Things I Think

It's Friday, and I have a lot on my mind. Let's get started with the ugly:



Everyone's worried about foreign terrorists. Gotta keep Al Cater out of the country or he's gonna kill a lot of people. Gotta keep those Iranians in check. While everyone's busy hunting for bad guys "over there," we've got homegrown terrorists -- Americans -- shooting abortion doctors, blowing up federal buildings, and now, killing a guard at the Holocaust Museum, a stone's throw from the White House. And let's not forget how, a few years ago, a former Army sharpshooter took a young kid on a shooting spree in Maryland and Virginia. They murdered countless people in parking lots and gas stations and scared the shit out of everyone in the mid-Atlantic States. Oh and remember how, right after 9/11, some kook mailed anthrax to Tom Brokaw and other media personalities? The moral of this story is, that there's no shortage of American nutjobs with axes to grind, people full of venom and hate. And in a developed country like ours, you can buy all the shit you need to kill a lot of people at the local Walmart or Home Depot. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City with a truck full of fertilizer. The next American mass murder may decide to build a dirty bomb out of all that extra radioactive waste lying around your local hospitals. Actually, another school shooting is more likely than that. For now. These people are terrorists too, right? I mean, you don't need a long beard and catchy "Down with America" chant to be considered a terrorist, do you? They say the hate groups in this country are all riled up because of Obama's election. No shit. They're on the wrong side of history; they should be riled up. I just hope someone's paying attention. If 88 year-old racists with nothing left to lose are pissed off, we're in bigger trouble than I thought.

Now the purdy:



That Miss California -- ex-Miss California -- what's her name, Carrie Prejean? She sure has some stupid views about gay marriage. Real dumb. Redneck dumb. But honestly, the first thing I think every time they show her sauntering around with those fake boobies of hers, is "Damn, that girl is f'n hot!" For what it's worth, I'm not proud of it.


David Carradine, WTF? That is one weird way to go out. And we're never going to know how he really died. It sure as hell wasn't suicide, like they originally reported. His hands were bound. That's impossible to do if you're going to hang yourself. Option two is auto-erotic asphyxiation, a form of masturbation where you cut off the oxygen to your brain to induce a more intense orgasm. Michael Hutchence of INXS supposedly died that way. I'm not sure I buy that theory either, even for an edgy dude like Carradine. Who needs an ex-tree intense orgasm at age 72? I mean, if I'm still that horny at 72 -- and mind you, I PLAN to be -- I'll be happy just to be able to pop one off at that age. I won't need all the extra fixins. I just don't think Carradine would be practicing that kind of thing at that point in his life. And if he was horny, baby, he was in friggin' Thailand. He had money. He could have gotten himself a very affordable playmate. It just makes no sense. I'm thinking he pissed someone off and got his ass killed.

Last night we had another thunder storm. I feel like I've been living in a thunderstorm for a month. The other night, the thunder crackled so loud at 3:30 a.m., I nearly wet the bed. I don't even remember what the sun looks like. It's almost summer, right?

Could someone please explain to me ESPN's inexplicable obsession with Brett Favre? Last year they wouldn't shut up about him coming out of retirement to play for the Jets. This year it's the Vikings he's courting. I say WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK!!! Is that asshole paying ESPN royalties to mention his name every thirty seconds? Does anyone outside of Minnesota care if he retires or not? I CAN'T TAKE ANYMORE FAVRE STORIES! I JUST WANT THE F'N RED SOX HIGHLIGHTS! PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP!


In other news, my Boston Red Sox have played the New York Yankee$ eight times this season, and they have won all eight games. Sweet, sweet ambrosia.


I have been following the Iranian election with considerable bemusement. You might be surprised to hear (a) that Iran is actually a democracy (more of one than say, China or Iraq); and (b) political elections there are as bareknuckle as they are here. There's a reformist candidate -- Moussavi -- running against Ahmadinejad, and I really hope he wins. He's a painter, an architect, a real renaissance man. Mahmoud is a cock gone flaccid. All arrogant flash and self-delusion but nothing real to er... stand him up when he needs it most. Just like our ex-President. Bush is gone and now it's Mahmoud's turn to leave. I'm really hoping things go that way. Funny how the leaders of Iran and the U.S. create all kinds of conflict inside and outside their countries, but the Iranian and American people seem to want peace and good relations with one another. Fingers crossed.


