A compilation of jokes about Bush's National Guard service, culled from late-night TV.

A representative quote, from Craig Kilborn: "President Bush is not fazed by other candidates' war records. He said, I may have not fought in Vietnam, but I created one."

Good stuff from McSweeney's:

The A-Team Resolves Lapses in Homeland Security.

Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush.

Rooting for Bobby Fischer

Check.

Chess champ Bobby Fischer is in trouble again. Apparently the State Department is really going after him... because, Lord knows, the U.S. Government has nothing better to do than to prosecute a mentally-ill expatriate for playing a chess match 12 years ago in a country that no longer exists.

Operation: Infinite Wrestlemania

I hate it when people bitch and complain about the horrible things that happen in the world, and yet never offer any solutions. Like most folks I occasionally find myself indulging in this practice as well. So as a gift to the world I'm going to present my (dare I call it foolproof?) plan that will resolve the deteriorating situation in Iraq and bring peace to the Middle East. It will cost very little to implement... in fact, it will end up generating a huge amount of revenue which Bush can immediately give to the wealthy in the form of a tax cut.

The proposal: A no-holds-barred cage match between 1980s pro wrestlers Sergeant Slaughter and the Iron Sheik... the former representing the United States, and the latter representing Iraq (or the Taliban, wacky Wahabists from Saudi Arabia, Al-Qaeda, or what have you). Think of it as "wrestling diplomacy" on crack. The match will be refereed by former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and "Mean" Gene Okerlund will do the pre- and post-match interviews. The government can televise the match on Pay-Per-View at $99.99 a household, and with the fate of Western Civilization in the balance you can imagine what the Neilsen numbers will look like on this program.

As far as the purse for the match is concerned... if the Iron Sheik wins the US will pull all troops out of the Middle East, cut off all aid to Israel and force Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera to wear burkhas. Should Sergeant Slaughter emerge victorious the Iraqi insurgents will stand down, OPEC will cut us the mother of all breaks on oil and McDonald's will be allowed to place a restaurant on every streetcorner in Najaf.

Here's a photo showing what this epic battle might look like.

While perusing AmLeft's blogroll, I came across the wonderful blog Abolish The Death Penalty. There's a post up there about America's new poet laureate Ted Kooser which includes his poem Electric Chair (apparently Nebraska is the sole remaining state to use that method of execution). I'm going to reproduce the poem here as well in flagrant violation of copyright laws, because it's really good. Somehow I don't think Mr. Kooser would mind.

Electric Chair

Ours in Nebraska is not as nice as some,
but Omaha is, of course, not Boston,
and most of the furniture here was made
heavy enough to endure a long ride
on the United Pacific. Ours is, I suppose,
Mission Oak, its blocky design straight out
of the Arts and Crafts movement, but not
as nice as a Stickley or even a Morris.
really, yet one that would comfortably fit
in a high-ceilinged Victorian parlor
somewhere in Bellevue, next to a window
creamy with lace, looking out over
the smooth Missouri; the kind of chair,
straight-backed and hard-seated, that a person
might choose to sit in to work on a speech
on the meaning of life, a chair that means
business. And yet, despite its blockiness,
it's a handsome thing, with its open arms
gleaming with oil and the black straps draped
like doilies. One can imagine a matching
smoking-stand with a rack for pipes,
a leather-bound volume of verse on one arm,
a few poems marked by red ribbons of silk.
It's a chair that belongs to the ages;
a chair, as we decorators say, that makes
a real Statement; a chair that should sit
in each Nebraskan's house, for it is a part
of our dark, oppressive furniture,
and does not have a drip-pan to clean
as those in some other states do.
Ted Kooser

Via Stout Dem: The White House Guide to Understanding the Terror Alert Colors (at Betty Bowers, the same site which brought you Is Bush Gay?).

Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream has been stolen. Again.

As horrible as this is, the London News Review has an entertaining take on the affair.

links via monkeyfilter and metafilter

Kerry in 1971

Fed up with right-wing distortions of Kerry's Senate testimony from his VVAW days, Atrios has published a transcript of Kerry's remarks. Find Atrios' transcript here.

