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Archive for March 2007
Willy Wanker and the Chocolate Flappery
Posted by Clif on 03/31/07 at 4:19 pm
Category: Wankers
Willy Donohue, the wanker behind the Catholic League for Civil Rights for Straight Catholics Only, has his rosary in a twist over a sculpture of Jesus made out of an unapproved material (chocolate) and showing an unapproved body part (the, er, willy). According to Donohue, the sculpture is “”one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” apparently ranking right up there with the Holocaust, slavery, Darfur, and, probably, even the actual crucifixion itself.
Now if an anatomically-correct Jesus is so offensive, perhaps we should ask Donahue where he stands on all those medieval representations of Christ crucified without a loincloth. Like this one. In fact, as Leo Steinberg documents extensively in his classic treatise The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, Renaissance artists frequently depicted a crucified Christ showing the part that Donohue dare not name. Sometimes, mostly during the sixteenth century and in the Low Countries, those depictions were — how shall we say it? — quite turgid. Where, I ask, is the Catholic League on this? Why are they not flooding museums with phone calls, outraged emails and threats of boycotts? Maybe it’s just the chocolate. Or maybe it’s just the dark chocolate; white chocolate might have been okay with these folks.
Of course, the other great thing about a chocolate Christ is the opportunity it provides Donohue to take a swipe at Muslims:
All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended.
The hotel and the gallery were overrun Thursday with angry phone calls and e-mails about the exhibit. [Matt] Semler [the gallery’s director] said the calls included death threats over the work of artist Cosimo Cavallaro, who was described as disappointed by the decision to cancel the display.
“In this situation, the hotel couldn’t continue to be supportive because of a fear for their own safety,” Semler said.
(Cross-posted at The American Street.)
Big Mac and an Order of Super-Sized Lies
Posted by Clif on 03/30/07 at 9:08 am Category: Wingnuts, D.C. Suffrage
Recent legislation to provide one vote in the House of Represen-
tatives to the predominantly black and Democratic District of Columbia has, predictably, resulted in a paroxysm of outrage from some of our favorite wingnuts, including the dimwitted Human Wingnuts columnist, Mac Johnson. Mac’s rather odd reason for disenfranchising the District has something or other to do with the District’s square mileage:
[The D.C. Voting Rights Act] seeks to turn the nation’s common capital into an illegal pseudo-state less than 5% the size of Rhode Island, so that the tiny District — no more than the downtown area of one medium sized city — can have its own voting delegation in Congress.
I suppose we can call that the “one acre, one vote” theory of voting rights.
Of course, the best part of this argument is that all of Mac’s figures are wrong. The landmass area of the District is 61.4 square miles which is three times larger than the 20 square miles that make up the island of Manhattan, which by all accounts is substantially larger than the downtown area of every other city in the country, much less a medium-sized city. Rhode Island’s land area is 1,044 square miles. I’m sure you can do the math better than Mac.
Obviously, Mac either can’t count or can’t figure out how to use an Internet search engine. According to Mac’s bio, he is supposed to be a “medical researcher” but my guess is that the only medical research Mac is allowed to do at his company is to find out who keeps leaving wilted lettuce in the sink of the employee kitchen.
Chicken Hawk Down
Posted by Clif on 03/28/07 at 7:48 pm Category: America's Worst Law Student
Drawing on his deep military experience (garnered mostly from a class in Commercial Paper at Harvard Law and from hours of playing first-person shooters), America’s Worst Law Student™ Ben Shapiro knows exactly how to assure the return of the British military hostages being held in Iran. Of course, it involves lots of guns a-blazing (wielded, of course, by people other than Ben since these guns will be, you know, real):
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain says British efforts to obtain the sailors’ release will enter a “different phase” if current negotiations fail. That “different phase” would include releasing evidence that the Iranians had entered Iraqi territory to grab the British sailors. That “different phase” would not, however, entail . . . military action. In other words, Britain will act miffed.
Now people with less military experience than Ben will no doubt imagine that a military invasion of Iran to snatch hostages might not result in the retrieval of any live hostages or, for that matter, any dead ones.
But Ben has anticipated this liberal pantywaist argument and counters it with the story of Ion Perdicaris and Teddy Roosevelt, thereby showing that Ben is not only America’s Worst Law Student™ but also America’s Worst History Student:
One century ago, Moroccan bandit Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli kidnapped supposed American citizen Ion Perdicaris. Teddy Roosevelt famously responded that he wanted “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” and dispatched seven battleships and a marine detachment to Morocco. The incident ended with the safe return of Perdicaris.
Of course, what Ben neglects to mention is that Roosevelt’s demand and show of military force had absolutely nothing to do with the release of Perdicaris, which makes this musty century-old anecdote completely beside the point.
The real story is this. Raisuli kidnapped Perdicaris from his villa outside Tangier and then demanded from the Sultan of Morocco a ransom of $70,000. Roosevelt dispatched battleships and marines to the area. The fleet waited in the Mediterranean Sea since they had no clue where Perdicaris was being held and thus no hope of actually finding and rescuing him. In the meantime, however, Britain and France urged the Sultan to pay the ransom, which he did and which is why Raisuli released Perdicaris.
The famous line — “”Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead” — was not uttered by Roosevelt but was the text of a telegram sent by Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay to the U.S. Consul-General in Morocco. Worse for Ben’s narrative the telegram was sent after the Sultan had already agreed to pay Raisuli’s ransom and was simply a bit of political theater intended to liven up Roosevelt’s second nominating convention, which had drifted off into unbearable dullness.
