyn (Hodgins) Leger.

He was a former employee of Consolidated Bathurst Paper Mill.

Besides his wife, Evangeline (Guignard) Leger, he is survived by: Two sons, Joseph Leger Jr. (Claire) of Moncton and Paul Leger (Angie Scribner) of Rothesay. One brother, Kenneth "Butch" Leger (Irene) of Nackawic. Two sisters, Joyce Thibodeau (Jerry) of Bathurst and Jeannie Dobson (Ernie) of Florida. Several nieces and nephews.

The body will rest after 2 p.m. Thursday at Elhatton's Funeral Home (www.elhatton.com), Bathurst. Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Friday (April 1, 2011) at 2 p.m. from the Sacred Heart Cathedral, St. Andrew St., Bathurst. Visiting hours are Thursday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 and Friday from noon until time of Funeral.

The Democrats send a Final Screw You to America

I Guess We're Just Too Stoopid Mister Gergen - and other tales from Intelligentsia

It's nice that the people at the institution...rather, it's great to get a chance to spit a blog out - though I think starting out with a literary mucus joke might make you think twice about why you're reading this. I've always wanted to take a slice out of David Gergen and other aging "moderate" pundits to explore just how "insightful" the progressive intellectual crowd really are - so if you want to go back to YouTube to watch that video with the fat kid playing with the light saber, no one's going to blame you.

First, before diving into that soup, let me be very frank about the WikiLeaks affair - from the mouth of Bing West, who is always there to put things in context when my eloquence eludes me;

"Placing hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables on the Internet constitutes a massive betrayal of America. A nation must safeguard its military and diplomatic secrets if it is to be trusted in the international system. Whoever provided the material to WikiLeaks should be prosecuted under the ...death sentence, regardless (of their) alleged motivations. Traitors always feel aggrieved."

This situation has gone far beyond the farce as the media has been portraying it. This is not about the media created fiction of "the people's right to know", which is just a euphemism the media uses for being intrusive and reckless. This is sedition at the very least, and treason at the worst, and I would be hard-pressed to find a way to reduce the gravity of this to fit the parameters of sedition in a legal context.

Batter up!

The always brilliant and insightful James Bowman, in his diary entry of Nov 15th, rhetorically mused "Why do the best and the brightest hate us simple folk as they do?" It's a fair enough question, and Bowman dissects it in a way that only a man of his remarkable talents can. Why do people like the G-20 protesters - who bombed a bank, chased and harassed the adolescent son of a hapless bank executive, and went on to cause millions of dollars in property damage to the city of Toronto - get a free pass from the media, while the peaceful tea party protesters incur the full wrath and scorn of every news organization (barring perhaps Fox)? Curious still is why the violent G-20 protesters were given an undeserved level of legitimacy from the media.

Anyone who's read Bowman's "Media Madness" or anything by Bernie Goldberg already knows the answer to that question, but let's take it a step further and ask the question "why do they keep getting away with  it?"   

The thing about Washington intellectuals, both inside and outside of the beltway, is that they have an uncanny knack for being wrong, and the good fortune of rarely being held accountable for it - with the exception of folks like Bowman, who have a singular talent for what the kids say in their post-modern vernacular "calling out" the David Gergen's and Michael Tomasky's of the world.

Gergen's been around Washington for a long time and would probably have lots of interesting anecdotes were he not constantly playing the role of Monday morning quarterback for his own cult of personality. It's a role he's been playing for almost 40 years. Gergen was one of the coveted few who fed Bob Woodword and Carl Bernstein information for their 1976 tell-all book about the final days of the Nixon administration. Gergen, a peripheral figure (at best) in the Nixon administration, paints himself as the quiet voice of modulated reason. Gergen is a buffoon, but he has cemented a place for himself both in the media and academia, making rounds at Harvard, Elon, Duke, and The Ford Foundation.

But every so often, we poor peasants don't like to play along to the media narrative set by these much coveted eggheads. Every once and a while, when they least expect it, we break from the story line and "go rogue", so to speak.

Remember the Jan 11th debate moderated by Gergen, when the plain spoken dark horse candidate Scott Brown laid him out for asking if he'd be

  "...willing to sit in Teddy Kennedy's seat and say I'm going to be the person who's going to block liberal health care policy for another 15 years",

To which Brown responded;

"It's not the Kennedy's seat, it's not the democrats seat....it's the people's seat."

