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APPENDIX 19: PERSONALITIES

Persons are listed in alphabetical order by their last names. To do a keyword search enter the last name of the personality in upper case folowed by a colon; for instance, "ALLEN:".

WOODY ALLEN:

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think Woody Allen is the genius spokesman of our collective angst, and those who think he's a filthy Jewish liberal gay-sympathizing cultural-elitist Communist madman. Another name for those two groups are Democrats and Republicans.
--Cynthia Heimel

AGNEW: [THE]

Probably the first incident of a true parasitic being having been elected to CONGRESS in the form of the Spiro-cheat.
--Fang-Face DreamWeaver; 27 Aug 1996

BARBARA AMIEL:

AKA Mrs. Conrad Black; she is Canada's equivalent of ANNE COULTER. John Miller wrote of her in his book Yesterday's News that some of her controversial columns included one in which she defended spousal abuse, writing, "In a private relationship between two adults -- spouses, lovers, friends, drinking acquaintances -- any kind of conflict they have including a physical conflict is nobody's business until one of them lays a charge and calls in the authorities." In other columns, she apparently wrote in favour of ethnic cleansing to solve the problem of multiculturalism, railing against the masses of "anxious, pushy Orientals with outstretched palms and camp smarts, trying to worm their way into the West," and also likened Black activists to Nazis.

JOHN ASHCROFT:

Someone, I forget who, wondered if the people of Missouri really prefered a dead guy to Ashcroft. According to my brother, who lives in St. Louis, it's because "John Ashcroft is such a bible thumping nazi a**hole, that the dead guy is preferable."

I'll spare you the rest of the characterizations that was sent winging my way...
--Keenan Powell, 13 Nov 2000
[The dead guy was Mel Carnahan; killed in a plane crash about a month before the election, Nov 2000. His wife took his term as senator. --MN]

HANS LUDWIG BABBLINGER:

[From] the spire of the great cathedral in Ulm, Germany, [...] you can make out two prominent landmarks; the foothills of the Bavarian Alps south of town, and the high bluffs overlooking the Danube River to the east.

In the late sixteenth century, Hans Ludwig Babblinger lived here. A maker of artifiical limbs, a craftsman with special skills and some local fame for those skills. Since amputation was a common cure for ills and wounds, he was a busy man. As his hands worked, his mind was often elsewhere. For Babblinger was one of those who imagined he could fly.

In due course, he used his skills and dreams and the materials in his shop to craft wings. And as fortune would have it, he chose to try his wings in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, where upcurrents abounded. One day, one wonderful day, in the presence of reliable witnesses, Hans jumped off a high hill and soared safely down. Sensational! Babblinger could FLY!

Shift of time and scene. It is the spring of 1594. King Ludwig and his court are coming to Ulm for a visit, and the city leaders want to impress him. "Get Hans Ludwig Babblinger to fly for the king!" Of course.

Unfortunately, because it suited the king and the townspeople, Babblinger chose the nearby bluffs of the Danube for his demonstration. The winds there are downcurrents.

The great day arrived -- musicians, the king and his court, the town fathers, thousands of ordinary folk, all gathered at the river. Babblinger stood on a high platform on the bluffs, waved, crouched, and threw himself into the air.

And went down into the river like a cannonball.

Not good.

The next Sunday, from the pulpit of the great cathedral, the Bishop of Ulm called Babblinger by name during the sermon and shamed him for the sin of pride.

"MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO FLY!" thundered the prelate.

Cringing under the accusing wrath of the bishop, Babblinger walked out of the church to his house, never to appear in public again. Not long after, he died. With his wings and dreams and heart broken.
--Robert Fulghum, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down It, pg 183-185

AMIRI BARAKA:

It so happens that Baraka wrote "Somebody Blew Up America" in September/October 2001, in the weeks following the tragedy known to all as "9-11." The 226-line poem was promptly posted on the Internet, copied onto many websites, and further publicized by the poet at numerous well-attended readings all over the U.S. and in many other countries. It quickly became one of the most widely circulated of his works. No attempt was made to conceal the fact that the poem was, in Baraka's own words, "an attack on Imper-ialism, National Oppression, Monopoly Capitalism, Racism, Anti-Semitism," and that it was meant to "probe and disturb." Not until the Dodge Poetry Festival, however, did anyone object to it.

What provoked the sudden media war on Amiri Baraka in September 2002? Assuredly it was not merely a difference of opinion regarding the art of poetry. In truth, despite the hue and cry, the poem itself is not the central issue here. In any event, the principal charge alleged against the poem (that it is "anti-Semitic") cannot withstand a moment's critical examination. Indeed, with its salute to the memory of such revered Jewish revolutionists as Rosa Luxemburg, and the questions it raises about U.S. capitalism's little-known complicity in the Holocaust, Baraka's poem is explicitly against anti-Semitism and all racism. If the ADL's hollow charge, repeated ad nauseam by the media, had even the slightest substance, how are we to account for the fact that it was completely unnoticed by the hundreds of thousands who had read or heard the poem during the preceding year? (The ADL, of course, construes any and all criticism of the Israeli government-even the merest mention of its long support of South African Apartheid, for example-as "anti-Semitic.")

No less spurious is the ADL's puerile argument that Baraka's poem is helping to foment "anti-American xenophobia," but this charge-bristling with sinister insinuations-does bring us closer to the real issues at stake in the media "police action" against the poet. For what the ADL, neoconservatives and repentant ex-New-Leftists really hate about Baraka is that he is a sharp critic of this country's anti-democratic institutions, and an activist who has time and again protested the U.S. government's repressive role in foreign and domestic affairs. Worse yet, from the point of view of the white ruling class and the politicians who do its bidding, Baraka is also an outspoken revolutionary.

Clearly, then, the real target of the ADL's ongoing defamation of the author of "Somebody Blew Up America" is not that particular poem, or any other poem, but the poet himself, his revolutionary courage and audacity, and above all his ability to articulate the anxieties and yearnings of those "furthest down" in humankind's long hard struggle against inequality and tyranny.
--The [Chicago] Surrealist Movement, POETRY MATTERS! On the Media Persecution of Amiri Baraka, 2002

BAREFOOT PROFESSOR: [THE]

See TROFIM LYSENKO

BARNEY:

• Well known purple mutant eggplant from Hell
• A purple blob pretending to be a dinosaur

BOB BARR:

[T]he mouth-breathing Georgia congressman who was among the first to call for Clinton's impeachment
---John Powers, 07 Jul 2003, Fight for Your Rights

JOE BIDEN: [SENATOR]

Democrat from Delaware and preeminent crusader in the War on Drugs. Currently [Oct 2002], he serves as chair of both the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs and the International Narcotics Control Caucus. He authored the law that established the nation's drug czar. In 1996, during a debate with Orrin Hatch, he insisted that "I'm the guy that suggested in the first national drug strategy that we get the military involved." He was a narc's wet dream.
--Will Doig, Metro Weekly and reprinted at Alternet.org, 08 Oct 2002

SHEIKH BIN BAZ:

Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman bin Mohammad bin Abdulla Aal bin Baz [the word "bin" means "son of" --MN], is the highest religious figure in the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia], and head of the Committe for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the arbiter of all that is Islamically proper, correct, and permissible in Saudi Arabia. [...] Sheikh Bin Baz is an anachronism even in reactionary Saudi Arabia. Aged eighty (in 1994), and blind since he was eighteen, he is fond of telling the king that women appearing on Saudi television are too enticing, even though he can't see them. On such statements, the king has disagreed with him. But on most occasions, Bin Baz, who memorized the Koran before losing his sight, goes unchallenged, and his retrogressive opinions are given great prominence in Saudi Arabia. In 1969, the shiekh declared that the earth was flat. Three years previously, when he was president of the Islamic University in Medina, he had stated that the sun revolved around the earth. So convinced was he that he wrote a paper accusing Riyadh University of heresy because of its teachings on the solar system. In it, he claimed that God had made the earth immovable, and had "fixed it down firmly with mountains in case the earth shakes." He was obliged to revise both claims after a Saudi astronaut flew in a space shuttle and broadcast back to the kingdom television images providing evidence to the contrary. Such antediluvian opinions did not disqualify Bin Baz from becoming the President of Scientific Research, Da'wa, and Guidance Directorates, a position he has held since 1976 and one that gives him the rank of minister.

Archaic pronouncements from Bin Baz are frequent and they are why one Islamic country, Algeria, has an organization called "The Committee for Protection Against Saudi Ignorance."
--Price of Honor, pg 211
Return to entry in main volume

BEHAN:

Come in you Anglo-Saxon swine,
And drink of my Algerian wine.
'Twill turn your eyeballs black and blue
And damned well good enough for you.
--Behan
[Who was originally a housepainter by trade, and while in Paris was asked to paint a sign on the window of a cafe to attract English tourists. He painted the above verse and took the money and fled before the proprietor had the presence of mind to have the sign translated. --MN]
(see REMMIE)

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL:

The Canadian who accidentally invented the telephone while trying to make a hearing aid.
--Bob Johnson, This Day in History , C.B.C. Radio One, 19 Feb 1998

KRISTINA BORJESSON:

The award-winning reporter-cum-media critic was actually fired from her job at CBS after digging too deep -- and refusing to shut up -- about what caused the 2001 crash of TWA flight 800. In her acclaimed 2002 book "Into the Buzzsaw," Borjesson chronicled her forced exile from mainstream media and encouraged other banished reporters to share their stories, too.

