What? A post?

Yep, a post. Oh, and a title change. This isn't really a return to blogging -- there are a few thoughts on Bush I want to share, and then I'm done. Well, unless I get the blogging bug again.

Those with long memories (i.e. fellow bloggers) will remember that the title of this blog was originally "Trust Me, You Have No Idea How Much I Hate Bush". That was back in 2004. Then it became "Trust Me, You Have No Idea How Much I Hate Bush, And Dick Isn't That Great Either", mainly because I liked the acronym TMYHNIHMIHBADITGE.

But TMYHNIHMIHBADITGE eventually gave way to the much milder "I just don't like this George Bush prick". Yes, he won re-election, but the swing of American public against him satisfied my outrage. "Finally," I thought, "People are beginning to get it."

Now, it's time for another title change. Explication to follow.

I hate Michael Moore (Part 1)

Well, hate’s not the word, but I don’t like him.

I did like Bowling for Columbine. Even though I now have regrets about liking it I have to admit that it was an amazing movie. It was funny. It seemed profound.

I think I responded to it the way a conservative would respond to a flawed movie about Planned Parenthood. So, you’d have problems with the movie on some points, but on the whole you’d enjoy it.

And I did like Fahrenheit 9/11 even though I was seriously troubled by it. Remember the scene with the kite? I agree with Christopher Hitchens about that. And when I agree with Christopher Hitchens you know there’s a problem.

The big controversy was whether Fahrenheit 9/11 deserved the Golden Palm at Cannes. I think it did. Even if it was a seriously flawed movie it had real strengths as a work of cinema.

Disgusting propaganda. But a work of cinema. Not as bad as Triumph of the Will because that was propaganda in the service of a rotten cause. But bad in the sense that propaganda is bad. Bad in the scene that it’s not honest.

Of course, it was a polemic. I don’t want to fall into the trap of attacking him for making a polemic instead of journalism. As a filmmaker he’s free to make any kind of movie he wants. It would be like attacking Quentin Tarantino for not making love stories. It’s not his shtick.

And a few years ago I saw part of Roger & Me and laughed at it. So, Michael Moore’s a person who makes good movies, that much I can agree with.

And I was disgusted by the response to Fahrenheit 9/11. Michael Moore gets this much scrutiny and Bush gets a pass? As someone joked at the time, thank God President Michael Moore is under scrutiny and not maverick documentary maker George Bush. It shows you democracy’s in a good state.

So I have qualifications as a Michael Moore critic. I think he’s a good film-maker. I don’t expect him to be fair. I’m just as angry with the way the media reacts to him. Maybe my politics are more moderate than his. But I’m not going to say he’s a hack, he’s biased or that he’s fat.

I do think, however, that his arguments are weak and that he's not as careful as he should be about the facts.

What's this now?

What's this? The George Bush prick blog, back in action? Say it isn't so!

You can thank Bert Prelutsky for it:

And, finally, it annoys me that every time I type “illegals,” my computer insists on underlining it in red, as if the word doesn’t even exist.

"My computer's dictionary has a liberal bias!" Now, that's wingnutty. Sad, yes. But also wingnutty.

But, wait, there's more.

Leftists ask little more of life than that they be regarded as more compassionate than Dr. Albert Schweitzer on one of his nicer days. It explains why they will always identify with the criminal rather than the victim of a violent crime. The heart of a normal person naturally goes out to the victim and the victim’s family. But how bourgeois is that?! By displaying concern for the perpetrator, the liberal highlights how special he is, how sophisticated, how broad-minded. It is, I contend, a particularly loathsome form of perversion in this country, and it’s more pervasive than rape or pedophilia.

Liberals always identify with the victim.

Identifying with the victim is a loatheome form of perversion.

So all liberals have a "particularly loathsome form of perversion".

I'm just glad he just said that it's more pervasive than rape or pedophilia, not actually worse.

Now that the ACLU has managed to get some loony judge to grant an injunction against executions on the grounds that lethal injections might be painful, I am reminded that when the plugs were pulled on Terri Schiavo, we were assured by all the liberal experts that starvation was totally painless.

All the liberal experts? Really?

Let's see. According to ABC News, "Death from Dehydration Is Usually Serene" (It's dehydration, not starvation, Bert):

"The process of starving to death seems very barbaric but in actuality is very peaceful," said Dr. Fred Mirarchi, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia.

Serene, peaceful -- not painless. What kind of pain would be involved?

The physical process of dying after life support is removed follows a pattern familiar to hospice workers. And the fact that Schiavo is in a vegetative state will likely make her death faster and less painful, Lynn said.

"It depends on whether she has the ability to swallow anything — and if that anything is offered," she said. "If she's unable to swallow anything, the course toward dying, so far as anyone can tell, is fairly comfortable."

Most patients who cannot eat or drink will enter a physical state known as ketosis. During ketosis, the body begins to use fat and muscle as a fuel source.

In advanced cases of ketosis, the nervous system response is dulled, and patients rarely feel pain, hunger or thirst. There is also some evidence that ketosis can produce a state of well-being or mild euphoria.

So, basically, the nervous system shuts down and the patient no longer feels pain, hunger or thirst. It's a horrible way to die, but it sounds like it's not actually painful.

So, once again, Bert won't let the facts get in the way of getting mad about stuff.

The Selling of The Internet

In 1996 the US congress gave away the digital frequencies to existing broadcasters, value $10 billion. Democrats, Republicans, and the press were ebulient: privatisation will set us free, and God damn the cost to the taxpayer.

10 years on, they're giving away the internet. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other telecommunication companies are getting control of the operation of the internet. And they're not paying a damn thing for it. As Josh Marshall said, this is the "grand ole daddy of special interest giveaways".