Few can forget that moment, but fewer remember Gergen's smug prediction, when he admitted to National Review that he had been taken off guard by the quick witted Scott, but that the voters

"...want to show their frustration, but they aren’t willing or ready, yet, to send a Republican to the Senate."

Brown went on to handily win the "people's seat", and Gergen added yet another failed prediction to his extensive collection without ever being reminded of it. Does anyone still listen to this guy?

Since the November GOP sweep, it's become fashionable for beltway intellectuals holding court in the lofty pundit corners provided by their all too willing media sycophants to wax philosophically about the how the GOP won by scaring the elderly about health care. Funny, considering the left has made a cottage industry of telling Americans that the GOP were coming to end school lunch programs, drag seniors out of nursing homes, and drown every last kitten in the lower 48.

In fact, the Democrats went so overboard in 1994 with scare tactics and nasty campaigning it cost them both the House and the Senate.

Republicans warned that Obamacare would give less coverage to more seniors - and that's exactly what happened. Last month, seniors saw a remarkable 8% increase in their out of pocket expenses, and we're not just talking about the older folks living the good life in Florida, God's waiting room. It's the poor that have been hit the hardest, and irony of ironies to those who demonize the corporate world, it's been the drug companies that have stepped up to the plate to help those who have also lost their jobs due to the inept and reckless spending of President Obama.  It has been the "evil drug companies" that have provided drugs to those hit the hardest at little or no cost to them.

Last week, at the end of a fascinating presentation by the wonderful (and very human) execs of a major drug company, a dear friend, whose firm did some PR work for President Clinton, said; "The GOP have only got two years left." He's made a few bad predictions in the past (though he's reluctant to admit it), so I made him repeat it twice, saying

"Remember this moment and what you've just said standing right here in the lobby of this nice hotel - I'm going to hold you to it, and there's no squirming out of it this time when you end up being wrong."

I suggest you get yourself a score card for the next time one of the great intellectual overlords looks down their nose at you and explains the way things are and how they're going to be. Hold on to that score card and swack them over the head with it like a frozen salmon after the next election.

Perhaps over time, if we conservatives devote ourselves to this practice, intellectuals will have to trade in their label for the one that once was reserved for them - Eggheads.

Cordially

Joe

Down for the Countdown - Olbermann and the Dems get the Boot

Hey there loyal readers!  Do you lack integrity?  Do you wait to speak out until after an issue has been voted on, then feign outrage and ooze sanctimony over the outcome?  Have you ever compared yourself to Winston Churchill or Walter Cronkite?  Do wear a protective plastic bubble over your head to keep your very important salt and pepper hair perfectly coiffed while you nap underneath your desk?  Do you possess only a peripheral knowledge of current events and compensate for it by saying everything in a loud baritone voice?  Do you show a complete lack of respect for your colleagues, your employer, and frequently make interns cry?  Can you shout "MISTER BUSH" repeatedly while pounding on your desk?  If so, you may just be what MSNBC is looking for.

On Friday, MSNBC announced that it has suspended prime-time host Keith Olbermann indefinitely and without pay for making political contributions to the campaigns of three Democratic candidates.  What is most curious about this, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, is that the network is doing this under the guise of ethics.  Did anyone think that MSNBC had ethics to begin with?  Does anyone really buy that network president Phil Griffin gives a damn about the appearance of bias and integrity?  This is the same network that ran ads weeks before the last election with all its major players standing in front of an Obama style banner that read "The Network of Change."

Olby's temporary replacement, Chris Hayes of The Nation, also gave close to $2000 to various Democratic candidates - a violation of the same rule that was used to kick Olbermann to the curb.

So what's really going on?

MSNBC is a sinking ship.  It is hemorrhaging money, and while that ass monkey Olbermann hosted the network's only popular program, his salary is probably more than the station makes in advertising revenue in a year.

But most of all, Olbermann is known to be an insufferable boor. He has repeatedly belittled and terrorized staffers and interns.  He throws legendary temper tantrums at anyone who dares look at him sideways, and has even come close to starting on-air fist fights with colleagues like Chris Matthews during the 2008 elections coverage.  Olbermann's ego has gone from being an annoyance to an open sore that's oozing puss.

