They’re Playing Our Song

I see you checkin’ me
Out on the dance floor
I know you want me boy, but you got something I want more
See, these are troubled times
A bad economy
I got some health issues, and medicine, well it ain’t free

I don’t care about your diamond rings
I don’t need none of those fancy things
If you really wanna be my man
Boy, you gotta put me on your health care plan!

Let’s start a family
And you can be the boss
Just prove to me that you’ve got Aetna, Kaiser, or Blue Cross
I can’t afford a doctor
I need your MDC
When I get sick all I can do is go to WebMD
Well you don’t gotta kiss me
And I don’t need no hugs
Just gotta get a discount when I need prescription drugs!
I need a flu shot baby
I got a tricky knee
And I ain’t seen a dentist since September of two-thousand-three

I don’t care about your diamond rings
I don’t need none of those fancy things
If you really wanna be my man
Just let me get all up in your health-care plan

Wanna be my dependent, girl? / What you got? / I’m gonna break it down…

I hear you say you love me
I wanna know fo’ sho’
You gotta prove it ‘fore I put you on my PPO
‘Cuz my co-pays are modest
And girl you know that’s true
My pre-existing condition is I’m in love wit’ you
My coverage is extensive
They pin my policy
You want some Lasik, baby, I got full optometry
Shi-at-su massage—all day for you’n’me
Don’t sweat the payments, girl, it’s covered ‘cuz it’s therapy

Aaa-oooh! How much is your deductible / How much is your deductible / How much…
Want some acupuncture baby? How ‘bout podiatry? I’ll get you braces, girl…

Tramp the Dirt Down

As the Palindrone combines with the Michael Jackson funeral coverage to make the Marabar media cave even more howlingly empty than usual,  leave it to war correspondent Joe Galloway to write the proper obituary for war criminal Robert McNamara:

McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McNamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: “I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process.” Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.

Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara’s comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.

The only disagreement i ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.

When McNamara published his first book — filled with those distortions of history — Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.

McNamara abandoned the tour.

Galloway also has an astonishing anecdote about something that happened to McNamara during a ferry ride, but I’ll leave you to read it. I also appreciated this tidbit from Matthew Yglesias.

The only eulogy this bloodstained bureaucratic monster deserves was written a while back by Elvis Costello. It’s called “Tramp the Dirt Down” and while the thoughts were aimed at another politico, a little adjustment would make the lyrics just as applicable to McNamara.

The Bombs Bursting In Air

If there are no local fireworks shows in your area, you can always watch the self-immolation of Sarah Palin.

Personally, I hope this is not the last we see of Wailin’ Palin. I want her in the next GOP primary, preferably with Newt Gingrich running alongside.

The Winger Mindset

Okay, people, somebody walk me through this.

Bill O’Reilly can spend hours of television time denouncing Kansas physician George Tiller as a Nazi, a moral equal to NAMBLA and Al Qaida, and call him “Tiller the Baby Killer” because he performed legal late-term abortions, but nobody can suggest that his words played any part in Tiller’s assassination by an anti-abortion psycho . . .   

. . . but mere words in a novel about a teenaged boy’s coming out are so dangerous to the public that a group of Wisconsin wingnuts not only want it banned from the local library, they want it burned in public.

I mean, the ranks of Wingnuttia are swollen with culture warriors who have built whole careers on the notion that mere video games, movies and TV shows have the power to warp minds and turn innocents into bloodthirsty criminals. The mere existence of Michael Moore was enough to cause the 9/11 disaster, to hear Dinesh D’Souza tell it. But a FreaksNews cable troll can howl against George Tiller night after night and that’s not supposed to have any effect on his viewers? The less stable ones, I mean, assuming that’s a distinction one can make among O’Reilly’s followers. 

While we ponder that question, let’s relax with some highly entertaining video built on O’Reilly’s latest froth-fest against Salon editor Joan Walsh. Good times!

God Squawk

The argument about same-sex marriage has been going on long enough now that we can sort the anti-SSM rationales into three, you must excuse the term, positions: (1) EEEEEYEEWWW!; (2) defining marriage as anything other than a union of man and woman undermines the foundations of civilization; (3) the Big Guy in the Sky says it’s forbidden, and we have to do like he says or he will withdraw his blessing from America and all kinds of bad things will happen.

Since (1) is self-refuting and (2) usually leads to (3), let’s focus on the religious argument — specifically the Christianist view. As it turns out, Damon Linker in The New Republic has a pretty cool rejoinder to the Big Guy in the Sky contingent:

Among many other things, Christian scripture and tradition affirm the legitimacy of slavery, claim that the Jews are cursed for killing Jesus, and assert that one must give away all of one’s belongings and even learn to hate one’s own family before following Christ. These are just a few of the matters on which contemporary Christians, including orthodox Christians like Rod (Dreher), feel quite comfortable breaking with, or explaining away, scripture and tradition. And it’s a good thing, too, because it shows that they’re willing to think for themselves about important moral issues and to use their minds to separate out what is enduringly true in scripture and tradition from the unexamined prejudices that shape and distort everything touched by human hands, very much including received religious norms, practices, and beliefs. The issue, then, is to determine why so many contemporary Christians have decided that the teaching on homosexuality — but not the teachings on slavery, Jews, and the most stringent requirements of becoming a disciple of Christ — deserves to be preserved.

