Go read the Johnny Carson tribute cartoons on this page. You’ll laugh your ass off, I promise.

I’m really starting to warm up to the fact that Condoleeza Rice is the new Secretary of State. “What the hell?!”, you may ask. Bear with me on this one, folks. It’s not what you think.

First let’s take a look back at Colin Powell’s tenure. While added to the Bush/Cheney ticket in 2000 to give them some instant cred (and help allay fears that Bush was an incompetent retard), once he was confirmed by the senate, his role took one of three forms : the “good cop” to the neoconservatives’ “bad cop”, the amiable frontman for an insane policy, or the shunned little brother who’s better seen and not heard. Is it any wonder why Powell was always at odds with the decision-makers in the White House and Pentagon?

Now let’s take a look at the job description. Traditionally we think of the Secretary of State as the nation’s “chief diplomat” and we rightly assume that the person who fills this role should possess all the values and gravitas that we’d want to present to the international community. But this is the Bush Administration we’re talking about here. Just as the role of Vice-President has transformed from tie-breaker to lie-maker, a SoS under Bush has one duty : selling the war.

That’s where Powell’s problems began. As someone who’s actually been to war, everyone understood him to be weary about invading other countries unless it’s a last resort. Although he talked a good game about the United States being “committed to diplomacy”, everybody knew that it didn’t truly reflect the President’s desires. Regardless of any diplomatic overtures that Colin made, if Junior wants to blow shit up, then he’s gonna blow shit up. The result of this schism between Powell and the rest of the Administration was four long years of mixed messages directed towards the international community.

Which brings me back to Condi. I’ll grant to you that she’s uniquely unqualified to run the State Department, but you’ve gotta give her credit for one thing : The lady can stay on message with the best of them. Indeed, her questioning before the senate reminded me of the “Have you made any mistakes?” cat-and-mouse game the press likes to play with Bush every few months. Even after hours of torture strong interrogation methods, I’m sure Condi would still stick to the script.

And what about mixed messages? Not only will Condi say exactly what she’s told to say, but the choice of her sends an even larger message of its own to the world. While I’m as disappointed as you are that the message seems to be “The United States rewards failure and celebrates mediocrity, so fuck off.”, with Bush being “re”-elected with three million more votes than Kerry, you’d be hard pressed to make the argument that it doesn’t truly reflect the will of the American people.

As much as it sucks to admit, Condolezza Rice does accurately reflect the Bush Administration’s goals and values. While my instinct would be to fight her nomination, in the back of my mind I can’t help but think I’d just be re-fighting a battle we’d already lost. Rice is a nearly perfect choice to lead the diplomatic efforts of a far, far, far from perfect administration. Sure, I’m disappointed that her appointment was assisted by the effusive praise and (more importantly) unnecessary votes of 32 senate Senators¹, the only real alternative here would have been a slightly less awful Secretary of State who’s completely ignored.

^{1: On a far more exciting note, the Alberto Gonzales nomination sailed through committee without garnering a single senate vote. His nomination is a much more important fight for Democrats and it’s a good sign that they’re all sticking together on this one.}

Sometimes you can find political messages in places where you least expect them. Here’s a couple of examples that are similar enough (and struck me in the same way) that I thought I’d throw them together into a post. The first comes from the blog of television chef Alton Brown reacting to the movie “Supersize Me” :

What shocked me about the movie wasn?t what it said, or. Heck I already new most of that stuff. What shocked me were the gasps I heard from the audience, most of whom seemed generally surprised that big business could be so?well?business like.

Here?s what it comes down to kids. Ronald McDonald doesn?t give a damn about you. Neither does that little minx Wendy or any of the other icons of drivethroughdom. And you know what, they?re not supposed to. They?re businesses doing what businesses do. They don?t love you. They are not going to laugh with you on your birthdays, or hold you when you?re sick and sad. They won?t be with you when you graduate, when your children are born or when you die. You will be with you and your family and friends will be with you. And, if you?re any kind of human being, you will be there for them. And you know what, you and your family and friends are supposed to provide you with nourishment too. That?s right folks, feeding someone is an act of caring. We will always be fed best by those that care, be it ourselves or the aforementioned friends and family.