AHHHH - but the schadenfreude!  Olbermann's suspension is the icing on the cake after the GOP literally and figuratively cleaned "House."  Even after holding almost absolute power in every branch of government, the Democrats still had to fight and bend the rules to pass every piece of legislation they rammed down the public's throat - and, like Olbermann, they got the boot.

America has opened the first page in a new chapter of a very old book called market driven constitutional  republicanism.  The supposed "racist" Tea Party movement managed to elect the most ethnically diverse candidates in the nation's history, and they have a lot of work to do.  Reversing the damage done in 2 short years of reckless big government taxing and spending will be a daunting task.

Reports today indicate that instead of helping seniors, Obamacare has increased their out of pocket expenses by up to 8%, and companies such as John  Deere have reported that co-pays will rise by 40%, increasing their expenditures by millions.  The President's stimulus bill has created an unemployment rate just shy of 10%, and in September, almost 4 million Americans joined the ranks of the poor.  How are you liking that "change?"

There will be no overnight magic, and Republicans would be well served to be cautious in promising too much.  Over the summer I asked Jonah Goldberg if a Silent Cal, hands-off President would be what the nation needed.  Goldberg confided that even under the most optimistic of conditions, the GOP would have to do some degree of legislating for at least 8 years to begin to reverse the damage the boy president has caused.

Republicans have been gracious in their victory, and they must never forget that they have not been given a mandate to return to business as usual - they have been given another chance to restore order and good government to the greatest nation on earth.  The Tea Partiers should remain vigilant to ensure the folks up on the hill keep their noses out of the pork barrel, and their hands out of the pockets of hard working Americans.

Thank you all for your patience while we dealt with a very personal loss. It's good to be back.

Cordially

Joe

No, It's Not a Conspiracy - You're Just an Idiot

Every year as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many readers write in to express their outrage and grief over the increasing apathy for the 2,985 people were murdered by crazed Jihadists who believed Christians were unclean, Jews were demons, and western women were whores for wearing skirts and going to school. This year their anguish is further compounded by the decision to allow a radical anti-Semite to build a mosque on the very site where the majority of the horror occurred that day.

Almost every month a new documentary appears mocking the brave men and women who are fighting and dying to ensure our safety, or another inane book is written accusing the United States and Israel of conspiring with the "Military Industrial Complex" of plotting 9/11 so they could line the pockets of the rich and have a convenient excuse to invade Iraq. If you believe such things, I'm inclined to think you're an idiot who eats things off the floors of public washrooms and shouldn't be allowed to use sharp scissors.

Still, many people do believe such outlandish things, and dedicate much of their lives trying to connect half-truths, propaganda and out-right lies to try and prove these delusions - but why? A reader of some importance asked to me to try to answer that question, and I have before, but I thought I would try to dig a little deeper this time - and it's been a long night.

For the last three hours I have been staring at a cryptic paragraph plucked from an online edition of The Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper from January of 1877. It's a small paragraph that makes little sense and seems benign enough - depending on what you consider "benign".  A thimble is an enormous bucket to an ant, but a marble is a tiny sphere to a human - that is, unless that human slips on it, breaks her back, and is forced to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. That small marble quickly becomes a wrecking ball.

But why do I find myself reading a 113 year old article three hours into a blog that should have taken 45 minutes? Because some say this is where it all started - an article that makes reference to a strange courtroom transcript.  An article that mentions a term that probably would have been very foreign to people of that age.

A few decades later in 1909, the Oxford English Dictionary decided to put two words together, officially making  the term mentioned in the newspaper part of the English lexicon - "Conspiracy Theory."

In the process of writing what I thought would be a simple blog peice, I found myself searching for the "first conspiracy theory", only to find that the debate over what the original conspiracy theory is, is considered another conspiracy theory. It's actually far worse than that. Those who ply in the trade of conspiracies hardly spend any time at all exploring the history of this phenomenon, and eventually find themselves trying to make sense of the same obscure article I stumbled upon, losing interest when, it seems to me, the story is really becoming interesting.

This is no small matter to me, because when we engage in fanciful thinking, we not only debase historical discourse, we debase history itself - and I love history.

History is a white wall and to engage in healthy debate of history is to take a fine quill pen and make an interesting mark upon it. Plying in conspiracy theories, on the other hand, is to take a can of spray paint and recklessly scar that wall with crass graffiti. Why do extremely intelligent people continue to believe in such fanciful notions?

