"What a fantastic monument to the better instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon." [Hunter S. Thompson] "For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad." [Hunter S. Thompson] "(Nixon) had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws. That was Nixon's style - and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds." In 1972, (back when Hunter Thompson and I both proudly carried our NRA creds) I would have danced on Nixon's grave - but the son-of-a-bitch wouldn't DIE! As we all have heard, "Time heals all wounds." Or heels wound all time . . . Nixon finally DID croak, providing an impetus to reassess the legacy of the Shah of San Clemente, "Dick the Trick". The gift of time allowed me sufficient objectivity to understand that Richard M. Nixon had been the last "liberal" president. (Obviously, when the Right wing-nuts characterize Eisenhower Republicrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as liberals, leftists, socialists, whatever, they've probably been smoking too much of their own propaganda.) Ed Quillen - musing in "Common Dreams" - in the article, "To Write Like Hunter S. Thompson" - says, "Thompson intuitively sized up the ruthless, ego-driven pragmatism of Nixon some 30 years ago." Thompson is entirely correct when he calls Nixon "the CREATOR of many of the once-proud historical landmarks that these dumb bastards are savagely DESTROYING now: The Clean Air Act of 1970; Campaign Finance Reform; The Endangered Species Act; opening a Real-Politik dialogue with China; and on and on." On and on, by the way, includes the integration of America's schools and the passage of Title IX. (The asshole looks better and better to me every day.) (Me, too, Ed.) "The prevailing quality," writes Thompson, "of life in America - by ANY accepted methods of measuring - was inarguably freer and more politically OPEN under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of our Lord, 2002." Yeah, and even the Republicans were interesting back then.
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IT'S THAT HOMOEXUAL AGENDA AGAIN ...
John McKay of Canadian Press Common Dreams has this:
The hit feature Shrek 2 joins the ranks of animated films to be "outed" by some Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., who charge that cross-dressing and transgender themes have made their way into the beloved kids' movie and warn parents to beware. Although many people see the Oscar-nominated film as a humorous story about a green ogre and his true love, the Traditional Values Coalition has a different take on the animated feature."Shrek 2 is billed as harmless entertainment but contains subtle sexual messages," the coalition says on its website of the movie, a popular DVD rental ... "Parents who are thinking about taking their children to see Shrek 2 may wish to consider the following."
(CP PHOTO/HO/DreamWorks)The article then proceeds to describe one of the characters, an "evil" bartender (voiced by Larry King) who is a male-to-female transgender in transition and who expresses a sexual desire for Prince Charming.
In another identified scene, Shrek and Donkey need rescuing from a dungeon by Pinocchio and his nose, which is made to extend as an escape bridge by getting the wooden boy to lie about not wearing women's underwear.
Whoa! I just remembered seeing that strange shotgun-toting hunter Elmer Fudd in the 'toon where he realized Bugs Bunny was in drag. Yeah, he was really pissed - but only because he saw Bugs's cotton tail realized the rabbit had tricked him!
McKay writes:
"So far, the coalition's "gaydar" doesn't seem to have picked up on DreamWorks' Shark Tale, in which a shark mafioso, voiced by Robert DeNiro, must come to terms with the fact he has a vegetarian son who likes to dress up as a dolphin."
" ... though I adore them with all the duty possible, yet the more a man considers and observes them, the less he finds of difference between them and other men." [Samuel Pepys, diarist, observing his boss, Charles II]
REFLECTING ON "NEW JOURNALISM"
AND HUNTER THOMPSON'S ROLE -
with fellow "New Journalist" / novelist Tom Wolfe
" ... Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was.
Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language." [Tom Wolfe]
Funny - and brutal, sipping Chivas or Wild Turkey:
"(Gary Hart) would have been a good President ... he just tripped over his dick."
Kitty Dukakis: "She was a really good advertisement for speed for twenty-six years."
He was a writer's writer:
"When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful."
"The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece."
Meanwhile, the White House Press Corps now fully understands that Scott McClellan responds to major sucking-up: “Oh, before we go inside, Jim - pay no attention to the gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values White House living room.”
Thanks to Al Franken for turning us on to the "2005 Republican Freedom Calendar: Celebrating a Century and a Half of Civil Rights Achievement by the Party of Lincoln." Seriously. See it for yourself @ Diversity among the Repugs ...Thoughts on Slavery over @ Ambivablog (which appears to be a personal, progressive, sort of, Christian site:
Slaves were separated from their own kin and made the quasi-kin of another house, owing the obligations of kinship without receiving any back. Male slaves did the work of sons, but could never inherit or achieve authority or status. Female slaves were sexually available to the master, but were not afforded a wife's honor nor the ability to produce heirs . . .
Americans chose to enslave a group that was conspicuously foreign. Race - a concept that, strictly speaking, didn't exist in the biblical era - was simply the old family/nonfamily distinction on a much larger scale. But this time, it involved breeding an entire ethnic group to be basically kinless. The family bonds among American slaves were not recognized by the law and often not in practice either; the only binding tie was to the master.
Here's the kicker for unreconstructed Confederates:
The Bible tells us that every group identity outside of Christ is doomed to die. In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, and when he comes back all the nations as we know them will be gone. If people want to cling to an identity based on blood or geography or something else, that really is a LOST CAUSE. (Emphasis added)
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Da Rev may be your worst nightmare -
a gun-totin' rationalist progressive . . .
