Saturday, January 02, 2010

BoneDaddy's Top Ten Shows of the Decade I'm king of the late lists.

10) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. No one talks about this anymore, but for a while it was as funny as anything on TV. Laughing at it or laughing with it? Either way, you're laughing.

9) 24. Yes, it's a stupid show. Anyone who uses it as an excuse for Bush-era torture is simply an idiot. I got sick of the torture before most. Before it went off the rails, this show was fun, comic book entertainment. TV needs more action, bad accents and wives with amnesia.

8) World Series of Poker. Like everything else on this list, ESPN's heavily edited broadcast of the WSOP Main Event entertained, amused and informed. Nothing else on this list, however, made me money. Respect must be paid. Also, somewhere along the line I started liking Norman Chad. As former Bear Stearns exec Steve Beglieter made a raise - "That's a big bet! Especially in this economy!"

7) Freaks & Geeks. Has an Outsiders-esque cast of future stars. There's a lot of regret in TV geek circles that this show did not last beyond one season, but I'm not sure it needed to do more than it already had. (Technically, this show started in 1999, but most of the shows aired in 2000 and I suspect more people have seen it on DVD in the past decade than saw it broadcast so here it is.)

6) The Office. When I heard they were remaking the brilliant British show I thought, that's stupid. When I heard they cast Steve Carrell I thought, that's brilliant. And it is.

5) Friday Night Lights. Up and down seasons two and three keep this show from landing higher on the list. The first season was pitch perfect. Mr and Mrs Coach get the well deserved acting kudos and Taylor Kitsch sets the hearts a-swooning. For me, Zach Gilford as QB2 Matt Saracen is the heart and soul of the show.

4) Mad Men. The show has such great depth it takes me three pages to say anything about it. Sometimes commentary over at Pandagon, or from Mrs. BoneDaddy, or from Tony Kornheiser on the BS Report will make me re-think scenes in completely different ways because there are many valid ways to read this show. Also, it's one of those shows that just hit on a great cast top to bottom.

3) Lost. This could flip with #2 if it sticks the landing. It's also possible that it could plummet completely off the list if it squanders and sputters to a meandering nonsense ending. Scares me to type that, but it's true. Lost could finish as the longest Twilight Zone episode ever. That could be a great compliment. On the other hand, some of those Twilight Zone episodes aren't actually as good as we remember. (Please stick the landing ...)

2) Arrested Development. One of the best comedy casts of all time combined with the best comedy writing on TV. How good was this show? The jokes you only catch the second time around are better than the jokes other shows labor to set up and announce with a laugh track.

1) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I believe you could study modern U.S. presidents through the comedians who best lampooned them. Nixon through Herblock, Reagan through Doonesbury. Clinton through This Modern World. The best comedy about the W tragedy, and often the best commentary and even the best reporting of the time, came from The Daily Show. One thing the top 7 shows here have in common is great supporting casts. The Daily Show correspondents - going back to the time Ed Helms, Steve Carrell and Steven Colbert worked together and without missing a beat to today's Aasif Mandvi, John Oliver and Larry Wilmore - created some of the best moments on the show. I would buy a "This Week In God" DVD in a second and a "Daily Show news of the 2000s" even faster.

Honorable Mention/Haven't Seen Enough Yet/Cop Out Section: 30 Rock, Dexter (only on season 2), Sportscenter, The Wire (I'm guaranteed to love this show so I haven't watched any until I can devote the time to devouring the whole series, odd as that sounds), Battlestar Galactica (someone should pass a law separating new religions, mythologies and prophecies from TV science fiction. Just stop it.) and The Colbert Report.

Labels: Bush, Lists, poker, sci-fi, TV

09:57 bone daddy

Thursday, August 20, 2009

There will be a time when all the jokes we made about the Bush administration will no longer be jokes but just facts before we knew with certainty that they were facts.

Tom Ridge admits the White House used terror alerts for political gain.

It's only a matter of time before the "Cheney Kept Alive on Diet of Puppy Blood" headline.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime

14:35 bone daddy

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Coming to a Remainder Bin Near You!
"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened." —former president George W. Bush, in Calgary yesterday, discussing the book he plans to write. [AP via Google]

Labels: Books, Bush

15:06 cdogzilla

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

2008 in Books
I took up the 888 challenge this past year and succeeded, although with much less ambition that I intended. I tracked my books through my LibraryThing, which was a blast even while it managed to show me just how middle and lowbrow so much of my reading has become in the past year. In the 888 challenge, you read eight books in eight different categories and are allowed eight repeats. My initial categories were things like politics, history, over 25 years old and books I've been avoiding (generally meaty classics). By the end of the year, poker had its own category, I had split crime and pulp into two separate categories while combining history and politics into one and filling it out with a history of the World Series of Poker, and those books I'd been avoiding? Still generally avoiding them.

