Music of the Day: Flying Monkey Orchestra, Back in the Pool

Someone (we're not sure who) last year signed us up for a subscription to Newsweek, that scurrilous left-wing fluff-rag that shows up, damnit, weekly. Mostly it goes, un-read, into the magazine rack next to the sofa, but every now and then, just for fun (or to jack up my bile-level) I pick up an issue and peruse it, which I did this morning.

The lead article this week was entitled The New War on Hillary by two people by the name of Darman and Hosenball and it was four pages of nothingness about the Senator from New York and ostensible presidential candidate, complete with six flattering photos and one not-so-flattering photo of her included. When I read the headline I almost passed this morning's Starbucks' through my nose laughing, but then I thought to myself, "Okay, perhaps there's a new war against Hillary--let's see who is involved and what they're saying. Maybe I'll enlist. . . ."

At the least I thought I'd get a good laugh out of the piece--after more than seven years of ceaseless, unending, unremitting, predictable, mendacious, grotesque Bush-bashing from every quarter of the mainstream media, the idea of a "new war on Hillary" seemed pretty humorous, and far-fetched, on its face, but what the hell, I thought, it's early in the day, the sky is blue, the breeze is cool, Max the Wonder Dog is still asleep and not needing to go out for walkies, so maybe I'll invest six or seven minutes in this screed.

Result: No evidence, from what I could tell, to justify the headline, no big revelation about a "new war" against the Mrs., just some recapitulation of old stuff from R. Emmett Tyrrell and something about Dan Burton being a "little-heard-from member of the minority party." Oh yeah, some guy named David Bossie, who worked for Burton, is mentioned twice, with one of those being this block-buster sentence: "In recent months, he [Bosie] has returned to investigating the Clintons, this time for a tough documentary scheduled for release in theaters this fall."

That's it: A one-man war, although the article alludes to other "active research teams, " all un-named. Talk about anti-climax; I finished my second cup of coffee without incident--no laughing, no immediate urge to fling Newsweek into the dumpster.

I made the mistake, however, of further perusing this week's issue of one of America's most popular "adult comic books," as my old running mate Dr. GDA, Jr., calls this rag, and this is what I found in the "My Turn" column. Some geezer named Denker in Staten Island has AN ENTIRE PAGE devoted to his maunderings and fulminations about being a nudist. Now this had laugh potential. And I was not disappointed. The "editors" at Newsweek gave this nut-job a full page to babble about such weighty notions as these: "All people should join me in taking off their clothes." He then lists six (count 'em) reasons why being nekkid is a good idea, starting with the most obvious and important reason, which is: "We could all zip through airport security." Yep, that's it, I want to sit, naked, on a freezing plane for five hours while flying to see dear old Mom for my next visit. Be careful with that seatbelt! And in case of a crash-landing, I'm gonna' die for sure because there is no way in hell I'm putting my head between my legs to get in that FAA-approved crash-survival-position. Call me crazy. . . .

Moving right along to nudity-virtue number three, Denker tells us that "nudists don't know how rich anyone is because everyone is dressed [sic] the same." This is followed by virtue number four, which is, "nudists listen to each other, because at a clothing-optional beach everyone makes eye contact." Damn those clothes for reducing beach eye-contact! Finally we're told that "nudists tend to be very kind people who take up many worthy causes."

At that point I have a disconcerting image of geezer-nudists along the side of the road to town, bending over to pick up litter for collection in those blue plastic bags they heft--a scary thought and one liable to cause countless auto accidents.

It's good to learn, too, that Denker's high blood pressure is alleviated by stumbling around in the altogether at the beach, but what's good for him may not be so good for me. For instance, going back to the War on Hillary for just a second, the thought of seeing Hillary Clinton nude in an airport security line is both funny and sufficiently off-putting that I had to fling the Newsweek into the dumpster. I never even made it to George Will's column at the back of this rag--and I don't think that's a design flaw on the part of the editors.

