Current affairs

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Old anti-war chants keep going through my head, as true for Iraq as they were for Vietnam. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many children are you going to kill today?” Answer, for Bush, nine. How much more United States wrought terror are we willing to condone?

I suspected it all along, that hard-core conservatives are psychologically disturbed. And now here’s a study to confirm it. Well, the U.C. Berkeley study doesn’t say exactly that conservatives are psychologically disturbed, but it isn’t hard to draw this conclusion from the findings. I mean, if at “the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality,” that doesn’t sound like the person I’d like to be, or have living next to me. As anyone can tell from listening to talk radio, conservatives can’t tolerate ambiguity very well, so they tend to see and state…

Back on July 17, in my “yin and yang news stories” post, I noted a report that men were paying big bucks in Las Vegas to hunt naked women with paintball guns. Something about this story didn’t seem quite right, but I took it at face value. After all, can’t you believe everything the media tells you? I even saw mention of this on Fox News! (Actually, I guess this should been a tipoff right there. It kills me every time a Fox anchor says, “Fair. Balanced. Unafraid.” Fair, balanced, and Fox News are four words that don’t belong together).…

These days it seems like there isn’t a whole lot of good news in the Oregonian and Statesman-Journal, but Tuesday, I believe, the O had a item in the TV section relating that Michael Savage’s weekend MSNBC “talk” (actually, rant) show had been cancelled. As described in this story, Savage told a caller that he was a sodomite who deserved to get AIDS and die. When I’m feeling masochistic I occasionally tune in to Savage’s late weekday afternoon slot on KXL, though it usually isn’t possible to listen to his hateful, misinformed, childish blather for more than a few minutes.…

It just keeps getting worse. Just when you think that the Bush administration can’t act any more high-handedly, dishonestly, and destructively-to-the-environment than it already is, we learn that there is more black magic in their evil bag of tricks. This is several day-old news, but it still frosts me—the decision to eliminate any significant mention of global climate change from the environmental report issued by the E.P.A. It really is astounding, how Bush and company are willing to let the planet go down the tubes so they can issue some paybacks to their corporate contributors. Why the public isn’t more…

Driving around in my car last Sunday, searching for anything other than a right-wing talk show to listen to on the AM dial (a tough job), I heard the Dolenz’s (or should it be Dolenz’?), a husband and wife personal finance team, interviewing an economist who worked on a deficit study that recently got shelved by the Treasury Department when the conclusions didn’t mesh neatly with Bush’s tax cut plans. Well, not only didn’t the conclusions not mesh neatly, they were completely opposed to the notion of reducing taxes and increasing the federal deficit. This column by Scott Burns on…

Today the New York Times web site reports that the National Museum of Iraq, which once boasted the greatest collection of artifacts in the Middle East (some 7,000 years old), has been completely looted. Big deal, Rumsfeld would say. This is what happens when a tyrannical government is overthrown. People celebrate, and go a little bit crazy. Except, Mr. Rumsfeld, this isn’t a matter of looters taking some office chairs from the Information Ministry. It is people taking priceless irreplaceable treasures, which by rights belong to all humanity, while U.S. troops stood by and did almost nothing to stop this…

Somehow Laurel had made it through her, um, 39 years of living on this Earth plane without ever being exposed to the Fox News Channel. So yesterday I served as her Right Wing Television Pimp and hooked her up with channel 205 on the Dish network. We managed to watch Fox News for about two minutes before we started to gag on the ever-present American flag logo in the upper left corner of the screen, and the hyper Got-To-Kill-Those-Damn-Iraqis-Before-They-Destroy-America (but how?) rhetoric from the so-called "news" anchors, all of whom seem to be angry white men with deep inferiority complexes…

On this eve of Bush's State of the Union speech, it is appropriate to ponder the all-important questions, "Does God bless America?", and "Does America bless God?" Recently there was a letter to the editor in our local newspaper that made a daring suggestion: maybe it is best for us to humbly bless God, rather than make imperious demands on the divine--God bless America!--such as our President is wont to do. Obviously this person was a thinly disguised neo-pagan, or perhaps even an Al-Quaida mole, because the evidence is clear that God truly does put America first among all the…

So tell me, where am I wrong in pointing out this particular piece of Iraq irrationality? Last night I was reading a Time magazine story about Rumsfeld's war plans. Reportedly he plans to emphasize the use of special forces troops, who are to swoop in at the beginning of the war and prevent Hussein from using his chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons. Now, one has to assume that this means the special forces will (1) be able to find out where the weapons are stored, and (2) be able to destroy them after they find them. But...isn't this just what…