That said, my reading has always had more than its share of comics, sci-fi and crime. I shouldn't be shocked by how it looks in cover view.

Two of my favorite books of the year were admirably lowbrow. I can't say enough good things about Lucky at Cards and Grifter's Game, both reprinted by Hard Case Crime. Both are long on obsession and cons and short on meandering. Someone once described a good novel as being like a Ramones song. Bang! Bang! Bang! and you're done. Grifter's Game was initially published as Mona, but you should get the reprint because the cover of the original, while much more lurid, gives away the shocking and poetic ending. And Lucky at Cards features my favorite tag line of the year - "He could handle cards like a master. But could he handle her?" If that doesn't crack you up, go read James Patterson.

My political reading of late has been largely depressing. I'm sending Worst President Ever off with a bunch of anti-Bush books. Trainwreck:The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon)by Bill Press (and researched by Kevin at Ghost in the Machine) bookended the year nicely with Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal. Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy spends no time establishing that W was a horrible president - you already knew that - but tries to explain the possible psychological/Shakespearean family dynamics that lead to W's awful mental make-up. It's a slightly rude poke in the brain of the president. (Excuse the word brain there.) It does contain a lot of personal and Bush family information that may be new to you.

For complete and utter depression, however, I recommend The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How America's War on Terror Turned into a War on America's Ideals by Jane Meyer. It exhaustively details our inexcusable rendition and torture program. Dick Cheney is the star of the book, to his eternal shame. I'm glad I read it, but it truly made me sad.

Kid's books did not. I proudly used children's literature as one of my 888 categories. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was even better than I remembered. Peter is a true character, in every sense, and by the end of the book I disliked Fudge just like one might dislike a younger sibling - and this comes from someone who is but does not have a younger sibling. I'm too old to have read Holes as a kid, but I can easily see why it is heading for classic status. It will be read by generations of subversive kids. Tightly plotted and funny.

Nothing blew me away in 2008, the way Watership Down did in 2007. Although with two strong Lawrence Block novels, a new name may have achieved "Grab at Any Library Sale" status. I'll start 2009's 888 challenge conceding that poker, crime and children's literature may as well be categories and we'll see where it goes.

Labels: 2008, Books, Bush, crime, Lists, poker

14:49 bone daddy

Monday, August 11, 2008

Baggage in the Bat Belt
I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight. It's certainly a very good to great movie, as everyone else has said. Heath Ledger is a mortal lock for an Oscar here if they submit him as a supporting actor. I'd even argue he could possibly score a Best Actor win - considering Anthony Hopkins did it with 15 minutes of screen time as Hannibal Lector. Does Lector/Clarice being man and woman somehow change the equation? They were both considered leads. Why not the Joker? This is really his film.

I'd further argue - because, you know, I like to argue - that it is a fairly iffy film without him. There were two things I'd heard about before going in and unfortunately, they did taint the film a bit for me. Somewhere, I'd read a dig about Christian Bale's Batman voice being one-note. When you listen to the movie with this in mind ... Holy Cow. How did a director/actor combo as good as Nolan/Bale let this monotonous growling take over every line of Batman's? I kept hoping he would talk less. Bale is the anti-Maguire. I like him as Bruce Wayne, not so much in the costume. (I hated the choice of Maguire for Spider-Man, but I do give him credit as the voice of Spidey.) And I apologize if you haven't heard this complaint because I just ruined your next viewing of the movie.

The second bit of baggage going into the movie was the now popular idea that Batman = Bush. Or Cheney. Or some kind of right wing worldview. The vast majority of action movies have a bit of right wing aroma about them. Many of them rely on the idea that someone - Dirty Harry, Bruce Willis, Jack Bauer, whoever - has to break the rules in order to protect us. We can't protect ourselves and rules and regulations make for dull movies, just as villains who give up information without being tortured are kind of sissy villains. Usually I can write this stuff off. If your politics need to be expressed by someone in a costume, you need to re-examine your politics, not me.

