One of the iron laws of modern life is that when you fuck everything up beyond redemption, it's time to visit Larry King. Larry's such a sycophant that after an hour of his kissing your ass, his retard audience will worship you forever. And if you take phone in questions and don't treat Bob from fucking Omaha like the half-wit that he is, you'll probably get a parade out of it. It seems that pretty much anybody can be a King for a Day.
It doesn't matter who you are or what shitty things you've done in life, if you agree to do Larry King Live, the host will brown nose you right into the fucking afterlife.
I think that Ted Bundy'sgreat mistake was not taking advantage of Larry's hospitality. I can guarantee you that Larry would introduce Bundy as "the famous ladies man," and begin his questions with "You're so handsome. Why the rape and murder? Were they asking for it?" And it would only go downhill from there. Remember, Larry's the same guy who once said "I would bump God if OJ Simpson was available."
Being a media whore par excellence, Larry shares his opinions on anything, despite his total lack of qualifications or knowledge on the subject. Christ, if he spent a weekend judging the Kentucky State Circle Jerk Finals, he would have written about it in his USA Today column for a month. For a guy who hasn't had a solid bowel movement since 1986, he sure is busy.
That's why I wasn't surprised when the former Mr. Zeiger repeatedly turned up in Carol Felsenthal's new book "Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House." The book is a portrait of one president's return to popular esteem from self-imposed disgrace. It is a classic tale which tells us more about the short memories and incredibly misinformed judgements of the public than anything else.
"Clinton in Exile" is a good book to read if you're stuck in an airport or are one of those mere mortals who actually tires of masturbation. It's a quickie book and hardly a scholarly tome, as the presence of Larry fucking King amply demonstrates. If you want to read a great book of the form, I can't recommend "Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon" by Robert Sam Anson enough. It's out of print, but it isn't that hard to find and richly rewarding.
Mrs. Felsenthal's book ends with a quote so shocking that I couldn't decide whether to laugh out loud or shit myself to death. That quote naturally comes from Larry King. "I think people regard him as a guy with a weakness who happens to be a tremendous person, who if he didn't have this weakness would be up there with Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln." (page 311. Emphasis added.)
That might be the most stellar example of overstatement I've ever read.
George Washington won his country's independence on the battlefield and ensured an orderly, peaceful transition of power previously unknown to man. Thomas Jefferson doubled his territory without firing a shot. And Abraham Lincoln preserved the union from chaos and ended the rancid institution of slavery in North America.
What precisely did William Jefferson Clinton do? Sure, I know he looks good when compared to his immediate successor, but that's hardly what gets you on Mount Rushmore. Autistic children look like competent administrators when compared with the current President Bush.
Bill Clinton is a lot like Jack Kennedy - people love them without being able to tell you what they actually did. In Kennedy's case, they point to the Cuban Missile Crisis without realizing that it wouldn't have happened in the first place without the Bay of Pigs. The serious tax cuts and the civil rights bills were carried out and strengthened by President Johnson, which most people forget. That leaves the Test Ban Treaty as JFK's only real presidential accomplishment.
Oh, and he caught a bullet with his skull, which is about on par with Clinton's use of Monica Lewinsky as a cock catcher's mitt and his impeachment for same.
Despite being in office over three times as long as Kennedy was, Clinton has a similar paucity of accomplishment. His modern supporters point to the economy of the 1990s, but history never records economics unless a depression occurs. Do you know anything about the economy under Jefferson? How about Lincoln? If the economy were a barometer for historical achievement, Calvin Coolidge would be remembered as the greatest president of them all.
So what exactly did President Clinton do other than get reelected and interrupt a perfectly good blowjob so he could jerk off into a bathroom sink?
NAFTA: The North American Free Trade Agreement was certainly important and Clinton should be credited for passing it against the wishes of his own party. Christ, if Hillary is to be believed (which she isn't), he passed NAFTA against the objectives of his own wife.
Every time an election rolls around, the majority of Democratic candidates piss and moan about NAFTA, which only proves that Democrats are idiots. Most manufacturing jobs in swing states aren't going to Canada and Mexico, they're going to China and India, which aren't a party to NAFTA.
Plus, I always get disturbed when the majority of Democrats agree with a lunatic like Pat Buchanan about anything.
Welfare Reform: Another nice idea that was only implemented for political expediency. If you want a president of another party to sign a bill that you know he otherwise wouldn't, pass it during an election campaign. Clinton hated the welfare reform bill and still spits on the ground whenever he talks about it (which isn't often.) But he signed it because Bill Clinton is an unprincipled whore.
It is also worth noting that people who love President Clinton hated the welfare reform act.
The Northern Ireland Peace Accords: The English could never stop the fighting in Belfast, but the English can't clean their own teeth properly either. Even though no American president ever took Northern Ireland seriously - and they all allowed American citizens to be the prime funders of the terrorist Irish Republican Army - Clinton should get credit for the agreement, which has astonishingly held.
This accomplishment should be mitigated by the fact that our penchant for drunken havoc is one of the very few things that makes the Irish interesting. The peace treaty also freed up Bono's time to allow him to be annoying about several other issues.
Other than that, there isn't much. Sure, there's a completely unconstitutional assault weapons ban that Bush was prepared to extend and midnight basketball and school uniform initiatives that never had any hope of passage.
And that's pretty much it. At best, Clinton was just like one of the presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, he accomplished a few things, but very little of consequence and would be completely forgotten in 50 years were it not for his impeachment. President William Jefferson Clinton is the picture of mediocrity and didn't even have the skill to get blown properly let alone be an inspirational leader.
Granted, he's not George W. Bush, but Ronald McDonald isn't John Wayne Gacy. That hardly qualifies one to have his picture on the currency. If Bush is the yardstick by which the presidency is judged, I fully expect the United States to be colonized by Cuba in the next three weeks. Pointing out the Clinton was a better president than Bush is like saying that Andrew wasn't half the hurricane Katrina was.
Having interviewed every president since McKinley, Larry King should know better. But Larry is a sycophantic half-wit in ways that make the Memphis Mafia look like the picture of quiet dignity.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: My Little Problem By: The Replacements From: All Shook Down
WHEREUPON I PUT ON MY BOY GEORGE OUTFIT & GET ALL 1980s ON MOOK'S ASS
I've mentioned this before, but I really enjoy debating with Mook. Mostly this is because the mentally ill amuse me when I'm not sleeping with them.
There's been a pattern that has developed in the space over the last several months: I make a series of well-reasoned points, which I'm given to do because my mind is every bit as tight and cute as my ass is, and Mook calls me a communist. We're like a sexless Abbott and Costello, and I'm sure that this bores my readers to tears. On the other hand, it entertains me and my entertainment is the only reason this blog even exists.
I wrote last weekend of the incredible fiscal irresponsibility of the modern Republican Party and how it will someday destroy us all. Things are getting so bad that if Robert Mugabe is wrested from power in Zimbabwe, he might immigrate and find a comfortable retirement in the Republican House caucus. Their economic reasoning is strikingly similiar.
Whenever I explore topics like this, Mook jumps in an accuses me of "Bush Derangement Syndrome." BDS, as it is commonly called, is wonderful invention of the nu-conservative blogosphere. Because it completely ignores reality, it is entirely compatable with the general world view of these bloggers. If you enjoy insane tax cuts, endless spending, massive deficits and unsustainable wars, then you should love President Bush with all of your heart.
If, however, you recognize that the only thing seperating Bush 43 and Mao Zedong is the fact that Mao had a more responsible foreign policy, then there's nothing at all deranged about loathing the Bush administration. In fact, it becomes the only reasonable course to take.
Whenever I've written about the American economy, I've pointed out that the government isn't exempt from the laws of supply and demand - which traditional, rational conservatives will agree with me on nine times out of ten - and that taxes are nothing more than the price of the product that is government. As a general rule, when you cut the price of product, the demand for it increases.
There have been three instances when supply side economics has been tried: during the Kennedy, Reagan and current Bush administrations. All three times the size of government exploded and rivers of debt were created that drowned successor administrations. The Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts and spending during a war created the stagflation that sunk the Nixon, Ford and Carter presidencies. Reagan's unwise fiscal practices led to the 1990 budget deal that destroyed the first President Bush (who I refer to as "the responsible one) politically with the GOP's mongloid base. The current president is well on his way to destroying both the housing and financial services markets and selling the country to the Stalinist Chinese and a deep discount.
Whenever I've expounded on this topic, my commenters have rushed to remind me of something that I'd never forgotten, that revenue isn't the problem, spending is. The thing is that I agree with them. But my friends on Al Gore's Interwebs ignore the fact that politicians and voters are like children who are enthralled with the Tooth Fairy until they realize that they only have 32 teeth. Voters and politicians exist only to do one thing: spend money faster than it can be collected.
My friend Mook wants to believe that he has an endless supply of teeth.
Skippy, cutting taxes does not = cutting the price or demand for govt. services. What are you thinking? Cutting taxes is actually a form of "starving the beast" of govt. spending, forcing politically unpopular alternatives such as deficit spending in order to get around the tax cuts on the spending side.. no different than a paycut (reduction of revenue) causing increased pressue to reduce spending on a consumer household.
I'm sure that you all join me in rejoicing in the fact that supply side economics hasn't resulted in deficit spending. Christ, think of what a mess that would be!
The only thing standing in the way of supply side economics turning the world into Mook's world of shiny, happy people is democracy. As long as the majority of voters demand free shit, politicians will give it to them. Supply side economics, like communism, is wonderful in theory, but greatly complicated by the exisitence of human nature. And like communists, supply siders dream of a world where they can have their cake and eat it, too.
That being the case, all giant tax cuts create is debt. And that condition is magnified when you're at war with everyone with guns and provoking trade wars with everyone without them.
Government is controlled by elected politicians, and getting elected demands catering to the demented spending priorities of the voters. All voters like the idea of cutting spending, so long as it isn't their spending. Trying to enact supply side in that atmosphere is like making basketball fair to short people by lowering the net. It might make you feel good, but it defeats the original purpose of the exercise. Discipline is to supply side economics what being able to jump really high is to basketball.
Every time supply side tax cuts have been attempted, they have resulted in inflation, recession, major tax increases or all three. The only thing that saved the Reagan administration from inflation and a much greater stock market collapse than occurred in October of 1987 was the fact that it raised taxes no fewer than six times during its second term. President Reagan was politically saved because they didn't actually call them taxes. He hid behind the intellectually dishonest term "revenue enhancements" instead. The revenue that was lost in the rate cuts of 1981 was more than made up for in payroll tax and fee increases in 1983, '85 and '86.
Mook's "beast" wasn't "starved" in 1962, 1981 or 2001-'03. Each time it grew to monsterous new proportions. The beast always gets fed; either by American banks, as it was under Kennedy and Johnson; by friendly foreign governments, as it was under Reagan; or by the People's Republic of China, as it is now.