[...] In October [2005], Borjesson released "Feet to the Fire" (Prometheus Books), a strapping collection of 21 interviews with the country's most influential TV, newspaper and magazine journalists. Her subject at hand? The impact of muddled intelligence -- and White House spin -- on mainstream media's desultory reporting of the lead-up to Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq.
--Laura Barcella, AlterNet, 02 Jan 2006

LT. GENERAL WILLIAM BOYKIN:

. . . deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, has stated to many a church audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." This reference to his Islamic foe in Somalia gets a warm reception from his like-minded listeners. Boykin, the intelligence guru, whose inflammatory remarks are fueled by his personal beliefs, apparently lacks the understanding that he is insulting the world's 1.3 billion Muslims each time he gives that speech. Allah, the Arabic word for God, is also used by twenty million or so Arab Christians in the Middle East. Due to recent revelations about our inadequate intelligence apparatus, Boykin's ignorance is excusable. I doubt he would say the same of people who worship Jehovah or Yahweh or any of the many other names various religions have for "their" God because said religions are "acceptable" in the American dialectic.
--Raff Ellis, YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States), 02 Mar 2004

BRICE:

Hmmm. To pull this marginally back on topic: You've been around those echoes longer than me -- can you educate us all as to the etymology of the term "brice"? (To the uninitiated, it is a verb or noun, generally meaning to post a message using someone else's name and origin line, and making him look like an absolute ass in the bargain.)
--Pierre LeClair

Ah, well there was, about 4 or 5 years ago, a character from Boston called Brice Wellington. He's since moved to Internet, where people see him yap on alt.atheism. He's a fundy of terrifying caliber, and he really should be put in prison. He claims he lost a testicle from excessive, uh, self-abuse, shall we say? and once claimed on alt.atheism that he has the right to inspect his son and daughters genitals to make sure they aren't sexually active -- even claiming he's done so on occasion, until people on the group harassed him about it -- suddenly he started backpedaling on that issue.

Anyway, when he was on FLAME, he was a neverending font of twisted wisdom about how women should be slaves to their husbands, yadda yadda yadda -- and the heavies chased him off like an eggsucking dog after a short while. Brice's sysop, however, decided to keep the blood flying by posting under his name -- getting weirder and weirder (but it seems Brice still can outdo a brice). It suckered in plenty of people on the echo (since the origin lines matched up), and now, whenever someone assumes the alias of a FLAME poster in order to smear their rep, it hath been dubbed a "brice".

Actually, I'm surprised it's become regular Fido lingua franca.
--Robert Jackson

BRITNEY:

Click this link to download a zipped MP3 file of Britney Speared in concert.
(Sorry, folk; gotta do it this way because Angelfire won't open and run certain types of files.)

BRUCE:

As I see it, in the deeper metaphysical sense Brucicity is a relative state of being. The interogatory resolution in the affirmative of the ancillary state of any specific Bruce, his primal essence if you will, hinges ultimately on the relativistic disidentification of all other postulated Bruci at the exact moment one encounters, or suspects an encounter with, a Bruce. The identification of the Bruce at said event horizon, once ascertained in this way, presupposes that, relative to all other Bruci the Bruce at the postulated event horizon must in fact be "Bruce". Relative to this elementary Bruce, as yet unpostulated Brucii can be considered to be coeval yet "other" in the nebulous domain of the Brucii continuum.

In it's practical application, what this all boils down to is the following.

At the event horizon presently under discussion, the Bruce subheaded "Nellis" was confirmed to be "Bruce". In a simultaneous but not coequal event, the Bruce subheaded "Ayers" , which had been postulated at that event horizon, was "other" relative to "Bruce" himself. Logically it then follows that any purported Bruci at all subsequent and coincident event horizons must be "still other" Bruce, relative to both "Bruce" and any "other Bruce" that we may discover.

To put it further into perspective for you: At this precise moment, relative to Bruci in general, you are "Bruce". The Bruce subheaded "Ayers" relative to yourself is the "other Bruce" and the Bruce subheaded "Nellis" has receded beyond the event horizon to a state of "still other Bruce". That is, I need not say, all relative to "Bruce" (being yourself), "other Bruce" and any other Bruci purported to exist in the continuum at any point in time or antitime.

All of this is rather simplified, you understand, and does not of course take into account many of the various aspects of Brucii that can impact on Brucic relativity. Spin, colour and flavour for example, not to mention top, bottom, the weak and strong Brucicity and the, so called, wandering free radical Brucii which some of the less cogent researchers in the field mistakenly identify as Brucie. The latter would of course be an entirely different matter, as any fool can see.

I trust I have managed to clear this is all up for you now?
--Ralf Guminski, 18 Dec 1997

LENNY BRUCE:

At a time when other stand-up comics told mother-in-law jokes, Lenny Bruce provoked people to think seriously about race, religion and politics; he challenged the prevailing attitudes toward sex, drugs and "dirty" language, and he ripped into social conventions and mocked the Establishment's hypocrisy. Like a prowling panther, Bruce bit sharply, leaving the stage strewn with the high ideals, mighty truths and core beliefs that he attacked as shams.

"What I want the people, my friends, to dig is the Lie," he explained. "Respectability means ... under the covers." Bruce dared to speak the unspeakable, and to tease and taunt his audiences. One of his favorite devices was to publicly voice hateful words and epithets. Repeating them again and again, he hoped to defuse their power to shock or wound.

But those who violate social taboos and slaughter sacred cows invite legal troubles. And so it was for Lenny Bruce.

Between 1961 and 1965, Bruce was arrested nine times for obscenity and was prosecuted six times. These misdemeanor obscenity prosecutions involved eight state trial judges (along with the numerous judges who heard bail matters and preliminary motions); required more than a dozen state attorneys and double that number of billable-hour defense lawyers; prompted civil-rights suits by Bruce in federal courts in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco; consumed untold man-hours and public monies, and entailed appeals or petitions to state high courts, federal appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, presided over, in total, by 25 state and federal appellate judges.

One way or another, he was almost always vindicated. A jury in San Francisco exonerated him. In Los Angeles, his cases were dismissed. Although he was convicted in Chicago, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed that conviction.

His 1964 obscenity conviction in New York, however, was never overturned. Bruce, by that time depressed and bankrupted by his legal battles, fired his lawyers and handled his own appeal, unsuccessfully. In August of 1966, bad luck, bad law and bad drugs finally took their toll. He died a convicted comedian, a man condemned for his words.
--Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, Pardoning Lenny Bruce's language, 02 Jan 2004, and reprinted at First Amendment Center

GEORGE W BUSH: [JUNIOR; AKA GEEDUBYA:]

(see Appendix 27 for unauthorized autobiography)

GENERAL ISAAC BROCK:

The only good general of The War of 1812. All the other British generals were timid; the Americans were uniformly incompetent.
--Bob Johnston, This Day in History, 17 April 2001

TUCKER CARLSON:

Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson is a nice guy and among the least offensive of contemporary conservative pundits. Unfortunately, that is damn faint praise indeed. In recent weeks, the purposely inflammatory demagogy of PBS's newest host has included a description of John Edwards as "specializing in Jacuzzi cases," owing to the lawyer's successful representation of a small child who saw her intestines sucked out inside a wading pool. Carlson has compared the Democratic Party's efforts to keep track of its own racial data to those of Gestapo head and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and he accused John Kerry of demanding that "dark skinned foreigners from the Middle East fight our war for us." No less odiously, he defended GOP smear tactics against the legless Democratic Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, who was linked with Osama bin Laden in one of the most scurrilous campaigns of the past century.
--Eric Alterman, PBS Adds Insult to Injury, The Nation, 17 Aug 2004

DICK CHENEY:

Clearly, Dick Cheney is no George W. Bush.

On Thursday night in Florida, Bush exposed himself as unprepared, easily ruffled, angry, excitable and muddled. As one wag put it, he came to a 90 minute debate with 10 minutes of material. On Tuesday night in Ohio, Cheney showed the American people who is really running things at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was controlled, calm, every inch the CEO in charge.

Cheney was also every inch the snarling, hunch-shouldered golem that has made him one of the least popular politicians in recent memory. He seldom looked up at moderator Gwen Ifill, or at the cameras facing him, choosing instead to speak into his own chest for the entire night. Cheney appeared, overall, to cut quite the frightening figure, the dark night to Edwards' optimistic day.

The other problem for Cheney, of course, was the way he lied with nearly every word that passed his curled lips. It was a virtuoso performance of prevarication, obfuscation and outright balderdash. On Thursday night, George W. Bush played the part of a man who couldn't possibly defend his record. On Tuesday night, Cheney acted as though that record did not exist.
--William Rivers Pitt, Cheney's Avalanche of Lies, 06 October 2004

CHEWBACCA:

What happens when a Magog impregnates a Nietzschean.

JACQUES CHIRAC:

[The following is a copy of an open letter to Jacques Chirac, one time President of the Republic of France, which was published in an Australian newspaper on the occasion of French testing of a nuclear weapon in the South Pacific.]

An open letter to M. Jacques Chirac:

Mon cher Jack

Je suis a bit fromaged off avec votre decision to blow up La Pacifique avec le Frog bombes nuclears. Je reckon vous must have un spot in La Belle France itself pour les explosions. Le Massive Central? Le Quay d'Orsay? Le Champs Elysees? Votre own back yard, peut etre?

Frappez le crows avec stones, Sport! La guerre cold est fini! Votres forces militaire need la bombe atomique about as beacoup as poisson need les bicyclettes.

Un autre point, cobber. Votre histoire militaire isn't tres flash, consisting, n'est-ce pas, of battailles the likes of Crecy, Agincourt, Poitiers, Trafalgar, Borodino, Waterloo, Sedan, et Dien Bien Phu. Un bombe won't change le tradition. Je/mon pere/mon grand pere/le cousing third avec ma grandmere/la plume de ma tante fought avec votre soldats against Le Boche in WWI (le Big One). Have vous forgotten?

Reconsider, mon ami, otherwise in le hotels et estaminets de l'Australie le curse anciens d'Angleterre -- "Damnation to the French" -- will be heard un autre temps.

Votre chums don't want that.

[signed] Millo.