Yet, in Dark Knight, the cell phone eavesdropping seemed plunked in solely to parallel Bush's illegal wire-tapping. I found myself muttering, "Well, at least Batman's eavesdropping was effective." Batman accepts the public's (rather sudden) hatred heroically. Bush's low approval rating is not a sign of his nobility, it's a sign of his suckiness. All of this made the sort of leaden speechifying at the end more grating than it needed to be. (There are other, more sensible, ways to interpret the movie if you really think it's worth taking the politics of Batman that seriously. Link via neilalien.)

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, movies

21:57 bone daddy

Thursday, May 01, 2008

How Loathsome
The headline, "White House Admits Fault on 'Mission Accomplished' Banner," struck me as faulty right away. Admits fault? The Bush White House? It can't be.

It wasn't. Read the article.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

Don't you love how the White House pretends Bush is the victim here? Me too. Of course, the reason they weren't more specific and said mission accomplished for these sailors is that they didn't invent that excuse until months after the fact.

What a crummy article. The only fault I can see is that we all misinterpreted a perfectly clear banner and beat up a poor defenseless president. It also continues the myth that Bush flew the plane. I wonder what percentage of Americans believe that Bush was the pilot. I bet above 90.

If you'll forgive me for patting myself on the back, but that day five years ago I told anyone who would listen - not many - that Democrats were going to wind up using that image in political ads.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, history, Iraq, TV

11:26 bone daddy

Friday, December 28, 2007

Top Four Non-Fiction Books of 2007

Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.

4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.

3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.

2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"

1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.

Labels: 2007, Books, Bush, Conservative Goons, Lists, sports

08:56 bone daddy

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ask a simple question Chris Dodd submits a YouTube question for the citizen's questions GOP debate. This is actually quite funny and a clever idea, whether or not the question itself helps terrorists.

Labels: 2008, Bush, youtube goodness

22:56 bone daddy

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Ah, Turkey ready to invade Iraq, Pakistan breaking out the whoop-ass on secular powers and the Get out of Jail free cards on the Taliban types ... how's that "stability to the region" coming? My favorite bit in this article about Musharraf's ham-fisted repression comes in here ...

The general's suspension of the constitution has given Pakistani authorities sweeping powers to detain without charge. Opposition groups reported at least 3,500 arrests over the preceding three days, many of them attorneys.

Pakistan's top human rights defender, Asma Jehangir, was watching Musharraf on television Saturday night explain his declaration of emergency rule as a necessary step in combating extremism. As he spoke, police knocked at her door and announced she was under house arrest.

Notice anything? When Musharraf gave himself the power to detain without charge, he at least announced it.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, Iraq

22:50 bone daddy

Monday, October 08, 2007

Worst. Bumper Sticker. Combo. Ever. I saw a beater of a car sporting the fading "W 04" sticker you still see here and there. You know the one with the flag sticking off the top of the W? That most owners have since snuck out of their houses in the night and scrapped off their cars? Looking over their shoulders to make sure no one's looking? Yeah, that one.

On the other side, a bumper sticker said, "I read your e-mail." Now, this guy probably wasn't one of the Bush goons who probably does read our e-mail. Those guys drive nice cars. Still, isn't it fitting that a W supporter would make a joke (or pass on someone else's joke) about invading your privacy? It's almost like a W supporter was also a Metallica fan and put Kill 'Em All next to the W 04 sticker. Except more subtle.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons

23:17 bone daddy

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

You Are Not What You Own If Tony Snow lived in the "Ownership Society" he's been selling as White House spokesperson, he'd really be screwed. (via Ghost in the Machine.)

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons

22:18 bone daddy

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I'm getting my family-values, anti-gay Republicans caught seeking gay sex confused. It's reached a tipping point. When I first heard the Larry Craig story - this was before GOP'ers started calling for his resignation and before his "Really, I'm still not gay" press conference - I thought it was a late reference to the McCain Florida campaign chair caught soliciting in a park.

I knew it wasn't Vitter, because he was totally straight with his prostitutes, and I knew it wasn't Ted Haggard, because that guy's a Reverend, not to mention he's totally cured of his gayness. I also remember the name Foley (because of the catheter) so I knew it wasn't him. I also remember Jeff Gannon, the gay prostitute who posed as a White House reporter on behalf of the totally straight Karl Rove, because it's one of the most mind-bending examples in the game "How would this scandal have played out for a Democrat?"