In the comments to last wekend's overwritten essay, Mook made some assertions that leave me little choice but to question his very sanity. In response to my case that government is as subject to supply and demand as any other consumer product, Mook responded;
That makes as much sense as claiming that a person who takes a pay cut at work will, as a result of that pay cut, spend more than ever.
That displays not only a fundamental ignorance of politics, but American economic reality over the last thirty years.
For most Americans, real income has gone down over the last thirty years, but consumer debt has exploded. As individual Americans take home less in inflation-adjusted dollars, they owe more. In effect, people have been taking a pay cut at work and spending more than ever. Two-income families weren't the norm thirty years ago, but they sure are now. Am I the only one who wonders why that is?
Also, if there wasn't a consumer credit problem, why was a bankruptcy protection bill that only protected lenders needed?
The current credit crisis happened not because individual Americans have been so great at paying their bills, but because banking regulations were loosened by the Federal Reserve, which allowed the banks to use more of their reserves for lending. Since the market for responsible lending was pretty much saturated, the banks started throwing money at the people who can least afford to pay it back.
That's how Little Orphan Annie got to play like Richie Rich over the last five years and that's how we got where we are now. And that's what the economy that President Bush has been touting is based on. His tax cuts didn't create wealth as much as they created the illusion of it. There used to be a time when living well off of borrowed money just made you stupid. Under this president, it makes you actually rich and the country properous.
In the process, the government debt has exploded beyond reason, the money is owed to the last people in the world it should be, and the American military and foreign policy are deeply compromised as a result. I'm not sure if President Bush and his nu-conservative blowboys have seen the memo, but he who owes the most money doesn't usually get to tell the lenders what to do. And anyone who thinks that doesn't have implications on foreign policy has no idea how life really works. You'll notice that President Bush's vaunted "democracy agenda" pointedly excludes places like Tibet and Taiwan.
If Mook was right, there wouldn't be a credit crisis in the first place. Americans have been living beyond their means for decades. Supply side economics just let them think that there wouldn't be any consequences for it. Buying a big screen TV will pay for itself if you stop feeding your kids, but if you build a drive-in movie size screen in the rec room to watch baseball games on as you feed the little bastards nothing but caviar, you'll eventually find yourself fucked.
"Eventually" just happens to be now. People are losing their homes and banks and brokerage houses are losing their silken unmentionables as a direct consequence of thirty years of rampant irresponsibility.
Because of psychotic spending at every level of American life, the taxpayer is now holding the bag for J.P Morgan's buyout of Bear Sterns. They won't see anything that would have if they had bought it on their own, like dividends, either. And if you think that Bear Stearns is the end instead of the beginning, you're insane.
And that's where John McCain is deadly wrong. If you let these lenders go under, you destroy Wall Street and take out half of the American economy out in the process. This is the Savings and Loan crisis cubed. In fact, it's worse because you can't politically bail out $200 million dollar a year investment bankers and not look out for the "homeowners" without inviting your own crucifixion.
Mook knows ideology. I know politics. You can decide for yourselves which makes the world go 'round. That's the difference between me and the Reaganauts.
Then Mook goes further in my favorite Reagan defense;
Having read your recent posts and some of your archives, I agree with most all of the philosophical underpinnings of your posts regarding govt spending. The problem is that you love to go all irrational and blame Bush and Reagan (and Paris Hilton?) for anything and everything you dislike about govt. That's the big flaw in your "logic". Fact is, Reagan did not champion much spending outside of rebuilding the military which was decimated under Carter. Yes, he played a major hand in deregulating S&L's which fucked things up at the time, but you've blamed him on the spending side without a factual leg to stand on.
I admire Mook for agreeing with my philiospohical underpinnings whilst calling horseshit on the historical facts. Its shows both intellectual dexterity and a good deal of moxie.
Somewhere along the line, St. Ronald got exempted from the same rules of history that apply to every other president. And nu-conservatives not infrequently lie shamelessly in furthering that fairy tale.
Firstly, the American standing army wasn't much larger when Reagan left office than when he entered it. They had a great many more more toys than they did under Carter to be sure, but the size of the bootprint on the ground stayed pretty much the same if it wasn't actually amaler. As the current president is learning, toys don't win many wars and bootprints are sort of important.
Now, Reagan's military build up (particularly with Minuteman missles and SDI) did hasten the end of the Soviet threat. However, if you believe nu-conservative orthodoxy, you believe that communism was also a rusted-out threat in the verge of collapse, anyway. That being the case, th Reagan build-up was at best, a wash, and, at worst, a ton of wasted money.
Furthermore, the Reagan military build was overly specific. It was almost entirely based upon the strategic nuclear threat of the Soviet Union. That build up was utterly useless in, say, Lebanon. And is anyone seriously suggesting that even a jabbring dupe of a president like Carter couldn't take Grenada? Had anyone even heard of Grenada before the United States invaded it?
My second point goes to what duplicitous and incredibly dishonest cocksuckers the nu-conservatives are. Did you know that defense and non-defense spending comes from the same budget? If you check the Constitution, you aren't going to find a provision allowing for "the president's special fund for bombing folks with funny accents." I know this because I checked.
All that money comes from the same great big cessool of spending. Given that, you can't assign credit or blame on either Congress or the president. One passes a fucking budget and the other signs it. Period.
You don't get to say this;
A Dem controlled congress under Reagan took control of spending. You should be informed enough and honest enough to admit that.. but you can't
That sentence alone makes Mook either a liar or a goddamned idiot.
Okay, let's given Reagan credit for the military build-up that stared down a threat that outlived his presidency by less than a year and left the United States with a fuckload of nuclear weapons and no one to point them at. Let's all concede that Reagan should be on Mount Rushmore just for that.
But how is it that all that other spending get past him? Was he sleeping? Not paying attention? Did the Democratic Congress trick him, and if so, for eight years in a row? What Mook and his nu-conservative asshole buddies aren't telling you is that Reagan didn't fund his much ballyhooed defense budget out of his own pocket. Those MX missiles really did come from the same pool of money that bought Reagan's famous welfare mothers Cadillacs. You should check.
If you're going to be halfway honest when you blame bloated domestic spending on the Democrats, you should be building statues proclaiming Tip O'Neill as the hero of the Cold War as well.
"Checks and balances" means precisely what the United States Constitution implies that it does. One branch does "control" spending, yes. But the other has a veto. And I can't think of a single one of the Reagan-era budgets that could have over-ridden a presidential veto. President Reagan played "go along to get along." Nothing more, nothing less.
What irks me to no fucking end is that Mook's fuckhead buddies are the very same people who sunk the presidency of the first (and to date, the only responsible) President Bush. And they did so because he agreed to a very modest "luxury tax" to avoid a government shutdown at the very time that he was seeking congressional authorization to go to war with Iraq! And back then, there were far greater reasons to go to war with Iraq than there were in 2003 - a war, it should be mentioned, that will ultimately cost upwards of three trillion dollars.
Liberals make my fucking skin crawl. I can't even use the word "liberal" without spitting on the ground. But I will say that they're at least honest about wanting to spending all the money and controlling the human condition. At this point, they're at least a whole more honest than the Republican Party, who prefer accomplishing those goals by stealth and under the cover of "individual liberty," is.
There was a time when the GOP was led by honest, serious conservatives like Gerald Ford, George H.W Bush and Bob Dole who knew that government was a necessary evil and tried dilligently not to starve everyone in the process of realizing some fantasy notion of "starving the beast." The beast will eat you and your children before it starves. For those of you unfamiliar with nature, that's how beats normally operate. A closer analogy to what supply side economics has achieved is beastiality. Except the beast is on top and the taxpayer gets fucked.
When Richard Nixon was elected to his second term, he began to think about using his office to build a third party with John Connally leading it. Nixon had just won 49 states and knew the machinery of politics better than anyone in history. If anyone could have pulled it off, he could have. If he had, maybe we would have been spared all of these Jesus shitheads who never knew the value of a fucking dollar and never will.
I'm hoping against hope that John McCain is playing the supply side idiots and religious retards just to get elected and actually accomplish something as president. But I wouldn't put money on it.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Beware of Darkness By: George Harrison From: All Things Must Pass
A THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE TO MOOK WHEREIN I USE THE WORD "FUCK" A LOT
I kinda like Mook. This is largely because he helps me tighten up my thinking, but mostly because he makes my readers so fucking crazy in the comments. The first time I wrote about Eliot Spitzer and his drug policy, my comments became a 84 post battle royale over the Civil War. That kinda shit entertains me endlessly.
Anyhow, I wrote a little essay last weekend about how President Bush made as big a mess of the Palestinian Authority as he's made of everything else that he's touched.
As I'm sure you all know, I'm firmly of the mind that if the restroom in Will Rogers Park where George Michael started beating off for a cop was named after George W. Bush, that would be more historical recognition than his presidency deserves. An open sewer in a particularly nasty part of Bangalore might be more appropriate, if only just.
In my little missive, I re-affirmed my belief that Bush would pale in comparison even to Lyndon Baines Johnson. This seems to have gotten Mook's dander up. This is the sentence as it appeared;
A few years ago, I compared George W. Bush unfavorably to Lyndon Johnson. In retrospect, I was far too charitable in my evaluation of the current president. President Johnson only destroyed Vietnam and did a decade's worth of damage to the American economy. Even that was mitigated by his heroic stands in civil rights and the establishment of Medicare.
As you will see, this set Mook on fire.
Skippy, since you call yourself a libertarian, how do you square your self-proclaimed libertarian views with your adulation of the creation of Medicare? I mean, it's another huge government monstrosity of a program (from a real libertarian's viewpoint). If it served only the needy, it would still be questionable, but at least defensible. How in the world do you support a government medical program which pays for Warren Buffet's medical care. just curious as to your thought process here.
Firstly, I'm glad that Mook consulted a thesaurus and found a cool substitute for the word "praise", which I'm normally told I'm doing about things I describe. I once started a paragraph by saying something along the lines of "I don't like McCain-Feingold but..." and was told I was "praising it" for something like two weeks.
But we were discussing my adulation of Medicare, wasn't I?
If it were up to me, we'd have a society where such things weren't necessary. Although it would be a much better world if it were run by my whims, I'm realistic enough to understand that mine is a minority viewpoint. I also wouldn't disingenously describe myself as a "compassionate conservate" (two things that are ideally mutually exclusive) and resort to rhetorical fag bashing to hide the fact that I'm not really what I seem to people dumb enough to think that I am.
Here are the cold, hard facts. Medicare is far and away the most popular program in the history of the United States government. So popular is it that even the most neandrethal of Republican office seekers dares to campaign against it. Nor do they even seek to "reform" it, as President Bush did with his Maoist attempt to federalize the stock market in the name of reforming Social Security.
This is something that Mook might not want to hear, but the battle over Medicare has been fought. Our side lost. Get used to it. As a matter of fact, I predict that the United States will have full, single-payer health care in the next fifteen years, too. That's not "adulation", it's a simple statement of fact.
Also, I'm pretty sure that Warren Buffett isn't going to be billing Medicare for his treatment. That's just a suspicion on my part.
As you may have figured out by now, I'm not the guy running around singing the praises of democracy. I think most voters are self-defeating fuckheads who were for the "estate tax", but are against the "death tax", because they think they're going to die rich. "The people" will spend themselves into fucking oblivion. If that wantonly stupid spending helps a few sick folks out, so be it.
What does drive me crazy is demanding spending without figuring out ways to pay for it. I think we can finally cut the shit about supply side economics working, because it has only created massive deficits every time it's been tried. Supply siders aren't conservatives, they're fucking deadbeats who want their grandchildren to pay for their extravegences. You want goodies? Great. Figure out a way to pay for them.
Having said that, I don't blame President Bush for his fiscal irresponsibilty half as much as I do the half-bright dickheads who voted for him after two wars and massive giveaways to virtually everybody and two giant tax cuts. Anyone who thinks that you're going to put somebody on the right path by rewarding their bad behavior is too stupid to spend time talking to.
And I don't intend to insult Mook in saying that. I intend to insult 51% of the American people.
But you really have to admire the politics behind Medicare. It managed to co-opt just enough votes from seniors to offset the racists that Johnson gave the Republicans with the Civil Rights Act to survive to this point.
Which brings us to the issue of war and peace.
As for competence, well, you should read more history. President Johnson micromananged military strikes, explicitly forbidding bombing attacks on enemy strongholds like, say, the Ho Chi Minh trail. Not a one off, he micromanaged specific attacks throughout his fucked up presidency while turning himself into a multi-millionaire through corruption. Oh yeah, he managed to singlehandedly turn an incredible military victory with the Tet offensive into a defeat. That is what the face of incompetency looks like, and GWB pales in comparison. Don't take my word for it, just ask any of the thousands of boat people who managed to escape. I read that something like 90% of Vietnamese Americans voted for GWB over Kerry in 2004. It's not like they know first hand what they're talking about or anything, right?
So much to work with ...
Yes, Johnson micromanaged the war, which was an issue of tactics. He did however inherit an arguably sound strategy of containing North Vietnamese communism. That I think it was mismanaged is somewhat inherent my sentence "President Johnson only destroyed Vietnam..."
As to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Johnson didn't bomb it because he feared a repeat of McCarthur's disasterous run on the Yalu River in Korea, which brought China into the war. The PRC wasn't a nuclear power in 1950. They were in 1968. Johnson was wrong about the Chinese, yes. But he was being cautious, which at least used to be a conservative value. Bush just kinda stormed in and said "Okay, now what?"
Of course, in MookWorld, this means that I have a giant poster of Ho Chi Minh on my wall. And that's not true. I have his portrait tattooed on my cock. It's life-sized, too. I'm not bragging, though. Ho was famously short.
I think that Mook and I agree that LBJ mismanaged an arguably sound strategy. Where we disagree is as to whether George Bush had anything approaching what even slightly literate adults would describe as a strategy at all.
From a conservative perspective, Johnson fucked up a realistic strategy that he inherited. From a realistic/conservative persecptive, Bush started a war with no strategy at all.
Iraq should have been the easiest thing in the world, and I thought the invasion would kill a lot of Americans. Go in, topple Saddam, install a military government and go home. The United States has done that dozens of times in the last century. What a country does within its own borders has never been America's problem before and it shouldn't be now. If an Iraqi junta wants rape rooms but doesn't invade it's neighbours, so be it. Isn't that what a "humble foreign polict" is all about?
The problem with the Bush foreign policy is that it isn't predicated on any strategy at all. Well, that's not true. He seems to have a childish belief in democracy that anyone who knows anything about history knows to be nonsense. Christ, it took the United States a civil war to become a more perfect union and that didn't involve anything as basic as who the real prophet is.
The Bush strategy, as best as I can figure it out, is that some silly notion of democracy is going to turn life between two groups with 1,500 years of enmity between them into the Hair soundtrack. And he was going to do it with a decidedly underwhelming force.
That isn't just hopelessly naive, its impeachably stupid. One can argue that South Vietnam was defensible to one extent or another. However, anyone who thinks that Iraq is ever going to be a swarthier version of Rhode Island is simply wasting the blood of Americans. Shit, the friendlest and most democratic part of Iraq is harboring terrorists who attack our NATO ally, Turkey.
If you think this is better than Vietnam, you just haven't been paying attention, Mook.
As to the voting habits of the boat people, I'm not sure what you're implying other than the fact that they just might be addicted to lost causes. Misery loves company? Maybe they'd like some Arab neighbors to throw a scare into those crazy fucking Cubans.
But if you want to talk about refugees, let's. Granted, these numbers are from the UN and the Nation, but I suspect that they're at least close to true.
Let's start with the numbers, inadequate as they are. The latest UN figures concerning the refugee crisis in Iraq indicate that between 1-1.2 million Iraqis have fled across the border into Syria; about 750,000 have crossed into Jordan (increasing its modest population of 5.5 million by 14%); at least another 150,000 have made it to Lebanon; over 150,000 have emigrated to Egypt; and -- these figures are the trickiest of all -- over 1.9 million are now estimated to have been internally displaced by civil war and sectarian cleansing within Iraq.
These numbers are staggering in a population estimated in the pre-invasion years at only 26 million. At a bare minimum, in other words, at least one out of every seven Iraqis has had to flee his or her home due to the violence and chaos set off by the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Already Iraqi refugees equal or surpass those of Vietnam. And remember, the Vietnam War started in 1949 and ended in 1975. That's 26 years. The Bush administration managed to at least equal that mess in just over five. Good going!
I probably hated Kerry more than any human being should, but even I don't think that he'd be worse than Bush at this point. You'd pretty much have to exhume a treasonous homsosexual like James Buchanan to top Bush. like Buchanan, the damage that Bush has done will be felt for at least a generation.
As for Kennedy's competency in comparison to GWB? Well, Kennedy certainly was a more competent manager of the economy. But with Bay of Pigs and Vietnam... well, I rest my case.
If you want to compare long-term consequences, the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam are going to look like the fucking Normandy landings compared to Iraq. You now have a region that has a population that hates one another, hates the United States, and is going to have nuclear weapons regardless of what you think you can do about it.
The United States inherited Vietnam from France. Who's going to inherit the Middle East from you?
The simple fact is that Hoover was a more competent manager of the economy than was Bush. Indeed, your average five year old would be a better manager of the economy than has been President Bush.
I do hope that this will be the end of the fantasy of supply-side economics though. Every time it's been been tried, all that it has managed to create is an endless supply of debt. If you want massive social spending, endless wars and stupid tax cuts, you have every right to vote for them. But it would be awfully nice if you could figure out a way to pay for it up front without dragging down the rest of the world economy down with you.
Sure, that's being corrected slowly as the United States spends itself into fiscal irrelevence, but these things take some time. However, it will be funny watching China tell you how to run the American economy like you told, say, Argentina just twenty years ago.
Mook, you're a card-carrying Republican and I suspect that you voted for Bush twice. You get what you fucking pay for. Read Bush's 2004 convention speech where he derided Kerry for "tax and spend" economics. Then realize that Bush was explicitly promising two trillion dollars more in spending than Kerry. I actually pointed that out here at the time.
Now today's Fed announcement committing taxpayers to guarantee mortgage securities, wow... This is naked socialism masquerading as a "helping hand", with all the backroom secrecy and lack of transparency on this "deal" that you'd expect with any other socialist regime.
It works like this: "yeah free markets!" when things are going good. But when things start to go bad, pull out all government money/stops for taxpayers to bail out the corrupt and the stupid. Unfuckingbelievable.
Yeah, it's funny what finacial institutions do with federally guaranteed money when free-spending Republican presidents have eight years in power, isn't it? I vaguely remember something similiar to the subprime crisis happening with the Savings and Loans at the tail end of the Reagan administration.
Of course, the GOP-controlled White House and Congress were busy with the really important shit, like gay marriage and Terri Schiavo, so I can see how the missed it.
Easy Listenining Recommendation of the Day: Political Science By: Randy Newman From: Sail Away
I've spent most of the month of February wearing a black armband and my mourning outfit. This confuses most of the people I encounter, both at work and socially. There hasn't been a major event like 9/11 recently and there hasn't been a death in my family.
But a big part of childhood died on Saturday February 2, when Earl Butz slipped his mortal coil and met his great reward.
Butz, a member of the Nixon and Ford cabinets, wasn't your typically communist Secretary of Agriculture like Henry Wallace. No, Secretary Butz was much more than a lackey of asshole farmers, he was gifted diplomat. He was a man who could look at an audience and tell them not what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear. He was a man who told the Big Truths in ways that you just don't see in politics anymore.
Speaking before members of a farm credit association in Champaign, Ill., in 1973, he said that if housewives did not have "such a low level of economic intelligence," they would understand that the price of everything had gone up and "you can’t get more by paying less."
Would broads today have a higher level of economic intelligence were it not for Earl Butz? I leave that for you to decide, but if you're even halfway smart, you know that the answer is "of course not!"
Nobody kept it real quite like Secretary Butz. Indeed, he was doing so 25 years before the term gained any currency in popular culture.
He was a man with a penchant for barnyard humor who delighted in showing visitors a wood carving of two elephants having sex that he kept in a cabinet behind his desk, a gift from a friend in Indiana symbolizing Mr. Butz’s quest to multiply farm votes for the Republicans.
But his off-color comments brought accusations of bigotry and his eventual departure from Washington. Trouble first arrived in November 1974 during an informal meeting with reporters in Washington when Mr. Butz, using a mock Italian dialect, criticized on Pope Paul VI’s opposition to using artificial birth control as a solution to world food problems. A spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York called on Mr. Butz to resign or apologize. He did offer an apology following a rebuke from President Ford.
That just proves that most people are stupid. Pointing out that the Catholic Church is wrong about just about everything isn't offensive, it just proves that you've been paying attention. You know what's truly and deeply offensive? Suggesting that crippling poverty is somehow "a gift from God," which Mother Theresa wouldn't stop doing.
If you have to use a funny accent to make a point, it's only because most people are simpletons and wouldn't get it otherwise. That's why I spent my teens, twenties and half of my thirties affecting a Bela Lagosi accent whenever Pope John Paul II came up. Laughing at Catholics isn't bigoted, the insane shit Catholics believe about the world's poorest and duskiest people is. Overpopulation, starvation and AIDS are all pretty big issues in places like Africa and South Asia. Forbidding the use of condoms is nothing less than the advocacy of genocide.
But what made Butz famous was his tireless work in race relations. Of course, it caused his public downfall, but nobody cottoned to Jesus's message at first either.
Butz started by telling a dirty joke involving intercourse between a dog and a skunk. When the conversation turned to politics, Boone, a right-wing Republican, asked Butz why the party of Lincoln was not able to attract more blacks. The Secretary responded with a line so obscene and insulting to blacks that it forced him out of the Cabinet last week and jolted the whole Ford campaign. Butz said that "the only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit."
Most people thought that Secretary Butz's comment was crass and racist, but most people are abject fucking idiots. Aren't we all just looking for tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit? Doesn't that mean that we're all really the same under the skin? Earl Butz was reminding us that we're all a brotherhood of man.
And you know who reported the remark? John Dean, that's who! The real tragedy of the Butz affair in 1976 was the revelation that Dean wasn't somebody to be trusted. John Dean, through his actions between 1973 and '76 destroyed my childhood. That prick ruined my faith that I could grow up to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in peace. I would have been a much better man were it not for that rat fucking bastard.
Earl Butz was fired in 1976 and his he never fully recovered his reputation. But where are we today because of Secretary Butz? Women have a much higher level of economic intelligence, and more African Americans than ever before enjoy tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit. Would either of those things happened without Mr. Butz? Perhaps, but I doubt it.
Even after he had been relieved of his political scalp, Earl was still targeted by the man. He was persecuted for something as silly as tax evasion and spent thirty days in jail. He was just like Jesus.
Earl Lauer Butz dedicated his 98 years to being a soldier of justice and now he is at peace. And no one can take that away from him. Earl Butz is gone and America is a poorer place for it.
Requiescat in pace, Earl. Requiescat in pace.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Ain't Got Me By: Paul Westerberg From: Eventually
HE STILL HASN'T FOUND WHAT HE'S LOOKING FOR, INSISTS ON CONTINUING THE SEARCH MUCH TO THE ANNOYANCE OF EVERYONE
Most politicians and high government officials are pretentious, lying motherfuckers. I know that's something that everybody should know, but I'm not all that sure that most of you pay attention to anything I post that doesn't have a giant set of tits in it.
If you were to give your average bureaucrat sodium pentathol and asked them which rock star they'd most to meet, I think we can agree that they'd answer "Tommy Lee." In the deepest parts of your soul, you just know that, say, Dick Cheney wants to smell Tommy's finger just as badly as the rest of us do.
But that would look wrong, and piss off the Christian Right and the feminist left. So they play it safe and meet with Bono instead.
As much as I'd like to relentlessly rank on the goofy Mick bastard, he does seem to know his shit about certain things, like poverty. Apparently, it's no fun. But just as I start to get a little respect for Bono, he does something stupid and starts lecturing George W. Bush about how damaging it can be for Africans to be paying interest on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt. C'mon, George W. Bush is not only paying debt on nine trillion dollars of debt, he actually created that debt in the first place.
At least as far I'm concerned, Bono takes one step forward and thirteen or so back. But I will give him credit, his heart's in the right place, especially since his band has sucked for about a decade.
U2 lead singer and activist Bono visited the Pentagon to discuss Africa and the fight against global poverty with U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates, representatives of the two men said on Wednesday.
What does Bono want the Pentagon to do, bomb poor people with love and cookies? As we've learned quite starkly in the last several years, the United States military doesn't exactly excel at nation building. And, as you might imagine, building some of the world's poorest nations is something of a necessity before their poverty can be relieved.
As the Republican nominee for president, George W. Bush knew this and explicity swore off nation building as a goal of U.S foreign policy. On the other hand, he also declared that he was a fiscal conservative, so I think we all know what his word is worth.
But let's hear Bono out. Maybe his ideas aren't that silly.
Among the topics at the 20-minute meeting on Tuesday afternoon were U.S. plans to set up a new U.S. military command for Africa, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.
Okay, I stand corrected. Bono's ideas are that silly.
In theory, an African command is actually a pretty good idea. Insane places with shitloads of oil don't just invade themselves and Nigeria's getting lonely. Of course, I kid. Sort of.
There are any number of problems with a potential African command.
Firstly, the American military's Central Command, which includes places like Iraq and Afghanistan that you may have heard of, is keeping the military pretty busy. So busy in fact, that no less a personage than Colin Powell has described the American army as "broken."
Much has been made of last year's surge, but none of the conservatives in the media or blogosphere have sufficently explained what happens if the Iraqis still don't have their shit together as the surge inevitably begins descalation. There's every indication that things go back to where they were in the fall of 2006.
This is why no sensible person should take American threats against Iran seriously. Whenever, I hear a shithead like Rudy Giuliani getting his man-on regarding the Islamic Republic, I ask myself the same question: "You and what army?"
Second, once the United States declares that Africa is enough of a priority to warrant its own command, Africans will look to it to solve its problems.
Let's take Darfur as just one example. The problems in Sudan are greater than a genocidal central government. They are problems of ethnicity and geography. The Arabs in the north of Sudan really don't like the tribal black Africans of the south, and there's no serious expectation that this will change anytime soon.
Stopping the immediate genocide - and the United States has called it just that - will require nothing less than regime change in Khartoom, and will end up requiring a whole lot more. Regime change in Sudan is a good place to start, but applying anything more than a band-aid is going to require partition of the country.
Most white folks look at Africa and blame its problems on the kleptocratic governments in the region. While that's certainly an issue, it isn't the primary one. Africa suffers from the same problem that the Middle East does: it is a continent composed of artificial countries.
There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to Africa's internal borders. They were thrown together by the European colonial powers with no consideration to race, ethnicity, language or tribal hostility. Demographically, Africa is Iraq writ large and fixing it is going to involve a horrendous amount of bloodshed.
The redrawing of Africa's borders in a rational way will happen eventually, it just might take a couple of hundred years. It took centuries of European fuck-uppery to turn Africa into the basketcase that it is, and to think that Bono can fix it between U2 tours is as stupid as it is dangerous.
If the United States and Europe devoted all of their military strength to fixing Africa's institutional problems, you have a situation somewhat worse than the 1948 partition of India, where hundreds of thousands of people died in a matter of weeks. Look at Rwanda in the mid-1990s for an idea of what that looks like. Then insert a bunch of white people, who actually created the problem, and let your imagination take over.
There's also the problem of history to contend with. The last time white people showed up in Africa in significant numbers, millions of said Africans wound up picking cotton and getting raped by Thomas Jefferson. I trust that you'll excuse any suspicions your average African might have about our motives.
I know that any number of the demonstrably idiotic advocates of the Bush administration will say that democracy is the answer. It really isn't, and any look at the former Yugoslavia explains why.
After the collapse of communism, all of the Yugoslavia's provinces were democratic to varying extents, and those provinces democratically decided to break away from the artificial central government. Then they democratically decided to ethically cleanse their newly independent republics. Slobodan Milosovic couldn't kill that many people all by himself, you know.
Does anybody wonder why NATO remains in the Balkans years after they were supposed to go home? We're still there to keep the formerly persecuted victims of Serbian genocide from democratically deciding to exact revenge on their tormenters and engage in a little ethnic cleansing of their own.
Africa had a Milosovic of its own. His name was Charles Taylor and until very recently, he was the president of Liberia. Taylor exacerbated some of the truly ugly upheavals in no fewer than three neighbouring nations in the hopes that Liberia could then exploit their diamond trades.
The single most chilling thing I had ever seen prior to 9/11 was a three of four year old child in Sierra Leone. That child's arms ended just below the elbows, and it was a perfect illustration of how unfettered democracy can work in Africa. That unimaginable violence against children occured during an election campaign where the government used the slogan, "The Future is in Your Hands."
Debt relief and foreign aid are great places to start in saving Africa. So is AIDS prevention, which will require a ton of money and a relaxtion of insane standards on the part of the American Christian Right and the Catholic Church. But those things alone are not going to turn Africa into a collection of dusky Ohios.
Ultimately, Africa's borders are going to have be redrawn in a way that makes sense to the Africans themselves. And no American "African command" can or should be involved in something like that. Heavily armed white people didn't do a particularly good job of it the first time.
Western governments and yes, even Bono, can should help Africa with things like debt relief, trade and AIDS. Those are only symptoms of a far greater problem. And the Pentagon and, yes, even Bono, should stay far, far away from those.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Staring at the Sun By: U2 From: Achtung Baby
MR. BILL DONE FUCKED UP: HOW TO RUIN A PERFECTLY GOOD LEGACY
Former President Bill Clinton is the most effective campaigner in human history. I think that much is beyond dispute. However, a qualifier is warranted in making that statement. Former President Bill Clinton is the most effective campaigner in human history when he's campaigning for himself.
When he campaigns for other people, that changes significantly. Nobody's better at getting himself elected, winning 8 out 9 times that his name was on the ballot. But his record in electing other folks leaves a great deal to be desired.
In 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004, a shocking low percentage of candidates that he campaigned for actually won, and I think we all remember what happened in 1994, don't we? 2006 was a special case. The anti-Republican mood was so intense that Rahm Emanuel could have enlisted Richard Ramirez as a surrogate, and he probably could have carried a dozen congressional candidates. Barring extraordinary circmstances, Clinton has no coattails. He didn't in '92 and '96 and he hasn't since.
Then there's the strange case of the former president's wife. A former president campaigning for his wife to win his old office is unprecedented. The closest analogy to made is George Wallace setting up his wife, Lurleen, because the Alabama constitution disallowed him to succeed himself. Of course, the voters knew that Lurleen would be a figurehead and that George would still be calling the shots. No one is suggesting that this is the case in the Bill and Hill show.
Candidates families are always a tricky proposition, as the very existence of Don Nixon, Billy Carter, and Roger Clinton proves. Wives are doubly so. Theresa Hienz Kerry was exceptionally angry and sounded as though she immigrated to America from Pluto. John Edwards has made Elizabeth his designated bad guy, if only because the fact that her tits are falling off makes her a hard target to hit back. And it makes the candidate look like far too much of a pussy to be president.
What makes Bill such a good campaigner for himself - his unbridled narcissim - makes him the kiss of death for his favored candidates. No one is better than talking about how wonderful he is. The problem is, that's exactly the same strategy he uses in trying to elect other people; he talks about how wonderful he is.
Clinton had something else going him. He was the greatest of the do-nothing presidents. He sure looked busy, but he didn't really accomplish anything, and he didn't do any real long-term damage. On the other hand, his successor makes him look like Thomas Jefferson in contrast.
That can't be said of Hillary. The one time she was given some actual responsibility in her husband's administration, she accomplished something very important: she ended forty years of Democratic dominence of Congress.
President Clinton is also masterful in going negative, but only on his own behalf. He has this "just folks" way of attacking people in the most vicious way that largely gave him a pass with the consituency being attacked. The Sister Soljah incident was a perfect example of that.
But when he goes negative on somebody else's behalf, things go wrong. In the last month, he's gone hard negative on Barack Obama, and he's done so in ways that I doubt that he would if Clinton himself was on the ballot. Dirtying up a highly likable candidate is a risky enterprise. If done in a heavy-handed way, you look ugly and, even worse, desperate. It also makes the likable candidate look unfairly put-upon. That's doubly true when the person going negative is a former president of the United States.