NOAM CHOMSKY:

There are people who don't bother with the news; they wait for the next Chomsky critique. It is hard to find a trenchant critique of him, as opposed to glib dismissals. Those who attack him on specifics usually wind up being handed their heads, studded with footnotes.
--Rick Salutin, A Chomsky moment at Dooney's, 03 Sep 2004

JEAN CHRETIEN: [AKA JOHNNY THE CRETIN, JEAN POUTINE]

Canada's Poster Child for Heteromonous Comprehension Impediment, he is usually described as the only Prime Minister who is incoherent in both official languages. His greatest example of HCI was on the occasion of his government having harmonized a tax he had promised to scrap during an election campaign. The day after the vote entrenching the Goods and Services Tax, he stood up at a press conference and when asked why he hadn't scrapped the tax as he had promised to he loudly proclaimed, "I did not promise to get rid of the GST, you misunderstood me."

At the time this was going on, one ilLiberal Party member, John Nunziata, criticized the harmonization and reminded Chretien of the ilLiberal promise to scrap the GST, and encouraged the party to "do the right thing". When the rest of the party voted to harmonize the tax, at the order of Chretien, Nunziata was the only one who stood fast and voted against it; and was subsequently fired for speaking out.

In April 2001, Chretien had to defend a minister, Tom Wappel, who had told one constituent to "kiss my ass" in a letter wherein he refused to provide the government assistance that constituent had sought, although this affair was revealed only when Wappel told an 80 year old, blind veteran that he didn't have to do anything for him on the grounds the veteran had voted for the Alliance Party. Chretien dismissed Wappel's malfeasance and violation of right to privacy and secret ballot as "freedom of speech". Obviously, Chretien has confused real free speech with voicing a criticism of the king, the latter of which is considered an act of treason; even in the pseudo-democracy the neo-fascist, ilLiberal Party has made of Canada.

JESUS CHRIST:

Scholars have long debated the exact ethnicity and nationality of Jesus. Recently, at a theological meeting in Rome, scholars had a heated debate on this subject. One by one, they offered their evidence: THREE PROOFS THAT:

JESUS WAS MEXICAN
1. His first name was Jesus
2. He was bilingual
3. He was always being harassed by the authorities

But then there were equally good arguments that:

JESUS WAS BLACK
1. He called everybody "brother"
2. He liked Gospel
3. He couldn't get a fair trial

But then there were equally good arguments that:

JESUS WAS JEWISH
1. He went into His Father's business
2. He lived at home until he was 33
3. He was sure his Mother was a virgin, and his Mother was sure he was God.

But then there were equally good arguments that:

JESUS WAS ITALIAN
1. He talked with his hands
2. He had wine with every meal
3. He used olive oil

But then there were equally good arguments that:

JESUS WAS A CALIFORNIAN
1. He never cut his hair
2. He walked around barefoot
3. He started a new religion

But then there were equally good arguments that:

JESUS WAS IRISH
1. He never got married
2. He was always telling stories
3. He loved green pastures

But perhaps the most compelling evidence was:

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS A WOMAN
1. He had to feed a crowd at a moment's notice when there was no food.
2. He kept trying to get the message across to a bunch of men who JUST DIDN'T GET IT!!
3. Even when He was dead, He had to get up because there was more work to do

LINFORD CHRISTIE:

A British Olympic Sprinter characterized during the 1996 Games in Atlanta as, "A well balanced young man -- he has a chip on both shoulders."
(see OLYMPIC SPIRIT )

ARTHUR C. CLARKE:

Clarke defined how to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done -- then do it."
--Jacob Burroughs, The Number Of The Beast, pg 75
(see CLARKE'S LAW, Appendix 07; also DISCOVERIES, in main volume)

HILARY CLINTON: [FIRST LADY ~]

The difference between Hilary and liquid helium? About 1 degree centigrade.

HILLARY CLINTON: [SENATOR ~]

As she [Senator Hillary (sic) Clinton] prepared to provide Bush the authority to kick-start a war, she declared, "I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible." Do you really think Clinton accepts Bush's word on anything, especially on this issue? It is true that Bush says he views war as a "last resort." Yet he has not proposed any other course of action. He has instead chided the United Nations to do something, but without specifying what it specifically ought to do. Bush has allowed his most senior advisers -- mainly Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- to loudly dismiss the effectiveness of a new round of more aggressive and intrusive inspections. It has not taken this administration a long time to reach the last resort. Clinton must know that, but she is unwilling to confront the obligations of such knowledge.
--David Corn, AlterNet, 18 Oct 2002

WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON:

A former president of the United States of America. He was also known as: Slick Willy Clinton. He had been tagged with that moniker before he was elected, but if ever a nickname was appropriate, it was certainly that one in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal.

NORM COLEMAN:

Norm Coleman is a man without a single principled bone in his body. He was a liberal Democrat who saw greater career opportunities on the other side and one night he sewed himself a new set of beliefs and crossed over. He is the first truly cynical politician in Minnesota in my lifetime.
--Garrison Keillor, Aug 2004, in an e-mail interview by David Talbot

WILE E. COYOTE:

Symbolises the triumph of hope over experience.
(see ANVIL )

ANN COULTER:

[1] [...] Ann Coulter (a columnist so out of touch even "The National Review" fired her)
--Laura Fokkena, 22 Nov 2002, and reprinted at Alternet.org

[2] [A] malevolent Twiggy with Tourette's. [...]

It's degrading to have to write about Coulter again. As a pundit, she is about on a par with Charles Manson, better suited to a lifelong stay in the Connecticut Home for the Criminally Insane than for the host's seat on Crossfire. Her books are filled with lies, slander and phony footnotes that are themselves lies and slanders. Her very existence as a public figure is an insult to our collective intelligence. I should really be writing about the campaign by neocon chickenhawks to intimidate Howell Raines and the New York Times on Iraq. But fortunately, John Judis and Nick Confessore have taken responsibility for that, leaving me to the less ominous but more baffling phenomenon of the bestselling Barbie-doll terrorist-apologist, who continues to be celebrated by the very media she terms "retarded" and guilty of "mass murder" while calling for their mass extinction by the likes of her ideological comrade Timothy McVeigh.

Make no mistake. Coulter may routinely call for the murder of liberals, of Arabs, of journalists, of the President, among many others. She may compare adorable Katie Couric to Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and joke about blowing up the Times building. But instead of ignoring, laughing at, or perhaps most usefully, sedating her, we find Coulter's blond locks and bony ass celebrated by talk-show bookers and gossip columnists -- even a genuine book reviewer -- from coast to proverbial coast.
--Eric Alterman, The Nation, 12 Sep 2002
(see BARBARA AMIEL)

KATIE COURIC:

What's more important in the discussion about Katie Couric and network news is not what she's been doing for the past 15 years, it's what she hasn't.

She hasn't been assigned around the country and the world in a rough-and-tumble, seat-of-the-pants struggle for stories. She hasn't been mixing it up with foreign reporters and politicians on their home ground. She hasn't fought deadlines, found surprises or earned bigger assignments. And she hasn't grown into a knowledgeable, experienced reporter who's seen the world and shown it to the rest of us.

You can't do that from the back of a limousine or the "Today" show studio. So however Katie Couric started out, instead of a newswoman, she's become a celebrity and entertainer.

That's fine for morning TV, but it's ridiculous that she was considered as the next CBS anchor and preposterous that she actually got the job. Very simply, she's not qualified.
--Barbara Walder, Couric Isn't Qualified to Anchor News, 12 Apr 2006

FRANCIS CRICK:

Crick was always fascinated by the intricacies of important problems. His endless questions as a child compelled his weary parents to buy him a children's encylcopedia, hoping that it would satisfy his curiosity. But it only made him insecure: he confided to his mother his fear that everything would have been discovered by the time he grew up, leaving him nothing to do. His mother reassured him (correctly, as it happened) that there would still be a thing or two for him to figure out.
--James Watson, DNA: The Secret of Life, pg 45

JOSEPH DALBY: [LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF]

[L]ate of the Parish of St. Mary-le-bone, proved July 27, 1784. I give to my daughter, Ann Spencer, a guinea for a ring, or any other bauble she may like better, I give to her lout the husband one penny to buy him a lark-whistle, I also give to her said husband of redoubtable memory, my ass hole for a covering to his lark-whistle, to prevent the abrasion of his lips, and this legacy I give as a mark of my approbations of his prowess and nice honour, in drawing his sword on me at my own table, naked and unarmed as I was, and he well fortified with custard.
--The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction; 1824

CHARLES DARWIN:

He cured his snuff habit by keeping his snuffbox in the basement and the key for the snuffbox in the attic.

DISCOVERY DAN:

Dan's full name is "Discovery Dan" and he is a mock-up of the viewer The Discovery Channel in Canada now wants to attract. Dan is a 30-year-old primary school graduate who enjoys changing the oil in his classic Cuda and washing down ketchup flavored ripple chips with a rum and coke. This explains why we no longer see intelligent science documentaries on Discovery Channel. This explains why we are seeing shows like "Monster Garage" and "Monster Truck".

EMILY DICKINSON:

A world renowned poet, she used to talk to visitors from an adjoining room because she was so self-conscious about her appearance.

NAWAL EL-SAADAWI:

A prominent Egyptian who is in the unfortunately unique position of being viewed both as an enemy of the state of Egypt and an enemy of the Islamists. One of the Arab world's leading feminist's, the [...] physician and writer is outspoken to the point of occasional stridency, in a style reminiscent of the early women's rights movement in the West. Both the Egyptian government and the Islamists have long sought to silence her, the former by banning her articles and books for twenty-five years (she has authored thirty and only one has been published in Egypt); they also closed her women's organization, her feminist magazine, and on one occasion Sadat jailed her. She was released only after Sadat's death. The extremists were even more aggressive: they placed her on their death list in August 1992. Since then Saadawi has had twenty-four-hour guards supplied by the government, which wants her muzzled but apparently not dead. Both sides, however, have failed to silence her.
--Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor, pg 330

T. S. ELIOT:

His favorite gift to critics was exploding cigars.

JERRY FALWELL:

Falwell is America's hate machine. [...]

As in the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by Constantine Cavafy, the whole world stands alert on its walls, awaiting the enemy's advance. When the enemy doesn't come, we feel even more afraid and confused.

