Are you there, God? It's me, Lurker...

I just wanted to know.... why did you put so many nimrods and twits on this planet?

Exhibit A-- Doug Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, one of the chief architects of the Iraq debacle.

Here he is, getting thoroughly dismantled and spindled by Jon Stewart while trying to sputter excuses and ass-covering explanations for the Bush Administration.....

Link with video.

I look at this sort of stuff with a historian's eye-- personally, I think that thirty or forty or fifty years down the road, people will be writing books about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in much the same way they write books about Voltaire or Mark Twain now. Humor makes things stick-- and you know what? The right wing might have the Heritage Foundation and all those other think tanks slaving away to write their own version of history, but we progressives have all the comedians. ;)

Incidentally-- John McCain's campaigning in western Washington State today, and one of the events on the slate is a fundraising dinner for which people will pay $33,100 per plate to attend. That says a lot about where the financial base for his election is coming from-- how many people can drop a figure comparable to MY ANNUAL SALARY on ONE MEAL??? That's the Republican Party for ya-- the only thing they want from anyone but the rich is their votes. Compare that to the millions of people who donated less than $200 each to Obama, and you get a picture of what people actually want in a candidate this year.

Incidentally-- I got a sunburn today. I'm burned as red as Stalin's undershorts (tightie reddies?).

Anyone want to go see a battleship?

Brazil

"Brazil" was a movie Terry Gilliam and a few conspirators made back in 1985; in large part, it's a satire on Orwell's '1984' and Thatcher's Britain. I can't believe it's taken me so long to get around to watching it....

One of the first scenes of the movie is a TV interview of a government official, a Deputy Minister from the Ministry of Information named Eugene Helpmann, who reminds me entirely too much of Donald Rumsfeld for this to be a good thing.....



Interviewer: What do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?

Helpmann: Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game, they'd get a lot more out of life.

Interviewer: Nevertheless, Mr. Helpmann, there are those who maintain that the Ministry of Information has become too large and unwieldy...

Helpmann: David... in a free society information is the name of the game. You can't win the game if you're a man short.

Inerviewer: And the cost of it all, Deputy Minister..... Seven percent of the gross national product?

Helpmann: I understand this concern on behalf of the tax payers. People want value for money. That's why we always insist on the principle of Information Retrieval charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and for the Information Retrieval Procedures used in their interrogation.

Interviewer: Do you believe that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

Helpmann: Oh, yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs. We're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

Helpmann: Why should decent law-abiding citizens have to subsidize criminals?

Interviewer: But Mr. Helpmann, the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.

Helpmann: Beginner's luck.



Am I completely out to lunch here, or is this not something you could imagine someone from the Bush Administration saying on Meet the Press?

On the other hand, a huge national security bureaucracy, a long and pointless battle against terrorists, and a government that arrests and tortures people arbitrarily.... well, that's just un-American, isn't it? We don't seem to have got to the point of billing people for the expense of torturing them, though...



Note-- apparantly this movie has been edited six days from Shabbos and there are several versions of it; the US version, as usual, apparently has most of the good bits left out.