A Love Letter to America’s Mesopotamian Friend With Benefits

I found this letter buried beneath John Ashcroft's Water Wiggle in a trunk in the basement. I wonder if we forgot to mail it? Gonna have to go get some stamps...*

mjs

++++

Dear Snuggle Pumpers,

Look, baby, you know I love you. Your belly full of oil, your eyes full of desire, your swarthy swarthiness--I wanted you in the worst way, which is the best way I want things. When I want something, I take it, and I slap it around and punch it and go to town, you know what I mean? And I wanted you, baby. You. It was always you. Well, since the internal combustion engine anyway…

I knocked you off your feet, and then picked you up by your feet, and then I dropped you…I admit I dropped you--but I picked you up again, and then, admittedly, dropped you once more, oh, but darn it, I just kept on picking you up. And dropping you. It was all good fun...at first. I slapped your thighs but good and gained the golden hall without so much as a titty-tickle and wham! came off like Speed Racer--it was good. Damn good. Get the bleach out good. Emission accomplished good. Jack-off in the shower while visualizing Max Boot good, now-that-I-think-about-it-good.

And remember when I found your daddy and got his buddies to fuck his ass up something fierce so we could be together, just you and me and some contractors? And then it was mostly just you and me (and the contractors, but what can you do?) and a future filled with flying carpets and easy money and then...oh, criminey, but I went soft. I'll admit it. I went soft like a White House reporter full of cocktail weenies and Swedish vodka. Yeah, that soft. Read more…

Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

To every Right-winger who cheered this war on; to the hawks on the left who seriously thought it was a good idea; to the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who still talk in glowing praise of GWBush's Noble Adventure™ in Nation Building™, I dare you, I DARE YOU, goddamnit, to read the story of James Blake Miller, who became the iconic image of the tough Marine, the brave soldier fighting for democracy, the poster boy for the Neo-con dream, and who, like a real human, paid a terrible price for your blood-soaked fantasies.

From today's LATimes, and the photographer who snapped that image and thus became inextricably joined to Miller, for good and bad: Read more…

poor old dickish cheney
never got to serve
and pity poor young georgie bush
who sort of lost his nerve

so many of our neocons
are history’s neo-can’ts
what they need is endless war
it is their second chance Read more…

The prison population will increase by 200,000 in the next five years and by 2025 the prison population in some areas will increase by 90%. That is at least $50,000 a head. These prisoners will be farmed out as cheap or free labor and will provide a permanent slave class. End slavery in America.

What the war did do was help drive the nation's prison population to more than quadruple its size from 1980 to 2005, with urban blacks and Latinos hardest hit -- a dramatically disproportionate result of the different networks that developed to distribute drugs. Read more…

Best Halloween viewing to commemorate the deaths of 103 Americans in Iraq during October 2006?

Hands down it's got to be Joe Dante's zombie movie Homecoming, a primal scream at what may go down in history as America's most hideously wanton war:

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we're in," (Dante) continues. "It's been happening steadily for the past four years, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war-—now that they see the guy is a little weak, they're kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn't bite back. It's cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody's done about this issue that's killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It's fucking sick."

After all the whining on the Right about Hollywood's liberal bias, you'd think we'd have seen movies like this coming out a dime a dozen, but we haven't. Why? Because, as is the case with many Republicans, Hollywood is motivated by the profit margin, and making anti-war statements, especially in today's political climate, is self-immolation. Dante himself recognized it:

"You can't do theatrical political movies; people don't go to them. You can't do them on television, because you've got sponsors," he says. "Michael Moore's last picture made a lot of money, but he was vilified for it so much he's practically in hiding."

Dante hopes Homecoming functions as a wake-up call—not so much for politicians but for filmmakers. "If this spurs other people into making more and better versions, it will have done its job. I want to see more discussion," he says. "Nobody is doing anything about what's going on now—compared to the '70s, when they were making movies about the issues of the day. This elephant in the room, this Iraq war story, is not being dramatized."

The movie itself veers wildly between satire and tears; the scene in the diner between an older couple and a dead soldier they call out of the rain is unexpectedly touching. I can't think of any movie more fitting for the day, and the election season, than one about the dire necessity of voting these bastards out of office, even if one has to come back from the dead to do it.

Rozen gets it just right: how the fuck can you call yourself an "independent" journalist when you're making promises on paper to politicians not to reveal a political event? Because, a war planning session with the specific purpose of convincing a president to lead a nation to war is an event. Zakaria is a whining beotch. Because, yeah, sure, everybody gets invited to secret, secure locations in Virginia with top administration officials and offered the chance to craft policy months before the rest of the world even knows it's policy. Changing your tune isn't going to help make you more believable, you sluttish punk. Read more…