As I’ve noted before (and implied many times as well), I tend not to be impressed by arguments that involve waving around the nearest handy copy of the local holy book. If the Almighty wants to part the clouds, shine down a beam of light and inform the world in thunderous tones that he doesn’t want to see SSM accorded equal status with opposites-attract wedlock, then he’s got my attention. Until then, Jesus whoopers and Christianists can put away their witch doctor paraphernalia and frame their arguments in a rational fashion.

I realize that I have failed to take into account the Rick Santorum if-we-allow-gay-marriages-then-we’ll-end-up-letting-people-marry-house-pets-and-livestock point of view, but since most of us would need nine-tenths of our brains surgically removed before we could address that argument on its proper intellectual level, I figured I’d save us a lot of trouble.

Stupid Prosecutor Tricks

Cases like this are just one more reason to be glad for the ACLU. As a breed, prosecutors are vulnerable to the Witchfinder General Syndrome, and this guy sounds like a classic example of what happens when a prosecutor gets drunk on his authority and power.

Weekend Bookchat

This space is frequently used to ridicule conservatives and Republicans, but in honor of the atmosphere of love and affection generated by the Valentine’s Day weekend, Weekend Bookchat will take this opportunity to step forward and praise Wingnut Nation for its leadership role in recycling.

 Because when one surveys the illiterary annex of the winger aviary, it becomes clear that there is no conservative argument so tired, so lame, so overworked or so played out that some ambitious illiterateur won’t scrape it off the bottom of the aviary and repackage and yet another bold, fresh pile of right-wing thought. Consider, for example, Andrea Peyser’s suavely titled new — that is, “new” — book Celbutards, an attack on Hollywood  liberals. As Steve M. puts it:

Wow, a right-wing attack on the likes of Rosie O’Donnell, Barbra Streisand, and Sean Penn. What a blazingly original book idea.

No, seriously — I bet this is a great book. After all, it was a great book when Bernard Goldberg wrote it and called it 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37). And it was an even greater book when Laura Ingraham wrote it and called it Shut up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America. And it was an even greater book when Michael Savage wrote it and called it The Political Zoo (“Serving as resident biologist and zookeeper, Dr. Savage asks that you watch your step when approaching the widemouth copperhead Ted Turner [also known as Mouthus desouthus], do not feed the ego of stuffed turkey Alec Baldwin [Notalentus anti-americanus], and please keep your children with you at all times around wolf boy Bill Clinton [Fondlem undgropeum]“).

Bloody hell, do these people have any new thoughts? Do they think this stuff is funny? Still? “Hanoi Jane”? Still?

“Still”? Of course still! If there’s one thing you can count on parrots to do, it’s take to the air in a flock to fly around in circles making identical screeching noises. No sooner have you wiped away the wingnut complaints about press being biased in favor of Barack Obama than Bernie Goldberg’s A Slobbering Love Affair:  The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media is deposited on the shelves of your local big box.

Which is why I can predict that  no matter how great Peyser’s book may turn out to be, it will only be dwarfed by the sheer awesomeness of aspiring New Media tycoon Roger Simon’s Blacklisting Myself, an attack on – yes! — Hollywood liberals. Because after conservatives have lied us into a disastrous war, destroyed the economy and laid the foundation for future disasters, what else is there to do but wheel out some creaky Jane Fonda jokes? Or tell everybody that Michael Moore is fat? After all, Dinesh D’Souza did it ahead of them all with The Enemy at Home, and he can leave his gated community without being pelted with eggs, so where’s the downside? 

* * * * *

A look at conservative labor relations. Is jazz dead? Like the man said, that depends on what you know. And leave it to a science fiction writer to come up with a big new idea for writers and authors.

A Dope on Dope

I’m not much of a sports buff, so it’s taken a little while for the nationwide hissy fit over Michael Phelps’ civilization-threatening (and, apparently, career-killing) faux pas with a marijuana pipe to reach my oblivious ears. Reading this foam-flecked columnist carrying on about the incident, I had to wonder who was smoking dope — the swimmer or the writer:

Phelps has not denied or confirmed anything. He has instead apologized for setting a bad example, which it most certainly was. No matter how many people defend marijuana and extol decriminalizing it, there are studies that say the stuff is bad for important functions like reasoning, and can lead to worse abuses.

On one side, an athlete who has managed his career climb so well it netted him eight Olympic gold medals; on the other, a copyhack reciting the kind of drug-war propaganda that has sixth-graders snickering behind their hands as the DARE officer wastes their classroom time. “The stuff is bad for important functions like reasoning”? Maybe Phelps’ dealer should send a couple bales of his finest to the New York Times sports desk. It can’t do much harm and it may help.     

I don’t have any truck with marijuana — my vices are strictly off the shelf — but the only impaired reasoning I can see here belongs to George Vecsey. Dopes shouldn’t write about dope.

Police States ‘R’ Us

It’s never too early to start training your kids in lifelong habits of acquiesence to authority and the presumption of guilt, so remember this Playmobil Security Checkpoint set whenever you get clutched up on a gift idea for the lil’ sprouts. Set it up with this Playmobil Police Checkpoint and the Scan-It Operation Checkpoint Toy X-Ray and your rumpus room will be like a window into the mind of Dick Cheney. All I want to know is, when does the Playmobil  Waterboard Interrogation set come out? (Thanks, Marc.)

Happy Birthday

An obvious choice, sure, but whatever. Without this man, I’m convinced the American South would currently resemble Belfast in the Seventies.