I loved Obama's speech in Cairo. It's about time an American President said those things to that audience. And it's about time that an American President didn't kowtow to Israel's every desire.

The GM bankruptcy shows that the companies everyone says were "too big to fail" were not too big to fail. I hate to say it, but the Republicans were right about this one. Though they're being totally hypocritical about it because most of them supported Bush when he was pushing these bailout plans nine months ago. Everyone screamed that we needed to save GM or the world would end. Billions of dollars later, it didn't work and GM is still going bankrupt. What a colossal waste of money. Not Iraq War wasteful, but wasteful nonetheless. Obamer got this one wrong. There, I said it.

The twenty-year anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square just passed. Did anyone notice? People seemed to give a shit '89. Guess we can't make too much of a big deal about it now since China owns our ass. Literally.

Palin's pissed about a tasteless Letterman joke about her daughter. Here, Dave explains what happened:



Good, now someone please grab a cane and drag dear Sarah off the stage. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill and misleading people in the process. Shit, if she didn't have any kids, she'd have no publicity at all. She should be thanking Dave for the airtime, not getting all up in his 62 year-old grille.

Here's a final thought to ponder over the weekend: what if every single thing our five senses tell us is actually an illusion? Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." That may be true. But what if none of what we think is real, the things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is the real reality? What if it's all a dream that the collective mind is having? A bad dream where Big Mind believes that it has divided into billions of individual bodies containing tiny, smaller minds? Where Big Mind has forgotten that it's actually one mind and is now divided and subdivided and at war with itself. Where it watches millions of tiny minds -- broken pieces of itself encased in symbolic bodies -- fight each other in every way possible, from household arguments between spouses to drunken fisticuffs, to criminal assaults, rapes, and serial murders, to world wars. What would it mean if nothing in this world really mattered, that it's all an illusion to serve some unknown purpose? What if nothing we see is real and we are living in Matrixland?

If you think this is a bizarre idea, tell me, did you have a dream last night or the night before? Have you ever had a dream where you thought you were flying? Or you were shagging that boy or girl you've had your eye on for awhile? Then you woke up and you realized it was just a dream, that you can't really fly, and Bobby/Georgina never looks in your direction. (And you were pissed!) Your mind, my mind, they have the power to create worlds that defy the laws of reality, or what we think is reality. We do fantastical things in our dreams. We do bad things to good people and bad people do them to us. If there is a powerful, collective unconscious mind out there, one that encompasses the electromagnetic strength of every living thing, isn't it possible that it too could be having an incredibly intense dream (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it) where it created a world -- this world --that's not the real reality? And time, birth, life, death, winning, losing, sex, killing, wars are all an illusion occuring in the dream? Me, I not only think it's possible, I think it's happening.

Tina & Amy

In case you missed it, here are two of my favorite female comedians, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, doing Sarah and Hillary last night. Nicely done, ladies.

President Palin

The bullshit factor of American politics never ceases to amaze me. More and more, I'm realizing that no one actually believes anything they say about the other side. It's all about tricking people, the easily persuaded American sheep who listen to radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh, into doing what you want. And it's gotten to the point where they're barely hiding it anymore.

The latest example of this involves McCain's pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. For the past three months (and even before, if you count the Democratic Primaries), I've been listening to McCain criticize Barack Obama for being too inexperienced to be President. Paper thin resume, he said. Not qualified to be "Commander in Chief," he said. To be fair, it wasn't just McCain saying this. Hillary Clinton, his own VP pick Joe Biden, and numerous self-loving talking heads on Fox and CNN said the same thing. And I considered it to be fair criticism. Obama's assent has been rapid, and it's a legitimate knock to say he doesn't have enough political experience to be President, even though I've always felt the criticism was overblown. If that's how you feel and it's all you care about, my view was, go ahead and vote for McCain.

Well you can throw that out the window now. McCain, who is 72 years old, just chose as his running mate a woman with exactly two years of political experience. And we're not talking experience in a state like New York or California or even Pennsylvania. We're talking Alaska, of all places ALASKA. Alaska is a huge territory but it has like 5 people living in it. It can hardly be said that Alaska represents the United States. And Palin's last significant political position before becoming governor TWO YEARS AGO was her service as mayor of a small-ass podunk town. Before that, she was a news anchor. And McCain was criticizing Obama's lack of political experience? What a joke.

