-- Yogi Berra
-- Is homosexuality immoral? Hillary Clinton dithered over an answer, finally telling ABC it was for someone else to conclude whether homosexuality is immoral. WTF?! Dems, how about this for an answer: In a free country, it's not the business of a politician nor the government to make judgments about what consenting adults do in the bedroom -- PERIOD. It is also not the business of the military to examine the sex lives of its personnel unless it is affecting their conduct while on duty. If you personally have a problem with someone else's sexual preference, perhaps you need professional help because it's your problem, not theirs, you miserable busybody.
-- Speaking of New York's junior Senator, somebody from her campaign tell her to stop with the accents already. Ever since the campaign days of Gennifer Flowers and 'stand by your man,' Hillary seems addicted to embarrassing herself by occasionally dropping into Norma Rae mode in her speeches. Listen, Mrs. Clinton, you're a bright middle-class white girl from Park Ridge, Illinois, with a very good education who grew up to be a wealthy white woman currently residing in the upper-crust suburbs of New York City when you're not in Washington. Your stint as First Lady of Arkansas notwithstanding, you're just not the Target/Wal-Mart shopper type; your tastes are more chicken Cordon Bleu than chicken-fried steak, and I'll bet you eat ribs with a knife and fork in private, if you ever eat ribs in private at all. This is nothing to be ashamed of, it's just who you are. No one believes it when you start spouting with a Trailer Trash Queen drawl: real Southerners wince at your pandering; everyone else ponders your mental condition. It's even worse when you try to get down and funky -- it's akin to Pee Wee Herman trying to win a Soul Train dance contest. Just be yourself and stop trying so hard to appeal to every ethnicity and region.
-- Good for Mark Green, new co-owner with his brother Steve of Air America Radio, responding to the flap over the Dems refusing to participate in debates hosted by Ailes' neocon Fox News, for brilliantly proposing that liberal AAR host a debate for the Republican presidential candidates in New Hampshire. He assured the GOP that "we too can be fair and balanced." Question: Why hasn't this story received the media play the Fox News ploy did?
-- Boo and hiss to the bland blonde GOP robot on MSNBC recently, advertised as a 'Republican Strategist' (I didn't bother to catch her name, but she's a new face), who compared Alberto Gonzales firing eight prosecutors for doing their jobs to the BS 'Travelgate' nothingburger during the Clinton years. Like most would-be Mary Matalin's, she apparently can't discern the difference between the Clinton's hiring new staff for the White House travel office and federal prosecutors sending politicians to jail for bribery and corruption. Here's a hint, Chuckles: 'Travelgate' did not affect the Republic in any way, nor cost the taxpayer a cent; political corruption and bribery, on the other hand, gets us into needless wars, pollutes our atmosphere, wastes our money on weapons and projects we don't need, and rots the foundation of our democracy. As Smiley O'Reilly would say, "Get it?"
-- "Mistakes were made" aren't words you use to accept responsibility -- that would be "I made mistakes" -- rather, it's a phrase to avoid or diffuse responsibility. As the your ol' Tattler has said before, if the average person says "I'm responsible" for a botched job at work, co-signing a loan, or committing a crime, they get fired, pay money or go to jail. Only in the twisted Bizarro World of official Washington can someone like Alberto Gonzales, or his boss George W. Bush, accept responsibility and keep his job. Gee, what message is this sending to all those children out there that Republicans say they want to inject with good moral values?
-- Seen those reprehensible TV ads touting Bush's complicated and overly expensive Medicare prescription drug plan? The message of this ad is confusingly bifurcated: it tells the consumer to support the plan because 'it's working' while it also says 'let's give the plan a chance to work!' What Big Pharma front group put together this hash? If 'it's working' it doesn't need 'a chance to work' because it's already working; only things that aren't working need a chance to work, which this plan isn't. Sweet Jesus.
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The Dirty Work of Empire
I wonder how many of our troops in Iraq feel exactly the same way as Orwell did.
"All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically -- and secretly, of course -- I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos -- all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty."
-- George Orwell, excerpted from "Shooting an Elephant," an essay on his short-lived career as a British police officer in Burma.
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