Sunday, December 18, 2005

I Am Not a Curmudgeon



The magnificently titled www.cuteoverload.com is a site whose only purpose is to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And it really does what it says on the packet, full of pictures like this whose only point in life is to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside and somewhat sticky with knowingly-welcomed kitsch.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Woar on terra


No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. . .
-- James Madison

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Simply the Worst!


When Bob Woodward asked him how history would judge his enterprise in Iraq, George Bush famously answered, "history, we don't know. We'll all be dead."


Cute, but a lie.

If there's one thing that motivates these people, it's their place in history.

When you boil it all down and strip out the complexities - something I'm prone to do as I stare at the blinking screen at 3 in the morning after a few tumblers of Scotch - then it's all history. It explains what the hell Blair's up to, why post-Lewinski and impeachment Clinton made his last-second dash to fix the Middle East and despite his disingenuous remark - Bush too.

Seen through a particular prism all Bush's presidency has been is an attempt to rewrite history - the history of his father's presidency. They were gonna invade Iraq bigger! Cut taxes morer! Do all the groovy paleo-con shit they never got to do while that effete, Euro-internationalist Bush I dude was barfing sushi, hugging homos and ignoring the base. Presidency as massive Oedipal playground - I've written on it before, and no doubt will again. But now let's just bring this oil tanker back onto course: Bush lies when he says he doesn't think of history.

And that's
what makes this so goddam funny:

It would seem that 338 out 415 of America's top historians have classed him well on track to snagging the prestigious 'Worst President Ever' ™ award and... [drum roll, please] he's got 3 more years to go!

Read and weep, my droogies:

This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:

  • He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;

  • He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;

  • He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;

  • He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;

  • He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign
    (Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);

  • He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;

  • He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;

  • He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.
  • As of now Bush is up against James Buchanan for the gong - Buchanan basically ran one of the most corrupt regimes in Washington and plunged America into the Civil War - but as noted, Bush has more than enough time to catch up, take a lead, possibly even lap Buchanan. There's one chink of sunlight for the Shrub however - as the piece points out:
    Many of the historians note that however bad Bush seems, they have indeed since worse men around the White House. Some say Buchanan. Many say Vice President Dick Cheney.
    Ah yes, our good friend Dick, that old warhorse of evil, corrupt buffoonery. Glad to see the Cheney-is-an-idiot meme may finally be catching on in the sombre halls of academia.

    Sunday, December 04, 2005

    Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures

    In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.

    ...

    ‘He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favourable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.’
    -- Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths