arse poetica

Worst.President.Ever.

Harper’s: “Worst. President. Ever.”

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

[snip]

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the
next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

I don't even know who to shake my fist at first.

Come, Armageddon, Come

Is Murkan culture is sustainable? It perpetuates the lone (male) hero myth, normalizes adolescent obsessions, and at least representationally subjugates all who do not fit in prior categories. Can it possibly bear out in our collective experience that the only honorable brave intelligent dedicated folks among us are lone white guys? It's so tired. I'm done.

"In a new subplot added by the filmmakers, the mayor of Whoville has 96 daughters. He has one son. Guess who gets all his attention? Guess who saves the day? Go ahead, think about it, I'll wait ... Boys get to save the world, and girls get to stand there and say, I knew you could do it. How did they know he could do it? Maybe because they watched every other movie ever made?"

--Peter Sagal, father of three daughters and host of National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” in a commentary on NPR about the new big-screen adaptation of “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!”

Peter Sagal is my new BFF of all time.

[via Broadsheet]

Heckuva Job, Bushie

81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track.

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

It was not reported if that 4% worked at Halliburton and its subsidiaries.

Why, Yes, It *is* for Lack of Trying

Damn you, Twitter! You killed my blog! It's easier to write (and think) in snippets, I won't lie. Coupled w/ the holiday crush and a deadline push, not a lot of extra brainspace 'round these parts. And as always, the insanity of our political reality inspires more catatonia than logorrhea.

For a long time I didn't miss the blog, didn't even care, over it. What the hell else could be said about my hate for Donald Rumsfeld? (Given the endless depths of his venality, a lot probably.) Then as my deadline passed from memory and I was able to relax into reading other things, enjoyable things, articles and essays and fiction -- real, honest-to-god fiction! -- and, as always, it made me want to record a little something here and there. A week later, here I am.

Anyhoo, still alive. More latre as the inspiration (or frustration) comes. In the meantime, here's a pretty picture to further signify the unspeakably boring shoegazey nature of this post:

My shoe, my pal JM's coffee table.

It's Just Not Fair

The world could be run by decent people of conscience. It could, right?

He's got my vote (until such time as the Dem nominee--obviously not this man--is chosen when I, again seized w/ disgust and dismay, will vote for said namby-pamby nominee in hopes that RoveCo has not already stolen the "election").

Sob.

Dried by the Breath of Unicorns

When historians look back on the Bush madministration's legacy of heinous crimes and mind-boggling idiocy, will they also note that Bush, besting despots and buffoons the world over since the dawn of time, has somehow managed to kill satire dead?

President To Investigate Where Laundry Chute Goes.

What? Somebody tell a joke?

(Here's Your Hat) What's Your Hurry, Trent Lott?

First I read this: Lott to retire; Kyl eyes whip role.

Then I think, Hmm. Something's fishy. Wasn't that repugnant misogynist L*rry Flynt sliming around town making pronouncements about bombshell announcements? Hmm.

Then I find this: Is a Male Escort Behind Trent Lott's Resignation?

I might need that new category for Closeted Homo-Hatin' Repugnican Senators after all.

Shorter Trent Lott: When I'm not pining for the bad old days of segregation, I'm (allegedly) blowing young male escorts while promoting anti-gay legislation. Sounds about right for today's Repugnican Party! I'm sure they'll miss ol' T.Lo dearly.

And I wouldn't give one hoot who Trent Lott did or did not blow if he weren't a dangerous, civil rights-attacking bigot lawmaker while he did or did not do it.

You, Too, Can Profit On the Backs of the Working Poor!

Extracting the maximum profit from the working poor. Finally, a lobby we can all get behind!

Predatory Lending Association (PLA).

Take that, grandma! Who says you need heat all winter?

Take that, family of 5 living on minimum wage! Scrambling for food will make you more competitive in the marketplace! Bootstraps, people, bootstraps!

Some people call them "debt traps," we call them opportunities!

Librul Conspiracy Confirmed!

This article refuses to plainly state two very obvious things that would put its provocative headline in context: 1) the Bush administration has been a miserable failure on a scale such that the scope of our national disaster is almost too frightening to contemplate and 2) professors engage critical thinking, analysis, research, contemplation, rigorous debate, peer review, and the scientific method to separate the facts from the Faux Nooze hyena pack echo chamber swiftboating.

Faced with a party of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Alito, Gonzalez, Rice, Bremmer, Feith, and the grandmaster buffoon of all time, not to mention "go f*ck yourself" and "known unknowns" and "Stuff happens" and "mission accomplished" and "quaint" Geneva Conventions and rescinded habeas corpus and moral relativism on torture, among many other tragic and infuriating injustices, is it any wonder the learned among us vote Democratic? Just venturing a guess here.

Also, who OK'd the punctuation in that headline?

Ivy League Faculty Giving Democratic, More Heavily Than Ever.

Professors and administrators at the nation's top colleges are supporting Democratic candidates for president at a rate higher than the historic averages.

More than 86 percent of those who teach or work directly for an Ivy League university have donated to a Democrat so far during the 2008 campaign, according to an analysis of campaign finance reports. That percentage -- which does not include those who work in affiliated hospitals -- is more than 10 points higher than the education industry as a whole.

Of the roughly $470,000 donated by these Ivy League higher ups, approximately $205,000 has been given to Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, and $147,000 to Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. The top Republican recipient was former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, who received approximately $33,000 in Ivy League largesse.

"I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that professors are more liberal than most," Massie Ristch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics, told the Huffington Post. "This industry is as Democratic as the oil industry is Republican and I don't think the split in either end would surprise anyone. With professors, however, we assume that these are more ideologically driven than economic."

No, Massie Ristch, it's not a surprise to anyone because it is one of the oldest class-baiting tropes in the Repugnican bag of smelly tricks. Thanks for playing along.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the education industry has become increasingly Democratic over the past twenty years. Whereas in 1990, 57 percent of the industry's donations - including Political Action Committee dollars - went to Democratic candidates, by 2006 that number had increased to 71 percent. The amount of money in play is also on the rise. In 1996 the total amount of contributions from academia was more than $8.8 million. By 2000, that had doubled and in 2004 it doubled again to more than $36 million.

Gosh, I wonder what's happened in the last twenty years to spur those in the education industry to "become increasingly Democratic." Who can tell in this reportage vacuum? Could it be that for 12 of those 20 years we've suffered through disastrous Repugnican/Bush family policy? Hmm. Feh.

You Can Sell Anything

I have a visceral reaction to stories like this. (You can't sell that! It belongs to the world!) Why am I so offended?

::sigh::

Magna Carta Is Going on the Auction Block.

The 2,500 words fill a page that is a couple of inches shorter than this one, but almost as wide. The faded letters in Latin are unreadable in places. Something that looks like a scraggly, russet-colored tail hangs from the bottom.

It is the document that laid the foundation for fundamental principles of English law. Angry colonists complained long before the Boston Tea Party that King George III had violated it. The men who drafted the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights borrowed from it.

It is Magna Carta, agreed to by King John of England in 1215 and revised and reaffirmed through the 13th century. The tail dangling off the page is a royal seal.

And it is about to go on sale.

[snip]

Mr. Redden arranged the Magna Carta auction quietly, so quietly that Sotheby’s did not tell its own employees why it was changing arrangements for other auctions. James Zemaitis, the director of Sotheby’s 20th-century design department, said he was asked to give up a room at Sotheby’s headquarters on York Avenue at East 72nd Street that he had reserved for a pre-auction exhibition of his own.

“All they told me was: ‘David Redden is selling this really important document, the most important document of all. Can you give up this room for us?’ ” he recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Sure, but what is he selling, the Magna Carta?’ ”

Yeah.