But to hear Ben tell the story, it was Roosevelt’s demand and a marine rescue mission that led to the hostage release. This is probably because Ben’s version of events comes more from a movie, “The Wind and the Lion,” than it does from reality. The movie is a fictional version of the Ion Perdicaris affair where, for the entertainment of film audiences, Roosevelt invades Morocco to rescue Mr. Perdicaris, rather oddly played by Candice Bergen and renamed Eden Perdicaris.
Once again it becomes crystal clear that everything the chickenhawks believe about war, they learned by watching DVDs in their underpants.
Report from the Department of Mindless Exaggeration
Posted by Clif on 03/27/07 at 10:52 pm Category: Gay Issues
In reading some of the wingnut outrage about the gay bus tour by Soulforce to campuses that expel gay students, I stumbled upon the writings of one Reuben David, an assistant professor of “Communication Arts” at North Central University in Minnesota. Last year David referred to the Soulforce bus tour as “weird sexual terrorism against heterosexual marriages.”
But it gets better:
Osama Bin Laden’s threat against the west is milder compared to the movements of [Soulforce] and others who are eating away at the vitals of a traditional society like zombies threatening to destroy traditional families. This is a guerilla war against traditional human marriages.
Yeah, right:
This line is blank
Global Warming: Special Victims Unit
Posted by Clif on 03/24/07 at 9:16 pm Category: Stupid Republicans, Climate Change
Fred Thompson, aka Arthur Branch by day and Mr. Moneybags for Scooter Libby at night, has been spouting off on global warming and, not surprisingly, has all the acumen about global warming that you would expect from a T.V. actor and right-wing hack. As with his ideological pals, James Inhofe and the hilariously witless Alicia Colon, somebody dangled the “It’s Getting Warmer on Mars” bauble in front of him and he’s grabbed it with the undisguised glee of a three-year-old:
Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming.
NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.
Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder.
And, so, another wingnut joins the “Blame the Sun First” crowd. And he has enlisted Pluto and Jupiter to his cause.
We’ve talked about Mars before. Current warming trends are mainly attributable to a wobble in the planet’s axis.
Pluto? Pluto orbits the sun every 248 years and its current warming is related to the planet’s current relative proximity to the sun in its elliptical path.
Jupiter? Uh, not getting warmer. Surface storms are apparently redistributing temperature so that some parts of Jupiter are getting warmer and other parts are getting colder.
You know, if these oil company shills and Republican hacks are going to play amateur astronomer, they ought to at least do a Google search before spouting off on the climate on Jupiter.
(Cross-posted at The American Street.)
Deport Lou Dobbs!
Posted by Clif on 03/23/07 at 9:03 am Category: Wankers
Lou Dobbs took off a moment from his daily assault on illegal immigrants who work without visas to be an illegal lawyer and practice law without a license.
Guess what? That little ol’ subcommittee can’t do much of anything to force executive branch employees to testify without the help of the very man and department at the center of this altogether silly and over-baked controversy. That’s right; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or one of his U.S. attorneys would have to enforce any subpoenas refused by any of the president’s aides.
The problem with letting illegal lawyers practice law is that they don’t know what they are talking about. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate all lawyers. Just illegal ones without licenses who take jobs away from real lawyers who have licenses and pay bar dues.
Legal lawyers, unlike undocumented lawyers such as Dobbs who sneak over the border and practice law on CNN, are quite aware that it is not Abu Gonzales who would enforce a Senate subpoena. Real lawyers are familiar with 2 U.S.C. § 288b(b), which states that the Senate Counsel (not Abu Gonzalez) is the lawyer who enforces Senate subpoenas.
Practicing law without a license is a crime in all 50 states. But rather than prosecuting Dobbs for his foray into the black market for unauthorized legal services, I say we just deport him. To Guatemala.
We emailed Lou Dobbs to point out his legal blunder. Sadly, he hasn’t responded. Usually undocumented lawyers have a hard time speaking legal English, so Dobbs probably was unable to understand our email.
Thanks to Adorable Girlfriend at Republic of Dogs for the heads up on this.
America’s Worst Grandmother
Posted by Clif on 03/22/07 at 8:58 am Category: Alicia Colon
Alicia Colon’s latest contribution to our nation’s arts and letters — “Rats, Here Come the Bureaucrats” — demonstrates that not only is she arguably New York’s worst columnist but she is also Staten Island’s (and possibly even America’s) worst grandmother. “Rats” tells the sad tale of how, allegedly, NYC housing inspectors treated her so badly that she “ended up in an emergency room with severe chest pains.”
Imagine hordes of inspectors demanding access to your home so they can check if you have peeling lead-paint chips, and you might end up there as well.
But before you shed more tears over the terrible plight of the literary lion of Staten Island, you might want to consider just why Alicia attracted the attention of the housing inspectors in the first place:
Suicide is Painless
Posted by Clif on 03/21/07 at 9:13 am Category: Wingnuts, Iraq
Michael Medved, once again, wins the daily intellectual Special Olympics competition over at Clown Hall with this uniquely preposterous take on the Walter Reed scandal:
The recent hearings about the shabby treatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reade [sic] Medical Center represented a concerted effort to transform America’s military into a victims group worthy of liberal sympathy. . . [in an] ongoing effort to portray active duty personnel as oppressed and hapless losers, rather than formidable and willing warriors.
And here you and I just thought it was an effort to prevent wounded veterans from having to sleep in their own urine. What on earth were we thinking?