See how easy it is to get confused? Anyway, which excuse is worse:

1) "I have horrible luck. There's always been these rumors that I cruise for guys, even though I'm totally straight. Then I wind up in a bathroom where this kind of thing goes on and I happen to have a medical condition that causes me to give the signal for 'I want some sex,' even though I really don't AND I'm cursed with an easy-going nature that made me plead guilty to the thing I didn't do." - Larry Craig

2) "I offered to give him $20 and a blowjob because he was black and I figured that's what he wanted." - Bob Allen

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime

22:14 bone daddy

Thursday, August 23, 2007

No Sense of Decency ... Bush scratches at the wounds of Vietnam in an attempt to smear his critics and prop up faltering support for his Iraq folly. I've long maintained that the pro-war right will get loonier and more violent as the debacle that is Iraq becomes less and less deniable. No reason Bush would be exempt from this I guess. There's two ways of looking at this - either a man with little ability to grasp the present is showing his trouble with the past as well, or Bush knows perfectly well that Iraq is and will continue to be a disaster for some time and he is setting up others to take the blame.

In a small sense, Vietnam War protesters have helped set up Bush's blame-those-who-were-right strategy by taking too much credit for ending Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because of the Vietnamese and, to a lesser degree, because we shouldn't have been there. Not because of the hippies.

Less than a year ago, Bush floated this analogy, prompting Robert Scheer to write ...

The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, "free fire zones," South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors ... none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three US Presidents--two of them Democrats--lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.

Lastly, I'd like to ask, if Bush knows so much about winning in Vietnam, why didn't he go ahead and fight there?

Labels: 2008, Bush, Conservative Goons, history, Iraq

14:21 bone daddy

Monday, August 13, 2007

Karl Rove to Leave White House, Spend More Time with Coven

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime, Iraq

16:50 bone daddy

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Great video on Generation Chickenhawk.

Labels: 2008, Bush, Conservative Goons, Iraq

10:33 bone daddy

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

We're already hearing - for those who couldn't figure it out - that we will fall far short of the goals Bush laid out for the surge/escalation, meeting "not a single goal." First Bush rejects anyone else's (already low) standards or expectations and, in fact, sneers at them. Then he proposes his own (corrupt and artificial and lower) goals as superior. Then he fails to meet them and will probably retroactively creat a third set of goals that he will have to lie to pretend to have met better than expected. I couldn't come up with a better motif of the W years.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime, Iraq

16:07 bone daddy

Monday, July 02, 2007

Who wipes away Libby's prison time? The accountability president. The "restore integrity to the White House" president. The Fitzgerald prosecution, already sort of empty in my book because it did not charge as criminals Rove and Cheney, just got a little emptier.

W and Libby partisans will moan about how he still has the guilty verdict and the fine and lost his job, etc. Still, it occurs to me that Valerie Plame lost her job through the actions of Libby, Cheney and Rove and her job - helping to keep the country safe from WMDs - was a hell of a lot more important than Libby's job of propping up the worst administration ever.

Anyway, only complete scandal fatigue and the absolute fanatical devotion of the right-wing base can keep W above 25% now.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime, Iraq

22:14 bone daddy

Friday, June 01, 2007

Bush's Amazing Achievement [NYRB]

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons

10:15 cdogzilla

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A Modest Proposal This whole timetable issue has a clear and easy solution. Well, at least the financial end of it does. Let's simply fund the Iraq disaster by taxing the people who supported it. You want it, you pay for it. This would also be quite easy to figure out. By 2004, the war was clearly a disaster. If you voted for Bush, you need to sacrifice for this fiasco you supported. Note how I'm exempting those who originally supported the war but came to their senses later. I'm generous that way. Now if you didn't support the war, but voted for Bush for some other reason, sorry, but you get taxed for having your priorities out of whack. Who could possibly complain about this? What, you want other people to fight and pay for your war? Now some might point out that punishing people for the way they vote is unconstitutional. However, this just brings up another beautiful aspect of my plan. By 2004, W. had already demonstrated his disregard for the Constitution. A vote for him was a vote for unconstitutional rule. Except for the fact that it will never happen, I don't see a flaw here.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, Iraq

22:36 bone daddy

Monday, May 07, 2007

I've finally gotten around to reading H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, partially because I loved the show and partially because I was kind of sick of reading on the back of every book that follows something for a year "It's the Friday Night Lights of chess/scrabble/day trading/porn." Just like they always say about the show, it's so much more than football. The portrait of the boom and bust town of Odessa, Texas which has no constant except a love of Mojo Panther football is mesmerizing. It's also very much about race. Bissinger does not flinch or cover up for this town that finally integrated its schools in 1982. And when they had to, they grabbed as many blacks as they could (sending the Hispanics elsewhere) because, you know, who do you want as a running back, a black or a Hispanic? The chapter on the use of the word "nigger" in Odessa is pretty much essential reading on race in America. (It's like household cleaner, you can use it anywhere.)