This is an example of socialising the risk and privatising the profit. The US taxpayer spent billions to develop the internet and now they have to pay for it again in the form of profits to private industry.

Why is this an issue? Because it will mean the end of the internet as we know it. As Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T said: Google shouldn't be allowed to“use " my pipes (for) free.” The internet will become like television: a medium beholden to commercial authority. Premium lanes and anti-competitive charges are one thing; imagine the corporate owner of an internet company shutting down websites because they have politics incompatable with the corporate line.

It's Howard Beale's world, we just live in it.

Hitchens Revisionism

Christopher Hitchens told David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine:

Christopher Hitchens claims that his moment of truth about Islamic fascism arrived in 1989, and that by September 11, 2001, he had fully come to "[t]he realization that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism." He then says that after seeing the World Trade Center atrocities on television, he was exhilarated: "Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose."

But as historian Sean Wilentz points out, in the September 13 2001 Guardian, "Twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- barely two years ago -- Hitchens fiddled on about the evil Americans and their taboos and their refusal to reckon with their wickedness".

Hitchens:

With cellphones still bleeping piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to attract such awful hatred. Indeed, the very thought, for the present, is taboo. Some senators and congressmen have spoken of the loathing felt by certain unnamed and sinister elements for the freedom and prosperity of America, as if it were only natural that such a happy and successful country should inspire envy and jealousy. But that is the limit of permissible thought.

In general, the motive and character of the perpetrators is shrouded by rhetoric about their "cowardice" and their "shadowy" character, almost as if they had not volunteered to immolate themselves in the broadest of broad blue daylight. On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.

Fantasyland

Digby spots this commentary from CNN military analyst Don Shepperd:

But our message to them as analysts was, look, you have got to get the importance of this war out to the American people.The importance message is that this is a forward strategy. It's better to fight the war in Iraq than it is the war on American soil. And further, the message needs to be imagine an Iraq, imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt combined for tourists, combined with oil, water and land and resources, imagine the effect of that. That's a message that has to get out to the American people because the American people do not feel they are at war.

Well, that hit a few talking points, didn't it? It's not a question of doing better, it's a question of getting the message out. If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here. If we pull out Zarqawi will control Iraq. Fantasyland.

And this from a retired U.S. Air Force Major General.

But our message to them as analysts was, look, you have got to get the importance of this war out to the American people.The importance message is that this is a forward strategy. It's better to fight the war in Iraq than it is the war on American soil. And further, the message needs to be imagine an Iraq, imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt combined for tourists, combined with oil, water and land and resources, imagine the effect of that. That's a message that has to get out to the American people because the American people do not feel they are at war.

I'm as mad as Hell -- and I'm a bit of a dope, too

This Washington Post profile of liberal blogs is shameful.

The story opens with an exemplar of the "Angry Left":

the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush… awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left... "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs… wonders what she should scream about this day… Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"… Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"… the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"...

And that's just the first 3 paragraphs.

But she's not just angry, she's also a bit of a dope:

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

"Darfur is not hopeless," she begins typing, and pauses.

"Ugh," she says.

"You are not helpless," she continues typing, and pauses again.

"Weak."She deletes everything and starts over.

Well, that's one strawman down for the count. I bet if scribe David Finkel was really serious about nailing the liberal activist web as vague and unreasoningly angry, he'd go straight to some of the big names -- Atrios, Kos?

"I just want to see these [expletive] swinging from their heels in the public square," reads a recent comment from someone named Dave in a discussion about the Bush administration on a Web site called Eschaton.

Crude times, too.

Yep -- someone named Dave who left a comment on Eschaton. Is he a liberal? Is he a conservative pretending to be a liberal? David Finkel doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care.

To what, effect, though? Do the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to Daily Kos, who sign their comments with phrases such as "Anger is energy," accomplish anything other than talking among themselves?

Well, David is concerned enough to do a hatchet job. I wonder if he'd say the same thing to Howard Beale? "Yes, you're as mad as Hell and you're not going to take it any more, but aren't you and the millions of outraged Americans who watch you just, well, talking among yourselves?"

"If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution" is how she signs her comments, in the place other people might write "Sincerely."

The Internet: a big tent.

And then there's the money quote:

"I'm insane with rage and grief."

And then David dips into the comments again:

To which Nite74 responds, "ADD implies that some attention span is already present to be deficient."

To which Linnaeus responds, "I might say, though, that saying he has ADD is an insult to those who actually have it."

David's indictment, so far, consists of a liberal "insane with rage and grief", a handful of comments on blogs (which of course can come from anyone), and The Rude Pundit. And not only is insane-with-grief liberal a bit nuts, she's a hypocrite:

She agonized over low wages for overseas workers every time she bought a $40 leather purse.

Did David actually ask her this?

"Nice purse -- leather, right? How much did it cost? Uh-huh... Ever worried about low wages for overseas workers? Yeah... OK, ever worried about low wages for overseas workers at the same time as you purchased a purse? Right, thanks. Now: petitions. Sign 'em?"

I think the subtext is that if liberals were really serious about all this stuff they'd don a sackcloth and become a tribe of mendicants.

Why is she so crazy? Fortunately, Doctor Freud is on hand with an answer:

And the photo album is because of a 25-year-old Marine who died fighting in Vietnam three months before she was born, which she thinks helps explain the note, the alcohol, the cigarettes and the very first piece of writing she ever published online, a rant against the war in Iraq that began, "Every single millisecond of my life was directly affected by the nightmare that was Vietnam."

As Finkel says: "from lost soul to angry soul."

I eagerly wait for Finkel's follow-up, where he trawls Little Green Footballs and Free Republic for signs of anger.