Referring to Obama's genuine anti-war positions has a couple of unintended consequences. First, let's say that Obama becomes the nominee. President Clinton will have given the GOP a tactic to use that has already been proven effective. Second, it is making black voters absolutely insane.
You can't understate the importance of the black vote to the Democratic Party. George Bush won 9% of blacks in 2000. That means that 91% of blacks voted for Al Gore. The Democratic Party starts each and every election with a built-in advantage of between 10-13%. Pissing off the black vote could have the same effect of a Republican annoying the Christian Right. If they stay home, you lose the general election.
If Hillary wins the nomination at the expense of destroying Obama and alienating his supporters, the nomination very quickly becomes something not worth having. President Ford went to his grave believing that he lost the 1976 election because Ronald Reagan sat on his hands after the convention in Kansas City. Jimmy Carter's slim margin of victory - just 2% - suggests that Ford was right. Can you imagine a Clinton restoration without heavy black turnout? I can't.
Then there's Bill's antics in Nevada. On the day of last Saturday's caucuses, Clinton said that he and Chelsea personally witnessed acts of voter supression on behalf of the Obama campaign. And the Republicans were otherwise preoccupied that day.
This is incredibly stupid for two reasons. First, unions are almost as important to Democrats as blacks are. Unions also have a well-deserved reputation for corruption. Perhaps reminding voters of that is a bad idea. Second, Nevada is a red state that is trending blue. Running a scorched earth campaign there during the primary could come back to bite them in the general election. There aren't a lot of electoral votes in Nevada, but they could come in handy in a close election.
There's yet another issue here. Former presidents have never before involved themselves in primaries before. Traditionally, they've been used to bring the party together at the convention. Remember, Democratic primaries tend to be far more savage than Republican ones, which makes party unity for the general election of particular importance.
The smart money currently has Hillary winning the nomination. But what if she doesn't? How does Bill Clinton have any credibility asking Democrats to line up behind Obama after the charges he's thrown at him. In the last month, President Clinton has essentially called Obama a fraud without actually using that word. A former president doing that and losing can have devastating consequences after the convention.
Now that may not be as important as it would in a normal year, because the only Republican with a hope of beating Hillary is John McCain. And with the economy falling to pieces and President Bush maintaining the approval rating of a sex offender, I'm not even sure that he can beat her. But Bill's strategy certainly isn't going to help.
Some pretty important Democrats are starting to notice the damage that Bill Clinton is inflicting on what should be an easy election this fall.
Of course, none of that matters to Bill Clinton. Nothing is as important to him as his wife's winning. Not his own legacy, not his standing as a former president of the United States, and certainly not the Democratic Party. The only way Bill's going to calm the fuck down is , as the Newsweek article suggests is possible, important Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Emanuel swing to Obama and end the Clinton restoration before the convention.
If nothing else, it sure is fun watching the wreckage the Cult of Clinton inevitably causes.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day:Wrecking BallBy: Emmylou Harris From: Wrecking Ball
It was ten years ago this Thursday past that the Greatest Story Ever Told became public. Before it was over, two Speakers of the House would be destroyed, a president of the United States would be impeached, a first lady would be on her way to collecting her reward of a Senate seat, the American people would be humiliated, three countries would be bombed, and I would have 13 solid months of laughing my ass off.
The story of Bill and Monica is one of the most joyous of my lifetime. Prior to that, all I had was O.J Simpson's murder trial, and I couldn't feel emptier. But there is no bigger stage for a freakshow than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the memory of it warms still. There hadn't been anything as publicly tawdry involving a president since the paternity scandal of Grover Cleveland, and I frankly miss it.
It was a long road to Monica Lewinsky, and it was a road littered with more personal and public corruption than any three of President Clinton's predecessors could have engaged in.
The story begins in the cesspool of Arkansas, where the Clintons took part in a highly questionable land deal. Somehow along the way, Hillary's law firm proved to be every bit as ethically crippled as her husband's public administration proved to be. Within the first 18 months of the Clinton administration, one of the first lady's law partners would be dead, and another would be in prison.
Early on in the Whitewater scandal, the associate attorney general of the United States, Webb Hubbell was discovered to have been defrauding his partners (including Hillary) at the Rose Law Firm, stealing from his clients, and hiding the money from the IRS. Hubbell resigned, pled guilty, and that was thought to be the end of it.
But things were never that simple in the Clinton years. Between his June 1994 resignation and his January 1995 guilty plea, Hubbell received some $600,000 in contracts from Clinton supporters for work that was never done. Among those companies was the Lippo Group, which we all came to know and love during the 1996 campaign finance scandal.
It was later revealed that several of those jobs were obtained for Hubbell through the good offices of Vernon Jordan. Jordan was a major civil rights leader, an incredibly powerful Washington lawyer, and, most importantly, a personal friend of President Clinton's. It could be said that the involvement of Vernon Jordan in making so much money for Hubbell - who was under federal indictment at the time - in so short a time span was a conspiracy to keep him from cooperating with the Office of Independent Counsel regarding Whitewater.
Three years later, Vernon Jordan admitted to helping Monica Lewinsky find a job in New York following the end of her affair with the president of the United States. Despite being a 23 year old whose only relevant experience was a healthy gift for fellatio, Lewinsky had meetings with both Revlon chairman Ron Perleman and then-Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson.
Perhaps you can make a case that Hubbell was a former associate attorney general, and was presumed guilty of the charges against him and that Jordan was extending a professional courtesey to him. But it is something of stretch to suggest that someone of Vernon Jordan's stature spent his free time driving Miss Daisy out of the goodness of his heart. Perleman testified that Jordan had never before recommended anyone to him for employment.
The involvement of Vernon Jordan was the legal justification Kenneth Starr needed to expand his investigation to l'affaire Lewinsky. You see, the president's involvement with Lewinsky could be - and later was - instrumental in the sexual harassment lawsuit of Paula Jones against Clinton. It established that two seperate witnesses in two different investigations were receiving employment consideration from the same person as those procedings were underway. In most criminal cases, that is usually enough to establish a pattern of obstruction that could send a lot of people to prison for a long time.
And the only link between those witnesses and Vernon Jordan just happened to be one William Jefferson Clinton. In fact, the payment of "hush money" to E. Howard Hunt through John dean was the foundation of the obstruction count of impeachment against President Nixon. The "smoking gun tape" had not yet been released when the House Judiciary Committee had voted on the articles.
Getting a job for Monica became particularly important given how Clinton planned to - and later did - testify in his deposition in the Jones lawsuit in January of 1998.
Q.
Mr. President, before the break, we were talking about Monica Lewinsky. At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?
A. I don't recall, but as I said, when she worked at the legislative affairs office, they always had somebody there on the weekends. I typically worked some on the weekends. Sometimes they'd bring me things on the weekends. She – it seems to me she brought things to me once or twice on the weekends. In that case, whatever time she would be in there, drop it off, exchange a few words and go, she was there. I don't have any specific recollections of what the issues were, what was going on, but when the Congress is there, we're working all the time, and typically I would do some work on one of the days of the weekends in the afternoon.
Q. So I understand, your testimony is that it was possible, then, that you were alone with her, but you have no specific recollection of that ever happening?
A. Yes, that's correct. It's possible that she, in, while she was working there, brought something to me and that at the time she brought it to me, she was the only person there. That's possible.
Q. Did it ever happen that you and she went down the hallway from the Oval Office to the private kitchen? At that point, Clinton's lawyer made an objection, the ruling on which was the first step in the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States.
MR. BENNETT: Your Honor, excuse me, Mr. President, I need some guidance from the Court at this point. I'm going to object to the innuendo. I'm afraid, as I say, that this will leak. I don't question the predicates here. I question the good faith of counsel, the innuendo in the question. Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Jane Doe 6 has filed, has an affidavit which they are in possession of saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton, and yet listening to the innuendo in the questions –
JUDGE WRIGHT: No, just a minute, let me make my ruling. I do not know whether counsel is basing this question an any affidavit, but I will direct Mr. Bennett not to comment on other evidence that might be pertinent and could be arguably coaching the witness at this juncture. Now, I, Mr. Fisher is an officer of this court, and I have to assume that he has a good faith basis for asking the question. If in fact he has no good faith basis for asking this question, he could later be sanctioned. If you would like, I will be happy to review in camera any good faith basis he might have.
MR. BENNETT: Well, Your Honor, with all due respect, I would like to know the proffer. I'm not coaching the witness. In preparation of the witness for this deposition, the witness is fully aware of Ms. Jane Doe 6's affidavit, so I have not told him a single thing he doesn't know, but I think when he asks questions like this where he's sitting on an affidavit from the witness, he should at least have a good faith proffer.
JUDGE WRIGHT: Now, I agree with you that he needs to have a good faith basis for asking the question.
MR. BENNETT: May we ask what it is, Your Honor?
JUDGE WRIGHT: And I'm assuming that he does, and I will be willing to review this in camera if he does not want to reveal it to counsel.
MR. BENNETT: Fine.
MR. FISHER: I would welcome an opportunity to explain to the Court what our good faith basis is in an in camera hearing.
JUDGE WRIGHT: All right.
MR. FISHER: I would prefer that we not take the time to do that now, but I can tell the Court I am very confident there is substantial basis.
JUDGE WRIGHT: All right, I'm going to permit the question. He's an officer of the Court, and as you know, Mr. Bennett, this Court has ruled on prior occasions that a good faith basis can exist notwithstanding the testimony of the witness, of the deponent, and the other party.
MR. BENNETT: Yes, Your Honor, but you understand, and I'm not arguing with you what my concern is, Your Honor, I wouldn't have any trouble with that if I knew that this deposition would be kept under seal. But when he mentions names, when he knows, or at least, you know, hearsay, hearsay, hearsay about something, they check it out, they get an affidavit from the woman, they ask these questions, and the Washington Times will have her name on the front page tomorrow or the day after.
JUDGE WRIGHT: As you know, I'm extremely sympathetic with your position, however this is a discovery deposition.
MR. BENNETT: I understand. That's all right, Your Honor. I'm sorry.
JUDGE WRIGHT: Go ahead.
MR. FISHER: Thank you, Your Honor.
THE WITNESS: What was your question again, sir?
MR. FISHER: I've forgotten, Mr. President, I'm sorry.
JUDGE WRIGHT: Something about Ms. Jane Doe 6 in the hallway.
Q. Do you recall ever walking with Jane Doe 6 Lewinsky down the hallway from the Oval Office to your private kitchen there in the White House?
A. Well, let me try to describe the facts first, because you keep talking about this private kitchen. The private kitchen is staffed by two naval aides. They have total, unrestricted access to my dining room, to that hallway, to coming into the Oval Office. The people who are in the outer office of the Oval Office can also enter at any time.
I was, after I went through a presidential campaign in which the far right tried to convince the American people I had committed murder, run drugs, slept in my mother's bed with four prostitutes, and done numerous other things, I had a high level of paranoia.