"And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?" asks Cavafy. "Those people were a kind of solution."

The solution that the Muslims offer Falwell is instant relief from his own personal anxiety. The problem is, Falwell's solution to his own anxiety is not only his private consolation.

He is not nearly as harmless as the survivalists who looked at Y2K a few years ago not as a technological problem that could be solved with reason and hard work, but as a worldwide conspiracy that could provoke chaos.

Falwell's own fears and doubts are so great that they can be assuaged only by the battle of Armageddon. When that battle is over, according to Falwell's reading of the book of Revelations, the Earth will be covered with blood, the Muslim world will be vanquished and two-thirds of the world's Jews will be wiped out.

PROFESSOR FISCHER:

Professor Fischer, who was lately found dead in the laboratory of the Prague Gymnasium, was the victim of a theory. Having mixed sal-ammoniac with cyanide of potassium, he bade his attendant to note how "science has advanced so far as even to be able to render harmless so dangerous an agent as cyanide of potassium." With this he tasted the mixture, was quickly seized with violent pains, and expired before a physician could arrive . . .
--Popular Science Monthly, December 1878

AL FRANKEN:

Al ought to give up radio, which is awfully hard work for a TV guy like himself, and establish residence in Minneapolis, near where he grew up, and get himself a late-model car and drive around and see the state. It's a wonderful place and, doggone it, people would like him. He can announce his campaign in a couple years and start raising money. I'll do some fundraisers for him myself. Al is a natural on the stump. He has a terrific grin that makes people feel good, unlike so many Midwestern liberals, who are about as warm as a concrete block. And he's a genuinely good man, a family man, patriotic, kind to a fault, passionate about justice, and I happen to think he'd enjoy serving in the U.S. Senate. The Senate is a fine platform for exposing deceit and corruption, which is a specialty of Al's. And you can talk for as long as you like.
--Garrison Keillor, Aug 2004, in an e-mail interview by David Talbot

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:

Franklin sailed a key-hung kite
and watched the storm-stung flight of it.
Everyone was much impressed
but Edison made light of it.
--James Facos

ROCKY FRISCO:

An author and musician who was best characterized by one of the characters in his book RACCOON'S LAW with the line, "I think this guy's muse has Multiple Personality Disorder." Rocky Frisco also plays guitar and keyboards, and has been the keyboardist for J.J. Cale for some time. His website is (might be): http://home.earthlink.net/~rockyfrisco/.

MAHATMA GANDHI:

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little which made him rather frail and, with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath.

This made him what?

A super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

BILL GATES:

(see Appendix 13 for BILL GATES; BILL'S BILLS; BILL'S JUDGEMENT DAY; BILL'S OTHER BABY; BILL'S SLANT ON THINGS)

NEWT GINGRICH:

Having watched election coverage nonstop all week, I sometimes wake screaming, "Bipartisanship!" and scare myself. Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems cooperate with their political opponents, the one who rendered me almost unconscious with surprise was Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich, the Boy Scout. Newt Gingrich, the man who sat there and watched Congress impeach and try Bill Clinton for lying about having an extramarital while he, Newt Gingrich, was lying about having an extramarital affair. (This all took place during his second marriage. The first one ended when he told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment.)

This is the level of Republican hypocrisy that reminds us all how far the Dems have to go. I tell you what. Let's all hold hands together and sing, "Oh the Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends!" Just not, please, Newt Gingrich, the man whose contribution to civility was to recommend that all Democrats be referred to with such words as cowards, traitors, commies, godless, liars and other such bipartisan-promoting terms.
--Molly Ivins, Now They're All For Bipartisanship, 14 Nov 2006

RUDY GIULIANI:

He's kind of like a pit bull. Great if you have burglars but if you don't, he'll probably eat your kids.
--Chris Rock, in a live stand New Year's Eve at Madison Square Garden performance, 31 Dec 2007

GOLDILOCKS:

This famous wicked little tale
Should never have been put on sale.
It is a mystery to me
Why loving parents cannot see
That this is actually a book
About a brazen little crook.
Had I the chance I wouldn't fail
To clap young Goldilocks in jail.
--Roald Dahl, 1986, Revolting Rhymes, Goldilocks and the Three Bears

PHIL GRAMM:

As author Jim Hightower used to say, if you need a heart transplant, try to get Phil Gramm's. It's never been used.
--Molly Ivins, Pay Close Attention: The Entire Nation is Being Texasified, 06 Dec 2004

MRS. GRUNDY:

Ahem. "Mrs. Grundy" type of people, and if you enjoyed yourself, you obviously ain't it.

"Mrs. Grundy thinks the word clitoris is obscene, possibly because she doesn't have one."
(Maureen Johnson)

"Or else she has one as big as a banana and doesn't want anyone to find out."
(Dr. Johnson)
--To Sail Beyond The Sunset

--Michael Nellis, in reply to a message

BARBARA HADDAD:

(see HADDAD/HARGROVE SYNDROME )

DASHIELL HAMMETT:

Best known as a mystery writer, he was once a detective with the Pinkerton agency. He got his first promotion for bringing in a man who had stolen a Ferris Wheel.

ELVIS HARGROVE:

(see HADDAD/HARGROVE SYNDROME )

ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN:

The GrandMaster of Science Fiction. His influence on science fiction and generations of SF fans is considered to have been so great that some people allow as to how there would have been no U.S. space program without that influence.
(see CRISIS OF THE LIBRARIAN; also see SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE SIMON-PURE SCIENCE FICTION STORY; THREE AXIOMS OF PROPHESY; and RULES OF WRITING, Appendix 07)

JESSE HELMS:

As Rod Serling might put it, submitted for your mytho-American approval: one Jesse Helms. Tobacco? Yes -- a matter of individual freedom. AIDS Education? No -- a matter of public morality. Clean needles for addicts? Ditto. An advocate of democracy who warps himself in the Amrican flag and uses racist TV commercials against his opponent in an Senate election. A self-appointed defender of the U.S. Constitution who advocates limitations on freedom of personal expression. Perhaps Walt Whitman, a poet who might be facing serious funding problems himself these days, had Helms -- and Tom Buchanan --in mind when he wrote, "that America necessitates new standards for her poetry is such a point with me that I never tire of dwelling on it."
--David Marc, Bonfire of the Humanities, pg 121

SEYMOUR HERSH:

An interview with Seymour Hersh is never dull -- to put it mildly. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist can be contentious, just as willing to challenge a question as answer it. He can be unpredictable, ever able to throw a hapless reporter off-balance with the unexpected. "Did you ever take a stewardess' course?" he might inquire just as you're trying to get him to discuss the role of the media.

When Hersh does answer the question -- which he will, with eloquence and at great length -- he is likely to make your head reel as he follows four separate lines of thought -- at the same time. In other words, it's a bit like being on a roller-coaster: often disorienting and a little daunting, but always a hell of a ride.

For when Seymour Hersh speaks, he does so with unparalleled insight, passion, and candor. He is willing to say what most other star journalists rarely permit themselves to even think in this era of celebrity journalism, when image is king. When Hersh speaks, it's for two simple reasons: it's important and he cares. It's why we care to listen. Be it his coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War or his recent work exposing the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, Hersh has been a dedicated watchdog for democracy.
--Lakshmi Chaudhry, Seymour Hersh: Man On Fire, 27 Oct 2004

IGOR:

An Igor learnth houthehold thurgery on hith father'th knee. And then practitheth on hith grandfather'th kidneyth.
--Igor, Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett, pg 323

ABDUL KASSEM ISMAEL:

Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century. He carried his library with him wherever he went. The 117 thousand volumes were carried by 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.

JESSE JAMES:

The mid-19th century outlaw who invented bank robbery. He was active as an outlaw from 1866 to 1882, and during that time he stole approximately a quarter of a million dollars. This was at a time when the average pay was under a thousand dollars per annum. However, that quarter million was over 16 years and he had a dozen gang members to share the loot with.

Bank robbery was not without its difficulties, too. In the first bank heist, James's gang walked away with 60,000; of which 45,000 was worthless paper cash. Despite that, the idea of bank robbery caught on like wildfire and was soon exported to other countries. Just like the Big Mac and Mickey Mouse.

Jesse James was shot in the back on 03 April 1882 by a gang member who wanted to collect the 20,000 dollar reward that had been posted on Jesse by the governor of Missouri. The reward had stipulated DEAD OR ALIVE specifically because no one in his right mind was going to try take Jesse James alive and rationally expect to walk away.

The reason the reward had been posted was that Jesse was getting more press-coverage than the governor.
--paraphrasing Bob Johnson, This Day In History, for 03 April 2001

SAMUEL JOHNSON:

Johnson was a fat, pompous, gluttonous, dirty old fool who would have faded into the obscurity he so richly deserved had he not been followed around by a spit-licking sycophant.
--Zebediah John Carter, The Number Of The Beast, pg 349

GARRISON KEILLOR:

As for me, I have unfulfilled ambitions as a writer, and writing is the best way to spend what time is left to me -- sit at my dining room table and try to write what is given to me to write, a comic novel, a sonnet, a Lake Wobegon story, a parody of the president, a limerick about a lady named Reba who cried out in rapture, "Ich liebe," a rhapsody to homegrown tomatoes. I've loved doing this all my life, and one should not turn away from good luck as good as that.
--Garrison Keillor, Aug 2004, in an e-mail interview by David Talbot

JOHN KERRY: [SENATOR]

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and Vietnam War hero turned anti-war protester, had been a tough skeptic on the need for a war against Iraq. Then he went soft. Kerry, an undeclared candidate for the 2004 presidential contest, hailed what he called a "shift" in the Bush approach toward Iraq. By that, he meant the White House's increased emphasis on disarmament as a rationale for striking Saddam. But Kerry, no dummy, knows that Bush was using spin for the benefit of Congress and the U.N. (Even in his Sept. 12 speech to the U.N., Bush made it sound as if he believed Saddam should be taken out just for being a ruthless dictator, regardless of whether he possessed weapons of mass destruction or not.) Kerry, like Hillary Clinton, asserted that Bush "recognizes that war must be our last option," and that Bush has stated that he opposes "a unilateral US war against Iraq unless the threat is imminent and no multilateral effort is possible." But, like the Senator from New York, he approved letting Bush decide on his own whether either of these conditions is true. This J.F.K. is no profile in courage.
--David Corn, AlterNet, 18 Oct 2002

ALFRED KINSEY: [DOCTOR]

Dr. Alfred Kinsey [...] was the Harvard-trained entomologist who pioneered research into the sexual habits of Americans. After interviewing tens of thousands of men and women, he collected his findings in two books that changed the way Americans comprehended sex. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and its female counterpart (1953), revealed the bedroom (and locker room and barnyard) habits of Americans in a way that blew the lid off puritanism forever. "God, what a gap between social front and reality!" was the conclusion he came to. Kinsey's been dead for nearly half a century and now, thanks to the movie, the religious right want to dig him up and kill him all over again.