Let me give you a few examples:

In the early '90's, DNA evidence proved beyond dispute that Anastasia was murdered with the rest of her family and didn't escape to some fairy tale life.

People forget that a conclusive study in 1993 by military professionals, historians, computer and ballistics experts showed that not only was there no magic bullet or 2nd shooter in the JFK assassination, but the trajectories and locations of Oswald's bullets were the only ones possible. This reality was actually a surprise to all involved.

Many very smart people who believe the moon landing was faked don't realize their assumptions are grounded in faulty evidence. For example, there is no "Zero Gravity Room" at NASA. The vomit comet is actually a Boeing 707 airplane. There actually IS gravity in space, and an astronaut can survive a tear in his spacesuit outside a shuttle. The Apollo missions did not take off from Cape Canaveral, but Merritt Island. Long before the moon landing conspiracy ever reached America, it was taught by Cuban and Nicaraguan schoolteachers as political propaganda.

Take 9/11 - If the Bush/Cheney administration really wanted to bilk middle eastern oil that badly, wouldn't it have been a lot easier just to re-negotiate the Iraqi oil deals they struck in the mid-eighties? Why are rational people so eager to believe their government conspired with Israel to slaughter thousands of it's own citizens for a few Halliburton contracts?

The world wouldn't lack mystery and magic if conspiracy theories went away. God fills our world with so much beauty and mystery we could not even begin to scratch the surface in four lifetimes. Theology and philosophy, even these are things that are filled with questions that have no certain answers and offer great meaning and fulfillment.

On March 1st, my first child will be born (well, the exact date and time is up to kid in the end). I have already seen the baby's heart beating. It beats between 160 and 169 beats per minute. I have seen it's little arms and legs. It already has tooth buds and can recognize and is comforted by my wife's voice. I too, am comforted - comforted by the fact that my baby will always give my life purpose.

It's a short stroll down the path called crazy, and the trail is littered with greasy haired wingnuts adorned with tinfoil hats slurring from behind fumes of bong smoke that "it's all a cover up, dude.  Open your eyes, man." But when we open our eyes to their kinds of magical thinking, we are closing our minds to the oftentimes much simpler truth.

Cordially

Joe

Mixed Bag of Blogging by Numbers

I don't have a movie review for you this week. Not surprising, considering that the offerings at your local theatre this weekend include Piranha in Real 3D and Eat, Pray, Love, a film based on Elizabeth Gilbert's inane quasi-memoir of the same name filled with pages of childish gibberish masquerading as profound insights on life.  I wish they would make a movie based on Azar Nafisi's much more engaging memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I would gladly pay double the price of admission to go see. If you haven't read it, you should. It chronicles the author's life in Iran's Islamic theocracy and follows the lives of seven female University students who joined Nafisi's (their former professor) secret book club where they meet to discuss banned Western literature after her resignation from the University of Allameh Tabatabei.  The book is filled with lots of eating, praying and love, but they are of a deep and profound nature that puts Miss Gilbert's gimmicky book/film to shame.  Hey! Let's do some blogging by numbers!

1 - I may not have a movie review for this week, but I do have a movie recommendation. Vigilante movies are a staple of American cinema, but as iconic as many of them have become - think Taxi Driver and Falling Down, for example - their heroes are usually a tad unstable.

Gran Torino was a satisfying film in many respects, but Eastwood can never divorce himself from his trademark tortured "victim hero", like he played in Unforgiven or Million Dollar Baby - oh yeah, did it ever occur to anyone that once those gang members posted bail, they or their friends were probably going to massacre the entire neighborhood? Kind of a huge plot hole, one would think.

Anyway, I think that up-and-coming director Daniel Barber may have given us the best movie in the genre to date with his first feature length film, Harry Brown.

Harry Brown stars the ever brilliant Michael Caine as a recently widowed ex-marine living in London's south end, an area being terrorized by gangs of violent young thugs. After Brown's friend is murdered trying to fend off local hoods, he finds the police sympathetic but unable to exact any real justice under Britain's bureaucracy-laden justice system. Harry, of course, takes matters into his own hands.