There are no curtains on the Oval Office, there are no curtains on my private office, there are no curtains or blinds that can close the windows in my private dining room. The naval aides come and go at will. There is a peephole on the office that George Stephanopoulos first and then Rahm Emanuel occupied that looks back down that corridor. I have done everything I could to avoid the kind of questions you are asking me here today, so to talk about this kitchen as if it is a private kitchen, it's a little cubbyhole, and these guys keep the door open. They come and go at will. Now that's the factual background here.
Now, to go back to your question, my recollection is that, that at some point during the government shutdown, when Ms. Lewinsky was still an intern but was working the chief staff's office because all the employees had to go home, that she was back there with a pizza that she brought to me and to others. I do not believe she was there alone, however. I don't think she was. And my recollection is that on a couple of occasions after that she was there but my secretary Betty Currie was there with her. She and Betty are friends. That's my, that's my recollection. And I have no other recollection of that.
MR. FISHER: While I appreciate all of that information, for the record I'm going to object. It's nonresponsive as to the entire answer up to the point where the deponent said, "Now back to your question."
Q. At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky alone in the hallway between the Oval Office and this kitchen area?
A. I don't believe so, unless we were walking back to the back dining room with the pizzas. I just, I don't remember. I don't believe we were alone in the hallway, no.
Q. Are there doors at both ends of the hallway?
A. They are, and they're always open.
Q. At any time have you and Monica Lewinsky ever been alone together in any room in the White House?
A. I think I testified to that earlier. I think that there is a, it is – I have no specific recollection, but it seems to me that she was on duty on a couple of occasions working for the legislative affairs office and brought me some things to sign, something on the weekend. That's – I have a general memory of that.
Q. Do you remember anything that was said in any of those meetings?
A. No. You know, we just have conversation, I don't remember.
Robert Bennett specifically tried to end the Lewinsky line of questioning based on Monica's affidavit, which Clinton knew to be false, but said nothing. That alone is what is called a material misrepresentation, and as a lawyer himself, could have resulted in Clinton's disbarrment. Regardless of the fact that Clinton was the respondent in the case, he was still a member of the bar and an officer of the court. The rules of professional ethics in all 50 states prohibit an officer of the court from presenting evidence that they know to be false.
President Clinton's entire defense, both in the Jones case and during his impeachment was the definition of "sexual relations." However, Monica Lewinsky signed her affidavit before that definition was arrived at the day of the deposition itself.
And when Judge Wright overruled Bennett's objection, Clinton committed perjury over and over again. Indeed, he lied a lot more than just about sex during that deposition.
Q. When was the last time you spoke with Monica Lewinsky?
A. I'm trying to remember. Probably sometime before Christmas. She came by to see Betty sometime before Christmas. And she was there talking to her, and I stuck my head out, said hello to her.
Q. Stuck your head out of the Oval Office?
A. Uh-huh, Betty said she was coming by and talked to her, and I said hello to her.
Q. Was that shortly before Christmas or –
A. I'm sorry, I don't remember. Been sometime in December, I think, and I believe – that may not be the last time. I think she came to one of the, one of the Christmas parties.
Q. Did she tell you she had been served with a subpoena in this case?
A. No. I don't know if she had been.
Q. Did anyone other than your attorneys ever tell you that Monica Lewinsky had been served with a subpoena in this case?
A. I don't think so.
(...)
Q. I believe I was starting to ask you a question a moment ago and we got sidetracked. Have you ever talked to Monica Lewinsky about the possibility that she might be asked to testify in this lawsuit?
A. I'm not sure, and let me tell you why I'm not sure. It seems to me the, the, the – I want to be as accurate as I can here. Seems to me the last time she was there to see Betty before Christmas we were joking about how you-all, with the help of the Rutherford Institute, were going to call every woman I'd ever talked to, and I said, you know –
MR. BENNETT: We can't hear you, Mr. President.
A. And I said that you-all might call every woman I ever talked to and ask them that, and so I said you would qualify, or something like that. I don't, I don't think we ever had more of a conversation than that about it, but I might have mentioned something to her about it, because when I saw how long the witness list was, or I heard about it, before I saw, but actually by the time I saw it her name was in it, but I think that was after all this had happened. I might have said something like that, so I don't want to say for sure I didn't, because I might have said something like that.
That was later proven to be completely false. In fact, it is Monica's testimony that she told the president in December of 1997 that she had received a subpoena in the Jones case, and that he told her that she could avoid testifying by signing an affidavit.
Since the definition of "sexual relations" that President Clinton relied so heavily upon for the following year had not been decided when Lewinsky submitted her affidavit, both she and Clinton had to assume that the commonly understood definintion of a "sexual relationship" would be in effect during the deposition. Therefore, Lewinsky committed perjury and Clinton suborned it.
Subornation of perjury is a federal misdemeanor, a grounds for disbarrment, and one of the grounds upon which the House Judiciary Committee passed the obstruction of justice article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon.
On the other hand, it led to some of the greatest fucking television of my life.
Wasn't that the greatest thing you ever saw? I happened to see that on TV and was talking to my dad immediately afterward. My reaction was pretty straightforward: "that sonofabitch just impeached himself!"
Then there was the Big Daddy of Them All, the Grand Jury testimony of the President of the United States
The moment when Solomon Wisenberg mentioned the cigar is far and away the greatest of my life. Nothing will ever top that. For the first time ever, Bill Clinton looked thrown, as if he was thinking "Oh, Christ! What am I going to do now? I'm fucked!" It was the first time I had ever seen a president of the United States look like he had been kicked in the balls, and I shall cherish that second and a half of videotape for the remainder of my days.
Oh, and remember that objection that Robert Bennett made during the deposition? That came back to bite Clinton, too. Hilarity ensued.
Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote an op-ed (for which she won a Pulitizer Prize) following that testimony called "The Wizard of Is." Here's what Dowd thought of Clinton and his Grand Jury testimony;
Mr. Clinton's greatest sin is not sex or dissembling about sex, as the heavy-breathing Kenneth Starr believes. His greatest sin is swindling and perverting the American language. He is like the cursed girl in the fairy tale: Every time he opens his mouth, a toad jumps out.
His problems stem from his instinct, when he runs into trouble, to shroud rather than illuminate. He tries to make words subjective, insisting they mean only what he wants them to. Just as he made the Democratic Party about himself, and the Democratic Conventions about himself, and the Presidency about himself, he tries to make the language about himself.
But he can't. Laws are composed of words. The President is in charge of our laws. When he drains meaning from words, he jeopardizes his ability to govern. He has made Washington Orwellian. His corrupt language corrupts thought.
Forever after that article, whenever I see Clinton, I sing a little song to myself; "We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Is." That's how he'll be remembered by anyone who paid any attention at all a decade ago. He's the Wizard of Is.
And that's too bad. There have been few presidents elected who held Bill Clinton's promise. Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that he's incredibly smart, and only Richard Nixon was a better politician in American history. He's a phenominally gifted man and he could have accomplished a great deal for the American people and the world.
Instead, thinking only of his own approval rating, he concentrated on midnight basketball, school uniforms and blowjobs. Instead of playing for history, he played for the next election. All of his gifts were for nothing, and for what? So he could beat Bob Dole?
For those reasons, someone who had greatness within his reach condemned himself to being the most inconsequential president since Harding. His wasn't a nightmare presidency, like George Walker Bush's, but that's only because he didn't do much of anything at all.
Clinton's defenders, who are, for the most part, retarded, argued that Clinton's crimes were "personal" and therefore not "affronts" to the Constitution. What that ignores is that most felonies are personal in nature and not constitutional. Would Democrats have been comfortable letting Clinton finish his term had he have decapitated Monica?
Subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice are either impeachable offenses or they are not. But you can't pick and choose where they are impeachable. Indeed, if you were able to do that, you can make a very strong case for Richard Nixon.
The reason that Nixon authorized the Watergate cover-up wasn't the DNC break-in. No one to this day suggests that he had any advance knowlege of it. What he did want to avoid coming public was Hunt and Liddy's involvement in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. That had to do with the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and that's national security.
At the time of the Pentagon Papers leak, the Nixon administration was conducting highly secret negotiations regarding the China opening. Those negotiations were conducted through Pakistan and Romania, both of whom appreciate secrecy, to say nothing of the Chinese themselves.
If leaks of the scope of the Pentagon Papers kept happening, there was little chance that the China opening would have happened at all. And few things were as directly responsible for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union than the China opening.
You might not agree with the premise, but there is an argument that can be made that Nixon's obstruction and subornation of perjury were directly related to national security and had ample precedent.
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, undermined the judicial branch - not once, but repeatedly - because he didn't want his wife to get mad at him. Which of the two was more egregious should seem pretty clear in that context.
For the first time in American history, a president committed impeachable offenses for reasons completely unrelated to the conduct of government. He abused the judicial, legislative and executive branches for no other reason than the one between his legs. He not only lied to the country, he had his secretary of state stand outside of the White House and repeat that lie. Little wonder the North Koreans wanted a summit after that.
William Jefferson Clinton used the executive branch to slander, defame and terrify the very woman he used for his own base satisfaction. He lied about her to the officers of his government knowing that those lies would be repeated before a Grand Jury and on worldwide television. And that's when Monica Lewinsky was cooperating with the Clintons.
Because William Jefferson Clinton committed felonies for no other reason than avoid the wrath of his wife, Monica Lewinsky went into debt to the tune of three million dollars. Because William Jefferson Clinton committed crimes unrelated to his office, he set the stage for the election of George Walker Bush and all of the horrors that followed.
Upon the release of his unreadable doorstop of a memoir, Bill Clinton was interviewed by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. When Wallace asked the former president why he nearly threw everything away for a blowjob, he gave only a three word answer.
"Because I could."
That's really all you need to know about the 42nd president of the United States. He broke the law, undermined the Consititution, embarrassed his country, humiliated his wife, and destroyed a young girl who did one of the nicest things a woman can do for a man .... because he could. Instead of raising the bar for chief executives, he lowered it. Because he could.
But former President Clinton doesn't want you to lose sight of the big picture. He doesn't want you to lose sight of who the real victim of the Clinton years is. It isn't the Constitution, the administration of justice, the American people, or even Monica Lewinsky. The real victim of the Clinton years was .... Bill Clinton.
Christ, even Nixon could look David Frost in the eye and say "I let the American people down, and I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life." Clinton can't even do that. It's still the fault of Ken Starr, the media, and even America itself.