I've never seen the movie and I have to believe it - like the show - kind of whitewashes some of Bissinger's book. I root for the Panthers on the show. The kids and the town in this book is frequently so ugly, conservative, racist and vain I often felt that losing would be good for them. Then you realize that the other team is often just as ugly and maybe nobody should win or maybe nobody should pour too much into this game.

The chapter on the Midland-Odessa rivalry becomes fascinating in light of the failed W administration. W grew up in Midland and wrecked his first businesses there. Friday Night Lights was published in 1990 and doesn't mention W at all - Bush the Greater gets a few pages - but the descriptions of Midland business culture are appalling when you consider this was W's environment.

"Greed, delusional visions of grandeur, the mercenary mercilessness that made every relationship expendable - Midland perfected all these long before they became the standard of the eighties around the rest of the country."

"Over at the country club, or in enormous corner offices with picture windows that seemed to deserve something more than wide-angle views of scrub brush and mesquite, [Midland oil executives] confused luck with business acumen. Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe they were the creators of it."

This is so much more than football. It's the Friday Night Lights of football.

Labels: Books, Bush, movies, sports, TV

23:33 bone daddy

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I missed Heroes over the long break. When the promos started up again a few weeks ago, I had some genuine anticipation. They could still kill off about half the characters and I wouldn't really mind. And you do have to overlook somethings here and there. For example, if you're Mohinder the scientist guy and you've just knocked out the superpowerful, crazy evil guy who killed your father do you (a) kill him or (b) pick up Peter's corpse and take it to an address you found in his wallet, leaving the crazy evil guy to wake up. Also, if you're Peter, why do you carry your mother's address in your wallet? Don't you have it memorized?

But mostly, it is a well-plotted show and it has some seriously enjoyable characters. How many people watch the telepathic cop trying to figure out if he's more like a Gutenberg or more like that doofus from Road Rules? I like the villian and in Hiro they have someone who perfectly embodies the silly/serious, dorky/cool vibe of the show. I like the show enough that I avoided all those spoiler-ific rumors about ripping off The Watchmen. After last night's episode, I can see that as a valid complaint. A massive disaster in NYC makes Americans put their faith in an unworthy leader. Seems to me like they're riffing on 9/11 as well.

Labels: Bush, TV

23:37 bone daddy

Thursday, March 22, 2007

I must confess I have so far taken a pass on the U.S. attorney scandal. I know many details about the outing of Valerie Plame and I'm exceptionally well-informed about the spinning of pre-war intelligence. I know more than a little about the incompetence of Bush's response to Katrina, but I can only do so much. I'm begining to think this administration is deliberately doing nasty and/or illegal things just to fuck with me.

I'll start to pay more attention if this scandal veers from recent scandal history - possibility of something vile/illegal suggested in media. Media attacked as evil Bush-haters. The vile/illegal thing is proved to have happened but probably not a big deal, right? Okay it's a slightly vile or maybe illegal thing, but Clinton did it too. Well, an underling is responsible for this thing and he's a great person doing a great job in Iraq/New Orleans/the White House. Hey, now that the underling has been disposed of there's really no need to investigate any further, right? Who would ever suggest that the guy who called himself "the Decider" every decided anything? Wow, look! Another scandal!

I'm also not particularly surprised that a guy who rolled his eyes at treaties barring torture would even blink at politically motivated firings. Rove and Bush probably could have gotten Gonzales to approve beatings, water-boarding and then dismissals.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons

23:06 bone daddy

Saturday, February 17, 2007

In my quest to read the book about the political build-up to the Iraq war, I finished Michael Isikoff and David Corn's Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. It's very good, but not definitive. The outing of Valerie Plame gets a lot of attention and Judy Miller of the New York Times has probably never looked worse. The authors document the backstory of three accusations propping up the Iraq menace: uranium in Niger, aluminum tubes, and mobile labs. How easily these could have been kicked out from under the blustery, lying, incompetent Bush adminstration shocks even a cynic like me. Of course, that would have taken an aggressive media, a bold opposition party and maybe somebody inside Bush's bubble willing to say no.

Anneheart's on a quest to read 100 books in '07. I'm not going to make it - without counting kids books anyway - if I keep hitting books like Fiasco and Hubris. I did tear through the second, but neither were particularly lively and both were, obviously, depressing.

Labels: Books, Bush, Iraq

22:40 bone daddy