What sets Harry Brown apart from other vigilante films is that Brown is not a wise-cracking Hollywood bad ass. The movie has wonderfully suspenseful moments, but Harry's body count is modest and not sensationalized. What keeps the film grounded is that the young punks who harass and terrorize the neighborhood are frightening and believable. The other well played card is the frustration of the movie's detectives, Hickock and Frampton, whose hands are tied by a PR obsessed upper brass more concerned with public opinion and press conferences than actually tackling crime.

Harry Brown is well acted, well paced, and succeeds were it's predecessors have failed. Go see it.

2 -  The Ground Zero Mosque debate is taking on the same tone I witnessed during theTea Party movement's early days, and as I discussed in the last blog, it's a tone intentionally set by the media.  The MSM has decided to frame the debate as the forces of the crazed, Muslim hating "Christian Right" vs the sober-minded liberal voices of tolerance and understanding.  Unlike the smear campaign the media launched on Tea Partiers, they are having less success painting the Mosque's detractors as crazed lunatics - but they sure are trying.  A recent protest against the Mosque was widely dubbed as an "anti-Muslim rally."  Strange, considering many of the people at the protest were Muslims. Rima Fakih, the first Muslim to wear the Miss USA crown (bestowed upon her by those intolerant Americans!!), has spoken out against the building of the Mosque. Hell, even Howard Dean has come to the defense of the protesters.

Those of us who oppose the building of the Mosque are opposed to it because it is in poor taste. The first amendment issues are utter hog wash and the so-called "Cordoba Center" has no more business being there than a Confederate flag would on a former slave plantation, or a Christian church would on the grounds of Auschwitz (yes, I do recall the "Cross Shadow" incident).

Putting aside the utter and complete disrespect the Mosque represents to the victims of 9/11, one must also question the motives of its supporters.  Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the Mosque’s principal backer and an outspoken ally of Iran's brutal theocracy, has previously blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy, claiming "America has blood on it's hands."  How can anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty look at Imam Rauf's history of notoriously anti-American utterings and believe in the purity of his motives?

The Ground Zero Mosque is a mockery to the memory of those who died there almost 10 years ago. We are not anti-Muslim, we are pro-respect. 

3 - Please email any tips on the types of food that helped you with nausea during your first trimester of pregnancy. My editor/incubator the lovely Mrs. Claire is re-enacting the ipecac scene from Family Guy every 2 hours and we welcome any suggestions that might help to ease the stomach of my dear wife. I know most writers wish this sort of thing on their editor, but I can't in good conscience allow this to continue.

4 - Speaking of editors, my precious wife is quite sick, so if you notice that my articles are full of mixed metaphors,  egregious punctuation and split infinitives, it's because she's too ill to edit my pieces at the moment. Any sloppiness is entirely of my own hand and not that of my talented editor.

5 - Oh the joy!! Oh the schadenfreude!! It's rare that an arrogant Hollywood liberal actually gets humiliated in public for his outspoken political beliefs, but James "the bully" Cameron finally shot his mouth off one too many times and got slammed for it. Now, there's nothing wrong with being a Hollywood liberal. Ben Affleck is surprisingly courteous and well informed, and people like Brad Pitt put their money where their mouth is and actually do some good in the world. I don't agree with most of their beliefs, but they're not pompous little dilettantes. James Cameron, on the other hand, has encouraged enviro-terrorism and has called people who question climate change "swine." Cameron decided to "call out the deniers" by challenging them to a debate, and here's what happened;

"... as soon as everything was organized, Cameron began changing the rules. First, he wanted to change his team. Then he wanted the format to be changed from a debate to a roundtable discussion. Then he wanted to ban the opposing side's cameras. Then he wanted to completely get rid of all cameras, stating that audio should only be recorded.


Breitbart, Morano and McElhinney agreed to all the unexpected changes, but Cameron kept going. He next said that he wanted all media to be banned and to make the roundtable open only to those attending the conference. He then decided against streaming the discussion on the internet and then concluded with a rule that no recording of any kind would be allowed.

The three men once again agreed. And finally, on the day before the event, Cameron withdrew, claiming that he no longer wanted to take part. According to Cameron's spokesman, the director did not want to participate because "Morano is not at James Cameron's level to debate. Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society."

Cameron is a coward and a liar and he knows he would have been laughed off the stage. Maybe now you'll shut your gd mouth, James.

6 - Have a good weekend!!

Cordially

Joe