I have nothing against Sarah Palin. In fact, I kind of like her. She's got that down home thing going, which American voters seem to like in their leaders. She seems genuine and nice. And I like the way she stuck the Bridge to Nowhere up Senator Ted Stevens' wrinkled ass. She's easy on the eyes, too. I don't like her political views (she thinks both evolution and creationism, i.e. intelligent design, should be required to be taught in school, for example), but she's not abrasive and has a bright future in the GOP. But are you kidding me? Vice-President???

McCain, God bless him, has been diagnosed with cancer four times. If elected, he'll be the oldest person ever elected President of the United States. I heard Doris Kearns Goodwin say today on Meet the Press that nearly 1 in 3 American Vice-Presidents have become President through assassination, illness, or resignation. With this pick, that's scary to think about. McCain and his minions have spent the better part of his campaign against Obama criticizing his lack of experience. And then he goes and picks as his number two someone who has even LESS experience than Obama? Either he never meant what he was saying about Obama or he is in serious panic mode in this election, because this pick was about as knee-jerk as you can get. You can say it doesn't matter. You can say the Palin pick "energized" his campaign. You can say that chances are, McCain will be fine and he's only running for a 4-year term anyway. But we have two wars going on and an economy that's in the shitter and this is the best he could do? It wouldn't matter if McCain was 50 or 60 or even 65, but the man is in his 70s for crying out loud. It's fair to say that this situation poses a more likely than typical scenario that McCain either will not live out his term, or could be sidelined for a substantial portion of it. Does President Palin have a nice ring to it for you? Not for me. And more importantly, what does this pick say about McCain's judgment?

Before picking her, McCain met Palin exactly twice. Why was she chosen? And how much involvement did McCain have in that choice? I can hear it now: "We need someone young, preferably female, who's pro-life, evangelical, and likes to shoot guns. Get on it!" This pick was like ordering a pizza. It's the way most people date on Match.com: pick all the personality traits you want in a person and then click on the picture you like the most. Scary. There were a bevy of Republicans, including women, who were more qualified VP picks than Palin. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Liz Dole, Tom Ridge, even Governor Huckleberry were more qualified. What was McCain thinking? He couldn't find a conservative woman with a more substantial resume than a two-year governor of a sparsely-populated state? This pick gets him no electoral states that he wasn't getting already, no security if something happens to him, and no one knowledgeable on the economy, like Romney would have been, though Palin does have some experience on the energy front. All this pick did was perk up some conservatives and solidify McCain's evangelical support. I submit that the Republican Convention and almost any other pick besides Lieberman would have accomplished the same thing.

McCain's bad judgment isn't my only point here, though. My larger point is about political hypocrisy. I've been laughing my ass off the past two days watching the political shows and seeing the very same conservative pundits who'd been criticizing Obama as inexperienced -- THE SAME EXACT PEOPLE -- bending over backwards, stttttreeeetccccching the facts about Palin's experience to somehow justify this crazy pick. Their response to her clear lack of international experience (did I hear correctly that she got her first U.S. passport in 2007?): she's an "executive" who's "tough" and "very popular" in Alaska. One jackass on Fox News actually tried to suggest that Palin had international experience because Alaska is very close to Russia. It's a fucking farce. Can you imagine this woman facing down Putin or bin Laden if something happens to McCain? Shit, call Obama inexperienced, but at least he's a Senator of a major American State who has a national presence and clear positions on foreign policy, even if you disagree with them. And any lingering doubts most people could have had on this front had to have been addressed by Obama's pick of Joe Biden. Palin is going to have to prepare for her debate against Biden like a college senior cramming for a final.

As a Democrat and Obama-supporter, I'm thrilled with McCain's choice, because it's an act of desperation and shows that McCain thinks things through about as much the Republican he's trying to replace: George Bush. Actually, credit to Bush, at least he picked Cheney, who, as much as I hate the fucker, actually had some foreign policy experience under his belt. If something happened to Bush, I wasn't worried that we had another Dan Quayle on our hands. But that's exactly what Palin is: Dan Quayle 2.0.

I don't know what McCain was thinking, but if he wins, he'd better stay healthy, or I'm getting the hell out of Dodge and moving to..... ALASKA.