Working at the University of Indiana - about as "red" as you could hope to find nowadays, and sponsored by that well-known fifth-column, the Rockefeller Foundation - Kinsey and his team developed as precise an interview formula as was possible in a country still mired in sexual ignorance and fear.

He interviewed single and married straights, gays, lesbians, incarcerated rapists and sex criminals, even those who had sought congress with beasts of the field and farmyard, all without surrendering scientific objectivity or passing moral judgments.

Before he published his work, Americans assumed that sex occurred only after marriage, that homosexuals and lesbians were demonic inverts, and that masturbation led to godless communism, hairy-handedness and imbecilized high-school quarterbacks drooling on college jackets.

Kinsey's two books were bestsellers, but he became entangled in the neuroses of his time. The Rockefeller folk were hounded into dropping their support, and J. Edgar Hoover demanded - but didn't receive - Kinsey's assistance in witch-hunting gays at the US State Department. That Hoover was a cross-dressing, closeted homosexual who lived with his overpromoted pretty-boy assistant, FBI director Clyde Tolson, speaks volumes about the grotesque hypocrisy of public figures in those days. Kinsey's detractors lined up around the block to get their licks in, then as now, and it's possible that their efforts helped speed his early demise in 1956 aged 62.
--John Patterson, Moral Right Takes Us Back to Dark Ages of Sexuality, 05 dec 2004
[Also filed as KINSEY: in the main volume]

RUDYARD KIPLING:

Spent five of the happiest years of his life in Brattleboro, Vermont in the 1890s. He invented snow golf so that he could get outdoor exercise in the winter, painting his golf balls red so they could be located in the snow.

CAPTAIN OF KOEPENICK: [THE]

On the face of it, it was a minor criminal incident: In 1906, a shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt was released from prison, after serving a sentence for forgery. To get work he needed a passport, which, as a former convict, he could not get.

So he went to a junk shop and bought the uniform of an army captain, commandeered some soldiers in the street, took them to Koepenick, a Berlin suburb, arrested the mayor and confiscated the blank passports. Since he was well-known to the police, he was soon arrested.

All Europe laughed at this exposure of the situation in Germany, where anyone wearing a uniform was a king and every army officer a person with super powers.

In the classic film about the episode, the news was brought to the Kaiser. For a long moment, the courtiers held their breath. Than the Kaiser burst out laughing, and the relieved courtiers joined in.

It wasn't really a laughing matter, because eight years later the unbridled German militarism was one of the causes of World War I.

UMM KULSUM:

[An Arab myth of] an old procuress of whom it was contended that "for the first thirty years she whored; for the next three decades she pimped for friend and foe; and for the last third of her life, bedridden by age and infirmities, she had a buck-goat and a nanny tied up in her room and solaced herself by contemplating their amorous conflicts."
--F. Gonzalez Crussi, On the Nature of Things Erotic, pg 109

LARRY LAPRISE:

What with all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went un-noticed last week. Larry La Prise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey" died peacefully at age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.

They put his left leg in - and then the trouble started. . . .

D. H. LAWRENCE:

One of the most original and controversial writers of the twentieth century, he had a fancy for removing his clothes and climbing mulberry trees.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?

1. Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
2. Advising the President.
3. Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
--David Letterman

TRENT LOTT:

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. As slick in person as a shiny patch on the Missisippi Delta - and nearly as toxic - he’s still befuddled over being betrayed by his fellow Republicans after publicly pining for the good old days of separate but equal, a sentiment with which, he surely thought, any Southern man would concur.
--Nina Burleigh, The South Will Rise Again, 03 Sep 2004

KING LOUIS: [XVI]

His flunkies thought he was an idiot, but, of course, they never said so out of love.
--Bob Johnson, This Day In History, CBC Radio One, 21 January 1997

TROFIM LYSENKO:

In the late 1920's, the Soviet Union was still finding its feet. Stalin had won the battle of succession after Lenin's death and was consolidating power. The collectivization of agriculture was underway, and in an obscure agricultural research station in distant Azerbaijan, an uneducated but ambitious peasant was making a name for himself. Trofim Lysenko, born in the Ukraine in 1898, appeared an unlikely choice to oversee Stalin's agricultural revolution. Barely literate, he was working as a minor technician at Gandzha at the Ordzhonikidze Central Plant-Breeding Experiment Station, when, in 1927, he was catapulted from obscurity by a visiting Pravda correspondent who, perhaps at a loss for good copy, was inspired by the sight of Lysenko: here was the "barefoot professor" solving agricultural problems so that the local "Turkic peasant can live through the winter without trembling at the thought of the morrow." Critically, the aricle painted Lysenko as a problem solver, not a highfalutin academic: "He didn't study the hairy legs of [fruit] flies, but went to the root of things."

The image of the barefoot professor was irresistible to Soviet apparatchiks. Here was a son of the soil, the true flowering of the Soviet man, of the rural peasant class; his agricultural intuition was surely worth more than all the book learning of the shifltess intellectuals. Not to disappoint, Lysenko was quick to capitalize on his newfound prominince by proposing that winter wheat be "vernalized." Winter wheat is normally planted in the fall; it overwinters as a shoot, with some of the crop perishing, the rest maturing during the spring. Through "vernalization," Lysenko suggested, the losses of winter could be avoided. He claimed that you could fool the wheat seeds into germinating in the spring simply by chilling and wetting them, and that increased yields would be achieved in the bargain. The definitive experimental demonstration of the method was carried out by none other than Lysenko's father in his own fields. Indeed, the yield was some three times greater than that of conventional unvernalized wheat planted in the same district.

Vernalization did not in fact originate with Lysenko; wherever he may have picked it up, the procedure dates back to the preceding century at least, appearing, for example, in the Ohio agricultural literature of the 1850s. But here Lysenko's lack of education (and therefore ignorance of what had been accomplished elsewhere) stood him in good stead when it came to claiming originality. The same, however, could not be said for every further attempt to apply the method, whose results can vary a good deal depending on local conditions -- something the Ohio farmers knew but the barefoot professor apparently did not.

Within a couple of years, beset by failures, Lysenko stopped advocating the vernalization of winter wheat and was pushing instead the vernalization of spring wheat -- a ploy worthy of the sharpest Soviet satire, considering that the crop is indeed named after the season in which it is normally planted. Later, his wheat yield policy did another U-turn when Lysenko called for warming (instead of cooling) the seed prior to planting. Wheat vernalization was but one of many agricultural nostrums that Lysenko peddled, but it illustrates well his overall strategy. A complete disregard for expert knowledge was de rigueur, as was a refusal to conduct consistent and rigorous tests. Essentially, any idea intuitively appealing to Lysenko was good enough to be implemented. What scientific method he did espouse almost seems inspired by theological reasoning, odd coming from a tool of a godless Communist state: "In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it."
--James Watson, DNA: The Secret of Life, pg 366-367
See LYSENKOISM

PERRY MASON:

Perry Mason was my dream and then my nightmare. The clients Perry Mason represented don't exist in real life. Most of my clients were guilty.
--Alan Dershowitz, Attorney

WILLIAM TOPAZ MCGONAGALL:

Internationally celebrated as the worst poet ever to assault the English language. McGonagall's lack of talent was matched only by his delusion and ego.

EARL MCRAE:

McRae is a short, compact, sort of crazy-eyed throwback to the kind of journalists who, if they managed to acquire a column, thought their job was to antagonize people. He wears a trenchcoat and shows a lot of bottom lip. He looks like you imagine all of those sports phone-in hosts on the radio to look, with the kind of face a perfect stranger might walk up to and punch. Former heavyweight boxing champion George Cufuvalo once shoved him up against a wall and threatened to rearrange his complexion. McRae actually used to do a radio sports phone-in show, but perhaps Chuvalo gave him an idea -- that his face could provoke as much controversy as his writing -- so he now does TSN. He has the type of mouth you imagine saying, "Yeah, well what makes you such an expert on hockey, pal?" He's perfect on TV, in the same way Don Cherry is perfect.
--John Miller, Yesterday's News, pg ?
[McRae is a friend of Miller's. --MN]

MICHAEL MEDVED:

What can I say about Moustacheford Douchington III that either Spudsy or I haven't already said? The guy is a total intellectual trainwreck, whose pop-psych observations about pop culture are so resoundingly fatuous and/or blatantly wrong that I'm consistently amazed he's actually being serious and isn't some flesh-and-blood Frankenstein's monster pieced together from Onion columnists wrought to life by a mad scientist in a meth lab.

His most recent endeavor, Why TV Addiction Links to Liberalism, is so terrible, so fact-mangled, so deranged, so rife with stinking horseshit, that it's almost beautiful in its grotesquery.
--Melissa McEwan, Shakesville web journal post, circa 18 Jun 2007

METHUSELAH:

Methuselah ate what he found on his plate,
And never, as people do now,
Did he note the amount of the calorie count;
He ate it because it was chow.
He wasn't disturbed as at dinner he sat,
Devouring a roast or a pie,
To think it was lacking in granular fat,
Or a couple of vitamins shy.
He cheerfully chewed each species of food,
Unmindful of troubles or fears
Lest his health might be hurt by some fancy dessert --
And he lived over nine hundred years.
--Anonymous

MODERATORS: [INTERUSER ECHO]

D'Artagnon -- he's the honcho, a rapid doberman with an attitude. Do NOT irritate him. You won't enjoy the experience.

