North Korea: Failure to Launch

I never watch the news, but you know what I saw on the news? The fucking humanitarian aid, the food and supplies, North Korea receives?  The North Korean people are told that these are tributes. To their Leader. Then, if they’re lucky, I guess they get to eat.

I imagine the sun shines and the rice grows to the greater glory of the current Kim. I imagine all of creation has been made into one big tribute—especially the bad parts. For there is no one for turning his own crimes into personal glory like the professional narcissist. But even if all you know is the amateur, it’s all the same. The absence, the carefully cultivated inability to acknowledge other people. These people are the Sun King, in their own lives.

This Way To The Egress

Here’s another oldie but goodie from the drafts folder, if anything more pertinent now that Miss Moneypenny is trying to sell herself as, can you believe it, guberantorial material. Read it and try not to weep. Hell, maybe she is just what the Golden State needs to keep us operating—hello, not.

God Says: Crisis and Hope

Noam Chomsky: It is always well to keep in mind Adam Smith’s astute observation about policy formation in England. He recognized that the “principal architects” of policy—in his day the “merchants and manufacturers”—made sure that their own interests had “been most peculiarly attended to” however “grievous” the effect on others …

Honestly, am I just a Radical, to suppose things needn’t be this way? That glossy and fetching appearance, don’t you know, lies and corruptionalways pretty themselves up. Counting on people not noticing. Which of course works.

Lost

The power of an appeal to decency @ The Paepae

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough,’ he cried; and as McCarthy showed that he was going to go on regardless, Welch added: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’…

But this is precisely what I think we’ve lost, in the dissolution of all things decent that the awful democracy of the Internet has brought about, and shall never see again. Not in the same way. Moral authority—where is the Joseph Welch of today?

Black Men With Guns

 

Doug writes today about guns showing up at health care rallies and imagines, what if, instead of good ol’ boys, it was, say the Black Panthers … Oh my. Can you fucking imagine. A row of uniformed (black leather jackets and cool berets, as I recall) angry, young and solemn African-American men carrying fucking guns.

Shut Up

Farhad Manjoo has some excellent advice for the President. About these “death panel” and other idiot rumors? Just shut up.

… the dilemma Obama faces in trying to debunk the lies surrounding the health care debate. In True Enough, my book published last year, I argued that despite techno-utopians’ many high hopes, modern communications technology—talk radio, cable TV, and the Web—have fractured society along ideological lines.

Which is frightening enough right there.

The Shadow Knows

…a terrible fear of living under the “governance” of a failed beauty queen

A friend sent this from a MySpace blog:

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that.

I’m not here to argue, but hello, no sometimes about that.

This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice …Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure.

Hell In A Trailer Trash Handbasket

…such an instant hit of bad

Palin Daughter’s Pregnancy Interrupts Script says the New York Times, and what the hell is that all about. Who can chart the Times anymore. Maureen Dowd gone insane, unable to compose a single column that makes sense, have you noticed. Anecdotes that have no point, hell, anecdotes that have no beginning, no end. Some reference to her father. I give up.

I give up on The Times tinge of Obama-caution, as if it might harm life, limb and circulation if they said something outfront positive about the man? Not bloody likely—and here we have what would be a bomb … what is a supermarket tabloid nuclear bomb—oh, and at five months along, like, they just this minute decided to marry?