The speech paints a picture of a young man who is articulate and patriotic, and whose experiences have made him fully committed to a humanistic approach to American foreign policy. Those ideals have no doubt faded over time (it's pretty evident that Kerry isn't exactly against the war in Iraq), but it gives me hope that he'll do the right thing more often than not.

There are moments in Kerry's 1971 speech that are relevant three decades later. You really should read the whole thing, but I'm going to highlight a couple of the testimony's points here:

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything...

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

The American Dream...

... is a white Ford Expedition, with "Support The Troops" and NASCAR bumper stickers affixed to the back, driving 90 miles an hour on I-75 on its way to a gated community.

Back at work. Tired. Depressed about the fact that I should by all rights be in grad school now working on my master's in conducting (was offered assistantships with full tuition remission at two universities last spring), and yet I find myself teaching again this year. It seems as though that has been my mantra for a while: "One more year. Then I'll go back to school." I'm also depressed about a number of other things, which are not really issues I can scribble about here.

Ha.

Lest this start to sound like some whining, black-clad teenager's LiveJournal, I'd like to state that things are, on balance, okay. I have a decent teaching position, my mortgage is paid up and the Mafia's not after me. Success.

Good hurricane.

Bad hurricane.

I'm in South Florida, and we have experienced gorgeous weather for the past couple of days. The Gulf Coast is another story, obviously. Friends of mine came down from Port Charlotte for the weekend (thank God, since their house was apparently at ground zero), and I'm boarding four (soon to be six) dogs in my backyard.

On a completely unrelated note: Sex Advice from Romance Novelists

The Cultural Revolution Will Be Fabulous

It's been a week of significant news coming from the front lines of the culture war; mainly, the voiding of same-sex marriages in San Francisco and the revelation that Republican NJ Governor James McGreevey is gay. Now, a beacon of journalistic integrity reports that Al Qaeda is "developing a bomb that turns anyone within a 30-mile radius of its blast into a homosexual." (When I sent the Weekly World News article to St. Louis-based blogger Waveflux, he quipped "Too bad one wasn't set off here in Missouri before the last primary.")

Current Terror Alert Level:



found here and here

Homeland Shenanigans, Music Edition

March 2003: Indie punk/orchestral/avante-garde (they're pretty unclassifiable) ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor is detained for several hours at a gas station in Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. An attendant at the gas station slipped a note to a female customer that the Canadian band were actually terrorists, and the police and FBI were on the scene immediately. Singer Efrim Menuck said, "I just feel very lucky that we weren't Pakistani or Korean... We're just lucky we're nice white kids from Canada."

August 2004: Brian Teasley, percussionist for the Polyphonic Spree, makes the mistake of packing a custom-made microphone in his luggage, not knowing that it would result in five gates in Terminal C at Dallas Fort Worth-International Airport being shut down and the FBI showing up at his home.

While signing a bill, Bush again surgically implanted his foot into his mouth:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," Bush said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Keeping in the spirit of that statement, Bush then signed a defense spending bill that throws billions of dollars at Iraq.

From the article:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush's misstatement "just shows even the most straightforward and plain-spoken people misspeak."

McClellan then went on to say, "So if that's the case, and even decent speakers misspeak, then of course Bush is going to mangle the language. I mean, the guy can barely put two words together!" McClellan was rushed out of the room by Secret Service agents and has not been heard from since.

Of course, it's only natural that people are going to point out that Kerry made a gaffe in his nomination acceptance speech:

We will double the size of our Special Forces to conduct terrorist operations... anti-terrorist operations...

Of course, the difference is that Kerry is generally articulate, and that Bush has a long history of less-than-stellar use of the English language.

Most of Tuesday's post has been deleted. It was cathartic to write, but isn't necessarily something that needs to be posted here. I've talked with a couple of people about the situation that influenced that post, got some great advice, and am going to deal with it.

In These Times has put up a detailed and damning timeline of what the Bush administration knew, and when they knew it.

Ron Reagan has published an op-ed titled The Case Against George W. Bush in the latest issue of Esquire.

Go read.

[most of this post has been deleted for excessive whininess... see above. I'm keeping the following part, though:]

As my mom used to say, "Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first." She was a hit at church functions.

From gapingvoid.com: A brilliant post on How To Be Creative.