Duffy -- he's got the friendly smile reinforced with a .357 magnum.

Ms Dickens -- pleasant right up until you cross the line, then becomes a vixen with a whip

DreamWeaver -- also usually pleasant but if riled, melts diamond at a hundred paces.
--Michael Tauson
(see MODERATOR )

MICHAEL MOORE:

Michael Moore's role is to make American liberals feel good about themselves without having to question the practices of a society which cast an increasingly long, cold, dark shadow over the planet. The job pays well, and Moore is becoming a wealthy man, a kind of well-kept court jester for those with occasional twinges of liberal conscience or human decency.

Moore likes to play the big, innocent kid from the heartland, a kind of latter-day Spanky McFarland, only much older, happily shuffling along with a beat-up baseball cap instead of beanie, keeping the faith with values absorbed in 1950s Flint, Michigan, but asking bright-eyed, impertinent questions about serious things. He's America's backyard Socrates in baggy pants and gym shoes.

The image appeals to the confused, clinging-to-childhood quality of American culture. Yet that very quality is what let the invasion of Iraq and so many other terrible events happen.

Moore, unlike straight-shooter Spanky, also displays a streak of the somewhat unpleasant practical joker or prankster. I do not mean the talent for funny lines that makes his books sell well, but a certain tendency to sly sniggering tricks, a certain Eddy Haskel or Candid Camera quality which overlays and sours the honest Spanky image. We see this clearly in the many stunts he uses, some quite clever, in movies or television to get filmed reactions from or about those who will not respond to him in a direct manner. These are the tricks of the process server or repo-man.

Moore's film revels in exactly the kind of inconsistent thinking, full of unwarranted assumptions, thick with suggestions of undefined conspiracy, typical to one degree or another of most media in the United States. The thinking also is typical of a President who keeps telling us he decimated Iraq and spent a hundred billion dollars to save American lives.

Moore told the world some months back that he had found his presidential candidate in former General Wesley Clark. That announcement should have been a warning, because Clark is indistinguishable in his views from George Bush, and the general's behavior in the former Yugoslavia was arrogant, provocative, and dangerous.

Moore simply wants to be rid of Bush, and he was ready to support an opportunistic and dangerous man like Wesley Clark to do it. Now, in his movie he has assembled a pastiche of attitudes, assumptions, and interesting, but largely unenlightening, film clips hoping to elicit enough of an emotional response to be rid of Bush.
--John Chuckman, America's pathetic liberals: the sequel, 19 Jul 2004

ROY MOORE:

Justice Moore's childhood religious convictions, as well as those of millions of fellow fundamentalists, are deeply imbedded in the emotional make-up of their cortex. It takes a major effort to change beliefs embedded in emotional experiences imprinted in childhood.

Those who are familiar with the evolutionary development of the brain realize that the situs of emotionality is rooted in neural circuits dating back about 180 million years. The more recently developed intellectual capabilities date back only about five or six million years. In a conflict between logic and emotions, the latter have a field day.

In other areas of his life, since there were no specific, early life- experience, emotional imprints, Justice Moore allowed his intellect to guide him. He received an appointment to West Point, honorably served his term in Vietnam, and later studied law at the University of Alabama. There is little doubt in my mind that intellectually the Justice developed in all areas except in his personal religious life. The raw emotions acquired early in his life dominate him!

We are dealing with an intellectually sophisticated man whose mental powers are shifted into neutral when it comes to his faith. The brain that dominates his understanding of the Bible and God never dared to go beyond the vestibule of the little Southern Baptist Church where he was reared and converted.

This is not an unusual phenomenon. While no intelligent person would be satisfied with limiting his reading ability to the first grade level, many smart people etch into rock the emotionality of a childish faith. This certainly explains the behavior of John Ashcroft. He also is a very smart individual whose spiritual growth is stunted by infantile emotional experiences.

Had Justice Moore allowed his faith to grow beyond a childish level, he would be able to study the Bible intelligently and prudently. As it is, the content of the Justice's faith is frozen like a 10,000 year old mammoth in Siberia.
--John Brand, D.Min., J.D, 03 Sep 2003, "No backing down"
[While Chief Justice of Alabama State, Roy Moore surreptiously moved a massive monument of the Ten Commandments into the rotunda of the state judicial building in Aug 2002, and then refused to remove it after being served with a court order to do so for church/state entanglement. --MN]

RUPERT MURDOCH:

[1] Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as 'Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)

Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success of Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a shell-shocked nation that sees itself at war.
--Hal Crowther, 04 Jun 2003, Weapons Of Mass Stupidity

[2] If Rupert Murdoch were the Angel Gabriel, you still wouldn't want him owning the sun, the moon, and the stars. That's too much prime real estate for even the pure in heart.

But Rupert Murdoch is no saint; he is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power he's carnivorous: all appetite and no taste. He'll eat anything in his path. Politicians become little clay pigeons to be picked off with flattering headlines, generous air time, a book contract or the old-fashioned black jack that never misses: campaign cash. He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes, and stacks them in his cavernous closet, along with his conscience; this is the man, remember, who famously kowtowed to the Communist overlords of China, oppressors of their own people, to protect his investments there.

The ambitious can't resist his blandishments, nor his power to get or keep them in office where they can return his favors. Mae West would be green with envy at his little black book of conquests: Tory Margaret Thatcher, Labor's Tony Blair, George Bush. Even Jimmy Carter couldn't say no. Now, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who know which side of their bread is buttered, like having it slathered by their new buddy Rupert. Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.
-?

MURPHY:

Murphy was an optimist.
(See MURPHY'S LAW, Appendix 07)

REX MURPHY:

A Don Cherry for smart people.
--Mike Boone, The Montreal Gazette, 04 Sep 1997

JOHN NEGROPONTE:

Good diplomat, in the sense that Pol Pot is a good family-planner.
--Rebecca Solnit

JOHN NORMAN:

What that man does to semicolons is an offense against nature.
--Unknown
(see GOR NOVELS )

OLIVER NORTH:

The thinking man's Rambo.
--Warren Bennis, On Becoming A Leader, pg 18

ROBERT NOVAK:

I'm reminded of the description of Novak, sometimes attributed to Michael Kinsley, which a number of sources volunteered: "Beneath the asshole is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole."
--Amy Sullivan, Little Big Man, Washington Monthly, posted to Alternet.org, 06 Dec 2004.

GEORGE ORWELL:

A cruel irony surrounded Orwell's death at only forty-six. He was world famous. He had found the literary form for his avowed mission - his weapon in his fight "against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." He had fired a shot heard round the world, but it had wounded his friends while barely nicking the true enemy recognized by his more careful readers. In fact, his weapon had been picked up and used by that enemy, which soon found Homage [To Barcelona] worth resurrecting as another weapon in the Cold War. [...]

It is ironic that Orwell finally won instant fame with two fantasy novels that not only were misunderstood, but were nowhere near the standard of his best work. And yet - and yet - had these two books not established him as an important voice, his other, better work might be long out of print and forgotten.
--Dorothy Bryant

ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE:

Mark Twain's official biographer and first literary executor, who apparently saw his job as that of a censor charged with printing only what he believed would not ruffle the public's image of his subject. In a 1926 letter to an editor at Harper and Brothers, Paine wrote that no one should be allowed to write about Mark Twain for "as long as we can prevent it." Once others were allowed to write about him, he continued, "the Mark Twain that we have 'preserved' -- the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark Twain -- will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark Twain property will depreciate."
--Jim Zwick, Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings in the "American Century"

THOMAS PAINE:

[1] Thomas Paine was the journalist of the American revolution who called forth the better angels of our nature, who imbued us with our democratic impulse, and articulated our American identity with exceptional purpose and promise. It was Tom Paine who argued that America would afford an asylum for mankind, provide a model to the world, and support the global advance of republican democracy. This is tonic for flagging spirits facing great odds, for it is Thomas Paine who insists that it is too soon to write the history of the revolution.
--Bill Moyers, 03 Jun 2005, in a speech, delivered at the Take Back America conference in Washington, D.C.

[2] Why read Thomas Paine? Because, it is widely agreed, without him there would have been no United States. Indeed, it was Paine who first used the phrase, "the United States of America."

For those unfamiliar with American history, a brief review may be in order. In September 1774, Thomas Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London. Captivated by Paine's passion for democracy, Franklin urged him to emigrate to the New World and sent him off with a flattering letter of recommendation. Franklin may also have been attracted to Paine's passion for science. Like Franklin, Paine was a scientist. He invented the single-span iron bridge and the smokeless candle, and helped to improve the steam engine.

Paine arrived in the colonies in mid-1775. In January 1776, he published his first pamphlet, "Common Sense," a powerful and accessible argument for political independence. As many as half a million copies of the pamphlet circulated. As much as 50 percent of the population of the colonies would eventually either read it, or have it read to them.

Within six months, the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence. Future president John Adams announced, "History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine." [...]

Almost 20 years to the day after the publication of "Common Sense," in January 1796, another fiery Paine pamphlet appeared. "The Age of Reason" offered a devastating critique of organized religion. But whereas Paine's attack on British tyranny and his advocacy for political self-determination had made him a national hero, his attack on the tyranny of organized religion and his advocacy for religious self-determination made him a national and international pariah. Even some of Paine's most vigorous critics expressed astonishment at how quickly and overwhelmingly Paine's peers turned on him.