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.

Feed yourselves.
Feed your loved ones.
And for God?s sake feed your children.

Don?t trust anyone else to do it?not anyone. I?m not saying that you shouldn?t go out to dinner every now and then?that is after all one of the great joys of life?but it isn?t life itself and that?s what I?m talking about.

Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn?t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn?t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn?t hug.

The second quote is from Troma Studios founder Lloyd Kaufman’s book All I Needed To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From “The Toxic Avenger”. In the chapter detailing the process of getting their cartoon “The Toxic Crusaders” onto the small screen, Kaufman makes this alarming discovery :

The Cartoons Most People Under 25 Have Grown Up With Are Actually Infomercials

By the early 1908’s, the FCC, under the Reagan administration, had relaxed its regulations on TV. A host of children’s programming that was primarily commercials for toy lines, from GI Joe to Thundarr the Barbarian to He Man, were allowed on the air. Not long after, “barter syndication” became possible; that is, a toy company or animators would give their half-hour cartoon toy commercials to television for next to nothing or free, to the benefit of both companies. In the mid-1980s, Lorimar Telepictures broke new ground with Thundercats, actually paying TV stations a percentage of the sales of the toys would reap in the broadcast area. TV stations became merchandising parters, saturating afternoon TV with kiddie brainwashing, while simultaneously selling commercial time within these commercials. Classic animated efforts like Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, and the old Looney Tunes were gone forever. The elites had infiltrated the entertainment industry in secret ways to the permanent detriment of quality.

[The book adds the following footnote : “Most of this information is from Carnival Culture (1992), by the great pop-culture historian and theoretician James B. Twitchell.”]

With all the outrage over evil corporations being evil corporations, we should all make sure there’s some blame left over for parents too lazy to properly raise their children. If Ronald McDonald is your chef and GI Joe is your babysitter, don’t be surprised when your kid grows up to be an unhealthy moron.

What does it say about an organization when the guy in charge has to publicly order his employees to stop breaking the law?

Tell me if this ever happened to you when you were a kid : You get dragged along on a church retreat, family reunion, boy scout “jamboree”, or other such trip in which you’re stuck in a single location for a few days and you know that you’re gonna be miserable. Hoping to turn lemons into lemonade, you cling to the coolest person that you can find. Although this person still isn’t very interesting, he/she is a genuinely good person that you can’t help but like. By the end of the trip, the two of you have formed an unusual, but strong bond.

When you get home, however, you start to realize that your relationship with this person wouldn’t last long in the “real” world. “It’s nothing personal”, you tell yourself, “we’re just very different people.” At best, the relationship could end up one in which you have a strong bond over a specific common interest, but are uncomfortable discussing anything else. Unfortunately, the other person doesn’t feel the same way, which makes various attempts to stay in touch feel awkward. You wish you could just leave the relationship in the past rather than clumsily try to reignite the tiny spark that brought you together in the first place.

Well, that’s how I feel every time I get an email from John Kerry. Not that I’m knocking his recent “Kid’s First” petition (which you should all sign), it’s just that every time I see his name in my inbox, I keep expecting the message to be “Dude, remember that time I ran for President? That was awesome!” I certainly don’t want him to go away or anything (this is where my analogy falls apart), it’s just that his attempts to transform himself from establishment candidate to grassroots organizer feel forced.

There’s nothing even remotely defensible about the pettiness behind the White House’s spin that the use of the term “private” is indicative of a partisan bias. It’s the height of absurdity to attack an ostensibly neutral third-party for doing you the favor of describing your proposals using your terms. I wish the press would finally stop trying to play catch-up and just say “Fuck it, we’re going back to ‘privatization’. Call us when you crybabies are ready to have a real debate.” Here’s a great Tom Toles cartoon that sums up this brouhaha rather nicely (via Josh Marshall) :

At this point, if the White House is serious about changing the vocabulary to fit their whims, the least they could do is publish a glossary of sorts at whitehouse.gov.