AJ

Yesterday, on a CBS Sunday news show, Senator Joe Lieberman said, "I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq." "And to me, that would include a strike into. . .over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

There's more, so here's the link, straight from the horse's mouth at CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/10/ftn/printable2908476.shtml

AJ

Music of the Day: Chris Standring, Hip Sway

Folks I would love to share a cab ride with (in no particular order) regardless of the weather:

Florence King.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Sandra Day O'Connor.
Vaclav Havel.
Bill Bryson.
Elie Wiesel.
Pete Sampras.
Peggy Noonan.
Ed Koch.
Mark Steyn.
Joseph Epstein.
Annie Proulx.
Stephen Ambrose.
David Horowitz.
Michael Brecker.
Bo Derek.
Victor Davis Hanson.
Billie Jean King.
Charles Krauthammer.
Sally Satel.
William F. Buckley.
Rod Laver.
Norman Podhoretz.
P.J. O'Rourke.
General Tommy Franks.
Thomas Sowell.
Keith Jarrett.
Lynne Truss.
Richard Russo.
Mona Charen.
Mark Bowden.
Charles Barkley.
Tom Wolfe.
Helen Fielding.
Andy Narell.
Robert Conquest.
James Webb.
Cormac McCarthy.
Margaret Atwood.
Firoozeh Dumas.
Glenn Beck.
V.S. Naipaul.
Mike Mainieri.

Folks I wouldn't share a cab ride with in a freakin' snowstorm--the clueless, the hapless, the witless, the mean, the mendacious, the moronic, the inane, the vapid, the vacuous--but hey, why focus on the dipsticks, the nay-sayers, the America-bashers? This list would include some of the usual suspects such as Dennis Kucinich, Sean Penn, Jimmy Carter, Jane Fonda, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Janet Reno, and unfortunately too many others but I choose not to spend too much time thinking about these people.

AJ

Music of the Day: The Stars and Stripes Forever

You can find all sorts of interesting facts about D-Day on various internet sites and, for those of you so inclined, in textbooks, memoirs, and biographies about World War II. What you may not find so readily is this simple fact--that about 9000 Allied soldiers lost their lives on this one day in 1944.

Nine thousand men.

In one day.

To defeat the enemies of freedom in far away Europe.

For the second time in less than 50 years.

Nine thousand men.

In one day.

AJ

Music of the Day: James Brown, In The Jungle Groove

Here's a little gem from the people at Reuter's in Tehran dated June 3, 2007. It seems that the president of Iran, ol' Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is at it again, this time in another speech made in advance of Monday's anniversary of the death of our old friend Ayatollah Khomeini who presumably went straight to hell in 1989. If you remember the man, he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Nice fellow. . . .

And just the other day ol' Mahmoud said, "With God's help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine." He further stated that "the angry oceans of nations of the region will remove your [Israeli] rotten roots from the region." Nice fellow. . . .

The Reuter's story had the following paragraph after these religious pronouncements from the President of the Islamic Republic (sic), to wit: "The president's comments caused consternation in Israel and the west, which also fear Iran is seeking to build an atomic arsenal under cover of a civilian nuclear power programme, a charge Tehran denies." Next paragraph: "Although Ahmadinejad has said Iran is not a threat to Israel, Iranian officials have said Tehran would respond swiftly to any Israeli attack. Some analysts have speculated Israel could seek to knock out Iran's atomic sites."

Interesting, isn't it, that by the end of this short piece, Israel has been transformed--from the potential victim of a nuclear attack to wipe them off the map--to the aggressor and that Mahmoud is allowed to say that Iran isn't a threat while at the same time it's reported that he said the "countdown" has begun for "the destruction of the Zionist regime."

I also find it interesting that one of the Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination, the guy with the nice hair on top of an apparently empty skull, has publicly stated that the war on terrorism is just a phrase invented by George W. Bush and that, apparently, we really don't have anything to worry about. It seems that the former senator from North Carolina believes that George W. Bush is a peerless puppet master--that Bush is able to make Mahmoud's lips move and openly speak of the destruction of Israel. Amazing that a Republican president, openly derided by Democrats for years for allegedly being stupid and witless and dim and inarticulate, can invent a phrase like the "war on terror" and actually cause terrorism to exist.

Mrs. Clinton made a telling remark the other night; she said something about there being very little difference between the various Democratic candidates and a huge difference between all the Democrats running for president and the Republicans running for president--you know what? She couldn't be more correct. . . .

AJ