Paine died in 1809. The New York Citizen wrote a terse and widely reprinted obituary. "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners attended his funeral.
--David Morris, Thomas Paine and Intelligent Design, 17 Nov 2005

WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY:

William Dudley Pelley, the son of a Protestant minister, stood out as the most prominent fundamentalist antisemite, a man convinced that he was divinely inspired to lead a mass movement against the antiChristian conspirators in America. In 1932 he had a vision that something important would occur on January 30, 1933, and after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany that day Pelley interpreted the accession as a God-given sign. He then began to think of himself as the American Hitler. In February 1933 Pelley found the Silver Legion, generally know as the Silver Shirts, which offered the same venomous message in the United States as did the leader of Germany. Like Hitler, Pelley used materials from Henry Ford's "International Jew" and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in many of his various publications, including Liberation.

Several of Pelley's views perplexed rational people. He claimed to have spent seven minutes in Heaven during which he allegedly conversed with God. Pelley also described an international conspiracy with 300,000 to 400,000 European Jews coming to the United States to spearhead an assault on the American government. And he also stated that he had "proof" -- pressed down and overflowing -- that the New Deal from its inception has been naught but the political penetration of a predominantly Christian country and Christian government, by predatory, megalomaniacal Israelites and their agents. Pelley's assertions provided the raison d'etre for his group, the Silver Shirts, which one 1933 observer dubbed, "the most important native anti-Semitic organization in the United States."
--Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America

RICHARD PERLE:

Richard Perle needs little introduction. He might be summed up as Washington's resident Creature from the Black Lagoon, displaying the accumulated toxic effects of a lifetime spent wallowing and bottom-feeding in the Potomac. He is exalted "fellow" at another of those propaganda-mill institutes, Defense Department wheeler-dealer and profiteer, tireless advocate for every American colonial war and bombing run, and energetic lobbyist for the Israeli military's way of doing things.
--John Chuckman, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), Sick puppies, 07 Jan 2004

JOHN POINDEXTER:

Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

[...]

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president. [...]
--William Safire, 14 Nov 2002

POPE BENEDICT XVI:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was selected to be pope on 19 Apr 2005 and assumed the name Benedict XVI. As cardinal, he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office charged with enforcing religious orthodoxy, and there were concerns on his ascenscion to office that he would be even more hard-line on social issues and church teachings than his predecessor, John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger had been dubbed "God's Rotweiler" by some church insiders for his stern pronouncements on issues such as equal rights for gays, abortion rights and secular institutions. Sister Jeanine Grammick of New Ways Ministry, a group addressing the needs of Catholic gays and lesbians, was quoted as saying that his selection as pope would be "devastating."

COLIN POWELL:

Caution became capitulation. The good soldier told a bad lie. That will always stain Colin Powell.

He was the Walter Cronkite of politics, was so popular and so trusted across party lines that his job approval ratings as secretary of state were between 80 and 90 percent. He cashed in on that popularity on Feb. 5, 2003, when he carried the Bush administration's case against Iraq to the United Nations Security Council.

Powell went at a time when known war hawks Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and President Bush himself were struggling to convince Americans that Iraq was a mortal threat to the United States. Two weeks prior to Powell's UN presentation, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Bush had not yet done the "hard work of diplomacy." Kerry said Bush's "blustering unilateralism" was alienating friends and fostering anti-Americanism.

Powell, the least likely Bush official to engage in bluster, calmly told the UN that "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid evidence."

Powell attempted to dazzle the UN with satellite images of weapons sites and ominous taped conversations to prove "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world."

[...]

It was so well presented that Powell's job approval ratings in four major polls in the weeks after the presentation were 81, 82, 83, and 85 percent. That more than made up for Bush's Iraq approval ratings, which were in the 50-60 percent range. The next month, America went to war. There would be no weapons of mass destruction, no nukes, no ties between Saddam and 9/11.

Powell once said the lesson of the Vietnam War was "when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons." He said senior officers "bowed to groupthink," spreading "the comforting illusion of secure hamlets" and "inflated progress reports." When it was his turn to call the shots, Powell bowed to groupthink. He could have been the last line of defense against a madness that has now killed hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of innocent vilians in Iraq. Powell instead crawled down into the UN to spin a credible illusion, ensnaring himself in the deadly lie.
--Derrick Z. Jackson, Too Much the Good Soldier, 17 Nov 2004

RICHARD POWERS:

Before he was married, Richard Powers went through a period of not speaking to anyone. It lasted a year. By the end of it, he had written a 400-page novel but had become, as he puts it, "a bit weird". As the walls of his study began to look increasingly inviting, the thought vaguely occurred to him that he was turning into Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The 45-year-old concluded that in order to save his sanity, he should find a job in the world outside his own head.

[...] it is odd that he has come to be characterised as a dispassionate writer, as one who, as he says of a character in the novel, puts "precision before warmth". Part of this is bias against his background - computer programming is not thought to deliver the sorts of insights required of a novelist - and part against the subject matter of his novels: artificial intelligence, game theory and molecular genetics are sufficiently removed from the traditional interests of the literary imagination to ensure that Powers is dismissed as a geek writer; that is, long on brains, short on humanity.
--Emma Brockes, 14 Mar 2003, The Guardian

REMMIE:

When patrons call to buy your art,
Get paid in cash before you start.
Then paint the truth while eating well:
Twice give their egos merry hell!
--Remmie's Laughing Ghost
(see BEHAN )

CONDOLEEZA RICE: [AKA: CONDI]

Rice isn't a neo-conservative ideologue in the manner of Vice-President Dick Cheney or Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom so effectively, and so brutally, undermined Powell. Rice, still National Security Adviser, is instead pure, unadulterated Bush. Probably only Laura Bush is closer to him than she is.

Their religious and sporting views are identical. She regularly spends weekends with him and his family at Camp David.

She fiercely supported the war on Iraq and strongly supported the doctrine of pre-emptive attack against potential threats (threats as the U.S. defines them, that is) and, therefore, of unilateralism.

As America's top diplomat Rice, thus, will have one significant advantage over [Colin] Powell. Whenever she speaks, the world will know that it is Bush speaking.
--Richard Gwyn, Add Rice to Bush Hard-Right Recipe, 17 Nov 2004

GERALDO RIVERA:

Geraldo Rivera is a fascinating case study because of his journey down the slippery slope from serious reporter to circus act. While he always displayed a disregard for traditional journalistic ethics [...] the former Puerto Rican activist also did some fine exposes of an unsafe mental hospital and filthy welfare hotels. He soon became a million-dollar-a-year star on 20/20.

By 1985, however, Rivera's flamboyant behavior had become a public relations headache for ABC News President Roone Arledge. When Arledge killed another reporter's segment linking the Kennedys, the Mob, and Marilyn Monroe's death, Rivera called it a "fucking outrage" and urged Arledge to resign. But Rivera had his own problems. He had made a $200 contribution to a political campaign, and his girlfriend had reportedly used an ABC messenger to pick up a small amount of marijuana for a friend. Arledge seized on these incidents to cut him loose. Rivera promptly took his act into the gutter.
--Howard Kurtz, Hot Air, pg 59/60

PAT ROBERTSON:

He calls himself "Pat" but apparently he was baptised "Marion".

WILL ROGERS:

Will Rogers, who died in a plane crash with Wylie Post in 1935, was probably the greatest political sage this country has ever known. Enjoy the following:

1. Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.

2. Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

3. There are 2 theories to arguing with a woman...neither works.

4. Never miss a good chance to shut up.

5. Always drink upstream from the herd.

6. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

7. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.

8. There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.

9. Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

10. If you're riding' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.

11. Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier'n puttin' it back.

12. After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him. The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

ABOUT GROWING OLDER...

First: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.

Second: The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Third: Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know "why" I look this way. I've traveled a long way and some of the roads weren't paved.

Fourth: When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.

Fifth: You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.

Sixth: I don't know how I got over the hill without getting to the top.

Seventh: One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

Eighth: One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.

Ninth: Being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.

Tenth: Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it's called golf.

And finally: If you don't learn to laugh at trouble, you won't have anything to laugh at when you are old.

RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER:

OK, the REAL reason that Rudolph's nose is red is actually a bit of an embaressment to the entire North Pole community. Rudolph is a lush. Never more so than on Christmas Eve. I mean, come on, if you need a headlight to pierce the fog, you wouldn't pick RED!! Of course not. The deer is a drunk, I tell you. OK, then, you ask, why? and why does Santa keep him on as lead reindeer? Actually, the answer is one and the same. Consider, I ask, that much of the Christmas trip is actually done in the Southern hemisphere, the tropics, and in the milder portions of the Northern hemisphere. So what, you say? What this means is BUGS! Now, consider how much hitting a bug at near light speed is gonna smart. Rudolph isn't a guide, he's a bug shield for the rest of the team. And the only way to get him in harness is to get him drunk.

<G>

(It was about this point that the single lady next to us REALLY started to paying attention to our conversation.)
--Russ Jernigan, 12 Dec 2004

ROUSAS RUSHDOONY:

The "father of Christian reconstructionism"; (he) considers democracy "heresy," and wants all Americans, even non-Christians, to be ruled by biblical law. He also campaigns for "the death penalty, preferably by stoning, for adulterers, homosexuals, abortionists, heretics, blashpemers, and disobedient children."
--Price of Honor, pg 330

MICHAEL SAVAGE:

Born Michael Alan Weiner

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA:

The intellectual Torquemada of Supreme Court conservatives, [he] went to Cleveland to accept the local City Club's "Citadel of Free Speech Award." Demonstrating his love for the First Amendment, he banned broadcast media from his speech and refused to answer any questions from reporters.

But the previous day at John Carroll University, Scalia had let it all hang out. "The Constitution just sets minimums," he declared with unnerving bluntness. "Most of the rights you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."
---John Powers, LA Weekly, 07 July 2003

SCHITT: [FAMILY, THE]

For some time many of us have wondered just who is Jack Schitt? We find ourselves at a loss when someone says. "You don't know Jack Schitt!" Well, thanks to my geneology efforts, you can now respond in an intellectual way.