This whole “SpongeBob promotes homosexuality” crusade is so fucking absurd, it’s a relief to see that the dreaded MSM™ is treating this with the level seriousness it deserves. (Hint : Check the quote under the photo)

Of course, this is hardly the first time a conservative religious leader has lashed out at the notion of tolerance. This is, after all, the same group that thinks “equal” rights are “special” rights. It’s all made even funnier when you compare James Dobson’s inability to even tolerate his enemies with Jesus’ teaching that you should love your enemies. I think little Jimmy Dobson needs to stop watching cartoons and start paying attention in church.

If you’re a big fan of Snopes.com, you should definitely check out the urban legends pages at ReligiousTolerance.org. This one is one of my favorites :

The hell hole: The story seems to have been broadcast on three episodes of a Trinity Broadcasting Network program in the early 1990s. Trinity also published an article on their Internet mailing list. It was allegedly translated from the original Finnish newspaper Ammennusastia. The story involves a team of geologists in Siberia who were drilling a well 14.4 kilometers (9 miles) into the earth to study the makeup of the earth’s crust. They lowered microphones into the hole and were stunned to hear the screams of people suffering in horrible agony. They could only assume that they had reached Hell and were listening to the suffering of countless billions of people being tortured without any hope of relief or mercy. Project leader Dr. Azzacov allegedly said: "The deep center of the earth is hollow!… Temperatures of 1,100 degrees C (2,000 degrees F) were reported…we could hear thousands, perhaps millions, in the background, of suffering souls screaming." The information we are gathering is so surprising, that we are sincerely afraid of what we might find down there." Half of the scientists allegedly refused to continue drilling. A newspaper article in Finland added more details: A luminous gas shot up from the drill hole. A brilliant being with bat wings then coalesced, with the words in Russian: "I have conquered" visible against the sky. The Ship of Fools website personnel traced the story back through a series of letters to editors and various Christian newsletters. The originator of the "bat out of hell" addition admitted that it was a fabrication, intended as a joke to prove how some religious folk will accept a totally outrageous story without checking it out. The Biblical Archeology Review printed a story about the Well to Hell story, intending it to be humorous. They figured that the story was so outrageous that nobody would treat it seriously. But many of their readers did. Of course, there was no deep well to Hell, and no sounds of the damned. However, you can hear an online recording that is claimed to contain the screams of the inhabitants of Hell.

I’m sure all the “journalists” at TBN were quick to issue corrections on that one.

There are quite a few other religious urban legends from Darwin’s deathbed confession, to Satanic human sacrifices, to Noah’s ark. Another good one is the “Proctor & Gamble are Satanists” myth, which becomes especially funny when you compare the P&G logos here and here to the one on this hysterical flyer. Oddly enough, I didn’t see anything on the site about the “she said ‘Yes’” girl at Columbine or the endless stream of rumors that “Liberals want to ban the Bible”. Then again, trying to keep track of all this shit must be a full time job.

I’m joining Kos and others on this one :

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales’s advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Convention, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales’s legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law’s undoing.

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales’s endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”

Legal opinions at the highest level have grave consequences. What were the consequences of Gonzales’s actions? The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality - views which he expressly reasserted in his senate confirmation hearings - inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world.

Michael Posner of Human Rights First observed: “After the horrific images from Abu Ghraib became public last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the world should ‘judge us by our actions [and] watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.’” We agree. It is because of this that we believe the only proper course of action is for the senate to reject Alberto Gonzales’s nomination for Attorney General. As Posner notes, “[t]he world is indeed watching.” Will the senate condone torture? Will the senate condone the rejection of the rule of law?

With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the senate to reject him.

I don’t think the Dems should be “obstructionists” (by which I mean opposing the Republicans out of spite), but this is an extraordinary circumstance which will speak volumes about our country’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law. It’s time for an “accountability moment”.

Ezra Klein, one of my daily reads, has broken out on his own. Go check you his new site at http://ezraklein.typepad.com and make sure to update your bookmarks.