Complexity

A column by David Brooks from today's Chronicle website. If all conservatives were as reasonable and intelligent as Brooks, what a wonderful world it would be.

Suicide pacts

K. Parker, a conservative with whom I agree about 25 percent of the time, has an interesting observation in this column. The idea of the Republican Party continuing the self-destruction begun in 2001 appeals to me. The level of lunacy they've reached since last January should make Republicans ineligible to govern the nation at any time in the foreseeable future.

Winky and The Wad in 2012 ?

Holy mother Mary, I knew something like this would eventually get into circulation. This country's in an ungodly mess, but if we ever have Palin and Beck running the show, these will be remembered as The Good Old Days. Republicans... can't live with 'em, can't squash 'em like cockroaches.

Ace McCain on the record

Former GOP presidential contender Ace McCain goes on the record. The shootings at Fort Hood were terrorist acts and that's all there is to it.

During the last year of W's reign of error, when the wheels were coming off, his conservative defenders always argued that after 9/11 there had been no further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. That was their standard defense: He kept us safe, and nothing else mattered to them.

Some of the same conservatives who defended W are now determined to establish that Hasan is an Islamic terrorist, the shootings were acts of terrorism, and Obama hasn't kept us safe (i.e., Obama isn't up to W's standard).

Republicans understand that if you repeat something often enough on television, it'll eventually be accepted as truth by most people. I'd be less skeptical about the Hasan story if I didn't suspect Republicans were using it to score easy political points.

Added 11:10 am:

A lot of the conservative bitching about the Fort Hood case includes disgusted references to political correctness, as in, "If it weren't for PC, it wouldn't have happened."

I think a lot of conservatives resent political correctness because it makes it harder for them to use the word they really want to use when talking about Obama.

Duck and Cover

High unemployment and economic insecurity are combining to keep a lot of people nervous and edgy, even grumpy from time to time. So the general mood in the country is fairly negative. But then, making matters worse, we have to deal with the 30-percenters. Those are the people who thought W did a great job every day of his eight years in office, and defended every one of his fuckups. All of a sudden there's a semi-liberal N in W's old office, and the same 30 percent who rationalized and justified everything W did are going crazy. Even if the economic picture was fairly rosy, these dipshits would be in a frenzy.

Things would be tough enough if all we had to do was cope with the economy and the usual array of international complications. I mean, that would be a plateful of hard right there. But on top of everything else, we have to put up with this relentless stream of misguided horseshit from the lunatics who turn to Limbaugh, Palin, Beck and Fox News for leadership. These freaks are beginning to fantasize about themselves as freedom fighters, and I have a feeling something bad is eventually going to happen.

All this makes me recall the old civil defense films teaching school kids to duck and cover. Get under your desk, curl up in the fetal position, and try to ride out the initial blast and the shock waves. Not a bad plan for the next few years, either. The new Stephen King book came out today. It's called Under The Dome, is 1072 pages long and weighs nearly four pounds. King's books are practically the only ones I buy new --- a longstanding personal tradition that has survived years of change. Maybe I'll curl up with this monster, and by the time I've finished reading it, things will have calmed down a little bit.

Cooper and Clarkson

Sometimes we'll watch a movie for no reason other than that we really like the actors in the lead roles, which is how my wife and I ended up seeing Married Life on TV last night. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson play a married couple, middle-aged and upper middle class, in the late 1940s. Cooper and Clarkson are character actors who are strong enough to carry a movie, and they do it again in this one. Married Life is not quite a heavy drama, a comedy, or a suspense thriller, but has traces of each of those genres. The plot revolves around the issue of marital infidelity, and how people who've been married a long time may not know each other as well as they think they do. A quiet film constructed to interest older, mature audiences like the bees, and recommended.