Jack Schitt is the only son of Awe Schitt. Awe Schitt, the fertilizer magnate, married O. Schitt, the owner of Needeep N. Schitt, Inc. They had one son, Jack.

In turn,Jack Schitt married Noe Schittt. The deeply religious couple produced six children: Holie Schitt, Giva Schitt, Fulla Schitt, Bull Schitt, and the twins Deap Schitt and Dip Schitt. Against her parents' objections, Deap Schitt married Dumb Schitt, a high school dropout.

After being married 15 years, Jack and Noe Schitt divorced. Noe Schitt later married Ted Sherlock,and,because her kids were living with them,she wanted to keep her previous name. She was then known as Noe Schitt Sherlock.

Meanwhile, Dip Schitt married Loda Schitt, and they produced a son with a rather nervous disposition named Chicken Schitt. Two of the other six children, Fulla Schitt and Giva Schitt, were inseparable throughout childhood and subsequently married the Happens brothers in a dual ceremony. The wedding announcement in the newspaper announced the Schitt-Happens nuptials.

The Schitt-Happens children were Dawg, Byrd, and Hoarse. Bull Schitt, the prodigal son, left home to tour the world. He recently returned from Italy with his new Italian bride, Pisa Schitt.

Now when someone says,"You don't know Jack Schitt." you can correct them.

Sincerely,

Crock O. Schitt

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER:

A former action hero film star and bodybuilding champion with a physique once described as resembling a condom overstuffed with walnuts.

ANAKIN SKYWALKER:

The young padawan who went on to be a Dark Lord of the Sith.

ALFRED E. SMITH:

No relation to Alfred E. Neumann.

A "Red Scare" about Communism and Socialism erupted after World War I that was equally damaging to Constitutional protections as the Red Scare that emerged during the McCarthyism era after World War II. Chris Finian says of that time, "Hysteria in the early '20s gave rise to the infamous 'Lusk laws' in New York state. Passed by an overzealous legislature, "the Lusk laws required a loyalty oath of all teachers, gave the Secretary of State the power to deny a place on the ballot to any 'disloyal' political party, handed the head of the Education Department the right to deny accreditation to Socialist schools. Happily, Al Smith vetoed the Lusk laws when he was governor."
--Pat Holt, Holt Uncensored # 349, 05 Nov 2002

Chris Finian is the author of Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior, available from Hill & Wang.

SOCRATES:

• The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.
  --Thomas Babington Macaulay
• Philosophers have a long tradition of questioning conventional norms and popular beliefs. Socrates was accused by the mob for being unpatriotic because he didn’t believe war with Sparta and the poorly planned Sicilian invasion were good ideas. As it turned out, he was right and they were wrong. Athens was demolished. He was promptly executed on trumped up charges, "Corrupting the Youth" and "Atheism" (gee, that sounds familiar!). In other words, Socrates was found guilty for being a critic of society, which made him an "enemy of the state."
  --Jacqueline Marcus, Targeted by Conservatives for Teaching Philosophy, 28 Mar 2005

RICHARD STANS:

The most saluted man in the United States of America.
(see MONDEGREENS, Appendix 18, also PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE)

ARLEN SPECTER:

The Pennsylvania Republican who sometimes lapses into sanity,
--John Nichols, 28 Jun 2006

PALMIRO TOGLIATTI:

Palmiro Togliatti was an Italian commie who had sense enough to realize that communism wasn't as "monolithic" as right-wingers believed (and feared) it was, that there were different variations and gradations, just as with any other "ism" or anything else.

JOHN TURMEL:

A Canadian political candidate who got into the Guinness Book of World Records after chalking up 52 straight defeats in running for elected office. The independent candidate has taken on some big names over the years, including Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, and Sheila Copps.

His 53rd political campaign was a byelection called in the Ontario riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka; a seat that opened up in February, 2001, when Ontario Finance Minister Ernie Eves retired from politics. The problem with that campaign was: Turmel lives in Ottawa, hundreds of kilometres away from the constituency, and he did most of his campaigning on Parliament Hill walking up and down the sidewalk carrying signs and wearing a white hard hat.

He blamed all previous losses on voters, arguing that they're not interested in examining issues and are too easily swayed by a candidate's image.

In an interview by CBC, Turmel complained, "What they do is they say, 'Who's got the most signs? I want to vote for the winner'."

MARK TWAIN:

No man knew Mark Twain who had not seen him aroused by some mean, detestable action which violated his sense of justice. In his wrath he was indeed terrible. One has only to read his condemnation of the capture of Aguinaldo, the Filipino General, to realize this.
--Andrew Carnegie, 1920

ABIGAIL VAN BUREN: [AKA DEAR ABBY:]

A highly popular advice columnist who is still stumped from time to time by the occasional reader. For instance:

Dear Abby, A couple of women moved in across the hall from me. One is a middle-aged gym teacher and the other is a social worker in her mid-twenties. These two women go everywhere together and I've never seen a man go into their apartment or come out. Do you think they could be Lebanese?

Dear Abby, What can I do about all the sex, nudity, language and violence on my VCR?

Dear Abby, I have a man I never could trust. He cheats so much I'm not even sure this baby I'm carrying is his.

Dear Abby, I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him.

Dear Abby, I suspected that my husband had been fooling around, and when I confronted him with the evidence he denied everything and said it would never happen again.

Dear Abby, Our son writes that he is taking Judo. Why would a boy who was raised in a good Christian home turn against his own?

Dear Abby, I joined the Navy to see the world. I've seen it. Now how do I get out?

Dear Abby, My forty-year-old son has been paying a psychiatrist $50 an hour every week for two-and-a-half years. He must be crazy.

Dear Abby, I was married to Bill for three months and I didn't know he drank until one night he came home sober.

Dear Abby, Do you think it would be all right if I gave my doctor a little gift? I tried for years to get pregnant and couldn't and he did it.

Dear Abby, My mother is mean and short-tempered. I think she is going through her mental pause.

Dear Abby, You told some woman whose husband had lost all interest in sex to send him to a doctor. Well, my husband lost all interest in sex years ago and he is a doctor.

JESSE VENTURA: [GOVERNOR ~]

We got a kick out of Jesse "The Body" Ventura and all the notoriety it got us: first state with a governor with a stage name. [...] Jesse was a plain-spoken man, and he had his principles -- he vetoed a post-9/11 Republican bill to require the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in every public schoolroom. He said that Minnesota kids were by gosh as patriotic as they could possibly be and the bill was an insult to the intelligence. Jesse was pro-choice and opposed to gay-baiting and, above all, Jesse was opposed to bullshit and cant and hypocrisy.
--Garrison Keillor, Aug 2004, in an e-mail interview by David Talbot

LEW WELCH:

The poet Lew Welch might have been mortified to know that, while few Americans can recite a line of his poetry, he has achieved literary immortality through this koan-like ad slogan: "Raid kills bugs dead."
--Paul Collins "Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books"

FREDERIC WERTHAM:

[...] Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, indicted comic books in the 1940s and 1950s as fervently as Centerwall has condemned electronic media. [...] Wertham had worked with juvenile delinquents in New York City in the immediate post-World War II years when juvenile delinquency was on the rise and Congress was looking for answers much as it looked for answers in the 1970s and 1980s when the homicide rate was going up. "If it were my task, Mr. Chairman, to teach children delinquency," he testified before a Congressional committee in 1954, "to tell them how to rape and seduce girls, how to hurt people, how to break into stores, how to cheat, how to forge, how to do any known crime, if it were my task to teach that, I would have to enlist the crime comic book industry. Formerly to impair the morals of a minor was a punishable offense. It has now become a mass industry. I will say that every crime of delinquency is described in detail and that if you teach somebody the technique of something you, of course, seduce him into it. Nobody would believe that you teach a boy homosexuality without introducing him to it. The same thing with crime."

In those days being gay was believed to be a serious mental illness, and Wertham was convinced that Batman and Robin were a blatantly homosexual couple created to entice new recruits. (Robin, he wrote, "is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.") The psychiatrist thought Superman was a fascist and worried that the muscular Krypton native gave children "a completely wrong idea of basic physical laws" by leaping tall buildings at a single bound. He called comic books "the marijuana of the nursery." Like Grossman and Centerwall, Wertham demonstrated that literal-minded humorlessness is a requirement for media bashing, but Congress and the public took all this unsuppo rted slander seriously. The comic book industry, which published 130 million copies a month, including at least 30 million devoted to crime and horror, capitulated after the 1954 Congressional hearings and thereafter published only G-rated stories. Fortunately for popular culture, the writers and artists laid off at EC Comics, the hardest hit when the industry crashed, went on to found Mad magazine.
--Richard Rhodes, The Media Violence Myth

STEVE WINTER:

I don't know if you've heard of Steve Winter, but trust me, you don't want to get to know him. He is a pharisee. A two faced, holier-than-thou, slavering, ranting, put-them-to-the-fire-and-the-sword, bash-the-babies-heads-in-with-rocks, I-love-God-more-than-anyone-else lunatic who condemns everyone who chooses to think for themselves. Which is to say: anyone who disagrees with his foaming-at-the-mouth anti-non-christian polemics, even though they might profess to the same religion.

He sits there and professes to be so christian himself, but will, at the drop of a dissenting opinion, use the name of God and Christ to curse the dissenter, all in the name of true christianity, of course.

Steve Winter is to cyberspace, Fidonet in particular, what tele-evangelists are to the real world.
--Michael Nellis, 18 April 1995

He was a onetime moderator of an echo ostensibly about the bible who would tolerate only comments that accorded with his own small sect. If anybody had the temerity to deviate (even to the extent of including mainline Protestants, not to mention Catholics, under the rubric of "Christian"), that person would be banned in a hail of the most vituperative and obscene abuse FidoNet has ever seen. The man's intolerance made the Spanish Inquisition look like the ACLU.
--Anonymous
[At the discretion of the editor. --MN]

MAO ZEDONG:

The man who led Communist China until his death in the 1970s, he was as a former librarian who created the 3rd largest economy in the world and the least diverse collection of books.

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