In the end, it's still all about Bill. That's why I hope he had a happy anniversary.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Campaigner By: Neil Young From: Decade
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen Finished, Thursday 19 January 2006
A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard Finished, 23 January 2006
Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party By Christina McCall-Newman Finished, 17 March 2006
Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architechts of American Power by David Rothkopf Finished, 6 April 2006
Strategery: How George W. Bush is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats and Confounding the Mainstream Media By Bill Sammon Finished, May 10, 2006
George Wallace: American Populist By Stephan Lesher Finished, June 15, 2006
Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi - U.S Connection By Gerald Posner Finished, June 20, 2006
Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan By Robert D. Kaplan Finished, June 27, 2006
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus By Rick Perlstien Finished, July 4, 2006
Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson And His Times 1961-1973 By Robert Dallek Finished, August 10, 2006
Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential By James Moore and Wayne Slater Finished, October 7, 2006
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The Way It Works: Inside Ottawa By Eddie Goldenberg Finished, November 12, 2006
Child Of God By Cormac McCarthy Finished, November 18, 2006
Right Side Up: The Fall Of Paul Martin And The Rise Of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism By Paul Wells Finished, December 8, 2006
The Private Life Of Chairman Mao By Dr. Li Zhisui, Translation By Tai Hung Chao Finished, December 14, 2006
Exile On Main Street: A Season In Hell With The Rolling Stones By: Robert Greenfeild Finished, February 21, 2007
"Work Hard, Study ... And Keep Out Of Politics!" Adventures And Lessons From An Unexpected Public Life By: James A. Baker, III with Steve Fiffer Finished, March 7, 2007
Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story Of The Struggle For Control Of The United States Supreme Court By Jan Crawford Greenburg Finished, March 14, 2007
Imperial Life In The Emerald City: Life Inside Iraq's Green Zone By: Rajiv Chandransekaran Finished March 18, 2007
Memories Of My Melancholy Whores By: Gabriel Garcia Marquez Finished, March 21, 2007
Guests Of The Ayatollah: The First Battle In America's War With Militant Islam By: Mark Bowden Finished, April 4, 2007
Screwjack By: Hunter S. Thompson Finished, April 19, 2007
State Of Denial: Bush At War, Part III By: Bob Woodward Finished, April 22, 2007
31 Days: Gerald Ford, The Nixon Pardon, And A Government In Crisis By: Barry Werth Finished, May 6, 2007
At The Center Of The Storm: My Years At The CIA By: George Tenent with Bill Harlow Finished, May 28, 2007
No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner By: Robert Shrum Finished: July 1, 2007
Chief of Staff: Lyndon Johnson and His Presidency By: W. Marvin Watson with Sherwin Markmarn Finished: July 12, 2007
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power By: Robert Dalleck Finished: July 17, 2007
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs - The Election That Changed The Country By: James Chace Finished: August 5, 2007
Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey By: Linda Greenhouse Finished: August 20, 2007
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination By: Richard Reeves Finished: September 20, 2007
Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush By: Robert Draper Finished: October 1, 2007
Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power By: Tom Flanagan Finished: October 9, 2007
Full Circle: Death and Resurrection in Canadian Conservative Politics By: Bob Plamondon Finished: October 17, 2007
My Years As Prime Minister By: Jean Chretien Finished: October 23, 2007
The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution By: Naftali Bendavid Finished: October 25, 2007
Not A Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency By: Richard A. Posner Finished, October 29, 2007
Slash By: Slash and Anthony Bozza Finished: November 1, 2007
The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star By: Nikki Sixx and Ian Gittin Finished: November 2, 2007
Clapton: The Autobiography By: Eric Clapton Finished: November 5, 2007
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet By: James Mann Finished: November 13, 2007
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the American Political Conventions of 1968 By: Norman Mailer Finished: November 15, 2007
Memoirs: 1939-1993 By: Brian Mulroney Finished: December 3,2007
Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperalism By: P.J O'Rourke Finished: December 4, 2007
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 By: Lawrence Wright Finished: December 11, 2007
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 By: Ron Suskind Finished: December 19, 2007
Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President By: Stephen F. Hayes Finished: December 25, 2007
When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House By: Patricia O'Toole Finished: January 1, 2008
America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 By: Richard Brookhiser Finished:January 7, 2008
The Road By: Cormac McCarthy Finished: January 9, 2008
The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews By: James Reston, Jr. Finished" January 11, 2008
Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford By: Thomas M. DeFrank Finished: January 15, 2008
The Bush Tragedy By: Jacob Weisberg Finished: January 18, 2008
When All You Have Is Hope By: Frank O'Dea with John Lawrence Reynolds Finished: January 21, 2008
Confessions of a Political Hitman: My Secret Life of Scandal, Corruption, Hypocrisy and Dirty Tricks That Decide Who Gets Elected (and Who Doesn't) By: Stephen Marks Finished: February 8, 2008
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court By: Jeffery Toobin Finished, February 18, 2008
The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power By: James Moore and Wayne Slater Finished, February 21, 2008
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln By: Doris Kerns Goodwin Finished, February 26, 2008
Post Office By: Charles Bukowski Finished: March 6, 2008
Factotum By: Charles Bukowski Finished: March 7, 2008
Women By: Charles Bukowski Finished: March 10, 2008
Queer By: William S. Burroughs Finished: March 12, 2008
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Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music By: David N. Meyer Finished: March 24, 2008
W.A.R: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose By: Mick Wall Finished: April 4, 2008
Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons By: Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark Finished: April 21, 2008
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq By: George Packer Finished: May 5, 2008
Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush By: John W. Dean Finished: May 7, 2008
Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House By: Carol Felenthal Finished: May 12, 2008
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America By: Rick Perlstein Finished: June 2, 2008
Infidel By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Finished: June 11, 2008
The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy By: Joe Mathews Finished: June 20, 2008
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate By: James Rosen Finished: June 30, 2008
American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond By: E. Howard Hunt w/ Greg Aunuapu Finished: July 4, 2008
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA By: Tim Weiner Finished: July 16, 2008
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder By: Vincent Bugliosi Finished: July 21, 2008
War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror By: John Yoo Finished: July 25, 2008
Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters By: Richard A. Clarke Finished: July 31, 2008
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America By: Kenneth M. Pollack Finished: August 13, 2008
The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture By: Ishmael Jones Finished: August 19, 2008
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba ... And Then Lost It to the Revolution By: T.J Enjlish Finished: August 25, 2008
Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia By: Ahmed Rashid Finished: Sepember 9, 2008
The Case Against the General: Manuel Noriega and the Politics of American Justice By: Steve Albert Finished: September 25, 2008
Condolezza Rice: An American Life By: Elisabeth Bumiller Finished: October 10, 2008
Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 Michael Beschloss Finished: October 13, 2008
What People Are Saying About skippy
"hands down, Canada's most underrated blog" Damian Penny, The Undisputed Dean of Canadian Political Bloggers. Posted at Daimnation , Saturday October 21, 2006
"You can count on “Skippy” to make you think in different ways about familiar issues. You can also depend on him to be rude, offensive, and outrageous – if you're offended by completely uninhibited sexual imagery (and imagination!), don't read Skippy – but your prudery will keep you from an often interesting perspective." Posted On: Jamulblog, July 12, 2007
"Your Maximum Leader is beginning to think that the less he posts, the better Skippy’s political posts are. Indeed, your Maximum Leader even thought (just a few short moments ago) that if your Maximum Leader just stopped blogging all together would Skippy just keep on writing enough good material for two blogs? (Admittedly one of those blogs would be an X-rated social commentary/diary site and the second a remarkably well-informed and insightful political commentary site…)" Posted On: Naked Villainy, September 18, 2007
"I love your writing. few could pull off sarcastic humor and self-loathing like you do. You've turned self-disgust
into an art form." Posted By:Ophelia July 19, 2003
"hahaha um, not funny" Posted By: Ophelia July 17, 2003
"This is not fucking funny." Posted By: Bee August 21, 2003
"I join Bee in saying that this isn''t funny AT ALL. jesus christ, Skippy." Posted By: Ophelia August 23,
2003
"You are obiviously being kept down by the Mud People." Posted By: DrReverend August 21, 2003
"I''ll give you $50.00 if you kill yourself." Posted By: DrReverend August 19, 2003
"Last time I read this blog." Posted By: Dave, October 24, 2003
"I think you should stop talking about killing yourself and ACTUALLY kill yourself. For fuck's sake, everybody is
tired of hearing about how you might, just do it or face the fact that you are too pathetic to even kill yourself."
Posted By: A Caring Guy, October 25, 2003
"If Joey Ramone were alive today he'd probably shit in your mouth." Posted By: DrReverend November 11,
"When you're good, you're good. When you're bad, you're even better. See you in hell." Posted By: Anna
November 11, 2003
"Skippy, if you can prove to me that giving head and swallowing will without a doubt keep lung cancer and heart
disease at bay, you've earned yourself a BJ." Posted By: Mary Magdalicious, December 5, 2003
"Wow...you know nothing about politics." Posted Dr. Reverend, December 26, 2003
"You are a dick and should think seriously about killing your stupid blog - go get a job, you big fag"Posted
By: Princess Paragonian, December 29, 2003
"You have a, how shall i say.... appealing 'tough', yet gently gay look." (Univited PM) Posted
by:Jus20012002, January 2, 2004 .
"I hope jesus doesn't kick you in the nuts."Posted By: Mary Magdalicious February 2, 2004
"Stumbled on to your blog by accident and i must say alot of the stuff had me in stitches. Love it" Posted
By:Jeremy February 4, 2004
" .....sick."Posted By: Bee February 7, 2004
"Hey Skippy, you ever consider running for public office in the states? I know some people in the West Virginia state
government and our Senator can't live forever.Hell, even Strom, Thomas-Jefferson-Fan, Thurmond died
eventually.Posted By: Ford W. Mavrick, February 9, 2004
Wow, for someone who is so opinionated, you really don't know shit about American or Canadian culture. You appear to
know even less about history." Posted By: Dr. Reverend February 13, 2004
"Your blog's the best I have come across in a long time. I may not agree with all you say but the verve with which
you say it and the humour and irreverance is terrific. These days when the media just reproduces the handout from central
control, blogs like yours do a great deal to form informed opinion in a democratic society. Thanks. Keep it up."
Posted By:Anandan February 13, 2004
"SKIPPY pities ME? Where's my noose?" Posted By: Kilgore Trout March 22, 2004
"Jesus Skippy. Now Allah is going to kick you in the nuts" Posted By: Mary Magdalicious March 22, 2004
"I could make one that says "Skippy has a small penis" although his cock is superb. Posted By: Bestest Pussy March 23,2004
"Cunt sucking is for bitches.You're considered one of the girls because you dress like one. Posted By: Dr. Reverend March 24, 2004
"John Malkovich is one sexy bastard. I have such a thing for him. And I never realized til now, Skippy, how much you resemble John Malkovich...this, by default, makes you also one sexy bastard. See how that works?" Posted By: Zombie March, 26, 2004
"Too bad you live up north. It could have been beautiful.
Ever since I started coming here and saw your pic I wondered why you weren't getting more action. You are not a bad looking guy at all.
Maybe the girls are just...well, that's enough kindness for one day." Posted By: Serenity March 26, 2004
"Hell, if they make gay marriage legal, I'll marry you..." Posted By: Outpatient March 26, 2004
"You look creepier than the REM faggot. But he looks much more like a homersexual." Posted By: Dr. Reverend March 27, 2004
"Skippy, your hits will go up again if you post pictures of your man nipples. Lots of man nips." Posted By: Mary Magdalicious April 15, 2004
"What the fuck? You turning faggot? Posted By: Dr. Reverend April 16, 2004
"Sometimes it gets to be just a little too much. Sharing, that is." Posted By: Bee May 23, 2004
"I'll give you $5.00 if you make the fucking font you use on your blog bigger.
I'll give you $50.00 if you stop fucking writing about American politics.
I'll give you $500.00 if you fucking kill youself." Posted By: Dr. Reverend May 26, 2004
"Of course women like jerks.
Why the fuck do you think they like me?
I guess you've learned nothing from me over all these years." Posted By: Dr. Reverend May 29, 2004
"Sometimes a bitch just has to die." Posted By: Ford W. Maverick May 29, 2004
"It looks like we have more in common than the swastikas carved in our foreheads."Posted By: Dr. Reverend May 29, 2004
"This might be a shallow and 'Waiting-for-Godot-like' comment but...you seem to have not only brains but also beauty." Posted By: Nietzscheswife June 7, 2004
"Skippy, you are such a twisted bastard. Seriously. Why haven't we had sex yet?"Posted By: 0phelia June 25, 2004
"Just found your site. I find some of the things you say quite disgusting. And really quite enjoyable,so keep up the good work."Posted By: Big Al June 28, 2004
"I've read most of your blog. I'd say that so far it's the best I've come across, and believe me, I've seen a few. It's funny, well written (except for the spelling...) and interesting. There will always be those few idiots who just don't get it. It's useless to get worked up about it." Posted By: Johnny June 30, 2004
"Skippy... Go for the facial tattoo. I dig em', and fuck what those other bitches think. You can always bite their tits off if they back talk you." Posted By: Mary Magdalicious July 1, 2004
"Go fuck yourself up your butt." Posted By: Reek Stankleberry July 6, 2004
"Well if ass-fucking won't keep Satan away, I just don't know what will." Posted By: Dr. Reverend July 7, 2004
"dude, you're killing me. keep it up." Posted By: Son of Nixon July 22, 2004
"Are you always either naked or in a suit?" Posted By: Rehella July 22, 2004
"That person should speak for himself or herself. 'Cause you really are that much of a cunt, skippy." Posted By: Kilgore Trout August 4, 2004
"I've read you for a long time but have never commented before. That isn't a slight to your great writing ability, it's mainly because I don't want to be seen here!" Posted By: Paul August 4, 2004
" Dead on. Bulls-eye. I take back what I said about you being a cunt. For now." Posted By: Kilgore Trout August 4, 2004
"Know what, Skippy? You're alright." Posted By: Anna August 18, 2004
"Excellent work. Damn you for being so dead on." Posted By: The Maximum Leader August 24, 2004
"Skippy, fuck the puppy idea. Try getting a monkey that smokes. That will get you laid." Posted By: Mary Magdalicious August 27, 2004
"As to the beard - I like the clean shaven better - and what's wrong with a bald head? Bald heads are hot on some guys - unfortunately most can't pull it off * sigh * You look like you can pull it off though and that's a good thing - not a bad.
BTW, love your blog. I saw it in my referrers and thought it was just a random hit. Then I started reading and found you to be hilarious - it was only after about 10 posts that I noticed you linked me. I was more than flattered - linked by someone I was about to link anyway - awesome. Thanks" Posted By: Kinky August 27, 2004
"Fuckin' Goy bastard." Posted By: Dr Reverend December 19,2004
"Who does a guy have to sleep with to get one of his Skippy quotes pasted to the sidebar?
Great googly-moogly." Posted By: Smallholder December 20, 2004
"Are you a child molester or what's the story?" Posted By: Fukinator, December 28, 2004
"Sick dude." Posted By: DCayer December 29, 2004
"You officially suck." Posted By: Sorry, January 22, 2005
"I heart you, Skippy" Posted By: Karinsky, January 25, 2005
"As I've stated before, you were quite skilled in bed and I had no need to fake any of my multiple orgasms." Posted By: 0phelia, June 30, 2005
"I love Skippy. I swear I do. The only blogger more twisted than me." Posted on: Velociworld, July 26, 2005
" You are so fucking ignorant about America. And while the American people ARE stupid, so are you." Posted By: Bill Lassiter, August 2, 2005
"How can you not love a man who hates himself so viciously?" Posted on: It's All About De , August 31, 2005
"If I wasn't positive that all Canadian men had tiny penises, I'd be all over that Skippy." Posted On: It's All About De
"I've seen pictures of you and I'd say you're fuckable." Posted By: Joan, September 29, 2005
" I love your posts on Canadian politics even more than I love your posts on porn.
And I love your porn posts.
Why the hell do you waste all this talent on the internet? Write a book or something, goddammit! Posted By: Cliff S., November 17, 2005
"Let it never be said that underneath your self-cavilling, bitter (yet strangely egomaniacal) surface that you never take the time to give the people what they want. Even if it's just one people. Gawd bless you, Skippy! Posted By: Locke, November 18, 2005
"Wow! I don't know that I've ever been flattered and yet somewhat revolted at the same time... It's an interesting sensation." Posted By: Dewey in Toronto, December 1, 2005
"Very often, debating you is like playing whack a mole: You pop up some premised assertion moles, I pull out my mallet and start whacking, then you pop up more premised assertion moles - which are mostly or completely unrelated to the original moles I was whacking at. Your stock of moles seemingly stretches into infinity. And yet, an endless supply of moles does not equate to cogent argument.
Very often, debating you is like speaking to a salesman who will not answer a particular direct question, and instead flies off on the flight of rhetorical splendor known as "baffling them with bullshit." I'm impressed with your rhetorical skills, and your IQ, and your accumulation of knowledge. I'm impressed that I'm the American citizen, yet you might have a more thorough knowledge of the American Constitution than I. And yet, these impressive things are not substitutes for cogent argument."Posted By; gcotharn, December 21, 2005
"Besides, you seem to think you're the least respectable person I know. While you're often right, you're wrong on that count. Careful, I might out YOU as a nice guy. Or something." Posted By: Dewey In Toronto, December 27, 2005
"I've been to Toronto. The most dangerous thing I saw there was an 11 foot tall red head with shaved balls."Posted By: Judy, December 31, 2005
"There was this "Caught on Tape!" video I watched back in my highschool days where one of the scenes shows two people starting to cross the railroad tracks. One looks up at the last minute and sees the train, the other does not. In the commercial, it cuts away just before the train does its thing, but the video...
Your blog is like a twisted version of the video. We know the train is going liquify you in shocking gory fashion, but that's why we keep coming back. It's so much more fun that we both know the train is coming and you still gleefully walk into its path...and we love you all the more for it." Posted By:Locke, January 13, 2006
"Fuck. I'm hooked." Posted By: DeAnna, January 14, 2006
"Your Maximum Leader has found Skippy's commentary more insightful and interesting than anyone elses. So now he supposes that Skippy will go back to writing about porn and strippers he meets in the subway." Posted By: The Maximum Leader on Naked Villainy January 24, 2006
"Slightly crazed is fine, but with the beard you look like a total nutjob. If you ever hope to get laid again, for fuck's sake, Skippy, NEVER, EVER grow a saddam beard. You're welcome."Posted By: The Lady O, 28 January, 2006
"Maybe we should get married. My readers could support us by purchasing my worn panties and you could be the panty pimp." Posted By; Joan 28 January 2006
" I know it must be hard for you...being objectified by women all the time. But come on, how can they really help themselves? Have you seen yourself lately? Your pheramones preceed you into a room (as does your crotch). Don't blame it all on them...you did choose to leave your house. :D" Posted By: Joan, 3 February, 2006
"Skippy, you sarcastic twerp." Posted By: Arwen, 8 February 2006
"Just so you know.. if I had to choose between Moussaoui or Skippy.. You'd win. Even if I know what an asshole you are. Posted By; Judy, 13 February 2006
"I'd be willing to sign a legal document stating that is IS ok, in fact, to masturbate whilst thinking of me." Posted By: DeAnna (Who seems unaware of my reputation as an outlaw) February 24, 2006
"Feel free to masturbate while thinking of me...actually, do you need some of my panties to help you with that?" Posted By: Joan, February 24, 2006
"I blame myself for this. I have been too lenient with you. Your Godless behaviour must come to an end. You will receive a severe beating this weekend and I am contemplating removing your testicles." Posted By: Dr. Reverend, February 24, 2006
"Just remember skippy, the US never threw a fit when you smuggled your own personal WMD over the border twice a year. After all, it wasn't like you were hiding in your pants or anything.
All's fair in love and war, so to speak." Posted By: Judy, April 4, 2006
"Wow...nothing hotter than a man willing to issue fatwas for pussy." Posted By: Joan, April 16, 2006
"You sir, are a brilliant writer." Posted By: Judy, May 4, 2006
"I think I'm falling in love." Posted By: DeAnna, May 11, 2006
"THIS IS THE MOST DIABOLICAL FALSITY YOU HAVE EVER ENGAGED IN!!!!
I was intending to kick you in the face upon our next meeting, but now it's obvious that I must douse your scrotum in kerosene and set your testicles aflame. Alas, it is the only way you will learn." Posted By: Dr. Reverend, May 12, 2006
"And i would like to commend you on some excellent blogging. This particular story would normally warrant a few cryptically humorous lines and a link. To an ordinary blogger. But you managed to wring an essay of New Yorker-esque proportions out of it. That takes talent. Your beautiful young friend is right. I see big things for you in the future." Posted By: Annika, June 4, 2006
" I like a man who will unabashedly tell someone his penis size because hes unashamed. Thats hot.
*raises hand* I'll take that 6.5, thank ya" Posted By: Kinky, June 6, 2006
"Elvis, like skippy, is the very definition of rock and roll. Posted By: Rube, June 10, 2006
" I'm beginning to think you're the only good man left in the world, skippy. WTF?" Posted By: By: DeAnns, June 11, 2006
"Just so everyone knows.
Skippy does indeed, taste like bacon.
And, any guy who doesn't know cum tastes good to real women, is clueless." Posted By: Judy, July 2, 2006
"There was a British columnist whose work was described as 'a suicide note in weekly installments.'
This blog is sort of like that." Posted By: Gadfly, July 6, 2006
"Jeez, Skippy. Sometimes I really hate coming here." Posted By: Cynlee, July 18, 2006
"Someone needs to throttle you with a riding crop...truly!" Posted By: Joan, July 18, 2006
"Holy mother of god. I just had an orgasm. It's official: I'm devoting the rest of my life to you, skippy." Posted By: DeAnna, July 19, 2006
"Skippy, sometimes I'm not quite sure of your sanity, but you are without a doubt the baddest morning news reading, quiz show hosting, talent introducing PIMP in the motherfuckin' blogosphere." Posted By: Shank, July 19, 2006
